Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice

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The Aldine Juvenal and Persius of 1501 copy printed on vellum and illuminated for the Pisani family of Venice. Original page-size 166x101 mm. c.4.g.io, sig. a2.

Aldus Manutius Printer

and Publisher of Renaissance Venice

Martin Davies

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Tempe, Arizona 1999

©

1995 Martin Davies

published 1995

First

by The British Library Great Russell Street

London wciB 3DG Second Printing © Copyright 1999 Martin Davies Published in North America

by The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies as Volume 214 in the series

Medieval

Texts

&

&

Renaissance

Studies

NOTE Unless otherwise specified, pressmarks of the books illustrated are of copies in The British Library

ALDUS MANUTIUS #

WITH MOST PRINTERS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

AS

from Gutenberg onwards, we know next to nothing of Aldus Manutius before he took up, in his forties, the activity which was to give him lasting renown. He was a reticent man who seldom wrote about himself, as opposed to his work, and no early biography supplies the gaps. to speak,

It is

the books themselves that have

with support from the occasional document or passage of humanist

correspondence.

He was born

at

Bassiano in the papal

probably about

states,

145 1. Bassiano is a hill town some thirty-five miles south-east of Rome which would have remained unknown to fame had Aldus not styled himself 'Bassianas' in a few of his earliest books, a style soon replaced by 'Aldus Ro-

manus'.

From

scattered corrmients here

he received some humanistic schooling

and there in the prefaces

it

emerges that

Rome, and some form of higher ed-

at

ucation at Ferrara. It

was in

Rome

that his life received the direction

turned to printing. If he had been asked

at

ian that he

wanted to be

philologist,

we

A

classical antiquity

to take before he

his

all

(a

scholar or

to absorb, understand

and

through the concrete vehicle of the

a middling sort of humanist

ably successful grammar, as well as a has the distinction of being the

at Rome seems to have who composed a reason-

the advent of printing in Italy.

first

life

work

of the reigning pope, Paul

brightest academic stars izio Calderini. It

may

was Calderini's

Italy in the

But Aldus, we gather from

from one of the

of the day, another Veronese humanist named

have been Calderini that belief

- one

that

second half of the fifteenth

literature that lay

which

a passing later ref-

stirred in

him

Dom-

a love of Greek,

was becoming increasingly general in century - that a full understanding of

the Latin classics, and of the ancient world as a whole, depended

edge of the Greek

11,

to mention, under the date 1466 - 67,

erence, also had the benefit of hearing lectures at the university

it

what

which had reached the Renaissance. His master

been Gaspare da Verona,

for

'80s

admired friend Polit-

good 'grammarian'

should say) was concerned above

expound the values of texts

a 'grammaticus'.

was

any point of the 1470s or

ambition was, he might well have answered with

his

it

on

a

knowl-

behind them.

The interdependence of Greek and Latin was

also

prominent in the teaching

of Battista Guarino,

a

famous teacher

at the

University of Ferrara and inheritor

of the chair of eloquence there from his more famous father Guarino da Verona.

Whether or not he had picked up any Greek in Rome, Aldus Battista's lessons at Ferrara, doubtless in the period

certainly followed

1475 - 80, and these includ-

much

known from the dedication to his old teacher of the 1496 Hesiod and Theocritus. By that stage he will have been fluent in both the ancient languages, and like many an-

ed Greek literature besides courses on Latin authors. This

other humanities graduate since, the question then arose as to

Schoolmastering offered

talents.

-

we

itself, as it

is

how

to apply his

always has, and in 1480 - the

first

him named as tutor to the young princes of Carpi, Alberto and Lionello Pio. The same document extended to Aldus citizenship of this small, precariously independent city just north of Modena, midway between Bologna and Mantua. He seems to have spent the next few years definite date

alternating

of his

life

find

between Carpi and

Ferrara, perhaps teaching in

both

places.

widowed Caterina Pio, was to be career. The immediate benefit to him,

Alberto, the elder of the two sons of the

an important figure in Aldus's

later

however, apart from more or

less

steady employment, was entry into the

He may have already become acquainted with Pico as a fellow student at Ferrara and is known to have taken refuge with him at Mirandola when Venetian

world of their uncle, the philosopher prince of Mirandola, Giovanni Pico.

armies threatened that city in 1482. Pico was a Renaissance intellectual par

thoroughly versed in the classics, and even acquainted - a rare accomplishment - with oriental languages. He had a powerful synthetic mind excellence,

which attempted

to

harmonize Platonism, Aristotelianism and

incorporating elements of Aldus, he was widely Venice.

