ITALY.
Italian historians have several times attempted to bring forward Pamphilo Castaldi as the inventor of printing. It is little use to recapitulate here the various unsupported assertions on which this claim is based,—a claim which, if it ever had, has now ceased to have any sensible supporters.
We may safely assume, with our present knowledge, that the art of printing was introduced into Italy in 1465 by two Germans, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. On their arrival in Italy they settled first in the Monastery of Saint Scholastica at Subiaco, an establishment of Benedictines, of which Cardinal Turrecremata was Abbot, where they would be in congenial society, since, as Cardinal Quirini says, many of the inmates were Germans.
The first book which they printed was a Donatus pro puerulis, of which they said in their list, printed in 1472, ‘unde imprimendi initium sumpsimus.’ Unfortunately, of this Donatus no copy is known, though rumours of a copy in a private collection in Italy have from time to time been circulated. The earliest book from their press of which copies are in existence, is the Cicero De Oratore, printed before 30th September 1465.[16] It has been always a moot point whether this Cicero De Oratore or the Mainz Ciceronis Officia et Paradoxa, printed in the same year, can justly claim to be the first printed Latin classic, while the claims of the De Officiis of Zel, which, though, undated, is very probably as early, have been entirely ignored.
[16] This book has usually been dated later than the Lactantius, that is, after 29th October 1465; but M. Fumagalli, in his Dei primi libri a stampa in Italia, Lugano, 1875, 8vo, describes a copy containing a manuscript note dated ‘Pridie Kal. Octobres, M.cccc.lxv.,’ so that the Cicero must be considered the first known book printed in Italy. On the other hand, it should be noticed that some authorities consider the inscription to be a forgery.
The Subiaco De Oratore is a large quarto of 109 leaves, with thirty lines to the page. Like the first German books, it is beautifully printed, and shows few signs of being an early production. Sweynheym and Pannartz must have learnt their business carefully, for this their first book is printed by half sheets, i.e. two pages at a time, though other printers were still printing their quartos page by page.
On the 29th October 1465 these printers issued their first dated book, the first edition of Lactantius De divinis institutionibus. Of this book 275 copies were printed. It is a small folio of 188 leaves, and thirty-six lines to the page, printed in a type which, though Roman, is very Gothic in appearance, and is sometimes called semi-Gothic. The smaller letters have a curious resemblance to those used by Zainer at Ulm and by Schussler at Augsburg in their earliest books, though the capital letters are quite different.
The fourth and last book printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Subiaco was an edition of the De civitate dei of Saint Augustine. This is a large folio, of 270 leaves, with two columns, and forty-four lines to the page. It was issued on the 12th June 1467; and though it contains no name of either printer or place, can be easily identified by the type. A copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale has an extremely interesting manuscript note, which tells us that Leonardus Dathus, ‘Episcopus Massanus,’ bought the book from the Germans themselves, living at Rome, who were producing innumerable books of that sort by means of printing, not writing, in November 1467, This note is valuable in two ways; it puts it beyond doubt who the printers of the book were, and it also enables us to determine more precisely the date when they left Subiaco. The Augustine was finished in June, and by November the printers were at Rome. As they issued a book in Rome in 1467, and would take some time to settle in their new establishment and prepare their new types, we may take it as probable that they left the Monastery of Subiaco as soon as possible after the printing of the Augustine.
About June, then, Sweynheym and Pannartz left the Monastery of Subiaco and transferred their printing materials to Rome, finding a home in a house belonging to the brothers Peter and Francis de Maximis. The semi-Gothic fount of type which had been used at Subiaco was discarded in favour of one more Roman in character, though heavily cut and not so graceful as the Venetian of the same period. A curious appearance is given to it by the invariable use of the long s. Their first venture was again a work of Cicero, the Epistolæ ad familiares, a large quarto of thirty-one lines to the page. It has the following colophon:—
‘Hoc Conradus opus Suueynheym ordine miro