Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

A grand publication for a grand entrance 

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[GOZZI, Gasparo, editor]. COMPONIMENTI POETICI pel solennissimo ingresso di sua eccellenza il signor cavaliere Francesco Morosini alla dignità di Procurator di S. Marco per merito. In Venezia: Appresso Luigi Pavini, MDCCLXIII [1763]. £1,500

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SOLE EDITION. 4to, pp. lxxxviii, xxiv; title-page printed in red and black, engraved vignette on title, engraved head- and tailpieces throughout, initials within engraved borders; clean and crisp throughout; a fine, wide-margined copy in contemporary patterned stiff wrappers; very slight wear to extremities.

 

A lovely copy of this very rare collection of poems celebrating the solemn entrance of Francesco Morosini into Venice in his role as Procurator of San Marco.

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The Morosini family had held a central position in Venetian society and politics for centuries, most notably in the figure of another Francesco (1619-1694), who had reconquered the Morea for Venice in the 1680s and was elected doge in 1688. The influence of the family lived on with Francesco Lorenzo Morosini, generally known as Lorenzo (1714-1793), whose skills were more political than military; his greatest accomplishment was the negotiation of the Treaty of Mantua, signed in 1755, which settled the dispute between the Republic of Venice and the Habsburg Empire over territories around Lake Garda and the Tyrol. It was this that led him to be appointed as Procuratore di San Marco De Supra on July 2, 1755, one of two responsible for the financial administration of San Marco and its treasury, and a role second in importance only to that of the doge. Thanks to a number of diplomatic missions, though, it was only on April 18, 1763 that he was able to make his solemn entrance into the city, and it is this that the present volume, dedicated to his wife Elisabetta Cornaro Morosini, celebrates.

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Opening with a canzone by the editor, the dramatist and critic Gasparo Gozzi (1713-1786), the volume contains a mixture of sonnets, canzoni, epigrams and more, chiefly in Italian but with a few in Latin, by a wide variety of authors, largely from Venice and the Veneto, including Girolamo Vaninetti, Carlo Casati, the philosopher Giuseppe Maria Pujati, and Ottavio dalla Riva (best known for his translations of Horace); an appendix at the end adds more poems by Bolognese poets, including Gioseffi Manfredi and the jurist and poet Vincenzo Berni degli Antoni. One might have hoped for a contribution from Luisa Bergali (1703-1779), who was married to Gozzi, and there may indeed be some; several of the poems appear anonymously.

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Although the volume is very finely produced, it is not faultless: on p. xvi, the word ‘sonetto’, contained as throughout the work within an engraved vignette, is printed upside down. 

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Not in OCLC, which records a number of similar titles with different printers and paginations; SBN (IT\ICCU\VIAE\013949) records copies in Bologna (Casa Carducci), Naples, Padua (Capitolare), the University of Pisa, and Vicenza (Bertoliana). 

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