It is

from

Pico's friends

Hebrew and Arabic

known and

More importantly

liked in the scholarly circles

mid- 1480s,

this period, the

and fellow

thought.

ized in English)

and

it

was

may

Aldus to make the

master's works.

With Barbaro, on

Venice, there

every reason to think that

path that Aldus took

he

is

natural-

never have been close but they were certainly cordial,

later to fall to

is

(as

with

Angelo

in Venice and

Poliziano in Florence, probably date. Relations with Politian

for

of Florence and

that Aldus's acquaintance

Ermolao Barbaro

scholars,

Christianity,

at the

first

collected edition

of the

the other hand, Politian's twin spirit at

end of the

his influence

was decisive on the

1480s.

VENICE AND PRINTING That path was to Venice. There

is

no way of

telling exactly

when Aldus

conceived his great plan of publishing wholesale the works of ancient Greece in the original language.

But

it is

certain that the intellectual atmosphere and

commercial opportunities of Venice in the 1480s were propitious to such a hazard-

The

ous undertaking.

on Ermolao Barbaro enjoyed informal courses on Aristotle drew large audiences. In 1485

great prestige - his

the city once

more

of grammar and

patrician circle centred

instituted a public lectureship in

Greek

at the civic

school

San Marco. The encyclopaedic interest took in all aspects of the ancient world - scientific and literary - found support in a number of well-endowed

rhetoric, the Scuola di

that Venetian humanists

philosophical as well as

private and monastic libraries,

though

official sloth

permitted the treasure-house

of Cardinal Bessarion's Greek manuscripts to stay untouched in until well into the sixteenth century.

Barbaro had an ancestral wealth of Latin and

Greek codices, but there were other eminent collectors such

(who

boxes

their

as

Giorgio Merula

lectured in Venice until 1482), Giorgio Valla (appointed to the lecture-

ship at the Scuola di

spoke of the

last

the 'four strong

San Marco), and the patrician Girolamo Donato. Politian

in the

men

same company

of letters'.

And

as himself,

Barbaro and Pico

as

one of

there was a large colony of Greeks long

of Constantinople in 1453, who upon for supply or copying of Greek manuscripts. Above

resident in the city, particularly after the fall

were regularly all,

called

there was at Venice a highly developed printing trade

far eclipsed

any other

city

which by 1490 had

of Europe in terms of production and organized

dis-

tribution.

The

art

Pannartz,

of printing had arrived in

who

issued

books

at

Venice, as in most Italian towns, ing, John

of Speyer producing

was shrewd and, in commercial

city

Italy

from Germany with Sweynheym and

Rome from 1465 onwards. In who introduced print-

Subiaco and it

was another German

his earliest

retrospect, obvious.

book

in 1469.

The choice of location

Venice had been for centuries the prime

of the peninsula, well connected by sea routes to western and

northern Europe,

as

well as the Levant, and by land over the Brenner Pass to

Germany and central Europe. John of Speyer made a further innovation of great importance

south

He

secured for his

bade anyone

first

for the future.

products a privilege of the Venetian senate, which fore-

else to exercise the craft

of printing in the Venetian dominions for

a period

of five

tives for

an entrepreneur with an invention or improvement to protect were

years. In

an age before patents or copyright, the only alterna-

monopoly of the

which the Venetian republic a few though carried on months and the privilege became void, even his work was by his brother Wendelin. By this stage it had already become clear to the authorities that such blanket monopolies would tend to disadvantage the export trade upon which the city's prosperity depended, and no more were granted either total secrecy or a local

sort

was long accustomed to granting. In the event John of Speyer died within

until the privilege returned in

modified form, for particular books, in the 1480s.

