De eerste 12. boecken, vande Ilyadas Beschreven in't Griecks door Homerum Vader ende Prince alder Poeten. Wt Grieksch in Franschen dicht vertaeld door Huges Salel . Ende nu uyt Francoyschen in Nederduydschen dicht vertaeld. Door Karel van Mander, kloeck Schilder ende Dichter Homer. Mander, Karel van (1548-1606), translator

Bound in contemporary vellum, lightly soiled, the author s name and "Ilyadas" on the spine in faded early ink. A nice copy with scattered blemishes and a few paper faults as follows: Light damp-stains to opening leaves and again a little further into the text, leading edge of leaf A6 ragged (not touching the text) with a long, clean tear in the text (mended with no loss), small ink mark on one woodcut and leaf opposite. Early reader s tick-marks in the margins of some leaves, particularly in Books 1 and 2, small ink spots on eight lvs. (B8-C1, D2-D3, L8-M1, K8-L1). Leaf H8 dusty in the gutter. Illustrated with 12 half-page woodcut scenes, one at the beginning of each book. Attractive woodcut initials. An extremely rare Dutch translation of the first 12 books of the Iliad by the Flemish painter, poet ,and art theorist Karel van Mander, friend and collaborator of Goltzius, with whom he formed an academy of painting in Haarlem. The book, like Van Mander s translation of Virgil s "Eclogues" and "Georgics"(1597), is illustrated with anonymous woodcuts. Simoni, Catalogue of Books from the Low Countries, 1601 1621, H157, states that the woodcuts have been attributed to Christoffel van Sichem but I cannot find a corroborating source. The subjects of the illustrations are: 1. Battle before the walls of Troy. 2. Odysseus strikes Thyrsites for mocking Agamemnon. 3. Aphrodite conceals Paris in a cloud and spirits him away, saving him from Menelaus. 4. Pandarus shoots an arrow at Menelaus but merely grazes him. 5. The "aristeia" of Diomedes, who is shown ready to hurl a huge boulder at Aeneas, surrounded by Trojans whom he has slain. The gods, who have made themselves visible to Diomedes, appear in the sky. 6. Diomedes and Glaucus exchange armor in a gesture of friendship, having learned that their fathers knew each other in the Age of Heroes. 7. The duel between Hector and Ajax. 8. Zeus influencing the battle between the Trojans and Achaeans. 9. Achilles, seated next to his armor, is unmoved by pleas for him to return to battle. 10. Agamemnon approaches Nestor before the night raid. 11. Patroclus, sent by Achilles, appears before Nestor, who asks Patroclus to persuade Achilles to return to battle. 12. A scene unrelated to Book XII, showing the opening scene of Book I: The priest Chryses begs Agamemnon to return his daughter, whom Agamemnon had taken as a spoil of war. The translation: As the title page makes clear, Van Mander based his translation on Hugues Salel s French version of the poem, specifically the first ten books. For Books IX and XII, he worked from the translation of Amadis Jamyn. The edition from which Van Mander worked is likely Jamyn s Parisian edition of 1580, "Les XXIII. Livres de l Iliade d Homère, Prince des Poëtes Grecs" or the reprint of 1584, in which Jamyn gives a polished and updated version of Salel s ten books. Smit, Kalliope in de Nederlanden, p. 299, believes that while Van Mander worked easily from Salel s translation, he had difficulty with Jamyn s rendering of books eleven and twelve. As a result, Van Mander gave up on translating the rest of the poem, as he tells us in a despondent epigram at the end of his translation of the twelfth book: "Den blinden volgend' int Ilions beleg, Verdroot my den reys, op den halven weg." [Following the blind into Ilion The journey made me weary halfway through] The book was published five years after Van Mander s death despite the fact, as the publisher tells us, that the translator had completed the manuscript at least eight years before he died. The reason for this delay is unknown. Smit, p. 298, offers several possibilities. Perhaps work on his masterpiece, Het Schilder-Boeck [The Painters Book] (1604) interfered with Van Mander s interest in publishing his Iliad, or perhaps he abandoned the project altogether when he gave up translating the second half of the epic. Published in April, 1612, Van Mander s translation remained the only translation of th