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Title Komodiai ennea [Comoediae novem, in Greek]. |
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Published, Date Aldus Manutius, Venice,15 July 1498. |
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Description Folio (30.5 x 20.6 cm). 348 leaves, 41 lines of commentary, Greek type, hand-coloured and illuminated woodcut decorative headpieces and 3- to 7-line initials, coat-of-arms within a laurel wreath supported by two cherubs and two (Aldine?) dolphins at foot of a1, rubricated, guide-letter, paragraph-marks and underlining; occasional ms annotations to margins, title leaf slightly soiled, decoration at foot of a1 a bit rubbed. Eighteenth-century mottled calf with central arms gilt, spine gilt in compartments with later morocco lettering-piece; joints cracked and weak, extremities rubbed, a few small repairs to spine, housed in calf-backed folding box. Provenance: Pauli Terhaerii (inscription on title page); S.Thaumaturgi Sergii, Bibliotheca seminarii ad Lavrae ssta Triados (inscriptions on title page, i.e. the Library of the Ecclesiastical Seminary in the grounds of the Trinity-St Sergius Lavra, which became); Bibl. Mosk. Dukhovnoy Akademii (Library of the Moscow Theological Academy, ink stamp to title); J.R. Ritman (BPH bookplate, #281, acquired from Christie's, 26 June 1991, lot 48). |
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Note Beautifully illuminated copy of Aldus' editio princeps of Aristophanes' comedies, the only complete plays from the 'Old Athenian Comedy' to survive up to now. With an important Russian provenance. A Greek scholar, born in Crete and linked with Venice, Marcus Musurus (ca. 1470-1517) translated and commented extensively nine of Aristophanes' eleven complete comedies which reached us. Having consulted diverse manuscript copies, he selected and edited the scholia, also included. The two other comedies, 'Lysistrata' and 'Thesmophoriazusae', could not be found complete and Musurus decided not to present them - the latter one was not published until 1515-16. The Moscow Theological Academy began as the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in 1685, the first higher education institute in Russia, founded by the Greek Likhudy brothers, and then run by Fedor Polikarpov, the Greco-Slavonicist who ran a productive printing press. It merged in the late 18th century with the Theological seminary at the monastery of the Trinity-St Sergius and was closed down in 1918 by the Bolshevik government, at which point its treasures were plundered and sold. The Trinity-St Sergius Lavra is Russia's largest and most important monastery; it was founded in the 14th century and had an impressive library of books and manuscripts. |
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References HC*1656; GW 2333; BMC V, 559; Goff A958; ISTC ia00958000; Brunet I, 451 ('édition belle et rare'). |
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Stock Number 84923 |
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