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Updated: May 11, 2025
Printing presses were erected at Rome in 1466, and book-publishing speedily became an honorable and lucrative business in every large city. Thus, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the scholarly Aldus Manutius was operating in Venice the famous Aldine press, whose beautiful editions of the Greek and Latin classics are still esteemed as masterpieces of the printer's art.
But what vigils, what anxious expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius or of Henricus Stephanus or of Johannes Froben?
The sixteenth century opened with another invention in type, the Italic, which was beautifully exemplified in a pocket edition of Vergil, the first of a portable series of classical works commenced in 1501 at Venice by the celebrated Aldus Manutius, who, after some years of preparation, had entered actively on his career as a printer in 1494, and deservedly ranks as one of the best scholars of any age.
But, fired by ambition, Bernardo left Pesaro for Venice, in order to see his poem through the press of Aldus Manutius; and being not only welcomed with open arms by his literary friends in that city, but also appointed secretary of the great Venetian Academy "Della Fama," with a handsome salary, he sent for his son, took a house in a good situation, and resolved to settle down in the place.
But what vigils, what anxious expenditure of thought, what agonies of doubt and expectation, were endured by those heroes of humanizing scholarship, whom we are apt to think of merely as pedants! Which of us now warms and thrills with emotion at hearing the name of Aldus Manutius, or of Henricus Stephanus, or of Johannes Froben?
He had dabbled a little in costly manuscripts a taste for an exquisite in those days, when Venice was the envy of the world for the marvels of her press; and already he possessed a volume or two, for his cabinet, from the atelier of Aldus Manutius that famous edition of Aristotle, the first ever printed in Greek, with the Aldine mark of anchor and dolphin on the title-page.
This and other things declares Budé, extolling Fra Giocondo as an excellent architect, and adding that by the researches of the same monk there were discovered in an old library in Paris the greater part of the Epistles of Pliny, which, after having been so long out of the hands of mankind, were printed by Aldus Manutius, as may be read in a Latin letter written by him and printed with the same.
In that reposeful kingdom, which could in miniature offer to Caterina's courtiers all the pomp and charm without the drawbacks of sovereignty, Pietro Bembo wrote for "Madonna Lucretia Estense Borgia Duchessa illustrissima di Ferrara," and caused to be printed by Aldus Manutius, the leaflets which, under the title Gli Asolani, ne' quali si ragiona d' amore, soon became a famous book in Italy.
The boldest preface-liar was Aldus Manutius, who, having printed an edition of Aristophanes, first published in the preface that Saint Chrysostom was accustomed to place this comic poet under his pillow, that he might always have his works at hand.
To Aldus Manutius of Rome, many greetings: ... I have often wished, most learned Manutius, that the light you have cast on Greek and Latin literature, not by your printing alone and your splendid types, but by your brilliance and your uncommon learning, could have been matched by the profit you in your turn drew from them.
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