 | A series of talks on the history of the written word 22. Italy 1464-1550. |
The first country outside Germany to accept
printing, spread to more towns than in Germany (73 to 1500). More scope in
Renaissance Italy than with basically medieval German social structure.
Sections to add:
Sweynheym and Pannartz
Rome 1467. Seat of curia, ecclesiastical and worldly
work for presses. By 1477 a dozen printers. Sweynheym and Pannartz in financial
trouble by 1472, petitioned Pope for help - overcrowded market. Partnership
dissolved 1473. Sweynheym went on to engrave copperplate maps for edition of
Ptolemy (1478). Stephan Planck published Mirabilia urbis Romae, guidebook
for tourists, 1489. Most Roman printing notable for contents rather than
typography. Exception Lodovico degli Arrighi di Vicenza, professional
calligrapher, printer from 1522 when published Operina first printed
specimen book of calligrapher. University
of Columbia website. Did much to spread chancery italic hand. Cut two italic
fonts. Probably killed in sack of Rome 1527. Antonio Blado, active 1515-67
published Machiavelli Il principe 1532 and first Index librorum
prohibitorum 1557. Printer to Holy See from 1549, good typographer.
Sections to add:
Sections to add:
Sweynheym and Pannartz
Ulrich Hahn
Stephan Planck
Lodovico degli Arrighi
Blado, Antonio. Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 1469-1527. Tutte le opere di Nicolo Machiavelli ... divisi in cinque parti. - Geneva : Pietro Aubert, 1550.
2 vol. - Not in Bruni & Evans. - Provenance: Mrs O.M.Awdrey. - Copies: o1550/MAC. The original 1550 edition of Machiavelli's complete works is ascribed to Antonio Blado who acquired the italic type from the font designer Ludovico degli Arrighi. The text throughout all five parts is set in italics with headings in roman. However the Imprint is false and surviving editions have been assigned to various dates between 1610 and 1670. They bear a woodcut vignette portrait on the titlepage - the so-called Testina, taken from the 1540 Comin da Trino edition of the Discorsi. The so-called Testina edition was printed about 1645 in Geneva by Pierre Aubert, according to Gerber and five different issues of the Testina edition are recorded. In 1557 Machiavelli's works were put on the Index librorum prohibitorum, or list of forbidden books of the Catholic church (in common with the works of Luther and, later, Galileo's Dialogi). Imprints produced in the safety of Protestant Geneva used the earlier date in an attempt to avoid censorship.
Venice 1469 most productive Italian centre in 16th cent,
by 1500 150 presses. Printing introduced by Germans Johann and Wendelin von
Speyer. Printed first edition of Pliny's Historia naturalis 1469.
Nicholas Jenson sent by French king to Mainz to learn printing in 1450s. Arrived
in Venice 1471, cut fine roman typeface. Erhard Ratdolt active 1476-86, produced
finely illstrated and decorated volumes. Aldus Manutius started printing 1490 (a
scholar printer, see later)
Sections to add:
Sections to add:
Johannes and Vindelinus de Spira
Venice. Jenson, Nicolaus. 1470-1480. Printer. Born about 1420, died 1480. 4 October 1458. Records of the French royal mint: Charles VII ordered agents to go to Mainz to inquire into the art of printing brought to light there by Messire Jeham Gutemberg "a man adept at cutting punches and caractères". Nicolas Jensen, master of the Tour mint was selected for this. By this time Gutenberg's first press had been seized by Johann Fust, and historians are unsure of his activities during this period. In 1468, Jenson went to Venice. In 1470 he opened a printing shop in Venice, and, in the first work he produced, the printed roman lowercase letter took on the proportions, shapes, and arrangements that marked its transition from an imitation of handwriting to the style that has remained in use throughout subsequent centuries of printing. Jenson also designed Greek-style type and black-letter type. The printer was prodigious in his publishing eventually producing around 150 titles. By the end of his life Jenson was a wealthy man, producing liturgical, theological and legal texts in a variety of gothic fonts, the roman type left only for the odd commissioned work. He worked separately but concurrently with Johann and Wendelin of Speyer (de Spira) and made the final definitive break from blackletter style towards a fully evolved roman letterform. During the 1470s he helped establish Venice as Italy’s publishing capital. In 1477 Jenson was able to run as many as twelve presses at the same time. To lower prices and force out less productive rivals, he cut cursive gothic type, enabling him to print text and gloss on the same page for the first time. Jenson's highly legible and evenly colored typeface, based upon Humanistic scripts, has been reinterpreted through the centuries by numerous type designers, most notably William Morris for his Golden type. The types first used in Eusebius's De praeparatione evangelica, present the full flowering of roman type design. A Greek typeface followed, which was used for quotations, and then in 1473 a Black Letter typeface, which he used in books on medicine and history. He launched two book trading companies, first in 1475 and then in 1480, under the name of Johannes de Colonia, Nicolaus Jenson et socii.