names of some

In the decade 1470 to 1480 the

known,

dozen anonymous firms

plus half a

types. Unrestrained competition

drove

fifty printers at

identified only

many of them

by

Venice are

their printing

out of business, particu-

of over-production in 1472-73. It was partly a matof poor estimation of what sort of texts, in what numbers, the market could

larly in a disastrous period ter

As with the

bear.

earliest printing in

Rome

and

tended to concentrate on books of classical,

ers

printed in the fine

est,

roman

Paris, the first patristic

Venetian print-

and humanistic inter-

types derived from humanist handwriting. After

of 1473, a gradual change to safer texts is observable, ones for which the clergy and universities would always have a steady demand - law, scholasthe

crisis

philosophy, theology, from the late 1470s an increasing

tic

There was

move

also a general

tive professions favoured.

number of liturgies.

towards the gothic types which the conserva-

These are only tendencies. Classical authors never

ceased to be printed at Venice, but not with the exclusive preoccupation of the

As

earliest period.

for typefaces,

should be be remembered that the most

it

famous and elegant roman types of the Jenson, were deal

more

Hand

far

outnumbered by

frequently in the course of his ten-year career.

in

hand with these developments went a consolidation of the trade

into large syndicates. Printing books

in

its

Frenchman Nicholas which he employed a good

1470s, those of the

his gothic founts,

market and slow in

its

was

a capital-intensive business, speculative

returns: long credit

and powerful backers were

required to assemble the texts, types and (the most expensive item) paper need-

ed to make an edition. The two large syndicates of the 1470s— one French, based

on

German

Jenson's company, and the other

original firm - joined together

at the

deriving from John of Speyer s

son in 1480, increasingly differentiation ers

Italian)

of functions

as

more

From

the

a short-lived

death ofJen-

to

were very powerful organizations, with a

between the

The

different parmers.

had secured funds, and printed, marketed and sold

enterprise.

form

(after the

end of the decade

Grande Compagnia. These syndicates and others like them

mid- 1470s the partoers

books

their

to a contract

clear

earliest print-

as a unified

took on more and

the specialized roles of merchant backers, printers, publishers, distributors

and booksellers, often with some degree of overlap. The structures

down

efficient capitalist

of the biggest firms and the constant competition both tended to drive

prices, so that for the first

time in history books were widely and

cheaply available throughout Europe.

The

international outlook of Venetian printers and the favourable situation

and traditions of the

from the

outset.

city

encouraged mass export of the products of the presses

The books would

Europe and other

parts

travel in

unbound

quires,

by

sea to western

of Italy, but more especially by the land route to the

large markets of southern

Germany. So

it

came about

that

many

Venetian

books scarcely touched on Bavarian monasteries. their

terra Jirma

By

before passing over the Brenner to the rich

the 1480s the larger printers had sufficient grasp of

markets to be able to concentrate on certain types of publication with a

Any diocese of Europe which needed a new breviary for uniformity of divine serin England vice could turn to one of half a dozen Venetian specialists and be assured of a high-quality product, with good press-work and correctly registered red and reasonable expectation of matching supply to demand.

- even

black printing. Baptista de Tortis and the brothers de Gregoriis specialized in the classics in the 1480s; in the 1490s de Tortis so far controlled the trade in legal printing that a

known

law book came to be

simply

as a 'liber

de

Tortis'.

THE PRINTING OF GREEK

By

end of the 1480s Venice had attained a posidominance in the printing of Latin books, more particular-

the time Aldus arrived at the

tion of unassailable

of academic and

ly in the profitable field

Greek books could not have been more been done For

all its

at that stage

large

anywhere

different.

in Italy,

The

situation

with

Very little Greek printing had

and none

at all

elsewhere in Europe.

Greek community, Venice lagged behind Florence and Milan

in this respect. In those cities local

combined

scholarship had

grammars which were the

humanist

interest

to have printed a small

- including the famous Florentine

little

liturgical texts.

staple

Vicenza, one of Venice's

literary texts

Homer of 1488 - as well as the rudimentary of early Greek printing everywhere. Even

own

subject towns, could

educational texts, to be set against the

preceded by the pseudo-Homeric

and emigre Byzantine

number of

two

mock

show seven of these

solitary editions (a

Greek

psalter,

epic Batrachomyomachia) that a short-

lived Cretan press put out at Venice in i486.

