Dell’Hercole di M. Giovanbattista Giraldi Cinthio nobile ferrarese, secretario dell’illustrissimo et eccellentissimo signore il signore Hercole Secondo da Este, duca quarto di Ferrara. Canti ventisei

4to (217x155 mm). 353 [recte 335], [17, of which 2 are blank]. Collation: A-V⁸ X-Y⁴ *⁴ †⁴. Leaves Y4v and †4v are blank. Full-page woodcut portrait of the author on title-page verso. Woodcut historiated initials. Text printed in two columns. Roman and italic types. Colophon and register at l. †3v. Errata at ll. †1v-4r. Late 17^th-/early 18^th-century stiff vellum, inked title on spine, sprinkled edges (slightly stained). Title page slightly soiled, outer blank margin of title-page verso reinforced with a slip of paper, occasional light staining and foxing, a good, genuine copy with a few old annotations in the index at the end.

Provenance. Front pastedown with the armorial bookplate of Alexander von Hübner (1811-1892), Austrian diplomat, born as Josef Hafenbredl and an illegitimate child of the chancellor K. von Metternich (1773-1859) with the niece of the Viennese glass merchant Rohrweck. From the year 1833 he assumed the name Alexander von Hübner and served on several missions in Italy. During the 1848 Revolution he was taken hostage in Milano and later in the 1860s served as Austrian ambassador in Rome. On the title page stamp of Cardinal Giuseppe Renato Imperiali (1651-1737). Elevated to the Sacred College of Cardinals in 1690, Imperiali exerted a great influence over the temporal administration, diplomatic posture, and intellectual life of the Papal States for nearly half a century. As Prefect of the Sacra Congregazione del Buon Governo for over four decades, he oversaw the municipal finances, public works, and fiscal administration of the entire pontifical territory, operating at the very center of Roman administrative statecraft. Simultaneously, Cardinal Imperiali achieved international renown within the European Republic of Letters (Res publica literaria) as a bibliophile and cultural patron. His private library, housed in the Palazzo Imperiali at Piazza Santi Apostoli in Rome and cataloged by the eminent scholar Giusto Fontanini in 1711, served as a vital institutional nexus for European humanists, antiquarians, theologians, and natural philosophers, embodying the ideal of the open, public-facing aristocratic library. Imperiali’s library was sold in 1793.

Rare first and only edition. This verse novel, which Giraldi had extensively discussed theoretically in his Discorsi (1554), was intended to be the practical realization of his ideas. Conceived in fifty cantos, it was published incomplete in Modena in 1557, with only twenty-six cantos, and was never republished. The Ercole is dedicated to the Duke of Ferrara and Giraldi's patron, Ercole II d'Este, who passed away in 1559 and was succeeded by his son Alfonso II, often mentioned as a child in the poem, indicating a complex, layered compositional process.

Ercole is a poem overtly pro-French and pro-papal (in line with the Este foreign policy) and is closely linked to the tumultuous events of contemporary history. With this poem, Giraldi seeks to offer an alternative model to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso: moving from the substantial unity of action with a myriad of characters to the unity of the protagonist with a multiplicity of actions. In this sense, Giraldi's novel is an objectively experimental work compared to the codified grammar of the verse poem in the 16th century. Classical mythology, also criticized by Tasso in both practical realizations and theoretical pronouncements in the Discorsi dell’arte poetica (1564), becomes an alternative option not only to the chivalric material of Carolingian descent but also to the historical material that guided another significant mid-16th-century epic experiment, Giovan Giorgio Trissino's Italia liberata dai Goti. The centrality of classical mythology in Ercole allows for a coherent discussion of an "Ovidian antecedent," identifying in the Metamorphoses the only narrative poem that presents, due to the choice of mythological material and the "gratuitousness" of many episodes, structural and thematic analogies with Giraldi's poem. This work is constructed additively, without a criterion in the selection of episodes (beyond their plausibility) and without a true focal point, apart from the protagonist's figure.

