Cento novelle scelte da più nobili scrittori della lingua volgare, [...] Nelle quali piacevoli et aspri casi d’amore, et altri notabili avvenimenti si contengono. Di nuovo ampliate, reformate, rivedute, et corrette, [...] aggiuntovi di nuovo le figure in principio d’ogni Novella.

4to (200x138 mm). [4], 238, [2] leaves. Collation: *⁴ A-Z⁴ Aa-Zz⁴ Aaa-Ooo⁴. Printer’s device on title page. With 100 woodcuts and numerous large ornamental initials and borders in the text. 20^th-century full hazelnut morocco gilt (R. Leuthe Biel-Bienne). Manuscript note on the title page (“Canceris” o “Cancevis”), some occasional minor foxing and staining, a very good copy.

First quarto edition, preceded by three octavo editions in 1561, 1562, and 1563 and followed by editions in quarto in 1571, 1578 and 1597. The text was altered from edition to edition. In the prefatory remarks in which Sansovino established the framework of the collection of tales, he states that these stories were related by a company of men and women which had gathered in the house of Francesco Lando at Oriago to escape the plague of 1556. Sansovino’s collection is the first scholarly anthology of the Italian short story, and thus a document of first importance in the history of fiction. It includes tales from Masuccio (ca. 1420-1480), Matteo Bandello (1480-1562), Giovanni Fiorentino (fl. 2^nd half of the 14^th century), Giovanfrancesco Straparola, (fl. ca. 1500-1527), Girolamo Parabosco, Giovanni Brebia, from the Novelle antiche, Boccaccio, and others.

“Di fondamentale importanza per la storia e la fortuna del genere novellistico del Rinascimento è la raccolta di Cento novelle de’ più nobili scrittori della lingua volgare, edita per le cure di Francesco Sansovino” (M. Ciccuto, ed., Novelle italiane. Il Cinquecento, Milan, 1982, p. XXVIII).

Each tale is headed by a woodcut, which was expressly made for this edition. They are in the soft, shaded late Venetian style. Furthermore, each story begins with an exquisite woodcut initial formed from plants, wild animals, fishes and reptiles. Of particular interest is the cut on leaf 50: a view of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, looking toward the clock tower. On the left is part of the Biblioteca Marciana, still under construction by Francesco Sansovino’s father Jacopo Tatti Sansovino. Twenty years earlier Jacopo spent some time in prison, because of the collapse of the library’s ceiling in December 1545 (cf. D. Howard, Jacopo Sansovino. Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice, New Haven, CT, 1975, passim).

At the end of ‘Giornata IX’ is an interesting passage in which is praised for her outstanding talent the Sienese singer and lutenist Virginia Vagnoli, wife of the well-known musician Alessandro Striggio. She was active for several years at Pesaro at the court of Guidobaldo II della Rovere (cf. I. Fenlon, Music and Patronage in Sixteenth Century Mantua, Cambridge, 1980, pp. 140-141).

The printing of the volume was some time attributed to Francesco Rampazzetto, since he used some of the cuts in the same year, but the absence of a Rampazetto’s colophon and Sansovino’s moon device on the title page seem to indicate him as the printer.

Francesco Sansovino was born at Rome to the sculptor Jacopo Tatti (Sansovino) by either a wife or an unfaithful concubine. The latter always harbored doubts about Francesco’s paternity. In the aftermath of the Sack of Rome (1527) father and son left Rome for Venice, where he received his early humanistic education in the school of Stefano Piazzone da Asola. Francesco obeying his father, he then studied law in Padua, Florence and Bologna, where he earned a degree in jurisprudence in 1542. Unhappy with law he quarreled with his father and began to write poetry and imaginative vernacular literature in the 1540’s. In 1550 Jacopo, still desirous that his son should travel the road to wealth and position, arranged for an appointment at the papal court of Julius III, who had held Francesco at the baptismal font. But Francesco disliked courtly intrigue and after a brief period returned to Venice. In 1553 he married a Venetian girl of good but non-noble family and settled down to a tranquil life of study and writing. In his career Sansovino wrote, translated, or edited about eighty volumes. He worked on his own initiative and lived on the income of his books. From1560 to 1570 and from 1578 to 1581 he operated his own press. At the same time he continued to compose and edit for other vernacular presses as well. His encyclopedic description of his adopted city, Venetia, cuttà nobilissima et singolare, descritta in XIIII libri (1581), is still a useful source for descriptions of churches, works of art, personalities, famous events and customs of the time. He also wrote a history of the Turks in Europe, Annali Turcheschi (1568), a history of illustrious Italian families Origini e fatti delle famiglie illustri d’Italia (1582), a treatise in seven books on the art of writing letters, Il Secretario (1564), as well as a treatise on the government of kingdoms and republics, Del governo dei regni e delle repubbliche (1561). Sansovino was acquainted with nearly all the popular vernacular authors whose publishing careers centred in Venice: Pietro Aretino, Anton Francesco Doni, Ortensio Lando, Luca Contile, Andrea Calmo, Bernardo Tasso, Lodovico Dolce, and many others. Since he avoided the personal quarrels which flourished in this literary society, he was probably of a calm and peaceable temperament. He enjoyed some recognition with memberships in literary academies, and in 1573 was made a cavalier of the Order of Constantine. Ceaseless literary activity weakened his eyes in the last decade although he continued to write until his death in 1583 (cf. G. Kucinich, Un polygraph venetian del Cinquecento, in: “Paine Istria”, VIII, 1910, pp. 121-130, 145-151; P.F. Grander, Francesco Sansovino and Italian Popular History, 1560-1600, in:“ Studies in the Renaissance”, XVI, 1969, pp. 139-180; E. Bonora, Ricerche su Francesco Sansovino: Imprenditore, librario e letterato, Venice, 1994, passim; and E. Scantanburlo, Nuovi documenti per la biografia di Jacopo Sansovino, in: “Venezia Cinquecento. Studi di storia dell’arte e della cultura”, XI/22, 2001, pp. 17-21).