Vita Di Ferrante Pallavicino. Scrita Da Girolamo Brussoni, L'Aggitato Accademico Incognito. by (PALLAVICINO). BRUSONI, GIROLAMO (c. 1614-186?) - 1655

1655. Venice, Turrini, 1655. 12mo (147 x 83 mm). 24pp. Title within double fillet border. Full-page engraved portrait of Pallavicino on title verso, signed Jac. Pi. (Giacomo Piccini). Gold-tooled green crushed morocco, sies with central grotesque tool and tiny fleurons at angles of a blind double fillet panel, spine gilt lettered with five faux raised bands, edges and turn-ins gilt, by Lortic; untrimmed. Provenance: Charles Butler (Warren Wood Hatfield bookplate); Bernard Breslauer. Repaired marginal tear in A10, grazing text; else a wonderful copy. First separate edition, second issue, dated 1655 and with the portrait, of Brusoni's brief biography of his friend Ferrante Pallavicino (1615-1644), defrocked monk, novelist, virulent anti-clerical satirist and fellow member of Loredano'Accademia degli Incognit. Pallavicino is best known for him being the only libertine of his generation to die for his beliefs. On a visit to Avignon, at the age of 28, he was imprisoned and beheaded. The author, Brusoni, was a libertine monk like Pallavicino and like him he was imprisoned for his beliefs; he spent time in a Venetion prison in 1644 for attacking the Church and its censorship of books. His fear of meeting his friend's fate made him toe the line thereafter. When he was released from prison he spent six or seven years in a monastery, in uncharacteristic silence, before publishing the present work, which lay the foundation for the exaltation of Pallavicino as libertine anti-hero. Considered by some Brusoni's best work, the Vita di Ferrante Pallaviciono floats in ambivalence, as Brusoni attempts to both exculpate his friend and distance himself from the flagrant libertinism which had led to his death. Brusoni concludes that Pallavicino, a mean of great intellegence and noble spirit, could not have written the scandalous anti-Catholic libel Il Divorzio Celeste (1643, then and now indisputably attributed to him), on of the pamphlets which may have been directly responsible for his execution. Picturesque references to the book trade abound throughout this colourful but poignant biography (the high prices fetched by Pallavicino's scurrilous manuscripts, literati who spy for the Inquisition, the pecuniary motivations of libellists, etc.). Pages 23 and 24 contain a list of Pallavicino's "permitted and prohibited works", which concludes with a reference to the burning of Pallavincino's books a the foot of the scaffold where he was beheaded. The Vita was published both separately, and probably in the same typesetting, in Pallavicino's Opere Permesse (Venice, I, Turrini, 1654-55, v vols.) The engraved portrait was apparently included in only few copies of the 1655 issue. In an inserted note, Bernard Breslauer, comments on the absence of a notorious work from Brusoni's list (a Platonic dialogue between a pederast and his student), The Alcibiade Fanciullo a Scola (1652), celebrated as 'the first homosexual novel', attributed first to Aretino, then to Pallavicino, and now considered the work of Antonio Rocco. [G. de Caro, art. DBI, 14:716 (citing a 1651 edition, apparently a ghost); Piposio, Il laberinto della verià: aspetti del romanzo libertino, 1995, pp. 18-19, 48-56. RLIN and OCLC list the separate edition at Harvard (166) and Berkeley (1654; the U. Wisconsin listing is microfiche), and the Opere Permesse at Harvard, Duke, And Boston Atheneum.