Barberino - Documenti d'Amore - 1640

LOVE, LAW, AND SYMBOL: THE SECRET TREATISE OF BARBERINO BETWEEN THE MIDDLE AGES AND ROMAN BAROQUE
This Roman edition of 1640 of the Documents of Love marks one of the most fascinating moments in the transmission of a deeply complex and visionary medieval text. Born as a moral and allegorical summa intertwining law, poetry, and social behavior, Francesco da Barberino’s work is here reforged in Baroque Rome under the press of Vitale Mascardi, taking on a new visual and conceptual guise. The engravings transform the doctrine into symbolic spectacle, giving form to the abstractions of Love, Virtue, and Discipline. From it emerges a book that is at once an ethical code and an allegorical theater, a bridge between the courtly world of the thirteenth century and the emblematic sensibility of the seventeenth.
MARKET VALUE
The illustrated seventeenth-century editions of the Documents of Love, complete and with a well-preserved iconographic apparatus, generally fetch between 500 and 900 euros.

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION AND CONDITION
Contemporary binding in bazza leather, spine with raised bands, gilded title and applied label; losses and signs of wear. Illustrated with numerous full-page copper engravings and decorative vignettes; title page with a figured engraving of a winged putto within a landscape. Interior with some browning and foxing, worming halos and signs of use. In old books with a centuries-long history, a few imperfections may be present, not always noted in the description. Pp. (8); 48; 376; 138; (8).

FULL TITLE AND AUTHOR
Documenti d’amore
Rome, Stamperia di Vitale Mascardi, 1640.
Francesco da Barberino.

BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR
Francesco da Barberino (ca. 1264 – 1348) was a jurist, poet, and moralist. Active between Florence, the papal court, and Avignon, he developed an original synthesis between legal culture and the chivalric literary tradition. In the Documents of Love he elaborated a normative system for amorous and social conduct, structured in allegorical form and accompanied by a rich symbolic apparatus.

PRINTING HISTORY AND CIRCULATION
The work circulated initially in illuminated manuscripts, often richly decorated, confirming its visual and allegorical nature. Printed editions are relatively rare and late: the Roman edition of 1640, issued by Mascardi’s press, is one of the most important and representative, distinguished by its extensive engraving apparatus that reworks the medieval manuscript tradition into a copper-engraved key. Its diffusion was limited to an educated and antiquarian audience, interested as much in the literary value as in the iconographic value of the volume.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
ICCU/OPAC SBN: record for “Documenti d’amore,” Rome, Mascardi, 1640 (verification of a specific copy recommended)
WorldCat: Francesco da Barberino, Documenti d’amore, Rome, 1640
Brunet, Manuel du libraire, I, col. 660
Graesse, Trésor de livres rares, I, p. 310
Gamba, Serie dei testi di lingua, n. 123
Edit16 (for the preceding printing tradition and Italian editorial context)
Studies on emblematic culture and moral iconography in Seicento Rome