Plato, Opera, Venice, Aldus, 1513, 2 volumes, modern gilt leather with portraits of Aldus and Musurus

Plato

Απαντα τα του Πλατωνος... Omnia Platonis opera. Venice: (in the house of Aldus and Andrea Torresano, September 1513)

bound in two volumes, folio (307 x 192mm.), woodcut Aldine device on title-page and final verso, text in Greek, with blank leaves 2/4 and ii4, bound in crushed tan morocco gilt with inset coloured portraits of Aldus and Marcus Musurus, gilt morocco doublures with blue morocco panel tooled to the design of a sixteenth-century arabesque binding with central stamp of a seated poet being crowned with a laurel wreath, lettered "Jos. Lassi et amicorum" on inside lower covers, spines gilt in compartments with red morocco lettering-pieces, in a single slipcase with brown morocco gilt sides with Aldine device stamped in gilt

EDITIO PRINCEPS OF THE TEXT OF PLATO, A TALL CRISP COPY. The text was prepared by Aldus and Marcus Musurus; the first addressed his preface to the new pope Leo X, making a "supplicatio" for a new Christian Republic and for literature, and the latter composed a verse Hymn to Plato (in Greek). Between the two prefaces is a list in Latin of the treatises include in this volume.

The book retains some endleaves from a previous binding, with watermarks of an armorial inhabited by a snake, similar to Heawood 688 and 690, both of which are dated to Paris in the 1680s.

LITERATURE

Aldo Manuzio tipografo 116; Edit16 37450; Renouard 1513/4; UCLA 114

PROVENANCE

José Lasso de la Vega, name stamped on bindings