Caesar, Julius. Opera, 1471. One of the earliest and most beautiful editions of Caesar. The Roman typeface drew its inspiration from Roman monuments.
Bible in Latin, Nicolas Jenson, Venice, 1479. The first Bible to be issued from Jenson’s press. Pope Sixtus IV conferred upon him the honorary title of Count Palatine.
1476. Pliny, Historia naturalis. Printed in 1,025 copies (1,000 paper, 25 vellum) as a partnership venture between Jenson and the Strozzi family, who backed the venture financially. It is a vernacular text, with translation by Cristoforo Landino. The Pliny text was printed (in a font closely simulating the modern humanist handwriting in which the manuscript of the work might have been written) with wide margins, without initial capital letters at the beginning of chapters, and with its titles isolated in a sea of blank paper on the frontispiece, crying out for illustration and decoration.
Andrea Torresano
Aldo Pio Manuzio (Aldus Manutius); ca. 1452 – February 6, 1515. Born in Bassiano, in the Papal States some 100 km south of Rome. His family was wealthy and Manutius was educated as a humanistic scholar, studying Latin in Rome, under Gasparino da Verona, and Greek at Ferrara, under Guarino da Verona.
In 1482 he went to reside at Mirandola with his old friend and fellow student, the famous scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. There he stayed two years, studying Greek literature. Before Pico moved to Florence, he procured for Manutius the post of tutor to his nephews, Alberto and Leonello Pio, princes of Carpi. Alberto Pio supplied Manutius with funds for starting his printing press and gave him lands at Carpi. Aldo tutored several Italian ducal families during his early career.
Manutius desired to preserve ancient Greek literature by printing editions of its greatest books. Before Manutius, four Italian towns had printed editions of ancient Greek texts: Milan, Venice, Vicenza and Florence. Of these works, only three, the Milanese Theocritus and Isocrates, and the Florentine Homer, were classics. Manutius settled in Venice in 1490. The city was not only a major printing centre but it also had a large library of Greek manuscripts from Constantinople and a population of Greeks who could assist with their translation. He soon printed editions of Hero and Leander by Musaeus Grammaticus, the Galeomyomachia, and the Greek Psalter. He called these "Precursors of the Greek Library." He began gathering Greek scholars and compositors around him, employing as many as 30 Greeks in his print shop and speaking Greek at home. Instructions to typesetters and binders were given in Greek. The prefaces to his editions were written in Greek. Greeks from Crete collated manuscripts, read proofs, and gave samples of calligraphy for casts of Greek type.
In 1495, Manutius issued the first volume of his edition of Aristotle. Four more volumes completed the work in 1497–1498. Nine comedies of Aristophanes appeared in 1498. Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus followed in 1502; Xenophon's Hellenics and Euripides in 1503; Demosthenes in 1504. In addition to editing Greek classics from manuscripts, Manutius re-printed editions of classics that had originally been published in Florence, Rome, and Milan, at times correcting and improving the texts. He became the leading publisher and printer of the Venetian High Renaissance, setting up a definite scheme of book design, developing the first italic type, producing pocket octavo editions of the classics, and developing several innovations in binding technique and design. He is believed to have been the first typographer to use a semicolon and in 1566, his grandson, Aldus Manutius [2], produced Orthographiae ratio on the principles of punctuation.
