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Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1668. Small quarto (23 × 17 cm). Contemporary elaborately decorated and richly gilt morocco binding with the armorial supralibros of Pope Clement X. on the front and back covers, from the orbit of the Andreoli/Rospigliosi bindery, with gilt edges; [16], 148 pp. with engraved title page, 14 copper-engraved plates by L[orenzo] Tinti, and numerous initials. Inner lid with ex-libris from the notable collection of the London bookseller W. A. Foyle, Beeleigh Abbey; binding showing traces of former ties; joints, headcaps, edges and corners lightly rubbed, the joints slightly more so; spine with a few minute, almost imperceptible restorations and a few tiny wormholes; slightly toned and faintly fox-stained in places along the edges; else very good. First edition with the copperplate engravings by Lorenzo Tinti, and the second edition of the text, first published in Florence in 1626 under the equally fictitious authorship of Pandolfo Ricasoli Baroni (see Melzi and Moreni). This Vita replaced Arcangelo Giani's "Della historia del b. Filippo Benizii nobile fiorentino", published in 1604, as the authoritative hagiography, updating Giani's account in light of the Processi informativi completed in 1621 in preparation for the canonization proceedings. During this process, the commissions in Florence (Philip's birthplace) and Todi (the place of his death) interviewed more than fifty witnesses and inspected the principal sites of veneration (see the Preface and Sabine Hoffmann, Ein heiliger und sieben Gründer . Munich, 2013, p. 47). The occasion for this second edition of the Vita, enriched with copperplate engravings, was the renewed - and this time successful - effort undertaken in Rome by the Florentines and the Servite Order to secure the canonization of their fifth Prior General. To him they owed the survival of the Order after the Second Council of Lyon (1274), when the smaller mendicant orders faced compulsory suppression. The Servite Order subsequently received papal confirmation in 1304, and Benizi has therefore often been regarded as its founder. For four centuries, the friars of the Ordo Servorum Mariae and the Florentines sought the canonization of their patron, who, during the conclave at Viterbo (1268-1271), was proposed for election as pope and is therefore said to have hidden in a grotto on Monte Amiata near Siena. The first major success in this long campaign came under Pope Leo X, the first pope of the Florentine Medici family, who in 1516 authorized the celebration of the Feast of Philip with its own Mass and Proper Office. By this time, the veneration of Philip had reached its height in Florence. (For this and the following, see Hoffmann 2013, pp. 15-48.) In the Servites' mother church, Basilica della Santissima Annunziata, a church central to the Florentines that housed one of the city's most important sanctuaries, the miraculous image of the Annunciation, Cosimo Rosselli (as is well known, the painter who, alongside Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Signorelli, executed three of the frescos in the Sistine Chapel) began, around 1475, a fresco cycle on the life of the city's venerated son. The cycle was continued in 1509-1510 with five frescos by Andrea del Sarto. Together with his pupils Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, he subsequently worked also in the forecourt of the basilica (the "Chiostrino dei Voti") on a second cycle, whose subject was the life of the Virgin Mary. With these two cycles, the pictorial biographies of the two figures of greatest importance to the order were placed before the basilica. When Vasari later wrote at length about the frescos, he referred to Filippo Benizi, more than a century before his canonization, quite matter-of-factly as a saint ("san Filippo"), even though his descriptions of the paintings, or more precisely his iconographic reading of the frescos, suggest that he was not entirely familiar with the associated legends (G. Vasari, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pi.
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