Beschreibung:

Jacomo della Lana and Dante Alighieri Jacomo della Lana, Commentary on Dante, La Divina Commedia, in Italian, manuscript on vellum [Italy, mid-14th century] An important and early witness to one of the very first systematic commentaries on the text of the greatest work of Italian literature, Dante's Divina Commedia. Only one other manuscript commentary can be dated with certainty before 1350 and only four or five belong to the middle of the century. A complete bifolium, the margins folded over, c.295 x 460mm (folded) c.380 x 500mm (full bifolium); each page with 2 columns of 55 lines, one rubric in red, paraphs in red mark the lemmata and superscript letters in red presumably key the commentary to a copy of the Dante text, 2-line initial in red with mauve flourishing (rather faded). Provenance: apparently used for his annual accounts(?) by Cristoforo Guidastri, a notary documented in Bologna in the late 16th and early 17th centuries: the spine area (the space between the double columns of text) inscribed in a large florid script 'Christofori Guidastri Not. 1603. 1604'; the front cover inscribed '31'. The text is the commentary by Iacomo della Lana on Dante’s Divina commedia, originally written in Bolognese dialect in 1324-28, just a few years after the completion of the poem in 1320 and Dante’s death in 1321 (for a recent edition see Mirko Volpi, Iacomo della Lana, ‘Commento alla “Commedia”’, 2010). The text was very popular, partly because it was in the vernacular, and more than 100 surviving manuscripts are known (see Mirko Volpi, ‘Iacomo della Lana’, Censimento dei commenti danteschi, 1: I commenti di tradizione manoscritta (fino al 1480), 2011, pp. 290-315, esp. pp.306-10), but of these most are in Italian libraries, none are in private hands, and none is in the USA (with the possible, but disputed, exception of some brief excerpts in Boston, Gardner Museum, 2.C.1.5, on which see A.-M. Eze in Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections, 2016, cat. no 214, p.264). The Schoenberg database cites only one manuscript on paper (Phillipps 248, sold in 1971), and Leythrop Harper in 1974 offered a four-leaf fragment (for $5,000). These are, to the best of our knowledge, the only other manuscripts to have ever been offered for sale publicly. The recto page has Inferno 15:91–121 ('[conscien]tia est spiritus corector et pedagogus anime [...] colui che vince cioe colui ch’avanza'; the verso page has the end of the Proemio of Inferno 17 ('ad un animale [...] da exponer lo testo dove bisogno'), followed by a rubric 'La exspositione del testo', and Inferno 17:1–46, ending at 'L’una era del fogo del predito circolo. L’altra era'. There are numerous differences from the edition. We are grateful to M. Volpi, who suggests that the dialect points to the north of Italy, probably Emilia or the Veneto, but perhaps not Bologna itself, despite the later provenance.