FIRST ALDINE EDITION OF ALUNNO'S TREATISE ON THE RICHNESS OF ITALIAN LANGUAGE

One of the first specialized dictionaries of Italian language using Boccaccio’s words as a model for good style

Alunno, Francesco. Le Ricchezze della Lingua Volgare di M. Francesco Alunno. Con privilegio di N.S. Papa Paolo iii. Et della Illustriss. Signoria di Vinegia. In Vinegia, (in casa de Figliuoli di Aldo), 1543 [Venice: Aldo Manuzio’s Sons, 1543].

Folio (297x200 mm), full vellum binding, author’s name handwritten in brown ink at spine, green edges, marbled paste-downs, ff. 226, [1]. Roman type, text in Italian. Dedication letter to cardinal Alessandro Farnese.
It contains the first occurrence of the Aldine anchor surrounded by vine leaves among which four heads of chimeras are hidden.

First Aldine Edition of Alunno’s Ricchezze della lingua volgare, collecting the Italian words used by Boccaccio in his works in order to create a high standard for vernacular prose and dignify it as a language.

The author’s mission was to supply the Italian vernacular language with a lexical index of all the terms used by the most important writers in their texts, so as to find out the most noble utterances and dignify the language. In his project, as he states in his warning Ai lettori, Alunno had set this matter in two sections: the first was to contain the vernacular words used by the Italian master of the prose Giovanni Boccaccio and a list of all the terms that could be used to describe everything in the world, the so called Fabrica del Mondo (The World’s Setting); the second part, on the other hand, should have contained the words used in poetry by Dante and Petrarca. The present work represents the first part of the original project, while the second had been left for a following publication that was never completed in this form. Instead, Alunno published under the title Fabrica del Mondo (Venice, Boscarini, 1546-48) the work corresponding to the entire project, that became one of the most printed works of the Renaissance, with twelve editions before 1612.

Le Ricchezze della lingua volgare had a great success among the readers, being one of the first specialized dictionaries of the Italian language. It followed the Renaissance tradition of the auctoritates, impling that using the same expressions of the famous authors of the past meant writing with a nobler style. Giovanni Boccaccio, the author of the famous Decameron, had been usually considered the founder of Italian prose, thus his masterpiece in the 1526 edition by Da Sabbio was chosen by Alunno for the realization of this lexical index. At the end of the work, moreover, Alunno put the Regolette particolari della volgar lingua, a sort of brief grammar of the Italian vernacular after the manner of Pietro Bembo, and a few paragraphs listing the foreign words similar to Italian words. For instance, in the section Voci che usano Englesi che sono conformi alla nostra lingua volgare («words used by the English people which are similar to our vernacular language»), under letter E the following words are included:

Elefante analephant. Elmo helmet. Estimato estimed.

In this edition for the first time the Aldine anchor can be found surrounded by vine leaves which have, hidden among themselves, four heads of chimera.

Francesco (del Bailo, known as) Alunno from Ferrara was born around 1484 in a family of the local minor aristocracy. He was educated in the same town and became a teacher of arithmetics and a renowned calligrapher. He moved to Udine and then to Venice, meeting and becoming friend to Pietro Bembo, Girolamo Ruscelli and the major intellectuals of the time working in the North of Italy. His lexical works, such as the present, the Osservazioni sopra il Petrarca (edited in 1539 by Marcolini together with the Aldine text of Canzoniere and Trionfi of 1501) and the Fabrica del Mondo (Venice, Boscarini, 1546-48) gained him a relevant reputation, but it was his skill as a type-designer and micrographer that left the emperor Charles V and pope Clemens VII speechless in 1530, as Bembo himself states in his letter of 27 November 1537, where he begs Alunno to paint an illuminated alphabet for him. He died in Venice in 1556.

References: Not in Brunet and Gamba. Adams A-842; Biancardi-Francese, Prime edizioni italiane, p. 25; Graesse I, p. 88; Haym, IV, p. 8; Renouard, 127, 2: «Première édition d’un livre qui, dans son temps, fut en grande estime».

Traces of foxing, halo at outer margin of the pages, ink stain at verso of f. 60; overall, a good copy.