Solinus - [Incunable] de Memoralibus Mundi - 1493

Incunable - Wonders and Sordidness of Ancient Rome and Monstrosities of the Ancient World
For sale online at $8,000.
Rare edition of the Roman Empire curiosity collection circulated in the Middle Ages. Published for the first time with the 'Mirabiliae Romae,' one of the earliest printed guides to Rome. The work is a compendium of knowledge and marvels of the ancient world, a sort of geographical and fantastical encyclopedia that blends observation and legend, revealing the medieval taste for the marvelous, the monstrous, and the extraordinary. It is also the oldest guide to the ruins of Rome, its baths, arches, catacombs, theaters, the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, and constitutes an extraordinarily important document for the perception of ancient Rome in the Middle Ages.
Market value
Incunable of great rarity. No copy of this edition has been recorded at auction in the last 35 years. Bibliographic references: BMC V 412, assigns the print to a workshop near 'Anima Mia'; IGI 9090; HC 14881; Goff S-621; Hain/Cop. 14880; GW M42830; Goff S 620; BMC V 478; BSB S-483; Klebs 922.7; Schudt 565.
A later copy is for sale online for 8,000 euros.

Physical description and condition
The work is rubricated throughout, with beautiful initial letters in red by a contemporary hand, and shows a significant amount of underlining and marginal notes in red ink in the first part, authored by an ancient hand. Cards (1); a1 reproduced on contemporary paper; 46 pages (1). A beautiful binding that reuses a sheet from an ancient antiphonary with a rubricated initial in blue and lines in red.

Full title and author
Polyhistor, or On the Wonders of the World, or Collections of Remarkable Things.
Venice, [Guglielmus de Cereto], 1493
Caius Julius Solinus; with references to Pliny the Elder and Pomponius Mela.

Context and Significance
First printed by Nicolas Jenson in 1473, this work, despite its geographical structure, is less a manual and more a colorful collection of curiosities and oddities mainly drawn from Pliny's Natural History and Pomponius Mela's Cosmographia. The Venetian edition of 1493, attributed to Guglielmus de Cereto, is the first and only of the 15th century to include the Mirabilia Romae, considered the oldest printed guide to ancient Rome. It describes baths, arches, theaters, catacombs, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and other monuments. The author notes the strangest and most marvelous things related to peoples, customs, animals, and plants from various regions: Italy, Greece, the Black Sea regions, Germany, Gaul, Britain, Spain, Africa, Arabia, Asia Minor, India, and the Parthian Empire. The Polyhistor (or De mirabilibus mundi) blends geography and myth, mentioning fantastic places like the Gorgon Islands and creatures such as the Manticore. The work profoundly influenced later authors, from Saint Augustine to Isidore and Bede, and has survived in numerous manuscripts from the 9th century onward.

Biography of the Author
Gaius Julius Solinus (3rd-4th century AD) was a Latin scholar, compiler of a geographic-naturalistic encyclopedia known as Collectanea rerum memorabilium, later called Polyhistor or De mirabilibus mundi. Based on Pliny and Mela, but also on lost authors such as Cornelius Bocco and Suetonius, Solinus gathered a series of marvelous facts about the world then known, from a perspective that blended empirical observation with mythological imagination. The work was hugely successful in the Middle Ages for its brevity and fairy-tale tone, inspiring poetic adaptations, including those in elegiac couplets attributed to Theodoric and Peter the Deacon. In the 14th century, Fazio degli Uberti chose it as a guide in the Dittamondo, symbolically associating it with the figure of Virgil in Dante's Comedy.

Printing history and circulation
The edition is attributed to Guglielmus de Cereto, a printer originally from Trino, active in Venice from 1485. He debuted with a Commentary on De anima, and his workshop was distinguished by a wide variety of productions: religious, historical, geographical, and scientific texts. Among the most notable works are the Isolario by Bartolomeo da li Sonetti (BMC V,410) and the Epistolae by Pliny of the Regio, where he signed as 'Gulielmus Tridinensis, cognomen Anima Mia.' The Polyhistor of 1493 represents one of the peaks of his historical-geographical output and testifies to the Venetian interest in collections of wonders and guides to the sacred and ancient sites of Rome.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
BMC V, 412; IGI 9090; HC 14881; Goff S-621; Hain/Cop. 14880; GW M42830; BMC V, 478; BSB S-483; Klebs 922.7; Schudt 565.
Mommsen, Solini Collectanea rerum memorabilium, Berlin, 1895.
C. Nicolet, The Inventory of the World: Geography and Politics at the Origins of the Roman Empire, Paris, 1988.
P. Gautier Dalché, The Geography of the Middle Ages and the Mirabilia Mundi, Florence, 1995.