Rime de la diva Vettoria Colonna

RARE EARLY EDITION OF VITTORIA COLONNA'S POETRY

8vo. 53, [1]ff. Nineteenth-century blue carta rustica binding stitched with fibrous twine, spine with turquoise sticker with 'Rime di Vittoria Colonna' stamped in black, overlapping edges (headcaps worn, minor rubbing and wear). 

Venice: Bartolomio detto l'Imperador, Francesco Vinitiano,

Rare early edition of the poetry of renowned sixteenth-century intellectual, writer and reformer Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547), printed in her lifetime. 

Born into a powerful Roman family in 1490, Vittoria Colonna's fame as a poet came later in her life, after the death of her husband Francesco Ferrante D'Avalos in 1525, an event that shaped the tone of much of her early work. An important figure in Renaissance intellectual circles in the early sixteenth century, she was 'the first secular woman to achieve a high level of literary status in Italy for vernacular production, and her example opened the way for subsequent women writers to publish in all manner of genres. ...She resisted a second marriage and devoted her later years to religion and literature, producing some of her most striking visual poetry in the years before her death.' (Brundin, 'Vittoria Colonna'). Colonna enjoyed friendships with the foremost artistic and intellectual figures of the age, including Marguerite de Navarre, Pietro Bembo, and Michelangelo, with whom she exchanged letters and from whom she received sketches of work. Her involvement in Italy's religious reform movement shaped much of her later poetry, evident in the Rime. 

The present volume is the eighth edition of Colonna's poetry. Her compositions circulated in manuscript amongst friends and correspondents, and collected editions of her Rime were issued - seemingly without her endorsement - in print in her lifetime and in multiple editions after her death. Though the first collected edition was printed in Parma, at the presses of Antonio Viotti, in 1538, one of her sonnets was printed alongside those of Pietro Bembo in 1535 (Venice: Nicolini da Sabio) and several were printed in 1537, in a volume celebrating the use of the lingua tosca (Naples, 1537) (Crivelli, pp.69-70). 

A. Brundin, 'Vittoria Colonna', in Oxford Bibliographies: Renaissance and Reformation [open access]. T. Crivelli, 'The Print Tradition of Vittoria Colonna's Rime', in A Companion to Vittoria Colonna Vol. V (Brill: 2016), pp.69-139. 

Adams 2397. BMSTC (Italian), 191. Brunet II, 161. 

OCLC: Cornell, BPL, Princeton, Williams, Yale. UK: BL, NLS, UCL.

Stock Code: 249790