Home / Topics / Brusantino's Angelica innamorata at Billingbear: Doni's 1553 Edition, Love and Death, and the Marcolini-Aretino Network

Brusantino's Angelica innamorata at Billingbear: Doni's 1553 Edition, Love and Death, and the Marcolini-Aretino Network

Mixed Ready evidence packet

Topic: Brusantino's Angelica innamorata at Billingbear

Source-Control Position

The 1780 Billingbear catalogue records:

Angelica Inamorata di Vicentio

Brusantino — Ven. 1553.

The modern Audley End spreadsheet identifies the surviving book as object 81035067, an octavo in half calf. It stands immediately before the Renaldini object 81035068 in the museum numbering. That adjacency and the uniform modern binding description make the two books a natural photography group, but do not prove that they were acquired or bound together in the sixteenth century.

Brusantino's book is much richer than its short catalogue entry indicates. It continues Ariosto; it was revised by Vincenzo Brusantino and corrected by Anton Francesco Doni; it belongs to Francesco Marcolini's visually experimental Venetian press; it converts each canto into an allegorical lesson; and it contains a long invention in which Love and Death exchange weapons, causing love to kill and death to inspire desire.

1. The Exact 1553 Book

The title page reads:

ANGELICA INAMORATA, DI M. VICENTIO BRVSANTINO FERRARESE. ALLO ILLVSTRISSIMO ET ECCELLENTISSIMO SIGNORE HERCOL SECONDO, DVCA QVARTO DI FERRARA. Reuista per il medesimo Autore, & corretta per il Diligente Academico Pellegrino. IN VINEGIA PER FRANCESCO MARCOLINI M D L III. CON PRIVILEGIO.

brusantino_1553_pdfpage_7.jpg; Internet Archive witness.

Two forms were issued in 1553. The Fondation Barbier-Mueller describes a 399-page illustrated octavo with 36 woodcuts, one at the head of each canto. It also describes a 240-leaf unillustrated issue with additional preliminary sonnets. The Audley End description says only octavo. Its pagination, signatures, title-page setting, and illustrations must be photographed before the exact issue can be assigned.

The 1553 book is the second edition and the first illustrated one. The poem had first appeared in 1550. It resumes Angelica's story at her separation from Medoro and continues the histories of Ruggiero, Bradamante, Marfisa, Gano, and the Christian-Saracen war.

2. The Corrector Was Doni, Not Dolce

Older catalogues and bookseller descriptions sometimes identify the Diligente Academico Pellegrino as Lodovico Dolce. Recent Doni scholarship resolves the name differently.

Irene Fantappiè calls Diligente and Negligente paired self-names used by Anton Francesco Doni. She identifies the former as:

il curatore della ristampa dell’Angelica innamorata di Vincenzo Brusantino, 1553

and explains:

nel caso di Brusantino, il Diligente era presentato come Accademico Pellegrino, il che costituisce un chiaro riferimento a Doni

Francesco Favarò independently describes the 1553 version as corretta dal Doni. The conclusion also fits the press context: Doni called himself Academico Pellegrino, worked intensively with Marcolini, and used the Accademia Pellegrina as an authorial and publishing identity.

This is consequential for research. The Billingbear book is not simply Brusantino's poem; it is a Brusantino-Doni-Marcolini artifact situated in the same experimental workshop culture as Doni's Marmi, Mondi, Inferni, and Burchiello commentary.

3. Brusantino's Life and Network

Favarò corrects the traditional death date of about 1570: Brusantino made his will on 16 June 1556 and died a few months later. He belonged to the Ferrarese nobility, possessed substantial property, and in 1538 received Reggian citizenship with his son Alessandro and the support of Ercole II d'Este. The dedication to Ercole II is therefore embedded in a real patronage relationship.

Brusantino was also close to Pietro Aretino. A letter of 21 December 1550 says:

non vedo l’ora di tornarmi a Venezia per poter meglio godere V.S. e apertamente mostrarmeli, tal quale li sono, sviscerato

He sends Aretino wild geese taken with his own hand and recalls marvelous stanzas Aretino recited in bed. The Angelica itself praises both Aretino and Marcolini. In canto XXXII the 1553 page says Aretino will guide pilgrims by demonstrating that empires and kingdoms must yield to virtue:

Pietro Aretino fia, che in veri segni / Ai pellegrini porgerà ristoro / Mostrando come, che gl’Imperi, e i Regni / Cedere a la virtù debban fra loro.

The same poem praises Marcolini's ingenuity and industry. These named tributes place the work within an identifiable literary-print network rather than an abstract category of Italian romance.

4. The Poem as Moral and Encyclopedic Romance

The 1553 canto arguments interpret the narrative morally. The first says Angelica represents the pride of women who reject lovers and only repent later. Other arguments treat jealousy, avarice, reason, desire, fortune, injustice, and the conduct of princes.

Favarò identifies an especially revealing digression: Brusantino reduces into ottava rima the Tabula attributed to Cebes of Thebes. Marcolini had printed the first Italian translation of that philosophical-allegorical work in 1538. This suggests direct interaction between the poem and the publisher's earlier list. A full collation could show whether Marcolini, Brusantino, or Doni shaped the adaptation.