The

why something did not happen are seldom discoverable, but cer-

reasons

made. The first is that overall demand for Greek texts what there was tended to emphasize elementary works primers, readers and dictionaries - which could assist western Europeans to learn the language. The base of Greek learning among the Italians, though in pockets profound, was not large or widely spread. The Greeks themselves were seldom tain obvious points can be

was very

slight;

possessed of the literature : the

two

editions

means or the patrons

to set

up

presses to print their ov^oi

Venetian firm of Laonicus and Alexander, which produced the

mentioned above, was an exception, but the

ture speaks for

of the diaspora

failure

of their ven-

The Greek people, as subjects of Venetian Crete consequent upon the Turkish conquest of their land,

itself.

or victims did not in

any case constitute a stable and concentrated market.

To

these disincentives

was added the

greatest difficulty, that

of a satisfactory

of Greek

transfer

script into type.

Greek handwriting had never undergone the

various stages of reform and standardization that had allowed Latin script to be

transformed into the chaste formality of Venetian gothic and roman founts.

by

written language was beset

ligatures

The

and contractions in wild profusion, and

the superstructure of accents and breathings that had inhered in the language since Hellenistic times

made any

typographical rendering technically as well as

Robert Proctor

aesthetically difficult.

at the

beginning of this century calculat-

ed that the number of sorts in the fount of Laonicus and Alexander - the separate pieces letters,

of type which represented

breathings and accents -

tedly the

most extreme

came

case, this

all

to

possible forms

and combinations of

something over 1300. Though admit-

was not the

sort

of printing calculated to

men who ran the Venetian industry. Those Latins who

appeal to the hard-nosed

were persuaded of the message of Battista Guarino and Ermolao Barbaro were generally of a sort well able to afford to have the texts they required copied out

by

hai^id.

The many Greek

scribes in Venice, often

also in straitened circumstances,

men

of great learning

could supply those needs. All in

all

if

the total of

sixty fifteenth-century editions in Greek, including bilingual readers, begins to

look

less surprising.

Of the

major Greek authors only Homer, Theocritus and

part of Hesiod had reached print before the Aldine press was set up.

was a technical problem, and

it

was

But if Greek energy

also a prestigious opportunity, awaiting

capital.

This, then,

was the

situation that

some point towards the end of the approaching forty.

Of his

when he repaired to Venice at an unknown grammar master we have only fugitive hints and

Aldus found 1480s,

contacts at this time

A

equivocal inferences drawn from humanist correspondence. survives

from Aldus

to Politian offering friendship, in the

and admiration of a Greek

company of the Greek er at

letter

scribe

of Politian. This, he

will

of 1484

manner of the

said,

time,

he had read in the

Emanuel Adramyttenus when they were togeth-

Mirandola under Pico's protection in 1482.

hope that one day they

letter

meet to cement the

Politian's reply expresses the

friendship, here gracefully recip-

rocated. Aldus certainly encountered Politian in 1491

- the

latter

made

a note

of the meeting - when the Florentine was in Venice with Pico in search of books and

libraries for

others.

That

ace to the

the limit of their

is

first

Lorenzo de' Medici, there to be entertained by Barbaro and

known

volume of the Greek

relations.

Aristotle,

death of all three of these great scholars, 'men

The Greek

Four years

later, in

the pref-

Aldus had occasion to lament th

who

could rival antiquity'.

scholar and teacher Janus Lascaris had taken the

same route

1490, visiting the libraries of Barbaro and others in the city with a similar

ii

com

mission to search out Greek manuscripts for the Medici collection in Florence Lascaris

10

was to

set

up

a

Greek

press in Florence

which

issued

its first

product

poems of the Planudean Anthology,

the Hellenistic

and

its

in

striking attempt to avoid the intricacies

was

to

and protege Marcus Musu-

the chief editor of Aldine Greek texts. Aldus

become

have failed to make contact with arship with

whom

this

much

he had so

in

a

of Greek cursive type by printing the

entire text in inscriptional capitals. Lascaris's pupil

rus

August 1494. This book

immediate successors, printed on the presses of Lorenzo Alopa, made

would hardly

commanding figure of Byzantine scholcommon, though no direct evidence of

acquaintance survives before the turn of the century.

