Tibullo - Quae Exstant - 1708

MASTERPIECE OF AUGUSTAN ELEGY: THE POET OF OT IUM AMONG SHEPHERDS AND ALLEGORIES
COLLECTOR'S COPY
The Amsterdamer edition of 1708 of Albio Tibullo's works represents one of the high moments of Dutch classical philology between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Edited by Jan van Broekhuizen (J. van Broekhuizen), it presents itself as a text critically established “ad fidem veterum membranarum,” with apparatus of variants and a triple index, according to a scholarly method now fully mature. The typographic presentation, with a red and black frontispiece, engraved frontispiece, and arcadian taste copperplate plates, transforms the elegiac poet into a collectible and scholarly classic, inserted in the refined editorial circuit of the Amsterdam Wetstenian Workshop.
MARKET VALUE
Wetstenian quarto editions of Latin classics, complete with plates and in a contemporaneous parchment binding, generally sit in a price range between 600 and 1,000 euros, depending on the freshness of the copy and the quality of the engravings. Particularly sharp copies, with qualified provenance or well-known ex libris, can exceed 2,000 euros. The described copy, well preserved and complete, falls into the upper-middle range of the collecting segment dedicated to Dutch philology.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION AND CONDITION - COLLECTOR'S COPY
Contemporary full parchment binding, richly decorated with blind tooling on the boards, spine with raised bands. Ex libris Clément Roemers (Maastricht). Frontispiece printed in red and black; copperengraved added title page; 9 copper-engraved plates interspersed; illustrations in the text. Pages with some browning and physiological foxing. In old books with a multisecular history, a few imperfections may be present, not always noted in the description. Pp. (4); 16nn; 476; 74nn; (4).
FULL TITLE AND AUTHOR
Quae exstant.
Amstelaedami, ex officina Wetsteniana, 1708.
Albi Tibulli.

CONTEXT AND SIGNIFICANCE
Albio Tibullo, an elegiac poet of the Augustan age, was celebrated for the purity of his style and the melancholic idealization of rural life and love. The 1708 edition is part of the great era of Dutch erudite humanism, when Amsterdam became a nerve center of European scientific printing. The text is established on the basis of ancient manuscripts, with a critical apparatus that bears witness to the intention to ground the poet’s authority on strictly philological criteria. The engravings – including the allegorical frontispiece with pastoral figures, rural landscapes, and symbolic allusions to bucolic elegy – translate Tibullus’s universe visually, suspended between rural otium and Arcadian idealization. The combination of learning, typographic elegance, and illustrative apparatus makes this edition an exemplary product of northern European classical publishing.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Albio Tibullo (c. 55–19 BC) was one of the leading Roman elegiac poets, a contemporary of Propertius and Ovid. Connected with the circle of Messalla Corvinus, he composed amorous elegies focused on the figures of Delia and Nemesis, privileging a clear and measured style, distant from rhetorical excess. His poetry exalted the simplicity of country life and intimate sentiment, in contrast to the celebratory epic of the Augustan age.
PRINTING HISTORY AND CIRCULATION
Tibullus’s works went through numerous printed editions starting in the fifteenth century, with important Italian and French Renaissance milestones. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dutch editorial centers – and especially the Officina Wetsteniana – distinguished themselves for philological precision and the typographic quality of classical editions. The 1708 edition, with expanded critical apparatus and lexical indices, represents one of the most authoritative eighteenth-century versions of Tibullus’s text, destined for an international audience of scholars.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
J. C. Brunet, Manuel du libraire, V, col. 856; J. G. T. Graesse, Trésor de livres rares, VII, p. 157; international OPAC catalogs for the 1708 Wetstenian edition; catalogs of Tibullian editions from the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries; studies on Dutch philology and on Amsterdam classical publishing.