Vinea domini. Cum breui descriptione sacramentor[um] et Paradisi, Limbi, Purgatorij, atq[ue] Inferni, a Cathechismo ... excerpta by PEZZI, Lorenzo (b. 1518?) - 1588

Venice: Girolamo Porro, 1588. 8vo (169 x 114 mm). [12] ff., 186 [i.e., 190] pp., [1] blank leaf (ff. E7 with printer's mark and E8 blank, between pp. 61 and 62, are unpaginated). Engraved title, medallion portrait of the author aged 69, and 13 engraved illustrations of which 12 full-page and 1 double-page, all by Porro; woodcut head-pieces and initials, large woodcut printer's device on E7r. Part 2, the Dialogus de Sacramentis, with drop-title. Title rehinged and a bit stained at top, double-page engraving on a guard, with right-hand border and first two words of heading at top slightly shaved, small stain affecting double-page engraving and the engraving of Paradise on verso. Early 19th-century vellum over pasteboard, edges speckled red. ***First Edition, first ISSUE, of this mystical treatise, beautifully illustrated by the Paduan-Venetian engraver Girolamo Porro (1529-1600). The author, identified on the title as a preacher from Cologne, is known only through a handful of devotional works. His treatise on the sacrament covers baptism to extreme unction, and contains chapters on paradise, limbo and hell, providing ample fodder for Porro's rich visual imagination and skill with the burin. The double-page engraving, a vast overview of the Vineyard of the Lord, with the walled city of Jerusalem at top and Inferno at the lower right, is a visual index, containing multiple scenes from the Bible, all occurring on the same plane, or "simultaneously." These are letter-keyed to the 9 full-page engravings which show the sacraments within their relevant biblical context (Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell are not indexed). All but the last two include vines winding through the picture in visual reference to the Vineyard theme. Porro's precise lines and densely packed mises-en-scène testitfy to the likely influence of the French goldsmith and engraver Jean Duvet, whose Apocalypse series appeared in 1555. The present copy is from the first issue, with Porro's imprint, and the double-page plate and portrait are in their first states ; in the second issue the Porro imprint was erased and replaced with that of the heirs of Francesco Ziletti, the double-page engraving contains additional shading and hatching (still more was added for the Italian edition issued by Porro a year later), and the portrait was trimmed so that the copperplate does not overlap the typeset verses, as here. Our copy contains variant states of plates 2-5 and 8-9 (noted by Mortimer in the second Harvard copy), with letters keying the plates to the double-page engraving, and with the river completed in engraving no. 4. This copy is wider than the Hofer copy described by Mortimer, in which both edges of the double-page engraving are cropped. The errata page at the end of part 1 (59v), which in the 1589 edition was covered with a pasted down Crucifixion engraving, shows traces of paste here, as in the Folger copy (cf. Mortimer). Brunet Suppl. II:215 (this issue); Harvard/Mortimer 378; BM-STC Italian 502; EDIT-16 CNCE 35555.