We are on scarcely more secure ground with Ermolao Barbaro. of him lished

as

one of the leading

work

('the

addressed to Alberto Pio.

appended to

Pio. Here, aristocrats

it,

through

is

is

chief point of it, however, seems to be the lengthy sister,

Caterina

of flattery and flummery with which Renaissance

expected to be approached, he

set

out a

programme which

again and again to promotion of the study of Greek, as preparation for the core of a rounded education. the presentation of a recently

The work was classical specialist

boys

it

pub-

a set of improving verses

addressed to Alberto's mother, and Pico's

the veil

furst

a slender basis for estimating their rela-

Assembly of the Muses')

The

The eulogy

of Venetian humanism in Aldus's

work, the Musarum Panagyris,

tionship. This

letter

lights

The occasion of this

disquisition

is

returns life, as

said to

be

composed work on Greek accentuation.

evidently printed several years after

its

composition, by the

de Tortis, perhaps about 1490. As a programme for the Pio

had already expired. The Panagyris and

a similar

brochure directed to

Leonello Pio seem rather to have served as advertisements of Aldus's powers of

composition and

as

specimens of his teaching methods.

It is

notable also for an

extended passage holding up examples of cultured nobles for imitation: Federigo

da Montefeltro (the famous book-loving condottiere), Pietro Barozzi (the Venetian humanist and bishop), and, most elaborately, Ermolao Barbaro, 'the glory of the Venetian senate'. Further evidence of the strong didactic turn of Aldus's

mind

lies

in his Latin Grammar. This

was likewise dedicated

to Alberto

and printed for Aldus in March 1493 on the presses of Andrea Torresani a figure of great importance for the future. The epilogue expresses dissatisfac-

Pio,

tion with the elementary that

grammar

works currently

teachers could expect. There

out, desire to be

of service to

means could be persuaded

What this

available,

humanity

to fund

in

is

and with the small rewards

a clear, but not precisely spelled

some

greater cause, if only

men

of

it.

no mystery. Throughout the early 1490s fairly regular mentions of Aldus crop up in connexion with the procuring and copying of texts. In 1491 Pico sent him, at his request, a Homer, though Pico's letter

greater cause

does not

tell

was

is

whether the 1488 edition or

a manuscript

is

meant.

He

is

mentioned in correspondence of the Hellenists Niccolo Leoniceno, Giorgio Valla

II

Detail of the Barbari

map of

Venice, a large aerial view of

from six woodblocks in 1500. At the centre of the detail is the church and square of Sant'Agostino where Aldus had his printing house till 1506. The house itself, which the city printed

Aldus called

his

Thermae, or

baths, stiU stands in the

Campo

Sant'Agostino.

Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British

Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings.

12

I and

(at

Bologna) Antonio Urceo

have them transcribed. Aldus was

as

someone who could

now

find

Greek

and

texts

firmly inscribed in the circle of Venet-

which drew inspiration from the scientific, philosophical and philological studies of Ermolao Barbaro, since 1491 an exile at Rome (where he died in 1493). The act of imagination which is Aldus's first claim to fame lay in connecting the intense, encyclopaedic interests of these scholars with the great engines of the Venetian printing presses, the one to serve as the vehicle of the ian erudition

The unhindered view of antiquity

other.

of recuper-

implicit in Barbaro's acts

-

which spoke for themselves, by medieval commentary, the convergence of Greek and Latin culture through which

ation was to be realized in plain texts

texts

accurately printed, widely accessible, uncluttered

very symbol of that

understanding of the ancient world could be reached.

PREPARING TO PRINT Doubtless Aldus continued to act as a teacher in the event, and

from the

six years'

work

this period,

but to judge firom

he claimed to have spent

that in 1497

preparing to print, he was at the same time laying the foundations of his ven-

by gathering manuscripts and editors and money. The first requirement was capital. The practical experience of having his own Latin grammar printed by Andrea Torresani had put him in touch with one of the leading printers ture

of the sense

city.

Torresani was a

formed

as

safe in the texts

man of much

his

own

age, with a robust business

an employee of Nicholas Jenson in the 1470s. he chose to

print, earning a

He

played very

contemporary reputation for ex-

treme personal meanness. But he could perhaps see in Aldus's proposal the possibility

of long-term

profit, if the

goods were priced

right, as

indeed proved to

be the case over the two decades of their partoership.

