{"product_id":"bonifacio-arte-de-cenni-1616","title":"L' arte de' cenni","description":"\u003cp\u003eCon la quale formandosi favella visibile si tratta della muta eloquenza, che non è altro che un facondo silentio. Divisa in due parti. The Art of Gestures, by which visible speech is formed. It treats of mute eloquence, which is nothing other than an eloquent silence. Divided into two parts. 1616 First Edition Pp. [1] f.e.,[20], 1-8, 5-624, [1] r.e. Vicenza Francesco Grossi Contemporary full rigid vellum, plain; smooth spine; some scratches, abrasions, and signs of age, including early ink doodles. Small split at the head of the spine; a small portion of vellum lacking at the top of the rear cover, approximately 1 inch. Leaf 7–8 (A4) inserted twice, and an additional index leaf inserted between A2 and A3 (with a loss at the lower corner affecting several lines of text), making the quire marks A1, A2, extra index, A4, A3, A4. Woodcut headpieces, tailpieces, and initials. Small worming in the lower inner margin of the first one hundred leaves; a light waterstain at the lower outer corner, more or less visible; a further stain in the upper margin of the initial leaves. Overall, a charming copy of this scarce edition. First edition of this significant cultural work. Giovanni Bonifacio's L'Arte de' Cenni is recognized as the earliest European treatise devoted exclusively to the systematic study of gesture and nonverbal communication. Bonifacio, a jurist who had spent decades as advocate and assessor in the tribunals of the Venetian Terraferma, framed the book as an escape from the courts,from the 'strepiti forensi,' (forensic clamour)and from the 'odioso cianciume e garralità' (the hateful prattle and garrulity) that he names in his dedication. What emerged from that retreat was a vast encyclopedic dictionary of the body's expressive possibilities - a learned attempt to make 'visible speech' legible through the resources of humanist erudition. Its importance lies in that unusual crossing of disciplines: legal experience, philology, moral reflection, and the history of performance are brought together in a single inquiry into how the body speaks before, beside, and sometimes against words. The verso of the title page bears a manuscript epigraph from Dante, Purgatorio X, 94-96: 'Colui, che mai non vide cosa nuova, \/ Produsse esto visibile parlare, \/ Novello a noi, perche qui non si troua. Part One, the great bulk of the text, proceeds 'a capite ad calcem' (from head to foot) through the body's parts, devoting chapters to the head and all its specific parts (forehead, eyebrows, eyelids, nose, lips, cheeks, chin, ears), arms, hands, fingers, chest and bosom, belly, flanks, hips, legsand feet, and even genitalia Within each chapter, specific gestures are catalogued, their significance expounded, and their meaning confirmed by an extraordinary apparatus of classic authors (Aristotle, Cicero, Pliny, Virgil, Ovid and many more), religious ones (the Church Fathers andScripture) and more modern authorities (Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, among many others). The curious chapter on the genitals treats with forensic calm such subjects as the display of the pudenda, the gesture of assuming feminine nature, and castration ('Tagliarsi il membro'), justifying the inclusion of 'gesti obsceni' as necessary to render more persuasive the invitation to avoid them. Part Two demonstrates the utility of gestural knowledge across twenty-one domains of human activity, among which:metaphysics, astrology, music, arithmetic, geometry, grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, poetry, history, ethics, economics, politics, agriculture, militia, medicine, navigation, architecture, wool-working, and hunting. The chapter on agriculture (Cap. XV, p. 589) invokes Hesiod, Cato, Varro, Columella, Palladio, and Virgil to argue that the farmer's art depends as much on reading natural signs as on verbal precept. In the section on dialectic (Cap. VIII, p. 545), the well-known anecdote of Zeno the Stoic illustrates the distinction between rhetoric and dialectic through a single gesture—open palm for the former, closed fist for the latter. The discussion of economia (Cap. XIII, p. 573) extends this logic to domestic governance, citing Hesiod, Aristotle, Solomon, and Ariosto on the husband's need to interpret his wife's unspoken signs. The work carries a dedication to the Accademici Filarmonici of Verona, of which Bonifacio was a member under the academic name 'L'Opportuno.'  Bonifacio turns every nod, wink, movement, and awkward silence into scholarship, sustained by learned citation and an almost encyclopedic command of sources. The treatise unfolds as a continually surprising inquiry, poised between Semiotics, Anthropology, and Rhetoric, and animated throughout by the intellectual energy of humanist proto-theory, dense with quotation and attentive to the strata of learned tradition and folklore alike. The body speaks; this book gives it footnotes.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"La Fenice Antiquaria","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48150053454059,"sku":"138-1616--920-494.48-2026","price":1487000.0,"currency_code":"KRW","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0766\/2000\/5611\/files\/00138_IMG_8007_9533c603-d369-490f-9714-733c1ee0e820.jpg?v=1777186871","url":"https:\/\/fenicebooks.com\/en-kr\/products\/bonifacio-arte-de-cenni-1616","provider":"La Fenice Antiquaria","version":"1.0","type":"link"}