SALVETTI ACCIAOLI, Maddalena
A FLORENTINE POETESS
Rime Toscane
Florence, Per Francesco Tosi, 1590£4,750.00
FIRST EDITION. 4to. pp. 155, [9]. Italic letter, little Roman. Woodcut arms of Cristina di Loreno, Grand Duchess of Tuscany to title, decorated initials and ornaments. Title a trifle dusty, light yellowing or foxing, slight browning or foxing, intermittent faint water stain along lower edge, small hole (flaw) to lower blank half of last leaf, worm holes repaired at blank gutter of gatherings P-Q. A good copy in C20 paper boards.
First edition of this collection of sonnets in the Tuscan language, dedicated to Cristina, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, whom they celebrate as the harbinger of much-needed change in Florence. Appended is a shorter florilegium dedicated to her husband, Ferdinand de’ Medici. Maddalena Salvetti Acciaioli (d.1610) was a Florentine noblewoman who wrote numerous poems published separately or circulated within collections. ‘Rime toscane’ is ‘richly intertextual, with echoes of the leading Petrarchists of the sixteenth century, most notably Bembo, Della Casa, and Tasso, along with Veronica Gambara and Laura Battiferri, scattered across its pages. […] Salvetti’s canzoniere to Christine refashions this genre for her project of praise, repurposing Neoplatonism and deploying its
unmistakable lexicon to promote the grand duchess as a new political saviour for Florence, while also incorporating the Mannerist elements then in vogue and that keep her work fresh centuries later. […] Salvetti’s canzoniere to Christine is an alluring amalgam: at first glance a love canzoniere from one woman to another, it becomes upon closer observation an impressively Mannerist, Counter-Reformation paean to the Christian glory of crusade, which is embodied in the figure of Christine herself’ (Wainwright, pp.133-5). The language borrows themes such as those of the angelic, immortal woman, metaphors involving the sun and the night, as well as classical deities, with Apollo, Lord of Delo, covering with a veil the light for some and bringing the day for others between ‘the scorching Cancer and the cold Capricorn’. A scarce, interesting work.
