Rime di Michelagnolo Buonarroti: Raccolta da Michelagnolo suo Nipote

Florence: Appresso i Giunti, 1623. BUONAROTTI. Rime di Michelagnolo Buonarroti. Raccolta da Michelagnolo suo Nipote. Florence: Appresso i Giunti, 1623.

First edition. Small quarto (9 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches). [12], 88 pp. Woodcut device on title-page, decorative woodcut head- and tail-pieces and initials, typographic ornaments throughout.

Uncut and bound in modern full brown speckled calf decoratively blindstamped on covers, gilt-stamped on spine with five raised bands. Minimal foxing throughout. Very good.

We read in the preface that the intent of Michelangelo's heirs was to publish a definitive volume of verses as an antidote to the many spurious editions produced since his death. Michelangelo's grandnephew goes on to say that these verses were in large part taken from a manuscript in the Vatican Library, most of which is in his granduncle's hand.

While this book is now hailed as a classic in modern gay literature, for many years this was not the case due to some creative editing by Michelangelo the Younger. The homoeroticism of Michelangelo's poetry was obscured when his grand nephew, Michelangelo the Younger, published an edition of the poetry in 1623 with the gender of pronouns changed from male to female. John Addington Symonds reclaimed Michelangelo's homoeroticism by translating his sonnets into English and writing a two-volume biography and publishing it in 1893.

"But when the queer art historian John Addington Symonds was granted access to the Buonarroti family archives in Florence in 1863 he discovered a note written in the margin of the poems by Michelangelo's grand-nephew (called Michelangelo the Younger) saying that the poems must not be published in their original form because they expressed ‘amor . . . virile', literally ‘masculine love', a Renaissance polite euphemism for paiderastia, better translated as ‘male-male desire'. Symonds thus was able to make public the fact that when Michelangelo the Younger prepared his great-uncle's poetry for posthumous publication in 1623 he had changed all the masculine pronouns in the love poems to feminine pronouns, thus ensuring that any sentiments in the poems that could not be interpreted as being merely platonic would at least be interpreted as being normal, i.e. heterosexual" (Rictor Norton).

This edition was printed by one of the most famous printers of their day, the Giunti family, whose device on the title page included the Florentine giglio, or lily. These fine productions are still known to book collectors as "Giuntine."

Gamba 248.

HBS 67330

$5,000.