Nella partenza del glorioso governo della città di Verona dell' illustriss. & eccellentiss. signor Dominico Capello; oda tradota dalla lingua ebraica

[Verona? 1692?]

1 broadside | Full-sheet | 498 x 347 mm

An unrecorded bilingual broadside ode to Verona mayor (podestà) Domenico Cappello, written in Hebrew on the occasion of his leaving office (partenza), and accompanied by an Italian translation. Cappello appears to have assumed his civic duty on 25 May 1690 and relinquished it sometime in 1692, though the circumstances of his parting are unclear. We wonder if partenza might just as well refer to his passing. Some of the laudatory verse, for example, could be interpreted in such a way (Chiamato (intendo) ei vola / A maggior gradi). Whatever the case, we can't imagine this would have been printed long after his parting, and such occasional pieces often relied on local printers. ¶ Verona had a number of Jewish confraternities at the time, and we wonder if one of them might have commissioned this piece. The 17th century was a time of significant growth for Verona's Jewish confraternities. For much of the previous century, Verona was home to a single Jewish confraternity, which became only more exclusive as the Jewish community grew. "Young unmarried Jewish men who migrated to Verona to serve as apprentices in local Jewish businesses found themselves excluded from the more prestigious Jewish confraternities already in existence there, and addressed this problem by simply forming their own. In the seventeenth century, another wave of Jewish migrants to Verona from the Sephardic community of Venice encountered the same sort of exclusion on the part of Verona's Jewish elite, but lost their marginal status in the city's Jewish community by gradually building up and dominating another confraternity" (Lynch). As Jewish newcomers arrived over the course of the 17th century, their exclusion from the old brotherhoods hastened the establishment of alternatives. By the middle of the 18th century, Verona had fifteen Jewish confraternities. ¶ The poetry itself is rather fulsome, at least in the Italian, comparing the Verona mayor to King David, and to Joseph, savior of Biblical Egypt. While modern readers might “characterize these poetic efforts as workman-like and largely devoid of intense personal feeling, it is important not to overlook the important role these poets and their poetry played in early modern society. Few personal or public events of any significance among the more educated or well-to-do classes—births, deaths, marriages, christenings, name days, etc.—passed without being celebrated in verse” (Paas). ¶ A fleeting witness to Jewish participation in the civic life of early modern Italy. We find no other copies.

CONDITION: Printed on the recto only of a full sheet of laid paper, and heavily decorated with various woodcut border pieces and small type ornaments. The watermark, three crescents of ascending size, was common to Venice at the time. ¶ Removed from a large bound volume, and retaining that stub along its left side; trimmed in the lower left corner, just barely affecting the border; some hard creases across both dimensions, that across the middle reinforced on the blank verso, repairing a 3-inch closed tear, and with scattered pinholes at other interstices; some mild foxing and soiling.

REFERENCES: Giambattista Biancolini, Notizie storiche delle chiese di Verona (1765), p. 285 (for Cappello's tenure as podestà); Supplementi alla cronica di Pier Zagata (1749), p. 109-110 (also for Cappello's tenure as podestà); Katherine A. Lynch, Individuals, Families, and Communities in Europe, 1200-1800 (2003), p. 97 (cited above); Elliott S. Horowitz, Jewish Confraternities in Seventeenth-Century Verona: A Study in the Social History of Piety (PhD Dissertation, Yale, 1982), p. 8-16 (excellent background on the growth of Verona's Jewish community); John Roger Paas, "Johann Georg Schleder (1597-1685), Journalist, Chronicler, and Broadsheet Author," Broadsheets: Single-Sheet Publishing in the First Age of Print (2017), p. 317 (cited above); Richard Kirwan, "Function in Form: Single-Sheet Items and the Utility of Cheap Print in the Early Modern German University," Broadsheets, p. 343 ("Since occasional print was highly responsive to everyday, local events it required speed and efficiency of production. These requirements were most easily met by local printers."); Edward Heawood, Watermarks Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries (1950), p. 84 and plate 136 (for similar watermarks used in 17c Venice); C.M. Briquet, Les filigranes, v. 2, p. 315 (on paper with three crescents: "This paper was known in Venice under the name Trelune and was made especially for the Levant")

Item #759