Gabriele Simeoni autore e autotraduttore di imprese nella Lione di metà Cinquecento

The first illustrated edition of Paolo Giovio’s Dialogo dell’Imprese militari et amorose is published in France by Guillaume Roville in 1559. The Florentine polygraph Gabriele Simeoni’s activity gravitates around this work from 1554. He readjusts Giovio’s dialogue in the form of a collection of devices that he integrates with those of his own invention and translates all the texts into French, as attested by the bilingual manuscript Ashburnham 1376 of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. The wood engravings of Giovio’s dialogue have as their model the drawings contained in this manuscript and the book is often bound with that of the Simeoni’s devices, which are also printed and illustrated according to the same model. The same wood engravings appear again in the French translation of Giovio’s dialogue, in the self-translation into French of Simeoni’s devices and in the Italian and French verses reduced from both Giovio’s and Simeoni’s devices, always printed by Rouillé. Simeoni’s self-translation as self-promotion allows him to occupy an important position in exporting an Italian fashion to French world, where he joins other significant works, such as those of Andrea Alciato and Claude Paradin.