Dolce, Lodovico
Dialogo (..) nel quale si ragiona del modo di accrescere e conservar la memoria
1562, Venezia (Venetia), Gio. Battista, et Marchio Sessa Fratelli (colophon)
First edition
First edition of Lodovico Dolce’s "Dialogo della memoria", a treatise on techniques for employing vivid mental images and repetition to fix complex texts in memory. The text is an important Italian adaptation of Johannes Romberch’s "Congestorium artificiosae memoriae", first published in Venice by Giorgio de’ Rusconi in 1520. Dolce, A Venetian polygraph, translator, and theorist, reshapes Romberch’s Dominican mnemonic treatise into a graceful vernacular dialogue, elegantly suited to Italian rhetorical culture. For this edition's illustrations, the Sessa press reused the wooden blocks first cut for Rusconi’s 1520 "Congestorium", acquired by their family when they reprinted the work in 1533. The series also incorporates the famous visual alphabet of tools, animals, and objects, first printed by Erhard Ratdolt in Publicius’s 1482 edition, one of the earliest mnemonic alphabets in Europe. Among the images is the celebrated city view showing a shopfront marked “Bibliopola” (street bookshop) which Sander (for the 1520 edition) proposes may be the first printed depiction of a street-facing bookshop window. References: Sander 6555; Adams D-732; Mortimer Italian 157; Wellcome 1828.
The text unfolds as a didactic dialogue between teacher and disciple, structured to accompany the reader from sensory perception to the celestial hierarchy of ideas. The plates and text together form one of the most complete and fascinating vernacular expositions of the “art of memory” available in sixteenth-century Europe. The volume’s twenty-three woodcuts are of exceptional iconographic and pedagogical interest. Among them appear striking visual aids for mental architecture and symbolic association, such as: a diagram of the human head mapping the faculties of sense and memory, which is a Renaissance visualization of Aristotelian psychology and one of the earliest examples of phrenological illustration (B5); a figure within a perspectival room, illustrating spatial "loci", and a sort of "memory space" used for mental storage of concepts in different chambers of an imaginary building (D1r; I1); a cosmological diagram of the celestial spheres, integrating memory with divine order (D5r); the famous urban scene depicting a “Bibliopola” in a city landscape, believed to be the earliest printed image of a street-front bookshop (E1r); and finally the visual alphabet of objects, tools, and animals, one of the earliest mnemonic alphabets (G4-G7), together with other similar visual tools (E3, H2, H3 and more). Together these woodcuts compose a vivid synthesis of mnemonic, rhetorical, and visual theory.
Memory made visible: a visual symphony of ancient philosophy and the workings of the mind, brought to life by a parade of Renaissance tools, curious animals, objects, and artifacts drawn straight from the sixteenth century. And as a final delight for bibliophiles: one of the earliest known images of a street-front bookshop.
Leaves [1] f.e., [4], 120, [1] r.e.
Full contemporary vellum, lightly wrinkled, somewhat soiled, and with small traces of bookworm, but still sound. Spine reinforced internally with reused old manuscript parchment. Title page with woodcut printer’s mark (Pegasus in an elaborate frame); 23 woodcuts in the text of various sizes, some full-page. A few small spots in some margins. In the text, various charming old handwritten notes and underlinings. Ownership inscription a the front and end papers "Giuseppe Lunati di Milano". Complete as per the register in the colophon, but H4 is erroneously signed G4; page 59 (H3) is erroneously numbered 56.
Dimensions (inches): 6 x 4 x 1
Lodovico Dolce (1508–1568), Venetian humanist and translator, was deeply involved in the city’s printing industry and became known for his prolific output, skillful adaptations of classical and philosophical works into elegant Italian prose, and his ability to bridge Renaissance erudition with a broader reading public.
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