SAVONAROLA Girolamo – Prediche Utilissime Per Quadragesima – 1514

SAVONAROLA Girolamo – Prediche Utilissime Per Quadragesima del Venerando Padre Frate Hieronymo Savonarola da Ferrara de lordine di frati Predicatori Sopra Amos, p(ro)pheta: & sopra Zacharia propheta: & parte etiam sopra lo sacro Evangelio – 1514. Venetia, per Lazaro di Soardi. Coeval leather, raised bands, blue sprayed fore-edges; quarto, 21.3 x 15.6 cm; pagg. 448; loose binding and with some woodworm paths, restored specimen, good state of conservation overall. Title page with central title and allegorical illustrations in woodcut; ownership notes; text printed on two columns; ornate drop caps; traces of ancient glosses and underlines; slight water gore, browning and small isolated spots; cut the lower right corner of the LVIII sheet with relative loss of the text contained therein; removed the sheets LVIIII, LX, LXI, LXII, LXIII, LXVII, LXVIII, LXVIIII, LXX, LXXV, LXXVI, LXXVII, LXXVIII, LXXVIIII, LXXX; the missing leaves were removed because the book was subjected to censorship by the Inquisition; LXXXI sheet has conspicuous ink marks; for numbering errors that do not involve the text, there is no CLXXXVIIII leaf and there are two CXCI sheets; in total 224 actual leaves; the last ones, healed in the lower white margin, contains the colophon, the register and the typographic mark. Rare post-incunabulum. Girolamo Savonarola was a famous Dominican friar (Ferrara 1452 – Florence 1498). His end, caused by a complex political affair of city factions, has perhaps the deepest reason in his confidence to be able to impose, in an age now open to worldly values, a severe penitential custom, acceptable only to a minority of followers, thickened for a short time by those who, dissatisfied with the political and religious situation, who believed in a revolution announced as a certain prophecy. The Savonarolian reform, desired with purity of intentions, with sincere passion, found partial consensus in the society of the time; the assumption of St. as a symbol of republican freedom and later his transfiguration as a precursor of the Lutheran reform, a hero of neo-Guelphism or a prophet of the reconciliation between religion and science are unilateral interpretations of an intense religious experience, which took place in an attempt to renew Florentine and Italian politics, divided by concrete interests and therefore provisionally allied to the all-medieval eschatology of the friar. Savonarolian prose, nourished by medieval and biblical elements, has an extraordinary vivacity of expressions and forms, vigorously punctuated by the lively and swirling rhythm of his religious and human experience