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"Some Observations on the 1532 Edition of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso", Studies in Bibliography, 40 (1987), 72-85.

I am grateful to Neil Harris, of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and to Jeremy Potter, of the Brighton Polytechnic, for drawing my attention to the existence of these copies, which have hitherto escaped the attention of Ariosto scholars.

J. Van Praet, Catalogue de livres imprimés sur vélin, qui se trouvent dans des bibliothèques tant publiques que particulières (1824-28), II, 109-10, lists the location of the five copies as: "1. Dans la Bibl. Barberini, à Rome [copy no. 11 in my list]; 2. Dans celle de Vicence [copy no. 8]; 3. De M. le comte Garimberti à Parme [copy no. 12]; 4. De M. Giuseppe Valletta, à Naples [the Chantilly copy]; 5. Le cinquième a passé en Angleterre [presumably copy no. 23, brought to Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century by Giuseppe Baretti for the Irish peer James Caulfeild (1728-1799), fifth viscount and first earl of Charlemont; see C. Fahy, "L'esemplare già 'Charlemont' dell'Orlando furioso del 1532", Lettere italiane, 14 (1962), 441-450]". The major Italian bibliography of the chivalric epic, however, gives only four vellum copies, conflating Van Praet's fourth and fifth copies; see [G. Melzi], Bibliografia dei romanzi e poemi cavallereschi italiani; seconda edizione corretta ed accresciuta (1838), 117.

See [L. Delisle], Chantilly: le Cabinet des Livres: imprimés antérieurs au milieu du xvie siècle (1905), 28.

For Standish's library, see Chantilly: le Cabinet des Livres, xxii-xxxii. Standish, a Francophile, bequeathed his collection to the king of France. His books passed to the duc d'Aumale on the death of Louis Philippe in 1850. For the acquisition by Melzi not earlier than 1830 of a large-paper copy with facsimile title-page, see G. Melzi-P. A. Tosi, Bibliografia dei romanzi di cavalleria in versi e in prosa italiani (1865), 38-39.

On this copy, see now C. Fahy, "A Copy in Sheets of the Orlando furioso of 1532", La Bibliofilia, 88 (1986), 189-193.

For the convenience of readers who may not have vol. 40 of Studies in Bibliography to hand, the 1532 Furioso is a quarto in eights, collating A-Z8, a-h8; it has nearly 300 press-variants, disposed from beginning to end of the volume, and affecting three-quarters of the formes required to print the text, and there is a cancel involving the inner sheet of gathering A.

See "A Copy in Sheets of the Orlando furioso of 1532", 191-193, and n. 10. A further visit to Verona has slightly altered my appraisal of the watermark situation in that copy. I now think that four, not two, different versions of the anchor mark inscribed in a circle are represented in its paper, the two new marks both having two barbs on the anchor fluke, not one; one of the new marks is surmounted by a six-pointed star, the other by a three-petalled flower. In addition, there is a hat watermark in both sheets of the final gathering, so reducing the number of unwatermarked sheets from 32 to 30. There are thus six different identifiable types of paper represented in this copy, and I have found a seventh, watermarked with the letters N B inscribed in a circle, in one sheet only of two other anchor paper copies. Doubtless the unwatermarked paper and all the anchor papers were part of the 400 reams that Ariosto bought from Salò for the printing of this edition (see SB, 40 [1987], 75, and n. 10). The anchor inscribed in a circle was a widely used watermark in Italy; the version with a single barb is Venetian, and so is the hat; see C. M. Briquet, Les filigranes: dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu'en 1600. A Facsimile of the 1907 Edition with Supplementary Material by a Number of Scholars (1968), I, 40-41; 222-223; and marks 588-589; 592; 484, 493; 544; 3401-08.

Briquet, Les filigranes, I, 2-4.

Briquet, loc. cit. The mark found in the 1532 Furioso is similar to a group of sixteenth-century Venetian marks illustrated in Briquet (7280-7302), though none of these has a countermark.

D. F. McKenzie, "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices", SB, 22 (1969), 1-75.

Despite the fact that it is reasonable to hypothesize the existence in this edition of three subgroups of copies, each with a different destination, I do not think there are any grounds for describing them as separate issues of the edition. The identity of the sub-groups was apparent to the printers and to the author, and their destination was known to the latter, and possibly also to the former. But none of this information was displayed on the copies, or otherwise made explicit, except in so far as the material on which they were printed of itself differentiated them in the eyes of users. Nor are the subgroups entirely discrete as bibliographical units: as has already been said, there is one incorrect state in some copies of the large-paper group, and the vellum group has both cancellandum and cancellans of sheet inner A.

Castiglione's letters to his steward, Cristoforo Tiraboschi, were published in an English translation by J. Cartwright, Baldassare Castiglione, the Perfect Courtier: his Life and Letters 1478-1529 (1908), II, 373-378. The Italian text was published in 1851, from originals which have remained in private hands. The appearance of the relevant volume of the critical edition of Castiglione's correspondence, now in course of publication, may help to resolve several small problems caused by the 1851 text and Julia Cartwright's translation. Another large-paper copy belonged to the Trivulzio family (Margherita Trivulzia, contessa della Somaglia, was one of the distinguished friends mentioned in Castiglione's second letter), and is now presumably in the Biblioteca Trivulziana, Milan; see A. A. Renouard, Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde, ou Histoire des trois Manuce et de leurs éditions; troisième édition (1834), 105. In Italian, "reale", applied to paper, normally has the same meaning as the English "royal". However, the large-paper copies of the Cortegiano are certainly not on paper of the size normally designated as "royal". Unfortunately, satisfactory documentation of the precise meaning, or meanings, of the terminology of printing and allied crafts in Renaissance Italy is singularly lacking.

A facsimile edition of the greater part of these fragments, which are now in the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea,

Ferrara, was published in 1904 by G. Agnelli (L. Ariosto, I Frammenti autografi dell' "Orlando Furioso"); two further leaves of the fair copy of the Olympia episode, which had become separated from the main part of this section long ago, and are now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, were published in facsimile in the same year by G. Lisio, "Autografi ariosteschi", in Da Dante al Leopardi: raccolta di scritti critici, di ricerche storiche, filologiche e letterarie, con facsimili e tavole, per le Nozze di Michele Scherillo con Teresa Negri (1904), 387-390. All the fragments were edited with introduction and notes by S. Debenedetti in 1937.

I have been rigorous in including in my count only variants which cannot reasonably be attributed to anyone else but the author. The total number of variants between the manuscript and the printed edition in this forme, excluding those involving abbreviations, which were very common both in written and in printed Italian in the first half of the sixteenth century, is 131.