We know of the other underwriter of the venture only through the eventual winding up of the company in 1542. This person, though never named in any Aldine publication, was a backer as influential as any that Aldus could have From later, different testimony, we learn that son and nephew of successive doges of Venice - his found.

powerful

till 1

Pierfrancesco Barbarigo,

uncle Agostino was

all-

501 - put 'several thousand ducats' into the firm, sharing in due

course perhaps half the profits, with Torresani and his junior parmer Aldus tak-

ing the other half

Whether Alberto

right, also contributed capital

prefaces addressed to him,

moral backing. But

it

Pio,

by now prince of Carpi

we do not know for certain:

it is

difficult to

in the

in his

own

many fulsome

disentangle the practical firom the

seems beyond doubt firom the dedication to Pio of all five

parts

of the Greek edition of Aristotle that the long years of preparation had

some

substantial support firom

him. At any

rate, the

arrangement with both

13

Barbarigo and Torresani can be shown to date back Constantinus Lascaris, Erotemata, an introduction to

Greek grammar with

facing Latin translation. first

publication of the

Aldine press, finished

on

8

March

a

G.7586,

sig.

a2^-a3.

class

Pio and on such goodwill as he could

of persons complained of in the epilogue

to the

grammar of

The most laborious of the preparations involved the engraving of punches

1493.

and impression of matrices from them to make Greek type.

1495.

mm.

from the

The

An

Original page-size

208x148

may have been dependent on

then Aldus find

Before

at least to 1495.

early sixteenth-century printer

who had

of the craftsman

vices

cut

announced

that

he had secured the

ser-

of Aldus's types, one Francesco da

all

He is now satisfactorily identified as Francesco Griffo of Bologna, a goldsmith known as an engraver of letters from 1475 onwards. The first decision to be made by Aldus, Francesco and the other advisers of the press (preBologna.

sumably including some of the Greek

made

his business to cultivate)

it

scribes

and scholars

was the form and

set

of the

whom letters.

Venetian model of the press of Laonicus and Alexander, with

redundant typecase based on old

stretch,

between the formalized

of handwriting, used in

earlier

It

of regret that Aldus

on

(or Griffo) settled

a faithful reproduction

tas, as

a specimen

the researches of Nicolas Barker have

same

style,

of the elabora-

has generally been taken as a matter

of the cursive hand of the

Aldine books to become that in the

script, stripped

Venetian Latin books for short passages of

Greek, and current calligraphic hands.

on

model of

and clear but not easy to read over the

were not encouraging.

Effective choice lay tions

earlier

staggeringly

liturgical hands, or the Florentine

Lascaris's inscriptional capitals, beautiful

long

its

Aldus had

The

this fount,

made

and

its

of the scribe

clear.

So

latter, specifically

Immanuel Rhuso-

influential

were the

increasingly smaller successors

imposed themselves on the European printing of Greek

for

hundreds of years. The attempt to capture the freedom and flow of contemporary handwriting in the rigidities of type was, in Victor Scholderer's words,

counter to the very nature and genius of the printed page'. The real

'directly

charge against the Aldine Greek founts

is

were ugly), but want of legibility. The ligatures, contractions his first

book - and of the

ate sorts

must have

may

first

felt at

and combinations

With

set

Aldus had the more

difficult

out and explained on two pages of

was no more than a selection from the 330 or so separfount - is indicative in itself of the difficulties that readers

the time, and have ever since.

no more than

'script'

The wearisome

overall effect

founts of computer typefaces

nowa-

a visiting card or invitation.

patrons and backers assembled, a supply of type and stocks of expen-

sive paper laid in at his cal expertise

the stage

workshop

in

Campo

Sant'Agostino (Fig.i), the techni-

and possibly the actual presses of his parmer Torresani

was

Gutenberg

14

fact that

this

be compared to the misguided

days, suitable for

not ugliness (though to Proctor they

in

at his service,

at last set for Aldus to put his name to the books themselves. Germany and Sweynheym and Pannartz in Italy had made their

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