Angelica Innamorata, composta per messer Vicentio Brusantino Ferrarese

FIRST ILLUSTRATED EDITION
Large 8vo (215x136 mm). 399, [1] pp. Collation: A-BB8. Illustrated with 37 woodcut vignette in text. Text printed in italics in two columns, containing 10 octaves per page. Woodcut printer's devise on the title page, other full-page printer's device on last leaf verso. Colophon and privilege on p. 399. Late 18th-century brown calf, gilt spine covered with red morocco, gilt edges (slightly rubbed). Livio Ambrogio's bookplate on the front pastedown. A very good, clean copy.
First illustrated edition (second overall) of this chivalric poem in ottava rima intended as a continuation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and dedicated by the author to his patron Ercole d'Este.
The work was first published by Marcolini in 1550 without woodcuts. The 1550 edition was then reissued in 1553 in what appears to be a forgery or rather an altered variant (cf. S. Casali, Gli annali della tipografia veneziana di Francesco Marcolini, Bologna, 1953, pp. 253-254). A third edition in four volumes was published in Venice in 1837-1838. This second 1553 edition is also preferable for the text as it was revised by the author and corrected by a ‘Diligente Academico Pelegrino', as stated in the title, identifiable with Lodovico Dolce (1508-1568), who improved the orthography and punctuation in particular.
Continuing the narration of Ariosto's Furioso, Brusantini connected the events of Angelica, separated from Medoro by the intervention of the sorceress Alcina, with those of Ruggero and Bradamante. To the latter Brusantini gave particular importance, with a clear encomiastic intention: the son of Ruggero and Bradamante is in fact celebrated by him as the progenitor of the Este lineage.
Vincenzo Brusantini (or Brusantino) was born in Ferrara in the early decades of the 16th century. Very little biographical information is known about him. A man of letters, he was a friend and correspondent of Pietro Aretino, but had no luck in his career as court poet. He went to Rome in search of ecclesiastical benefits, but received none and instead ended up in prison for reasons that remain obscure to this day. He regained his freedom and wandered around Italy in search of accommodation, which he finally found in Ferrara at the court of Ercole II d'Este. In 1554, Marcolini printed Brusantini's second literary work (Le cento novelle da messer Vincenzo Brugiantino dette in ottava rima), an octava rima version of Boccaccio's Decameron, dedicated to the Duke of Parma, Ottavio Farnese. Brusantini died in Ferrara around 1570 (cf. Brusantini, Vincenzo, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, vol. 14, Rome, 1972, s.v.).
BMCSTC Italian, p. 129; Edit 16, CNCE7740; Casali, Op. cit., pp. 251-251, no. 100.