Description

4to (210x145 mm). 39, [3] leaves. Collation: a-k4 [χ]². Colophon at l. k3v. Printer's device on title page and l. k4v. Errata on l. [χ]1r. The last leaf is a blank. Roman, Greek and italic types. Woodcut historiated initials. Modern quarter vellum. A very good, wide margined copy.
Rare first edition (the work was reprinted in Milan in 1626), dedicated to Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, of this work written in the form of a dialogue between the author himself, the celebrated Verona physician Girolamo Fracastoro (1483-1553) and two other characters called Timotheus and Adamus, who discuss the origin of the sources of the Nile and its yearly flooding.
Nogarola drew on the classical and modern sources that had dealt with the Nile and believed that the river originated in the snow-covered Mountains of the Moon in Ethiopia. In an attempt to explain the annual flooding, he provides an elaborate theory about the climate and geography of Ethiopia, drawing on classical authors such as Ptolemy as well as on the observations of recent Portuguese voyagers and the geographical compilation of Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485-1557).
This edition is also notable for “its remarkable calligraphic quality, and it is also interesting because it employs italic capitals, and shows how far type-founders had departed from the Aldine character” (D.B. Updike, Printing Types, Cambridge, 1922, I, p. 162).
Lodovico Nogarola, a man of letters, a neo-Platonic philosopher and a translator, was the scion of a noble family of Verona, to which the famous scholar Isotta Nogarola (c. 1418–1466) also belonged. He studied in Padua and Bologna, and after 1525 he was based in Mantua at the court of Ercole Gonzaga. He corresponded with the cardinals Bernardo Clesio and Gasparo Contarini, as well as Gian Francesco Pico della Mirandola. In 1543, he had the opportunity to present his theory of the tides to Pope Paul III. Thanks to the intercession of Cardinal Madruzzo, he was permitted to deliver an oration at the Council of Trent in 1545, despite being a layman. He was also the author of Disputatio super Reginae Britannorum divortio (1532) and Oratio in adventu Petri Lippomani episcopi Veronensis (1544) (cf. H. Jedin, Un laico al Concilio di Trento, il Conte Lodovico Nogarola, in: “Il Concilio di Trento”, 1, 1942-43, pp. 25-33; see also P. Pellegrini, Nogarola, Ludovico, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, vol. 78, Rome, 2013, sv.).
Edit 16, CNCE36168; USTC, 844871.