MACHIAVELLI , Niccolo (1469-1527) – Agostino NIFO (c.1473-1538 or 1545) - photo 1
MACHIAVELLI , Niccolo (1469-1527) – Agostino NIFO (c.1473-1538 or 1545) - photo 2
MACHIAVELLI , Niccolo (1469-1527) – Agostino NIFO (c.1473-1538 or 1545) - photo 3

MACHIAVELLI , Niccolo (1469-1527) – Agostino NIFO (c.1473-1538 or 1545)

Lot 75
13.12.2023 11:00UTC +01:00
Classic
Starting price
£ 15 000
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1105614
Lot 75 | MACHIAVELLI , Niccolo (1469-1527) – Agostino NIFO (c.1473-1538 or 1545)
Estimate value
£ 15 000 – 20 000
MACHIAVELLI , Niccolo (1469-1527) – Agostino NIFO (c.1473-1538 or 1545)

Eutychi Augustini Niphi medices philosophi Suessani libellus de his: quę ab optimis principibus agenda sunt. Florence: Filippo Giunta’s heirs, 3 April, 1521.

Extremely rare Machiavelliana; the first edition of perhaps the earliest political treatise inspired by Machiavelli’s The Prince. Agostino Nifo was a major Averroesian philosopher, famously chosen by Pope Leo X to confute Pietro Pomponazzi’s De immortalitate animae. In the years 1519-1522 Nifo was in Florence, and was part of the intellectual circle associated with the Giunti printing house that included Machiavelli; the latter’s Arte della Guerra was published by Giunti in 1521.



According to Bertelli-Innocenti, Bibl. Machiavelliana, the present work shows the clear influence of Machiavelli on Nifo, and is the first political work concerning the behaviour that a prince should adopt in order to be successful. It therefore represents an extremely important and early influence of Machiavelli’s thought on political theory. Two years later in Salerno, Nifo translated Machiavelli’s Italian into Latin, eliminated chapters XV and XXIV-XXVI, restyling ‘The Prince’ into four parts, and adding an additional fifth. Published as De Regnandi peritia in 1523, it was called a direct ‘plagiarism,’ although, as Coyle has noted, ‘Nifo … was careful to adapt his material to the political context of the south. He added a number of contemporary Neapolitan examples’ (Coyle, The Prince, 31).



Rare: RBH only one records one highly defective copy at auction; we can trace 5 copies in the US (Stanford, Newberry, Princeton, JHU and Duke), and 2 in the UK (BL and Oxford). EDIT16 CNCE 55289; Bertelli & Innocenti, Bib. Machiavelliana, pp. xxxi-xxxii and no. 4 (described in the note to De regnandi peritia).



Small quarto (188x126 mm). Roman type, [4], 27 ff. (final leaf with woodcut device supplied from another contemporary work by Giunta bearing the same device and re-margined with early paper and mounted, small marginal stain to lower corner, light waterstains to upper margin and gutter in the second part, occasional scattered spotting mainly confined to fore-edge and heavier to final 2 leaves). Modern wrappers (lightly soiled, endpaper renewed). Provenance: paper label at upper corner of front wrapper numbered in ink manuscript ‘12443’.

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