Aldo Manuzio e la nascita dell'editoria by Gianluca Montinaro

Abstract

 Reviews Aldo Manuzio e la nascita dell’editoria. Ed. by G M. (Piccola Biblioteca Umanistica, ) Florence: Olschki. . vi+ pp. €. ISBN ––––. Gianluca Montinaro explains in a brief introductory essay that this first volume of a new series promoted by the Biblioteca di via Senato of Milan was devoted to Aldo Manuzio because he was the ‘father of modern publishing’ (p. ), not just a shrewd businessman but someone whose printing followed a coherent cultural programme. Portraying Aldo as a ‘publisher in Utopia’, Montinaro reminds us that already in , just one year aer Aldo’s death in Venice, omas More described how the inhabitants of Utopia were introduced to the art of printing by being shown the characters printed by Aldus in paper books; moreover, Aldo idealistically decried the armed conflicts of his day. Montinaro’s collection brings together six further essays. Piero Scapecchi offers a summary of Aldo’s career and legacy, suggesting that he has attracted interest above all because of his editions of classical and Christian Greek texts and because of the myth that started to grow around his name even during his lifetime. For Giancarlo Petrella, Aldo’s most enduring impact resulted from his change of direction from printing primarily Greek editions to publishing Latin, Greek, and vernacular literary texts in octavo format and, for the Roman alphabet, in an italic font; he was driven to do so by economic necessity, but he was certainly not aiming at a mass market. Petrella then turns to an aspect of the myth of Aldo, the passion for collecting his editions. Prices paid for them at the auction of the collection of Carlo Maria Maggi in  were not especially high, and Aldine mania seems to have set in only in the period around , encouraged by the surveys of scholars such as the father of modern Aldine studies, Antoine-Augustin Renouard. Ugo Rozzo considers the terms in which Lodovico Domenichi praised Aldo in his dialogue on printing, in the version plagiarized by Anton Francesco Doni in  and in the redaction of . Among his revisions, Domenichi prudently deleted a phrase on the worldwide fame of Erasmus and added a commendation of the printer Paolo Manuzio, one of Aldo’s sons, as far superior to his father in judgement and learning. Antonio Castronuovo compares the variant forms of Aldo’s device of a dolphin entwined around an anchor (already discussed, as he acknowledges, by Harry George Fletcher III in ), and he shows that, when it was first used around , the image represented an ideal of productivity coupled with tenacity that was already present in Aldo’s mind. Montinaro underlines the links between two editions of , the Scriptores astronomici veteres and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Both have hermetic and esoteric elements, they share features of iconography, and they have the same dedicatee, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the cultured duke of Urbino. Aldo may have been encouraged to print the Hypnerotomachia on behalf of Leonardo Grassi, Montinaro suggests, by the fact that Grassi intended to dedicate the edition to a man whom at this juncture Aldo could have seen as a potentially valuable patron. e final essay, by Massimo Gatta, discusses representations of Aldo and Aldines over five centuries, from the recollections of Erasmus to present-day novels such as e Rule of Four by Ian MLR, .,   Caldwell and Dustin omason (), El impresor de Venecia by Javier Azpeitia (), and Polvere d’agosto by Hans Tuzzi (). ere are several such works, although as an inspiration for narrative fiction Aldo has yet to reach the status of Leonardo da Vinci. e collection would have benefited from firmer co-ordination in a few respects. ere is no discussion of how the essays relate to the theme indicated in the book’s title. Some information is duplicated, a portrait of Domenichi promised on page  does not appear, and statements are occasionally contradictory: Aldo printed Erasmus’s translations of two plays by Euripides (as on page ) rather than Sophocles (as on page ), and the dialogue on printing that Rozzo accepts as authored by Domenichi is later attributed to Doni (pp. –). However, these essays provide some well-judged overviews of Aldo’s achievements together with insights into the fascination that his...