CHAPTER III.
THE PRINTER-PUBLISHERS OF ITALY, 1464-1600.
THE reproduction and distribution of the works of classical writers to such an extent as not only to influence the scholarly thought of the time, but to widen enormously the circles of society reached and affected by intellectual influences, became possible only through the new art of printing which had been brought across the Alps by German workmen; while the prompt utilisation of printing for the service of scholarship called for the devoted labour of printers who were themselves scholars and who were prepared to subordinate and even to sacrifice, in the cause of a literary ideal, their immediate business advantage. It was to the high scholarly ideals and courageous and unselfish labours of Aldus Manutius and his immediate successors no less than to the imagination, ingenuity, and persistency of Gutenberg and Fust, that the Europe of 1495 was indebted for the great gift of the poetry and the philosophy of Greece. Mayence and Venice joined hands to place at the service of the scholarly world the literary heritage of Athens.
The close of the fifteenth century witnessed a great expansion in more than one direction of European thought. In the West, Columbus had opened up a new world, and his discovery, while giving manifold incentives to the men of action, must also have served as a powerful stimulus to the imagination of the thinkers of the time, in its suggestions concerning the possibilities of the future. In the East, the printers of Venice were making use of scholars from Constantinople to rediscover for Europe the vast realm of Greek thought, and to bring Homer, Plato, and Aristotle to the knowledge of the students of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford. Perhaps in no other epoch of the world’s history has there been so great an expansion of the possibilities of thought and of action, so suggestive a widening of range of the imagination, as in the decade succeeding 1492.
The introduction into Italy of the art of printing was due to Juan Turrecremata, who was Abbot of the monastery of Subiaco, and who later became Cardinal. He was a native of Valladolid in Spain, and his family name was Torquemada, of which name Turrecremata is the Latinised form. The Cardinal has been confused by Frommann[447] with the Torquemada who was Inquisitor-General of the Inquisition during the period of its most pitiless activity. The latter probably belonged to the same family, but his Christian name was Tomas, and he was not born till 1420, thirty years later than the Cardinal. Juan Torquemada had, however, been one of the confessors of Queen Isabella, and was said to have made to her the first suggestion of the necessity of establishing the Inquisition, in order to check the rising spirit of heresy. He did not realise what a Trojan horse, full of heretical possibilities, he was introducing into Italy in bringing in the Germans and their printing-press.
The monastery of Subiaco was some sixty miles from Rome. Among its monks were, in 1464, a number of Germans, some of whom had, before leaving Germany, seen or heard enough of the work done by the printers in Mayence or Frankfort to be able to give to the Abbot an idea of its character. The Abbot was keenly interested in the possibilities presented by the new art, and with the aid of these German monks he arranged to bring to Subiaco two printers, Conrad Schweinheim, of Mayence, and Arnold Pannartz, of Prague, who were instructed to organise a printing-office in the monastery. They began their operations early in 1464, their first work being given to the printing in sheet form of the manuals of worship or liturgies used in the monastery.
In 1465, they published the first volume printed in Italy, an edition of a Latin syntax for boys, edited by Lactantius. This was followed in the latter part of the same year by an edition of Cicero’s De Oratore, and in 1467, by the De Civitate of Augustine.
It was only the enthusiasm of the Abbot that rendered it possible, even for a short period, to overcome the many obstacles in the way of carrying on a printing-office in an out of the way village like Subiaco. But the difficulties soon became too great, and in 1467, the two German printers found their way, under the invitation of the brothers Massimi, to Rome, where they set up their presses in the Massimi palace. There they carried on operations for five years, during which time they produced a stately series of editions of the Latin classics, including the works of Cicero, Apuleius, Gellius, Cæsar, Virgil, Livy, Strabo, Lucan, Pliny, Suetonius, Quintilian, Ovid, together with editions of certain of the Church Fathers, such as Augustine, Jerome, and Cyprian. They also published a Latin Bible, and the Bible commentaries of Nicholas de Lyra, in five volumes.
With the production of the last work, the resources which had been placed at their disposal by their friends the Massimis and by another patron, Bussi, Bishop of Aleria, were exhausted. The Bishop addressed an appeal to the Pope on their behalf, setting forth the importance of their work for the “service of literature and of the Church.” Sixtus IV., who had just succeeded to the papacy, while apparently not affected by the dread which influenced future popes concerning the pernicious influence of the printing-press, evidently did not share in the enthusiasm of the Bishop as to its present value for the Church. He was also somewhat avaricious and preferred to use his money to provide for a large circle of relatives rather than to support a publishing business. The printers were, therefore, unable to secure any aid from the papal treasury, and, in 1472, they brought their business to a close. Schweinheim transferred his activities to the work of engraving on copper, while concerning the further undertakings of Pannartz there is no record.
During the seven years of their operations in Subiaco and in Rome, these two printers, who constituted the first firm of publishers in Italy, had printed twenty-nine separate works, comprised in thirty-six volumes. The editions averaged 275 copies of each volume, the total output aggregating about 12,500 volumes. There is no record of any attempt being made to secure for this first list of publications the protection of privileges, and there could in fact have been at the time no competition to fear.
Shortly after the cessation of Schweinheim’s business, Turrecremata became a cardinal, and he immediately invited another German printer, Ulrich Hahn, from Ingolstadt, to settle in Rome. Hahn’s first publications were the Meditationes of the Cardinal himself, and these were followed by a number of editions of the Latin classics. The learned Campanus, Bishop of Teramo, was one of Hahn’s patrons and gave also valuable service as a press-corrector, working so diligently that at one time he reserved for himself only three hours’ sleep. The Bishop writes with great enthusiasm to a friend concerning the art of printing, “by means of which material which required a year for its writing could be printed off ready for the reader in one day.”
Other German printers followed Hahn, and before the close of the century more than twenty had carried on work in Rome with varying success. The influence of the Church was at this time decidedly favourable to the new art, and nearly all the Roman printers of the earlier group were working at the instance of ecclesiastics, and often with the direct support of ecclesiastical funds. It is to the Church of Rome, therefore, that belongs the responsibility for the introduction into Italy of the printing-press, the work of which was later to give to the Church so much trouble. The little town of Subiaco can, as the record shows, claim the credit of the first printing, while it was in Rome that the first publications of importance were produced.
The leading place, however, in the production of books was almost from the outset taken by the printers of Venice, and as well for the excellence of their typography as by reason of the scholarly importance of the publications themselves, the Venetian printers maintained for many years a pre-eminence not only in Italy but in Europe. The distinctive prestige secured by Venice came through the printing of Greek texts, the beginnings of which, under the direction of Aldus Manutius, will be referred to later.