UCL Library Services is fortunate to possess some of the most splendid early editions of Dante’s great work. The first printed edition of La Commedia was produced at Foligno in 1472 – a century and a half after the poet’s death, but less than a decade after the introduction of printing into Italy. Vendelin de Spira of Venice produced one of the copies now at UCL in 1477, as well as the first Florentine edition of 1481.

The latter has an interesting background to its history and origin. A product of the cultural circle surrounding the Signoria of Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici, it was conceived as a polemical work, directed towards other Italian centres of production – especially those of Venice (the 1477 edition) and Milan (1478). The 1481 edition, featured here, represented the Florentine attempt to reclaim the great poet, whose work had achieved classic status throughout Italy since the 14th century. A manuscript copy was presented to Lorenzo, together with a new commentary by Florentine humanist Christoforo Landino and illustrations by Sandro Botticelli, the city’s great contemporary artist. The complete series of illustrations contemplated for this book was never completed, as is shown by the blank spaces left before each canto. Only the first three plates, taken from Botticelli’s designs, are ever found printed directly onto the text pages. The remainder are printed on separate slips of paper, subsequently pasted into place. UCL’s copy has only two plates, the first cut down.

The UCL 1491 copy, with Landino’s commentary edited by Piero de Figino, was the first completely illustrated edition of La Divina Commedia. It features delightful woodcut illustrations and decorated initials at the start of each canto. Formerly owned by Antonius Gallardus (whose inscription appears on the last leaf), it was previously in the possession of the University of Genoa Library, and bears its stamp on the first leaf.

The Dante Collection at UCL owes its origin to Henry Clark Barlow’s bequest of his Italian library in 1876. This included his important Dante collection, as well as personal papers and correspondence, travel diaries and sketches. At the same time he endowed the Barlow Memorial Lecture on Dante. The collection was supplemented by editions from the Morris Library, the Mocatta Library (1906) and the Whitley Stokes Collection (1910). A printed catalogue was issued in 1910. Other later editions also came from the Rotton Library in 1926, from Sir Herbert Thompson in 1921 and from the valuable library of Huxley St John Brooks, whose books were purchased by UCL Library Services on his death in 1949.

Born in 1806, Barlow had a lifelong fascination with Italy, first fuelled by early encounters with it as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts. He acquired an interest in geology while studying medicine at Edinburgh and moved to Paris in the late 1830s, which further fanned his enthusiasm. Barlow embarked on his first continental tour to the Low Countries and the Rhine in the summer of 1840, and the following year set out for Italy. Here he was to remain for five years, living the life of an artist and student of art. He compiled his own Italian Grammar and kept a series of notebooks, filled with sketches and notes and places he visited. His observations on the history or painting and continental galleries were often in the form of letters to the Morning Post, and they made an appreciable contribution to the development of the National Gallery, which he championed. He discovered Dante while in Pisa during the winter of 1844–5, and the study and illustration of La Divina Commedia soon took precedence over all interests. UCL was to benefit from Barlow’s deep scholarship and dedication to this field of study.

The collection, now numbering a little under 3,000 volumes, includes 36 editions of the Divina Commedia printed before 1600, notably three incunabula: that printed by Wendelin de Spira of Venice in 1477, the 1491 edition of Petrus de Plasiis of Cremona and the first illustrated edition printed by Nicholas di Lorenzo in Florence, 1481 (the latter two featured here). There are also two copies of the first Aldine edition of 1502, together with five later Aldine editions.