[SIONITA (trad.?) Antonius] Evangelium Sanctum Domini nostri Jesu Christi.

First edition, third printing, with the first volume dated July 1774.

This first printing of the Gospels in Arabic-Latin interlinear version, released at the same time as the first printing of the Gospels in Arabic, is one of the first works to come off the presses of Ferdinando de Medici, the ‘Typographia Medicea’, founded by Pope Gregory XIII for the evangelisation of the East (copies can be found under the dates 1590 and 1591). The Arabic text was printed in Robert Granjon’s font under the supervision of the orientalist G. B. Raimondi.

It was the first complete edition of the Gospels in Arabic in the West.

The work begins on page 9, with no title page or preliminary text: the planned preliminary text was apparently never published, and the first eight pages were only provided when it was put back on sale in 1619, changed for the new sale in Florence in July 1774.

This edition is illustrated with a magnificent series of 150 woodcut illustrations (not 149 as Mortimer indicates), which constitute a remarkable virtual complement to the text. Although most of the blocks are unsigned, a number of them bear the monograms of the Italian painter, draughtsman and engraver Antonio Tempesta (1555-1630) as artist, and Leonardo Parasole (c.1570-c.1630) as engraver. The woodcuts are remarkable examples of Tempesta’s work, distinguished by the clarity of their composition and the didactic narration of the episodes depicted.

« Parasole, the cutter of these 1590 blocks, developed for the Typographia a method of printing books of plain chant. The illustrations for the Gospels in Arabic, intended as an aid to instruction, may have been a hindrance to missionary work among the Mohammedans, who by the Koran were forbidden the contemplation of images… An edition of the Arabic text with interlinear Latin was printed at the same time, and it is the Arabic-Latin edition that was reissued in 1619 and 1774. The size of the Arabic edition cited by Aspland as four thousand copies, of the Arabic-Latin three thousand” (Mortimer).

Some occasional watersatins, some leaves browned. Fine with deckle edges.