Fontanus, De bello Rhodio libri tres, Rome, 1524, Roman brown morocco gilt for Mercurio de Vipera

FONTANUS, JACOBUS. De bello Rhodio, libri tres. Rome: Francesco Minizio Calvo, February 1524

FIRST EDITION BOUND FOR GIOVANNI MERCURIO VIPERA (1436-1527), possibly a presentation copy from the author.

This text is "by far the most popular of printed first-hand Western accounts of the great siege and capture of Rhodes by Suleiman I in 1522" and "that by which the majority of Europeans learned of the collapse of their last Christian outpost in the East" (Arthur Freeman, "Editions of Fontanus, De Bello Rhodio", The Library 4 (1969), pp.333-336, p.333).

Mercurio Vipera (1436-1527) was Bishop of Bagnoregio, a jurisconsult, and Auditor of the Vatican tribunal, the Sacra Romana Rota. Another copy of this edition bound in Rome by the Cardinals’ Shop and belonging to G. M. Vipera is recorded by Anthony Hobson, "Two early sixteenth-century binder's shops in Rome" in De libris compactis miscellanea, Studia Bibliothecae Wittockianae (Brussels 1984), pp. 79-98 (p. 95, no. 21) and by Maria Luisa Agati & Paul Canart, "Copie et reliure dans la Rome des premières décennies du XVIe siècle: Autour du Cardinals' Shop" in Scripta 2 (2009), pp. 9-38 (p. 13, no. 3 and pl. 10). An inscription on the lower endleaf of the present volume notes that an "Alexander de Alexiis" left Rome for Mantua on 16 June 1524; we may presume that Vipera gifted him the book at this time. It was likely later acquired by Paolo Giovio of Como (1483-1552), Bishop of Nocera; some mathematical calculations on the lower pastedown appear to be in his hand.