Bembo, Delle lettere primo volume, Rome, 1548, Venetian red morocco gilt for Fulvio Rangoni, the Fairfax-Murray copy

BEMBO, PIETRO. Delle lettere di m. Pietro Bembo primo volume. Rome: Valerio and Luigi Dorico for Carlo Gualteruzzi, September 1548

POSTHUMOUS COLLECTION OF PIETRO BEMBO'S VERNACULAR LETTERS; THE ONLY KNOWN VOLUME BOUND FOR CONTE FULVIO RANGONI AND THE FAIRFAX-MURRAY COPY.

Fulvio Rangoni (c. 1535-1588) was born in Modena to Conte Claudio and Contessa Lucrezia Pico. He received a humanist education from a young age, studying under a series of eminent tutors, including Jacopino de’ Bianchi, detto de’ Lancellotti, the heterodox priest Girolamo Serafino Teggia di Sassuolo, and later the humanist scholars Carlo Sigonio and Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano. Lodovico Castelvetro, the literary critic perhaps best known for his commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, was also involved in Rangoni’s education, lending him significant volumes for study. Rangoni later took on a diplomatic role, serving as ambassador for the imperial court and undertaking various diplomatic missions. From November 1571 until his death, he was governor of the city of Reggio. 

The workshop responsible for this elegant binding has been disputed. De Marinis first attributed it to an anonymous Venetian binder (II 2220, Plate C50); Schunke designated it as the work of Der Wanderbuchbinder, an itinerant university binder working in Venice around 1550, when this volume was bound (“Venezianische Renaissanceeinbände”, 1963, p. 166, 169); Hobson later renamed the Wanderbuchbinder as the Mendoza binder, expanding the list of bindings produced in this shop, but rejecting this binding for Rangoni as one of them (Renaissance book collecting, 1999, pp. 244-250).

Another copy of the same edition was bound for Rangoni's sister, Claudia (1537-1593), with similar decoration and the same lettering, with her name on the lower cover, suggesting it was bound in the same anonymous shop at the same time. Both volumes were later in the collection of Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919): they were lots 88 and 89 in the 1922 Fairfax-Murray sale in these rooms, and the present copy is mentioned in A list of printed books in the library of Charles Fairfax Murray, 1907 (p. 22).