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FUNERAL EXEQUIES, INCLUDING POEMS IN PERUVIAN TONGUES
[LIMA IMPRINT] CUENCA, P. Victoriano. Parentacion solemne que al nombre augusto, y real memoria de la Catholica Reyna de las Españas, y Emperatriz de la Indias…Doña Maria Amalia de Saxonia... Lima, Pedro Nolasco, 1761.
4to. [20 x 15 cm], (3) ff., 434 pp. , with 1 large [50 x 33 cm folding engraved plate of the catafalque (unsigned).
[Including:] GORRICHATEGUI, Augustin de. Oracion Funebre. (11) ff., 43 pp. Bound in later vellum with ties (one wanting), some loss to half-title (not affecting text), light toning to title, expert repair to small tear in margin of the plate. Generally excellent.
$14,000 An unusually fresh example of the rare first edition of this collection of funeral exequies composed in honor of Maria Amalia of Saxony (1724-1760), the wife of Charles III, who died of tuberculosis within a year of her arrival in Madrid. The work contains a large folding plate of the Queen Consort’s catafalque, and is also of considerable cultural interest for its collection of funerary texts composed in Basque, Catalan, English (!), and two Native American languages.
As Cuenca explains prior to the engraving (pp. 86-98), the catafalque of Maria Amalia was designed and built by the architect Antonio Bejarano Loayza, who had recently designed similar monuments for Maria Bárbara of Portugal (1759) and Ferdinard VI (1760). Composed of four rising cuerpos (registers), it was supported by 20 Ionic columns and flanked by two 36-foot-high obelisks, crowned by the lion and castle of the Spanish royal crest. Its rococo ornamentation—most notably the auricular flourishes of the balustrades, spandrels and candelabras—testifies to the growing influence of French rocaille design on Spanish baroque architecture (and, by extension, to that of New Spain) during the mid-18th C.
After recounting the program of funerary exequies on June 27, Cuenca then presents the eulogies composed by members of Lima’s religious orders, chiefly sonetos or 10-line décimas, a Spanish form. A selection of poems from the Colegio Real de San Martín, a Jesuit-run lay school in Lima, includes an interesting acrostic sonnet. These efforts are outshined, however, by over 60 pages of verse composed in 11 languages by the Jesuits of Lima’s Colegio Máximo de San Pablo, including a dialogue in French between the town of Lima and the Rímac River, and poems in English, Hungarian and Basque. Of exceptional interest are two poems written in indigenous languages—‘Mobima,’ a Moxos dialect, and Quechua, the lingua franca of the Peruvian Andes. Exequies printed in Indian languages are unusual in contemporary funeral-books; Cuenca, a Jesuit himself, perhaps included them to publicize his order’s activity among the Indians.
Printed on the heels of the exequies for Doña Maria Barbara de Portugal (Lima 1760) and Don Fernando VI (Lima 1760), which were also printed by Nolasco, the volume concludes with a funeral oration delivered by Augustin de Gorrichategui, a Panama native and later Bishop of Cuzco (1771-1776) who served at the Cathedral of Lima. Medina notes that the plate of the copy he examined was signed Camacho after Bexarano (or Bejarano); the present copy, like the Yale copy, has the same dimensions but lacks signatures, suggesting another, possibly early issue. With thanks to Moira Fitzgerald at Beinecke for checking their copy.
OCLC: Gordon College, Indiana University, Duke, Yale.
* Palau 65888; Medina, Lima 1172.
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