Aristotle 1549 First Edition (Portugal Coat of Arms) – De arte dicendi libri III

This rare first Vascosan edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Latin, edited by the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro (1454-1493), is bound with the arms of the Kingdom of Portugal.

First published in 1479, Barbaro’s text is here copied from a folio Giunta edition of 1548, which had been accompanied by the Greek text edited by the Florentine scholar Pietro Vettori (1499-1585). The following year, Michel de Vascosan (d.1577) printed both texts as separate octavo volumes, in his characteristic simple and elegant style. OCLC records only two copies in North America, at Illinois and North Carolina. For the Latin and Greek editions together, refer to Graesse I, p.215, and USTC 150205.

8vo, ff.131, [1 (blank)]; woodcut initials; light dampstaining to the lower margins, a few leaves lightly thumbed, but an excellent copy; bound in early eighteenth-century mottled sheep, the arms of Portugal blocked in blind to the upper board, the spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in one, and the edges speckled red; slight rubbing at the extremities, corners a little bumped; early marginal notes in ink to the index, ink inscription ‘Silva’ and ink stamp with initials ‘SP’ to the title, and a twentieth-century woodcut bookplate of E.S.Bastos to the upper pastedown. Language: French.