Davies, Martin

Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice. 

The British Library, 1995.

Along with a foldout as shown in the images.

AS WITH MOST PRINTERS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 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. It is the books themselves that have to speak, with support from the occasional document or passage of humanist correspondence. He was born at Bassiano in the papal states, probably about 1451. 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 comments here and there in the prefaces it emerges that he received some humanistic schooling at Rome, and some form of higher ed- ucation at Ferrara. It was in Rome that his life received the direction it was to take before he turned to printing. If he had been asked at any point of the 1470s or '80s what his ambition was, he might well have answered with his admired friend Polit- ian that he wanted to be a 'grammaticus'. A good 'grammarian' (a scholar or philologist, we should say) was concerned above all to absorb, understand and expound the values of classical antiquity through the concrete vehicle of the texts which had reached the Renaissance. His master at Rome seems to have been Gaspare da Verona, a middling sort of humanist who composed a reason- ably successful grammar, as well as a life of the reigning pope, Paul II, which has the distinction of being the first work to mention, under the date 1466 - 67, the advent of printing in Italy. But Aldus, we gather from a passing later ref- erence, also had the benefit of hearing lectures at the university from one of the brightest academic stars of the day, another Veronese humanist named Dom- izio Calderini. It may have been Calderini that stirred in him a love of Greek, for it was Calderini's belief. one that was becoming increasingly general in Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century that a full understanding of the Latin classics, and of the ancient world as a whole, depended on a knowl- edge of the Greek literature that lay behind them.

–––––––––––––

Offered for sale as is.