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The order of its development is just this: Wealth; architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture. Printing, as a mechanical art, just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were scholars too, made Venice renowned for it. Journalism, which is the accident of business and crowded populations, in great perfection.
The order of its development is just this: Wealth; architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture. Printing, as a mechanical art, just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were scholars too, made Venice renowned for it. Journalism, which is the accident of business and crowded populations, in great perfection.
Caxton was a practical man of business, as this advertisement shows, no rival of the Venetian Aldi or of the classical printers of Rome, but resolved to get a living from his trade, supplying priests with service books and preachers with sermons, furnishing the clerk with his "Golden Legend" and knight and baron with "joyous and pleasant histories of chivalry."
Though the Florentine craft never attained the reputation of the Venetian Aldi and Asolani, the Giunti of Rome, the Soncini of Fano, the Stephani of Paris, and Froben of Basel, it had the name, for a time at least, of being one of the most accurate of all presses. To Lorenzo it owed this celebrity.
But just as she seemed to have reached the height of her prosperity when the Aldi were the chief printers in Europe, and the Bellini were starting the great Venetian school of painting a formidable rival came to the front, who had been slowly preparing a novel method of competition in the Eastern trade for nearly the whole of the fifteenth century.
A new Venice, a Venice of loftier palaces, of statelier colonnades, rose under Palladio and Sansovino along the line of its canals. The press of the Aldi gave for the first time the masterpieces of Greek poetry to Europe. The novels of Venice furnished plots for our own drama, and became the origin of modern fiction.
Later on came the vast advance of printing from separate and moveable types. Originating at Maintz with the three famous printers, Gutenberg, Fust, and Schoeffer, this new process travelled southward to Strassburg, crossed the Alps to Venice, where it lent itself through the Aldi to the spread of Greek literature in Europe, and then floated down the Rhine to the towns of Flanders.
For the historian his book is of equal value in its own department with the Principe of Machiavelli, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, and the Diary of Burchard. It was written in 1514, and first published in folio by the Aldi of Venice in 1528. We find an English translation so early as 1561 by Thomas Hoby. At this time it was in the hands of all the gentlefolk of Europe.
Showell Rogers, whose dream has been fulfilled, that Heaven, having a place for each true man, may be "a bookman's paradise, where early black-lettered tomes, rare and stately, first folios of Shakespeare, tall copies of the right editions of the Elzevirs, and vellumed volumes galore, uncropped, uncut, and unfoxed in all their verdant pureness, fresh as when they left the presses of the Aldi, are to be had for the asking."
The Aldi, the Stephani, and Froben toiled by night and day, employing scores of scholars, men of supreme devotion and of mighty brain, whose work it was to ascertain the right reading of sentences, to accentuate, to punctuate, to commit to the press, and to place, beyond the reach of monkish hatred or of envious time, that everlasting solace of humanity which exists in the classics.
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