Dante at Auction in the 20th Century. Carlo Alberto Chiesa and a Rediscovered (and Lost again) Incunabulum of Dante's Comedy of 1487

Abstract

The essay examines a copy of the Brescia edition of Dante Alighieri's Comedy of 1487, previously belonged to the Dante Center of the Conventual Friars Minor in Ravenna at the time of the direction of Father Severino Ragazzini (1920-1986). The documents kept in the Franciscan library allows the reconstruction of the phases that led to the purchase of the copy in 1967 in the Milanese antiquarian bookshop led by Carlo Alberto Chiesa (1926-1998). In the late Nineties, after a short period during which the volume was believed to have been stolen from the library's deposits, the incunabulum was found in the auction catalogue of Christie's Rome. The investigations carried out on the copy made it possible to reconstruct its past provenance and the passages at the major European auction houses, from the first, at the end of the Sixties, to the last, in November 2002.