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Specialist Notes
Very rare edition of Comedy, the first in 24°. Paganino's Dantino, so nicknamed because it represents the smallest Renaissance edition of the poem, is illustrated by four woodcuts placed at the end of the volume, created by the famous Venetian cartographer and engraver Giovanni Andrea Vavassore, identified by the monogram 'IA' engraved on the first plate. Just as Aldus reinvented the octavo format, dedicating it to vernacular literature and the Greek-Latin classics, so Paganini, who regarded Manutius as a master, was the true creator of the twenty-fourth format, which bears witness not only to the eclecticism and inventiveness commercial of the Benaco printer, but also the definitive overcoming of some fifteenth-century modules of book production. The edition, dedicated to Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, was included in a series inaugurated by Paganino in the same year with Petrarch's Rhymes, Bembo's Asolani and Sannazaro's Arcadia, also dedicated by the printer to illustrious contemporary personalities and patrons: «Dante in twenty-fourth is dedicated to Giulio de' Medici and refers to the edition, nuper excussa, of the De remedies: connection with a clear strategic value in Paganino's catalogue, that of choosing, as dedicatees, the most authorized authors Tuscans, the two great Medicis, characters extremely involved by family tradition (and not only) with the vulgar culture. The operation is so aware that it will be necessary to think of the printing of the Comedy right next to that of De remediis, therefore in the same 1515». (Angela Nuovo, Alessandro Paganino (1509-1538), Padua 1990, p. 28).
De Batines I, 77-78. Mambelli, n. 26; Martini, p. 30; Adams D, 337; Baroncelli, 46; Brunet II, 502; Cat. Books, no. 582; Essling, 540-41; Sander, 2323-24. 1515