Dante: Divina Commedia / Divine Comedy - Prestige Limited Edition

Dante: Divina Commedia / Divine Comedy - Prestige Limited Edition by Dante Alighieri. Published by Cadell Davies, 1802. Hardcover 204 pages NoISBN Language: English. Dante: Divina Commedia / Divine Comedy - Prestige Limited Edition The Divine Comedy La Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri. Cadell Davies, 1802. ALIGHIERI, Dante. The Divine Comedy La Divina Commedia. London: Cadell Davies, 1802. Fine press compilation, c. late 20th or early 21st century. Illustrated: The volume is elaborately illustrated throughout in color, comprising a comprehensive anthology of Dante's text accompanied by historical illustrations. Limited Edition: Copy number 39 of an ultra-restricted limitation of only 50 copies printed. Format: Royal Octavo, 210 x 215 mm. Text beautifully composed in double columns with 96 lines, printed in Gothic Rotunda typeface with Pearl 5-point typesize, pp. vi, 110, lxxxviii, featuring comprehensive appendices and addenda. Literary Note: This magnificent edition merges two centuries of English Dante scholarship, featuring the English verse translation by Reverend Henry Boyd alongside the celebrated translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Harmoniously echoing the high decorative, delicate filigree tendrils, vine stalks, and foliage scrolls of the marginalia, this artistic edition smoothly intertwines and poetically, intricately interweaves Reverend Henry Boyd's translation published by Cadell and Davies in 1802, concordantly blending with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's translation published by Ticknor and Fields in 1867, perfectly matching all these exquisite, abundant, and richly decorative elements across every page. Condition: Exceedingly Rare Luxury Binding. Immaculate volume in exceptionally fine condition. Premium, deep-grained designer buckram binding with spine straight, perfectly tight binding, and strong, intact hinges. Custom-designed decorative endpapers pristine and undamaged. Internally unmarked and immaculate; ultra-thick archival paperstock engineered for centuries of preservation, leaves crisp, showing no obvious signs of handling. The exterior reveals only minimal, superficial shelfwear to corners, evidencing preservation by careful archival handling. An extraordinary copy of distinguished provenance in impeccable condition throughout, featuring an exceedingly rare luxury binding of the highest collector grade. Description: This spectacular volume represents an extraordinary multi-century synthesis and stands as the absolute pinnacle of modern private press book production. This Special Collectors' Edition belongs to an ultra-restricted limitation of only 50 numbered copies worldwide, featuring magnificently ornate composition, decorative gilt embellishments, and bespoke deluxe printing quality of an elite tier. Crucially, the core text honors the profound cultural moment where, for the first time in history, an author published a work of monumental epic scale entirely in the vernacular tongue. By bypassing traditional Latin, Dante Alighieri boldly elevated his native spoken idiom into a supreme literary medium, effectively turning the Florentine Tuscan dialect into what is now recognized as literary Old Italian and setting the foundational baseline for the modern, standardized Italian language. The frontispiece and title page are preceded by a spectacular half-title featuring a reproduction of the hand-illuminated incipit leaf of the 1502 Aldine edition of Le Terze Rime di Dante by Aldus Manutius from the Newberry Library, Chicago. The frontispiece features a neoclassically framed portrait of Dante Alighieri placed opposite the title page. The composition is split into an oval portrait at the top and an architectural monument base below. The work is housed in a modern luxury case-laminate hardcover executed in an antiquarian style, leaving the book internally immaculate and free of wear. The front board features an ornate, lavishly gilded armorial Renaissance motif mirroring a historic European provenance layout, centered by a mirror-script monogram which can be read as a stylized, inverted capital letter D for Dante, or alternatively as a calligraphic capital letter C highlighting the title of the Commedia itself. Evoking Leonardo da Vinci's celebrated tradition of scrittura speculare, or mirror writing, the interlocking geometry on the cover is structurally reversed, acting as a deliberate graphic signal advising the reader that the text requires a non-linear perusal. The spine is detailed with six flat, gilt-paneled compartments divided by intricate horizontal gold borders that create the striking geometric illusion of classic raised bands, completed with the title in gilt on a dark green title label positioned elegantly between the tooled panel lines. As a sophisticated monument of modern typographic art, the volume is illuminated throughout by polychrome illustrations and decorative elements, seamlessly merging the text and images into a self-contained bibliographic masterpiece. The illustrations and copious illuminations by Priamo della Quercia and Giovanni di Paolo from the Yates Thompson MS 36 are meticulously integrated throughout all pages of the text block as a continuous artistic sequence. Following traditional medieval rubrication rules, every major structural text section begins with a prominent, decorative polychrome illuminated initial, while the text is set in a dense Gothic Rotunda blackletter typeface. The designers deliberately abandoned the rigid constraints of Henry Boyd's rhyming stanzas to insert Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's fluid blank verse. This allowed the typographers to manually adjust line breaks and sentence structures to satisfy hidden cryptographic grids without fracturing the literary coherence of the text. Under the designer's typographic scheme, the layout completely redefines printing by locking verses into vertical, line-by-line acrostic matrices inspired by the 1544 Venetian mathematical printing tradition of Alessandro Vellutello. The architectural geometry of the layout owes its structural lineage to the landmark 1544 Venice edition of Dante Alighieri published by Francesco Marcolini, featuring Alessandro Vellutello's commentary and illustrations. In Book I, Inferno, the initial capital letters of the left margin run in a strict vertical sequence to continuously spell out ""SATANA"" over and over again, locking the reader's eye into a claustrophobic and inescapable typographic cage. In Book II, Purgatorio, the outer column margin vertically spells out ""PURGATORIO,"" while the parallel inner margin tracks a matching vertical sequence spelling ""ANATHEMA"", the contemporary ecclesiastical curse of excommunication. In Book III, Paradiso, the first column spells out ""PARADISO,"" which is balanced against a secondary vertical sequence in the inner margin spelling ""SANCTUS,"" forcing the type itself to act as the unceasing, looping background hymn of the angelic choir. The text section comprising all three canticles is followed by the complete collection of woodcuts in color by Alessandro Vellutello and Giovanni Britto published by Francesco Marcolini in Venice in 1544. This modern edition reproduces all of Alessandro Vellutello's historic 1544 illustrations completely in color, rendering his iconic, architectural woodcuts, which were originally carved by Giovanni Britto, with a vibrant visual depth never seen in the original monochrome printings. The volume features full-color reproductions of the opening manuscript plates from the Dante Urbinate (Codex Urb. Lat. 365) in the Vatican Library, including the famous frontispiece by Valerio Mariani da Pesaro. It includes full-color plates with all maps of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradiso from the celebrated 1568 Venice edition, edited by Bernardino Daniello da Lucca and published by Pietro da Fino. Additionally, it features color plates with engravings and intricate iconography by Cornelius Galle and Ludovico Cardi Cigoli, alongside many more opulent, intricately rendered illustrations and extensive pictorial ornamentation. The volume concludes with an exceptionally detailed Table of Contents and a comprehensive Page Index that exhaustively cross-references every individual Canto with corresponding illuminations, color plates, and historical maps. This magnificent, collector-grade object stands completely apart from commercial reprints, serving as a crown jewel for any serious collector of Danteana.