Michelangiolo gianetti (4 Ergebnisse)

Zustand: New. In English.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Elogy of Captain James Cook | Composed and Publickly Recited Before the Royal Academy of Florence | Gianetti Michelangiolo | Taschenbuch | 96 S. | Englisch | 2017 | hansebooks | EAN 9783337091064 | Verantwortliche Person für die EU: Hansebooks GmbH, Trakehner Weg 52, 22844 Norderstedt, gb[at]hansebooks[dot]com | Anbieter: preigu.…

Small folio, original quarter calf and boards, a fine copy. Rare, eccentric, but beautiful elegy for Cook. This prose essay honouring the life and voyages of the navigator in florid style would have greatly embarrassed him. Describing his achievements in purple tones, "this prodigy of nature" is lauded for his mapping of the St Lawrence, to which the author ascribes much of General Wolfe's successes. Each of the three voyages of discovery is described in some detail, while Cook, like many sailors a non-swimmer, is given powers that he never possessed: "From his infancy he was accustomed to the useful practice of swimming, and could cleave the waves of the Ocean with the facility of its inhabitants". Although the poem exhibits a particular interest in the exotic islands of Tahiti and Hawaii, as well as the sometimes violent interactions in New Zealand, the work does include a particularly attractive passage on Cook's grounding on a reef and subsequent beaching at Endeavour River. This is a beautifully printed book in the best Italian eighteenth-century tradition, much in the style of Bodoni, using elegant roman and italic types, classically composed within ruled borders. The dedication is to Sir Horace Mann, then English ambassador to the Court of Tuscany. Gianetti was professor of anatomy at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and well-known as a dilettante poet and friend of English poets such as Hester Lynch Piozzi. The English translation is signed R.M., that is, the English poet Robert Merry, who wrote under the pseudonym Della Crusca, and was the great English literary figure in Tuscany at this time. This work could be compared with Merry's own Ode on Rodney's defeat of De Grasse in the West Indies (1782), which appeared accompanied by a French translation by Sir Wogan Browne and an Italian translation by Gianetti himself (Brian Moloney, 'The Della Cruscan Poets', MLR, January 1965, p. 50). .…

First and only edition of "the first of the complete eulogies to Cook" (Smith, p. 228). A fascinating, highly appealing example of Cook's rapid European apotheosis, printed six years after his death and noted as a fine example of 18th-century Italian printing. An uncommon book with only a handful of copies traced in auction records. Gianetti was a dilettante poet and professor of anatomy at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. His rhapsodic account includes "what were fast becoming common features of tributes to Cook, such as his humble beginnings, and his introduction of the fruits of European civilisation - new plants, breeds of cattle, technology and commercial skills - to the peoples of the Pacific" (Williams, p. 71). Kippis, Cook's biographer, noted that "greater honour is paid to [Cook's] name abroad than at home. A remarkable proof of it occurs, in the eulogy of our navigator, by Michael Angelo Gianetti, which was read at the Royal Florentine Academy, on the ninth of June, 1785, and published at Florence, in the same year" (Kippis, p. 505). The dedication is to Sir Horace Mann, British ambassador in Florence. The translation, signed "R. M.", is by English poet Robert Merry, who arrived in Florence in 1784 and entered the city's circle of expatriate English writers and dissident Italians, returning to England in 1787 following an affair with the mistress of the grand duke; it is Merry's extravagant style, which William Gifford later characterised as "Truth sacrificed to letters, sense to sound" (ODNB), which is responsible for some of the more high-flown elements in the English text, most famously the claim that Cook, who in fact never learnt to swim, could swim so well as to "cleave the waves of the Ocean with the facility of its inhabitants". This copy has the ownership inscription of Auguste Ponsot (1846-1924), dated 1878, across the title pages. Ponsot was a French chemist responsible for the invention of papier d'Arménie, a paper which when burnt releases a benzoin and vanilla smell. It was immensely popular in the 1880s and 1890s as a supposed air purifier. Beddie 1957; Forbes 99; not in Hill; Holmes 51; Kroepelien 486; Parks (Cook) 116; Sabin 27267; Spence 226. Andrew Kippis, The Life of Captain James Cook, 1788; Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyage, 1992; Glyndwr Williams, The Death of Captain Cook: A Hero Made and Unmade, 2008. Quarto (304 x 220 mm). With title pages in Italian and English, each with an engraved vignette of the Royal Society Cook Medal, Italian and English text in parallel, framed throughout. Contemporary marbled half calf, recent red morocco spine label, single flower in gilt to compartments between raised bands, Turkish pattern marbled sides, edges speckled blue. Housed in a custom grey cloth solander box. Contemporary ex libris inscription and various shelf marks to front endpapers, library stamps of the Lega degli insegnanti Bolognese to first few leaves, marginal pencil annotation to p. 55. Binding neatly refurbished, leather built up at spine ends and tips, evidence of prior label removed from lower compartment. Spots of wear to leather, sides rubbed, hint of worming to rear pastedown, outer leaves faintly soiled, a couple of marginal marks, light dampstain to fore edge margin of pp. 49-56, contents largely bright; a wide-margined copy in very good condition.…