Pagina 127 - BCSV, XL, 2

The Maximilian Wildenstein’s
De uno and De constantia
This essay makes public the existence and the characteristics of another
exemplar of Giambattista Vico’s De universi juris uno principio et fine uno ( Du)
and De constantia jurisprudentis (De const.), both works in a single volume,
similarly to the volume Vico donated to F. F. A. Gervasi, in 1734. In addition,
the essay asks whether the project’s program and suggestions of Vincenzo
Placella for the definitive edition of the Diritto universale – Du , De const., and
Notae combined – is feasible.
Vincenzo Placella, in Alcune Proposte per la Nuova Edizione delle Opere di
Vico in «Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani» (VIII, 1978), and Fabrizio
Lomonaco, in Giambattista Vico, De Universi Juris Uno Principio et Fine Uno
(Napoli, Liguori, 2007), have spoken of three exemplars, identifiable by the
name of the city’s library that owns them, or the name of the city where they
are preserved, or the name of the person for whom Vico wrote the dedication,
or the signature assigned to them by the librarians. The experts know the par-
ticular characteristics of these three exemplars. By presenting these character-
istics, we will arrive at the main issue of this essay.
Placella speaks of the exemplar of the Biblioteca Casanatense of Rome,
where the volume arrived for Tommaso M. Minorelli, the curator, sometime
during the first two weeks of September 1721, and this exemplar goes under
the signature H XIII 13 (also given as H XIII 12, in Placella, p. 79). In 2009,
to an inquiry about it, using the signature H XIII 13, the librarian for the
«Fondo Manoscritti e Opere Rare» of the Biblioteca Casanatense replied that
in the register of the concordances the signature H XIII 13 was inexistent. This
exemplar was intended for a public readership and not for a single reader, and
this explains why it is said to possess margins cleared of the author’s interven-
tions, with only one noticeable comment in calce, and accurate and clean direct
corrections of small printing errors or of linguistic nature of the text. Placella