Petrarch in Print 1

Donato degli Albanazi (ca. 1326-ca. 1411) translated De viris illustribus into Italian and Felix Antiquarius and Innocens Ziletus printed the book in Pojano. They clearly intended their large and sumptuous edition for adornment by illuminators, rubricators, and others—binders among them—who would ultimately produce a physical product worthy of the book's contents (and of its owners; see, e.g., previous book). This copy of their 1476 imprint, like many other of the Cornell University Library books on display in this exhibition, comes from the Petrarch collection gathered by Willard Fiske, now the heart of Cornell's magnificent Petrarch Collection. Its printed strapwork still awaits such decorative ministrations although, in the nineteenth century, the English firm of Bedford put the book into the kind of "collector's binding" then thought appropriate for such a work. The assumptions that underlie this physical production suggest Petrarch's status—partly achieved in his own lifetime but continuing to grow even within the first century of his death—in Italian and European print culture.