# Plotini Platonicorum facile coryphaei Operum philosophicorum omnium libri LIV in sex Enneades distributi. Ex antiquiss. codicum fide nunc primùm Graecè editi, cum Latina Marsilii Ficinii interpretatione & commentatione



**Autore:** Plotinus

**Dati editoriali:** Basle, Peter Perna, 1580 (Colophon: Basileae, ex officina Petri Pernae, 1580 Kalend. Iunii)

**Codice archivio:** 196

**Prezzo:** 6500.00 USD

**Stato commerciale:** Disponibile

**Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/plotinus-enneads-first-greek-1580

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## Descrizione accademica e analisi

Folio (345x215 mm). [36], 771, [45] pp. Collation: α-γ6 a-z6 A-Rr6 Ss8 Tt6 Vv-Xx8. Greek and Latin text in parallel columns, with Ficino’s Latin commentary; Greek, roman and italic types. Large woodcut printer’s devices on the title-page, on 2S8v and on the final leaf; woodcut portrait of Marsilio Ficino on α6v; ornamental and historiated initials. Colophon on 2S8r. Contemporary or slightly later French calf, covers with a central gilt foliate ornament within a gilt fillet, spine in compartments with gilt ornaments and lettering (worn and rubbed, joints skilfully repaired). Early ownership inscription on the title-page, tentatively read as “La Roche[…]”, and a later blue oval stamp of the library of the Château de La Roche-Guyon. Light dampstaining to the lower inner margins towards the end and occasional light browning; a very good, generously margined copy internally. First edition of the original Greek text of Plotinus’s Enneads, one of the central works of ancient philosophy and a formative text of Renaissance Platonism. Published eighty-eight years after the first appearance of Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation, this substantial folio brought the Greek original into print alongside the translation and commentary through which generations of European readers had approached it. The edition offered scholars the means to compare Plotinus’s own language with the interpretation that had shaped his Renaissance reception. Plotinus’s fifty-four treatises, arranged by his pupil Porphyry into six groups of nine, investigate the nature of the soul, knowledge, beauty, time, providence and the relationship between the visible world and its intelligible principles. Their account of reality, articulated through the One, Intellect and Soul, also provides a framework for an inquiry into human experience: what it means to know oneself, how beauty directs the mind beyond appearances, and how the soul can recover an awareness of its own intellectual life. The range of the collection is remarkable, extending from sensation and memory to the nature of evil, freedom and the ultimate good. Porphyry’s Life of Plotinus, printed among the preliminaries, supplies the biographical and editorial setting for this body of thought. Ficino’s translation and commentary, first published at Florence by Antonio Miscomini in 1492, had made Plotinus a central presence in the philosophical culture of the Renaissance. His interpretation brought the ancient philosopher into sustained dialogue with the intellectual and religious concerns of the fifteenth century. Perna had already published a Latin edition at Basel in 1559; the addition of the Greek text in 1580 substantially extended that undertaking. The resulting volume preserves both the ancient work and the extensive interpretative apparatus through which Ficino helped establish its place in European thought. The preparation of the Greek text depended on an international network of manuscript owners and scholars. Perna’s preface records the use of four Greek manuscripts, three from Italy and a fourth supplied by the imperial historiographer and humanist Johannes Sambucus. Correspondence of April 1577 documents the transmission of Sambucus’s manuscript to the printer. This material history gives particular substance to the title-page’s claim that the Greek was being published from ancient manuscript witnesses: the book embodies the movement of texts between private collections and the scholarly printing houses of northern Europe. Perna’s involvement also places the edition within the intellectual culture of sixteenth-century Basel. An Italian religious exile, he developed a publishing program that brought classical scholarship into contact with theology, medicine and natural philosophy. The dedicatory preface, addressed to the magistrates of Nuremberg and acknowledging their support for the academy at Altdorf, presents the study of Plotinus as a contribution to philosophical and religious understanding. Signed by Perna, the preface has been attributed by Carlos Gilly to Theodor Zwinger. The dedicatory preface is dated 27 August 1580, following the colophon’s date of 1 June. The handsome woodcut portrait of Ficino, after Tobias Stimmer, derives from the portrait series used in Paolo Giovio’s Elogia virorum literis illustrium of 1577, here set within a different decorative frame. Placed immediately before Porphyry’s biography, and accompanied by Latin verses including epigrams attributed to Poliziano and Andrea Dazzi, it gives the Renaissance interpreter a conspicuous place at the entrance to the ancient text. The elaborate title-page device, with its lamp-bearing figure and biblical motto, is also associated with Stimmer’s production for Perna. The present copy bears the stamp of the library of the Château de La Roche-Guyon, a provenance linking it to an important French aristocratic collection. The château’s association with the La Rochefoucauld family and the duchesse d’Enville, and with the intellectual society frequented by Turgot, Condorcet and Arthur Young, lends historical interest to this evidence of ownership. The earlier manuscript inscription remains only tentatively deciphered, and its writer has not been securely identified.

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## Bibliografia di riferimento

VD16, P-3571; Italian Union Catalogue, IT\ICCU\BVEE\014622; F. Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen, no. 155. D.J. O’Meara, “Plotinus”, in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, VII, 1992, pp. 55-73, especially p. 59; G. Almási-F. Gábor Kiss, “In search of Sambucus. His philology, publications and friends”, in Ch. Gastgeber and E. Klecker, eds., Iohannes Sambucus / János Zsámboki / Ján Sambucus (1531–1584): Philologe, Sammler und Historiograph am Habsburgerhof, Vienna, 2018, pp. 35-126, especially pp. 63–64; C. Gilly, “Il dibattito intorno a Paracelso in Basilea”, Azogue, 7, 2010-2013, pp. 260-274; S.F.W. Hoffmann, Bibliographisches Lexicon der gesammten Litteratur der Griechen, Leipzig, 1845, III, p. 169.

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