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Venice · 1476 · Nicolaus Jenson
Called by the trade "the most significant and best documented publication from the presses of Nicolas Jenson." The first edition in Italian of Pliny's Natural History, in Cristoforo Landino's translation — a super-royal folio set in Jenson's roman with Greek, financed by the Strozzi (who supplied 400-plus reams of paper) and illuminated for its grandest copies by Francesco d'Antonio del Chierico. It joins the two 1470 Jenson editions already held (Eusebius and Cicero), extending the typographic story to his mature work.
The facsimile is the Bodleian copy (Arch. G b.6, Bod-Inc P-372), chosen deliberately over the BSB copy that the ISTC record links: BSB left the initials blank, whereas the Bodleian copy is one of the lavishly illuminated presentation copies, with every initial supplied. Its proem is dedicated to Ferdinand I of Naples, so it shows Jenson's roman with the hand-decoration intact rather than the bare text block.
Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, Arch. G b.6 — CC BY-NC 4.0
ISTC ip00801000