In 1501 he began to use, as his publisher's device, the image of a dolphin and anchor, soon pirated by French and Italian publishers. He adapted the image from the reverse of ancient Roman coins of Titus and Domitian, AD 80–82 and associated it with the motto "Festina lente" (Hasten slowly), which he had begun to use in 1499, after receiving a Roman coin from Pietro Bembo, which bore the emblem and motto.
His famous octavo editions, that gentlemen of leisure could easily transport in a pocket or a satchel, his libri portatiles, are often regarded as the prototype of the mass-market trade paperback but this small format had already been used for works of private devotion, although it was Aldus who first adopted it for classical and secular texts. He commissioned Francesco Griffo to cut a slanted type, the very first italic font, for his series of pocket-sized editions of the classics. Despite his efforts to patent the font, he could not stop printers outside Venice from copying it. Manutius' edition of Virgil's Opera (1501) was the first octavo volume that he produced, in a larger than average print run of 1,000 copies. In his prefatory letter to Pietro Bembo in the 1514 Virgil, Aldus recorded that he "took the small size, the pocket book formula, from your library, or rather from that of your most kind father".
Catullus. Tibullus. Propetius [sic].
Venetiis : in aedibus Aldi, 1502 Bruni and Evans A 8.
The copy in Exeter Library (shelf o1502/CAT) is a contemporary counterfeit by Baldassare Gabiano produced in Lyon. Gabiano had been an associate of his uncle Giovanni Bartoloeo de Gabiano, a bookseller in Venice and moved to Lyon in 1493, where he was active until 1517. The piracy can be identified by the spelling of "Propetius" on the title-page, an error that did not occur in the original edition.
In order to promote Greek studies, Manutius founded an academy of Hellenists in 1502 called the "New Academy." Its rules were written in Greek, its members were obliged to speak Greek, their names were Hellenized, and their official titles were Greek. Members of the "New Academy" included Desiderius Erasmus and the English humanist scholar Thomas Linacre.
Manutius' press also published finely printed editions of Latin and Italian classics. Between 1495 and 1514 appeared the Asolani of Bembo, the collected writings of Poliziano, Dante's Divine Comedy, Petrarch's poems, a collection of early Latin poets of the Christian era, the letters of the Pliny the Younger, the poems of Iovianus Pontanus, Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia, Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, the Adagia of Erasmus and above all the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the allegory of love in a dream attributed to Francesco da Colonna, his finest illustrated book (1499).
Hypnerotomachia Polophili
For these Italian and Latin editions, Manutius caused the elegant roman type to be cast which is said to have been copied from Petrarch's handwriting, and was cast under the direction of Francesco da Bologna.
Hypnerotomachia Polophili
For these Italian and Latin editions, Manutius caused the elegant roman type to be cast which is said to have been copied from Petrarch's handwriting, and was cast under the direction of Francesco da Bologna.
The Second Italian War, which pressed heavily on Venice at this time, suspended Manutius' labours for a while. In 1508 he resumed his series with an edition of the minor Greek orators, however, and in 1509 appeared the lesser works of Plutarch. Then came another stoppage when the League of Cambrai drove Venice back to her lagoons, and all the forces of the republic were concentrated on a life-or-death struggle with the allied powers of Europe. In 1513 Manutius reappeared with an edition of Plato, which he dedicated to Pope Leo X in a preface that compares the miseries of warfare and the woes of Italy, with the sublime and tranquil objects of the student's life. Pindar, Hesychius, and Athenaeus followed in 1514.[5] At the end of his life, Manutius had begun an edition of the Septuagint, the first to be published; it appeared posthumously in 1518.