Brusantino also praises Venice as an ideal city. That Ferrara-Venice axis matters for a book dedicated to the Este duke but printed in Marcolini's Venetian workshop and later preserved at Billingbear.

5. Love and Death Exchange Their Bows

Canto XXXI contains the most original research avenue found in this pass. A young woman has Love's weapons; Death demands the bow, but the frightened woman gives her the wrong arms. The 1553 text states:

Morte dunque d’Amor l’armi ritenne / E in man d’Amor l’Arco di Morte venne.

brusantino_1553_pdfpage_406.jpg.

The consequences reverse the ordinary operation of each power. Death shoots at two kings in battle, but they turn toward l’amorosa Corte and waste their minds in love. Death tries to kill an aged Sicilian queen, who instead becomes devoted to the arts of love. Love's new weapon kills young lovers:

Ch’i Giouinetti Amanti nel bel fiore / D’Amar da Morte non hauean riparo: / Perche come lo stral giongeua al core / Peria ciascuno per tal caso raro.

The poem names Pyramus and Thisbe, Narcissus, Leander, Guinevere, Isolde, and Tristan among those caught in the inverted effect. Nature complains; Jupiter calls a council of the gods on the moon; the weapons are eventually restored, but the episode ends by explaining why the confusion still sometimes persists.

This is more than a decorative conceit. It uses exchanged instruments to make love lethal and death erotic, then represents the disorder as a crisis in nature and cosmic government.

6. Shakespeare Research Avenues, with Folger Text

The comparison should begin with exact dramatic language. Similarity alone does not identify a source.

6.1 Cupid's weapon changes its destination and effect

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Cupid aims at the imperial votary, but the shaft is quenched and falls upon a flower. Its power then moves from the intended woman into a transferable juice:

OBERON

Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took

At a fair vestal thronèd by the west,

And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft

Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon,

And the imperial vot'ress passèd on

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before, milk-white, now purple with love's wound,

And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.”

Source: Folger, A Midsummer Night's Dream 2.1.163-174, FTLN 0527-0538, act 02 scene 01, Folger online.

The more specific shared mechanism is not merely Cupid's arrow. In both stories the weapon fails to produce its ordinary result in its intended place, its power is transferred to another bearer or object, and desire is redistributed disastrously. The next research step is to search for intermediate versions of the Love-and-Death exchange and for editions or translations circulating in England.

6.2 Cupid kills with arrows and traps

Brusantino literalizes the lethal arrow of Love. Hero's concluding couplet in Much Ado About Nothing compresses the same traditional paradox into a social plot:

HERO

If it prove so, then loving goes by haps;

Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.

Source: Folger, Much Ado About Nothing 3.1.111-112, FTLN 1233-1234, act 03 scene 01, Folger online.

That couplet is not evidence that Shakespeare used Brusantino. It precisely defines a corpus question: how often before Shakespeare is Cupid explicitly said to kill, and how often is that killing generated by a mistaken or exchanged weapon?

6.3 Pyramus and Thisbe inside the Love/Death inversion

Brusantino names Pyramus and Thisbe among the lovers killed when Love bears Death's bow. A Midsummer Night's Dream chooses their deaths for the artisans' court performance. To avoid relying on remembered plot summary, the Folger text has Pyramus say:

PYRAMUS

Approach, ye Furies fell!

O Fates, come, come,

Cut thread and thrum.

Quail, crush, conclude, and quell!

and later:

Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.

Now am I dead.

Now am I fled.

My soul is in the sky.

Source: Folger, A Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1.298-301 and 5.1.316-319, FTLN 2077-2080 and 2094-2097, act 05 scene 01, Folger online. This is a broad classical-story intersection; the research value lies in testing whether Brusantino's unusual weapon-exchange framing has any closer verbal or structural continuation in the play's love-magic and comic deaths.

7. Research Program

  1. Identify which 1553 issue survives as object 81035067.
  2. Collate 1550 against both 1553 forms, marking every correction, new allegory, new argument, and image.
  3. Attribute the editorial layers between Brusantino and Doni rather than treating revised and corrected as synonyms.
  4. Reconstruct the woodcut history. Degl'Innocenti and Rizzarelli indicate that Ariostan images were ingeniously resemanticized in the Angelica and related Doni books.
  5. Transcribe the complete Love/Death episode and identify earlier sources for the weapon exchange.
  6. Reconstruct the Tabula of Cebes section against Marcolini 1538.
  7. Search English print for Brusantino/Brusantini, Angelica innamorata, exchanged bows, Love bearing Death's arrow, Death inspiring love, and the named lovers in the sequence.
  8. Search Neville, Killigrew, Hoby, Savile, Sidney, and Aretino-related correspondence for Marcolini and Doni as well as Brusantino.

Quoted Source Passages

The source quotations are placed in their analytical contexts above. They include the complete 1553 title, Fantappiè's Doni identification, Brusantino's Aretino letter, the poem's Aretino tribute, the Love/Death weapon exchange and its consequences, and exact Folger passages from A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing. The 1553 title page and Love/Death passage were checked on the retained PDF page images rather than copied from OCR alone.

Notes on Access

8. Citations