Beschreibung:

Bible. Latin. Biblia sacra vulgatae editionis tribus tomis distincta. Rome: Stamperia Apostolica Vaticana, 1590
First and only edition of the Sixtine Vulgate, the first papally authorized edition of the Latin Bible. Rare on the market. In the 1580s scholars in Rome under the direction of Cardinal Antonio Carafa worked for years on emending the Latin Bible text but Sixtus V, confident in his learning and impatient of their progress, decided to set their work aside and assume editorship himself, even correcting proofs. Sixtus introduced his own system of verse numbering, seeing the now widely accepted verse divisions of Robert Estienne as smelling of heresy. He omitted all the traditional prologues, including the authentic prologues of Jerome, and excluded the Prayer of Manasseh and apocryphal books 3 and 4 Ezra, present in most editions from the Gutenberg Bible onward.
Printing was completed in May 1590, and copies were sent that month to the leading rulers of Catholic Europe. The preliminaries include a Bull of Sixtus, Aeternus ille celestium, declaring the text to be immutable and forbidding any reprint without papal permission. Sixtus died in late August 1590, and early the following month the College of Cardinals suspended sale and distribution of the edition. Sixtus’s Bull was ignored. The College requested the return of copies already sent out, but with only partial success. Many Jesuit colleges in northern Europe held on to their copies. In April 1594 the copies of the Sixtine Vulgate that had been returned to Rome were pulped. For two years after 1590 there was no official Latin Bible, but the many earlier post-Tridentine editions of Louvain and Antwerp (notably of Plantin) were considered fully acceptable.
The hurry of printing led to many typographical errors which were partially corrected by hand and by small paste-on printed cancels, whose presence and absence varies considerably from copy to copy. A number of such corrections are present in this copy. 3 volumes in one, Super-Median folio (341 x 233 mm). Roman type, double column, 47 lines plus headline. collation: π2 ππ2; *6 **2; A-Rr6 [Genesis-Job]; ***2 Ss-Ffff6 [Psalms-2 Maccabees]; ****2 Gggg-Aaaaa6 Bbbbb8 [New Testament]. π2 misbound after *6. Title printed in red and black, additional engraved title-page, woodcut initials. (Both titles and π2 laid down, the engraved title trimmed short of the plate edges; lacking *1_8 which have been supplied in typographic facsimile, probably in the eighteenth century, some foxing and browning. A manuscript note on the verso of the title-page, "Non amoveatur sub pena excommunicationis," perhaps indicates that it was under restricted access in some library.)
binding: Eighteenth-century Italian sprinkled sheep (351 x 257 mm), spine gilt in compartments with red morocco lettering- piece, red edges, vellum index tabs at start of each volume. (Binding slightly rubbed and scraped.)
acquisition: Purchased from Librairie Quentin, Molènes, 1997. references: Darlow & Moule 6181; Edit16 5805; Renouard 243/1.Note: The pervasive statement that Aldo Manuzio the younger (d. 1595) was the head of the Vatican Press is incorrect. He lived in Rome as professor of rhetoric at the university, but was only taken on as a corrector at the press, one among several, in 1595.