Ieroglifici, ouero, Commentari delle occulte significationi de gli Egittij, & d'altre nationi, Volumes 1-2

First edition of the first Italian translation of Valeriano's Hieroglyphica, emblem book, handbook of Renaissance Egyptology, and the first Renaissance dictionary of symbols and hieroglyphs. The Italian edition was an important sourcebook for Venetian painters of the Baroque, as the Latin edition had been for the generation of Mantegna and Bellini. For the literary and iconographical diffusion of key emblems--the stork, pelican, phoenix, and other motifs of Egyptian origin, the work was a kind of bible. It includes not only hieroglyphs and emblems but also elements drawn from classical Greek myth, the Latin Cabala, Hermeticism and Christian religion. It was compiled by Fra Urbano Valeriano Bolzano (1443-1524), and first published by his nephew Pierio in Latin in Basel in 1556. Pierio was a humanist scholar tutored by Giorgio Valla, and is said to have been close to Aldus Manutius, with whom he may have been part of a poetic confraternity in Padua (see K. Gouwens, Remembering the Renaissance (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 1998).