L'Adone, Poema del Cavalier Marino

First edition, illustrated with a large title vignette with the coat of arms of Louis XIII, as well as numerous fine woodcut head-and tailpieces as well as initials. Preceded by an epistle to Marie de’ Medici. Printed entirely in italic in 2 columns per page, each canto has divisional half-title page. At the end of the privilege one reads: “Achevé d’imprimer pour la première fois en italien le 24 avril 1623.” 

Modern full vellum binding, spine with five raised bands, manuscript title label, boards with some brown stains; leaves 501 and 503 have been mistakenly placed after leaf 495. Numerous pagination errors at the end of the volume, some leaves browned. Note that leaf A1 is a blank.

In 1615, Marie de’ Medici and Concini summoned Marino to France, where Louis XIII retained the poet with a pension of 2,000 écus. He composed his most celebrated work, L’Adone, in Paris over a period spanning more than twenty years.

This Baroque poem is made up of 40,000 verses and 5,183 octaves. The Cavalier Marino recounts the story of Venus and Adonis in a unique mixture of registers — epic, mythological, satirical and romantic — tinged with unbridled imagination. He blends Christian and Greco-Roman mythology, eroticism and mysticism, creating a text both innovative and close to the style of Ariosto and Tasso.

The publication immediately met with immense success in France, but also in Italy where it influenced the creation of the “Marinist style” and revived scholarly disputes. The poem was later placed on the Papal Index. Chapelain’s letter, written in French and found in the preliminary leaves, praises L’Adone, “a good poem, conducted and woven in its novelty according to the general rules of the epic and the best of its kind that could ever appear in public”.

Provenance: manuscript ex-libris “[G.D.?] Gaillard” on the title page, similar to one recorded on a copy of Compendium logicae, 1666 (Université Toulouse 1, Resp Mn 13004).