[LANDO, Ortensio.] Paradossi cioe sententie fuori del comun parere, novellamente venute in luce …

‘Licentious and Blasphemous’

[LANDO, Ortensio.] Paradossi cioe sententie fuori del comun parere, novellamente venute in luce … Venice: [Bernardino Bindoni for Andrea Arrivabene?]. 1544.

8vo. Nineteenth-century calf, borders filleted in gilt, arms of the Spitalieri di Cessole counts (a pelican in her piety) blocked to both boards in gilt, spine gilt in compartment with two gilt black morocco lettering-pieces, edges gilt; ff. ‘101’ (i.e. 106), [2]; A–N8 O4; woodcut printer’s device to title depicting a tree struck by lightning; upper hinge cracked; small oilstains to ff. B6 and D2, short closed tear to f. 70 at head; nineteenth-century ownership inscription of Henry de Cessole to front free endpaper verso, later bookplate of G[ener]al Taufflieb to front pastedown.

Second edition (first Lyon, 1543), the first published in Italy, of these thirty controversial and widely censored paradoxes by the Milanese satirist Ortensio Lando, his first book in the vernacular.

This edition followed the following spring, published ‘at the initiative of A[ndrea] Arrivabene, a publisher with reformist sympathies, executed by B[ernardino] Bindoni, the same printer of the Beneficio di Giesu Christo crocifisso’ (DBI, trans.). The Beneficio, by Benedictine monk Benedetto da Mantova, argued for salvation through faith alone (a premise to which Lando indicated that he was receptive in his 1535 Forcianae questiones) and was swiftly suppressed by the Church, with almost all copies destroyed. Lando moved in circles sympathetic to the cause of the Reformation and was a friend of Étienne Dolet (hanged and burned for heresy, with his books, in 1546); all of his books were swiftly placed on the Index – with the present Paradossi widely confiscated in particular – as well as local Venetian lists of prohibited books. In an attempt to avoid such censorship, the work was published anonymously, with Lando (before 1512–c. 1558), concealing his name in two places: the main text concludes with ‘SUISNETROH TABEDVL’, i.e. ‘Ludebat Hortensius’ when read backwards, and Paolo Mascranico’s note to the reader on the verso identifies him as ‘M.O.L.M.’, i.e. Messer Ortensio Lando Milanese.

The paradoxes treat, for instance, whether poverty is better than riches; whether it is better to be ugly or handsome; whether drunkenness is better than sobriety, and whether it is better to have a sterile wife than a fertile one, and whether it is preferable to die or suffer at length. Amongst the most controversial paradoxes are the arguments that being born a bastard is neither ‘blasphemous nor odious’ because they are born of real love and passion; that losing one’s wife should be mourned as much as getting rid of mange, fever, or plague; that the works of Boccaccio are not worth reading (especially the Decameron); and that Aristotle was ‘not only an ignoramus, but also the worst man of his time’, and Cicero ‘ignorant not only of philosophy, but also rhetoric and cosmography’ (trans.).

Serveral of the Paradossi were ‘so licentious and blasphemous that even the French translator Charles Estienne, was compelled to omit them in the version he published in 1553’ (Sotheby’s, catalogue of the library of Guglielmo Libri (1861)). There were three variants published in the same year, of which this is the one with the fingerprint ‘uaar sire ial- sume (3) 1544 (R)’.

Provenance:

1. Ownership inscription of Henry de Cessole of Nice, collector of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century books and friend of Jacques-Charles Brunet. Famously, Italian virtuoso and composer Niccolò Paganini died in the arms of Cessole’s father, Count Hilarion Spitalieri di Cessole, in 1840. The count had Paganini’s body embalmed and smuggled to several locations before Paganini received a proper burial in 1876, thirty-six years after his death.

2. Bookplate of French First World War general and senator of Bas-Rhin Marie Émile Adolphe Taufflieb (1857–1938), dated 1920; he was named Grand Officer of the Legion d’Honneur in the same year.

Adams L–119; EDIT16 CNCE 23179; USTC 837261.

SKU: 2126621