ILIAS AMBROSIANA.

HOMER.

(Bern, Switzerland: In aedibus Urs Graf, 1953). 365 x 275 mm. (14 1/2 x 10 3/4"). LVII, [3] pp., followed by plates. No. 66 OF 800 COPIES.

Publisher's stiff vellum with gilt illustration on front cover. In original plain dust jacket and (somewhat soiled and worn) blue backram slipcase with printed paper label on spine. With 58 color photographic reproductions of the illustrations from the Ambrosiana Library manuscript of the Iliad, printed on glossy paper and tipped onto plates, as well as 26 leaves of black and white photographic reproductions of the text. Color photos with captions in Italian, German, English, and French. With a prospectus for the publisher's forthcoming "Hellenistic-Byzantine Miniatures of the Iliad" laid in at front. ◆Top three inches of back cover of the dust jacket wrinkled, tape-repaired, and missing a three square-inch piece at the outer corner, minor soiling to the jacket, vellum with (naturally occurring) variations in color and grain, but the text immaculate and the binding unworn.

This is the first color-printed edition featuring the illustrations from the fifth century A.D. manuscript of Homer's Iliad held by the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. The miniatures depicting scenes from the Iliad are painted in a Hellenistic style, which leads scholars to believe that the manuscript may have been created in Alexandria. Sometime in the 11th century, the 58 scenes included in our book were cut from the manuscript and pasted into a codex of Homeric texts in the south of Italy. That volume later landed in the collection of Venetian humanist Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535-1601), who amassed the greatest library in 16th century Italy, and after Pinelli's death, the collection was purchased by Cardinal Federico Borromeo for the Ambrosiana Library. The images were removed from the 11th century text and rebound in 1612; they remained unrecognized for what they were until the early 1800s, when the scholarly Angelo Mai (1782-1854) began to study them. Our volume contains his descriptions of the illustrations in English and Latin, as well as an introduction in Italian, English, German, and French by Italian archaeologist and epigrapher Aristide Calderini (1883-1968). Following the reproduced color illustrations are black & white images of the text in the original Greek. (ST17496-024)

Price: $450.00