RARE EDITION OF HOMER’S ILIAD IN ITS ORIGINAL CALF BINDING

HOMER. Homeri poetae clariss(imi) Ilias. Interprete Lauren(tio) Valla. Eucharius Cervicornus excudebat, Anno M.D.XXVII [Köln: Eucharius Cervicornus, 1527].

8vo (152x101 mm), full calf binding with phytomorphic blind-tooled frame to covers, blind-tooled diagonal cross and eight rosettes per board, three raised bands spine enhanced by blind-tooled fillets, pp. 495, [1, woodcut], [32].
Historiated woodcut frame at title-page, with architectural elements, a coat of arms with three crowns at the top of the page and the Adoration of the Magi represented at the bottom.

A woodcut at f. H7v representing a knight sitting backwards on his horse with a winged monster at his feet, presumably a scarce iconography of St. George and the dragon.

Scarce German edition of Homer’s Iliad translated by Lorenzo Valla.

Probably the most influential work of the Western literary canonthe Iliad is the epic poem attributed to Homer that relates the legendary happenings connected to the Trojan war when, due to the escape of the queen of Sparta Helen, married to Menelaus, to Troy because of her love affair with the prince Paris, the Greeks besiege and then destroy the Anatolic town. What emerges is a great war fresco in which humans and deities take part and fight for their own interests, creating quite an endless source of imaginary and myths that fed art and literature on topics for centuries.

Iliad’s fame, in fact, is to be attested from the classic Greek tragedy on. During the Middle Age, the text itself had been partially forgotten in favour of popular chivalric romances, but the characters and the story was too rooted in the collective imaginery and were recovered in full from the beginning of the 15th century with the Humanism and the revival of the study of Greek. It was in that period that Lorenzo Valla, among others, decided to translate the original text into Latin, writing the version contained in the present edition.

The topics and characters of this poem that influenced Western art and culture are several. Figures like Helen and Achilles have become the symbol of beauty and glory, while Ulysses the personification of the power and limits of human mind, also due to the Odissey tale, sequel of the Iliad, centred on his long coming back to Ithaca.

In the literary Trojan war of the Iliad, moreover, the Olympic gods, goddesses, and demigods fight and play great roles in human warfare. Unlike practical Greek religious observance, Homer’s portrayals of them suited his narrative purpose, being very different from the polytheistic ideals Greek society used. To wit, the Classical-era historian Herodotus says that Homer, and his contemporary, the poet Hesiod, were the first artists to name and describe the godnesses’ appearance and characters as picture and literature have passed on to us.

HOMER (presumably living in the 8th century B.C.) is the person credited with the composition of the two most influential epic poems of the Western canon, the Iliad and the Odissey. Little is known about his life: historians place his birth sometime around 750 B.C. and conjecture that he was born and resided in or near Chios. However, seven cities claimed to have been his birthplace. Due to the lack of information about Homer the person, many scholars hold the poems themselves as the best windows into his life. It is from the description of the blind bard in The Odyssey, for instance, that many historians have guessed that Homer was blind. What is undeniable is that the works of Homer proved to be the most influential not merely for the poets of ancient times, but also for the later epic poets of Western literature. There is much evidence to support the theory that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by different authors, perhaps as much as a century apart. The diction and the style are markedly different, with the Iliad being reminiscent of a much more formal, theatric style while the Odyssey using a more novelistic approach and a language more illustrative of day-to-day speech.

LORENZO VALLA (c. 1406–1457) was one of the most important humanists of his time. In his Elegantiae linguae Latinae, an advanced handbook of Latin language and style, he gave the humanist program some of its most trenchant and combative formulations, bringing the study of Latin to an unprecedented level. He made numerous contributions to classical scholarship. But he also used his vast knowledge of the classical languages and their literatures as a tool to criticize a wide range of ideas, theories, and established practices. He famously exposed the Donation of Constantine—an important document justifying the papacy’s claims to temporal rule—as a forgery. He compared, for the first time, St. Jerome’s translation of the Bible with the Greek text of the New Testament, thereby laying the foundations of critical biblical scholarship. In his Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie also known as his Dialectics, he attacked scholastic-Aristotelian thought from an essentially linguistic point of view.

EUCHARIUS HIRTZHORN (Latinized in Cervicornus; active from 1516 to 1547), was an accurate German printer whose works used to have richly historiated woodcut frames at title-page and, often, a single xilographical carrè at the end of the text, with a narrative vignette (in this case, St. George and the Dragon, with a small hidden princess in the back). Another distinctive features of Cervicornus’ editions are the heart-leaves decorating the titles all along the text.

PROVENANCE: Some handwritten glosses in brown ink to the margins, by ancient hand.

REFERENCES: Not in Adams. CNCE, Censimento, 000846.

A few light water-stains and natural traces of oxidation to the leaves, but overall a very good and unsophisticated copy, in its original binding.