Eusebii Caesariensis Evangelicæ demonstrationes Libri Decem. Donatus Veronensis vertit

Folio. ff. [vi], 173, [1] (blank). Wrapped in a contemporary vellum sheet covered in contemporary Italian manuscript verse. Woodcut printer’s device to title, many ornate woodcut initials throughout. Contemporary ownership inscription of Balthazar Tharavasius (or Baldassarre Taravasio, canon from Sarzana, Italy) to front free endpaper and title page (the latter possibly with dedication to a friend), further inscription to front free endpaper obscured in ink.

Rare first edition (one of three copies in the US), preceding the first appearance of the text in the original Greek, translated into Latin by Bernardino Donato, a humanist whose work was admired by Erasmus. Eusebius’s fourth-century exposition of the Gospels presented Christianity as a continuation and completion of Judaism. Filled with many spurious and forged early Christian texts.

The vellum sheet employed as wrapper is covered in contemporary verse in Italian, all apparently unpublished, added after the book was bound. One of the poems is an elegiac sonnet on the tomb of Hadrian, linking ideals of Roman virtue with vague intents of sweet death in the Tiber’s water; other lines express a yearning for the gifts of eloquence and evoke the spirit of the ‘great Tully,’ author of the unmatched Philippics, as a mentor. The vernacular verses are interspersed with Latin moral maxims, facing the dilemmas of a soul contending with fortune and virtue.

See EDIT 16: censimento nazionale delle edizioni italiane del XVI secolo. Rome, 18381; USTC 828510.

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