THE FIRST FULLY ILLUSTRATED VENETIAN EDITION OF THE COMEDY.

After the Florentine edition by Nicolò di Lorenzo of 1481, the text of the Comedy regularly appears accompanied by the commentary of Cristoforo Landino, as also happens in this edition of March 1491.
A new feature of this Venetian incunabulum is the complete iconographic set . In two previous editions, the illustrations had been limited to accompanying only parts of the Comedy. The 1481 edition included a maximum of nineteen vignettes for the Inferno, inspired by the drawings of Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) and engraved by the Florentine Baccio Baldini (1436-1487). Images from other sources stopped at the end of the Purgatory in the Brescia edition of 1487. The iconographic set is complete here and returns in the other edition of 1491 and in those of 1493 and 1497, all printed in Venice. The enterprise of Bernardino Benali and Matteo da Parma reaches all the way to the end, and provides each hundred canto with an ad hoc illustration. The author of the drawings is a certain anonymous Maestro di Pico , active in Venice in the second half of the 15th century, first as a miniaturist, then as an illustrator of printed texts, then as a designer of woodcuts. The vignettes have a didactic-cartoonish quality: above Dante and Virgil, although quite recognizable in some of their constant features (Virgil with long hair, beard and moustache, Dante perfectly clean-shaven and with a characteristic headdress), are the distinctive initials: «D» and «V». And so several other characters are highlighted by their name.

Goff D32; Sander 2313; Pell 4117 (var); IGI 363; Pr 4877; BMC V 373; GW 7969.