Jacobus de Cessolis | Libro di Givocho di Scacchi, [Florence,] 1493, the Dyson Perrins copy

Jacobus de Cessolis

Libro di Givocho di scacchi intitolato de costumi deglhuomini & degli offitii de nobili. Florence: Antonio Miscomini, 1 March 1493

FIRST EDITION, 4to (197 x 130 mm), 66 leaves (only, of 68), large woodcut of a king and courtiers playing chess on i4v, 13 half-page woodcuts of the anthropomorphised chess pieces and pawns, 2 five-line and 23 three-line white-on-black floriated woodcut initials (some repeated), faded early modern marginal inscriptions and page numbers added in manuscript, late-nineteenth-century red morocco gilt by L. Broge, gilt edges, inner dentelles, lacking title (with large woodcut) and b8 both supplied in facsimile, i2-3 with neatly repaired worming at lower margin, i4 a trifle shaved at outer margin and neatly repaired at lower margin (with a couple of letters supplied in facsimile), washed

The only fifteenth-century Italian edition of Cessolis' overwhelmingly popular work on chess, which had fifteen other incunable editions in Latin, Dutch, German, and English (as the second book printed, in his own translation, by William Caxton). NO COPY OF THIS EDITION HAS APPEARED AT AUCTION IN OVER THIRTY YEARS: the last being the Schäfer copy (sale in our New York rooms, 8 December 1994, lot 57).

Cessolis was a thirteenth-century Dominican monk who wrote his treatise on "The Game of Chess" not as instruction on the rules and strategy of the game itself, but as a didactic allegory of the human condition. He does, however, describe the moves allowed each piece and the pawns, and his work is recognized as the first printed book on the greatest and most universal of all board games. Cessolis interprets the pieces of a single side as representing the stations of society: the five major pieces embody their actual roles — king, queen, knight, judge (the modern bishop), and king's deputy (the modern rook) — while the eight pawns are represented as a woodsman, a blacksmith, a wool merchant, a moneychanger, a doctor, an innkeeper, a watchman, and a water-carrier.

The thirteen fine woodcuts presenting these personifications are in the manner of the title- block and are cut within similar decorative frames, but they are evidently the work of different block-cutters as well as a different designer. Although they lack the fluidity and distinction of the first illustration, which both Hind and Sander had compared to Botticelli's atelier, their quality is high enough to justify Sander's ranking of Miscomini's edition as "un des plus beaux livres illustres de la Renaissance."

For other early editions of this work, see lots 10 and 12–15.

PROVENANCE:

William Mitchell, British collector (d.1908), bookplate; C.W. Dyson Perrins, British collector (1864–1958), bookplate and shelf-label (item 67); sale, Sotheby’s, 17 June 1946, lot 82, £200, Anton Zwemmer; purchased privately by Lothar Schmid

LITERATURE:

Alfred W. Pollard, Italian book-illustrations and early printing; a catalogue of early Italian books in the library of C. W. Dyson Perrins (Oxford: OUP, 1914), pp. 63-4 (this copy); USTC 996066; ISTC ic00419000; GW 06534; Goff C-419; HC 4900 = H4899; GW 6534; BMC VI642 (IA.27205); Kristeller, Early Florentine Woodcuts, 101; Sander 1918; Pollard/Perrins 67; Berlin Kat. 2895; Hind 11 537; 5 Jh. Buchill. 48. Arnim 99