Giraldi, like all those who wrote narrative poems in the 16th century after Ariosto's masterpiece, intended to propose with Ercole an integral alternative model to the Furioso: this is demonstrated by his use of topical modules of "war poems" (the reviews and catalogues: some incredibly extensive) and moral allegories, typical of the modern poem (above all, Hercules at the crossroads, of probable Ariostean and Trissinian ancestry). Thus, alongside the overall experimentalism of the project, there are also explicit structural homages to tradition, indicative of an ambition, inevitably destined to be frustrated, to rewrite the coordinates of the genre in which his work is placed. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Ercole is the use of the prophecy module (already used by Ariosto and earlier by Virgil), which, in a poem with fluid material and essentially paratactic development, serves to construct a semblance of framework, creating overlaps of temporal registers and thus compensating for the sequential structure of the work. It is curious to note that when Giraldi makes historical prophecies, he is almost systematically contradicted by the actual development of the events to which he alludes. Consider the inevitable prophecy of a new anti-Muslim crusade, with Pope Paul IV invoked as the natural political and military leader: historical fate had it that Pope Carafa died in 1559, unable to materially pursue any such political and religious project. Another element of interest (also linked to a consolidated epic tradition) is the description of the exploits of a specific character (with a clear distinction between war exploits and amorous exploits). Those of Hercules, in the poem, are expanded and amplified to excess. On the other hand, it is only on a level of eloquent elaboration that one can express the creative freedom of an author who deliberately renounces, from the outset, to create an original poem in terms of inventio: almost all the episodes of the work are in fact codified by a robust literary and mythological tradition (with some significant exceptions, such as the Argonautic expedition, in which not Jason, but, understandably, from the encomiastic perspective that partly accompanies Giraldi's work, Hercules himself is the captain of the expedition).

Beyond its objective limitations, Giraldi's poem represents an important chapter in the development, far from linear, of chivalric and narrative poetry of the 16th century (especially in Ferrara) and testifies, well beyond the intentions of its author, to the crisis and unrest in which the Este duchy found itself around the mid-century, on the historical plane. To unravel these knots (but not entirely, perhaps, and not without an acute personal crisis), we must await a non-Ferrarese poet, Torquato Tasso, who, by recovering the Ariostean model, but bent to his own needs and intentions, and certainly also keeping in mind the nearby Giraldian Ercole, will propose a new, formidable declination of the verse novel with the Gerusalemme Liberata (cf. D. Rasi, Tra epica classica e tradizione romanzesca: introduzione all’«Ercole» di G. B. Giraldi Cinzio, in: “Schifanoia”, 4, 1987, pp. 73-83; also R. Bruscagli, Vita d’eroe: l’Ercole, in: “Schifanoia”, 11, 1991, pp. 9-19).

In the Biblioteca Ariostea, there is an autograph manuscript by Giraldi Cinzio (Classe I 406), containing three unpublished cantos of Ercole, along with numerous corrections and revisions (cf. C. Molinari, 'Correctio et rescritto in forma grande': note sul codice Classe I 406 della Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea (I Canti Undici dell’ “Ercole” di G.B. Giraldi Cinzio), in: “Studi italiani”, 2005, nr. 2, July-December, pp. 139-198). In it, the author states that the tenth canto was composed at the home of Ludovico Castelvetro (on the relationship between Giraldi and Castelvetro, see S. Jossa, Rappresentazione e scrittura. La crisi delle forme poetiche rinascimentali (1540-1560), Naples, 1996, pp. 139-252).

G.B. Cinzio initially studied medicine and philosophy, then human letters, succeeding his master C. Calcagnini in the chair in 1541. During the duchy of Ercole II d'Este and in the years of Renata of France's circle, he was the undisputed protagonist of the Ferrarese cultural scene. In 1561, following a conflict with the dukes of his city, he went into voluntary exile first to Mondovì, then to Turin, and finally to Pavia. Among his students, we particularly remember G.B. Pigna, with whom Giraldi had a violent clash regarding the discourse on novels that Pigna published in 1554, arousing the ire and accusations of plagiarism from the old master (cf. G.B. Giraldi Cinzio, Discorso dei romanzi, edited by L. Benedetti, G. Monorchio, and E. Musacchio, Bologna, 1999, passim).

The fame and influence of Giraldi were not limited to the Ferrarese environment but had a European resonance. He is credited with the European revival of Senecan theatre with its dark tones and cruelties, in open opposition to the Trissinian formula. The Orbecche, in particular, performed at the author's home in the presence of the duke in 1541, enjoyed considerable public success and constitutes one of the most successful Italian examples of Senecan tragedy (cf. P.R. Horne, The Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio Giraldi, London, 1962, passim). In 1563, Giraldi published a collection of novellas, the Hecatommithi, which were widely disseminated throughout Europe and provided Shakespeare with material for Othello and Measure for Measure (cf. P. Cherchi, M. Rinaldi, and M. Tempera, eds., Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio gentiluomo ferrarese, Florence, 2008, passim).