Perotti, Niccolò 1430-1480. In hoc volumine habentur haec cornucopiae sive linguae latinae commentarii
Venetijs : In aedibus Aldi, et Andreae soceri M. D. XIII. mense Nouembri 1513. Bruni and Evans A19.
Exeter Library, shelf: x1513/PER.
In 1505, Manutius married Maria, daughter of Andrea Torresani of Asola. Torresani had already bought the press established by Nicholas Jenson at Venice. Therefore, Manutius' marriage combined two important publishing firms. Henceforth the names Aldus and Asolanus were associated on the title pages of the Aldine publications; and after Manutius' death in 1515, Torresani and his two sons carried on the business during the minority of Manutius' children. The business expired with the third generation.
Paulus Manutius
Aldus Manutius II
Erhard Ratdolt
Johannes and Gregorius de Gregoriis
Francesco Marclini
Gabriele Giolito de Ferrari
Florence 1471. Notable for woodcut illustrations of
1490s using mixture of white line and black line, e.g. in works of Savaarola.
Giunta family main printers, publishers from 1491, printers from 1503.
Sections to add:
Sections to add:
Giunta family
Parma. Saladus, Octavius and Ugoletus, Franciscus. 1516. Printers. Grapaldi, Francisco Mario, 1460-1515. Francisci Marii Grapaldi: poetae Laureati: De partibus aedium: Addita modo: Verborum explicatione: Quæ in eodem libro: continentur: Opus Sane elegans: & eruditum: tum propter Multiugam: Variarum rerum: Lectionem: cu; propter M. Vitruuii & Cornelii Celsi: emaculatas dictiones: Quæ apud ipsos: Vel Medesae: Vel obscurae: Videbatur. - Impressum Parmæ : per accuratissimos Impressores Octauianu Saladu & Franciscu; Vgoletu; ... 1516. [20], 265 leaves ; 23 cm ; 4to. - Bruni and Evans A15. - Shelf: o1516/GRA. The author Francesco Mario Grapaldi was born January 1460 in Parma and was raised by his maternal uncle Niccolò Ravacaldo, archpriest of Fornovo. He received his first humanistic education fom Filippo Beroaldo who taught in Parma in 1475-76. He became a notary but in 1486 was appointed a professor of fine letters at Parma, a post he held until his death. He composed many Latin poems but devoted himself mainly to De partibus aedium, which was first printed in 1494 in Parma by Angelo Ugoleto and reprinted several times throughout the sixteenth century in Italy and abroad. He also became a prominent politician in Parma, a member of the Elders and he held several positions at the time of the Franco-Spanish wars. In 1501 he was sent as a representative to Milan. He was sent as ambassador to Rome in 1512 and was crowned poet by Julius II in person. He returned to Rome in 1514 as ambassador to the new pope Leo X. He died in November 1515 in Parma. De partibus aedium is an encyclopaedic work ranging from architecture to mechanics, medicine to botany, zoology, and home economics. It applied the knowledge derived from classical writers to a modern aristocratic readership. The classical authors are quoted in large numbers: from Homer, Plato, Thucidides, Aristotle, Lucretius, Virgil, Cicero, Seneca, the two Plinii, Varro, Columella, Galen, Vegetius, and also Christian writers such as Girolamo and Cipriano, but above all Vitruvius and Celsus, the two authorities mentioned in the title page of the 1516 edition. The work consists of a meticulous description of all the spaces in the house: doors, stairs, floors, of the rooms, the layout of the library, but also of the garden, the stables and other places used for different animals, fountains, granaries etc., cataloguing everything they contain. It also contains information on furnishings, objects and manufactures of the time, methods of taking water from the well, cheese production, clocks, book binding and paper making in Parma and so on. In the posthumous edition of 1516, an explanatory glossary was added. The work was reprinted outside Italy: in Strasbourg by J. Prüss in 1508; in Paris by J. Granjon in 1511 and J. Petit in 1517; in Basel by J. Walder in 1533 and 1541; in Lyon in 1535; in Dordrecht in 1618 and in Salzburg in 1723.
This page last updated 18 September 2020
