Venice, more than any other town, has the credit of having rescued from oblivion, by editions and translations, the master-pieces of Greek literature.
The art of printing was welcomed upon the very threshold of its discovery and the services of Venice on this line are unique in the history of letters. Her printers were not mere workmen; some of them were scholars. "The Aldine Press" is synonymous with scholarship today as it was in renaissance Italy. Symonds describes the enthusiasm of the elder Aldus (or Aldo) for Greek literature, and his life-ambition, which was "to secure the literature of Greece from further accident by committing its chief masterpieces to type." He relates how Aldo, already a scholar and qualified as a humanist, "according to the custom of the country," spent a further two years in a study of Greek literature. Not a Venetian himself and with no ties in the city, by some "accident of fortune" he selected Venice as the place in which to build up a work whose parallel the world has not since afforded and of which a similar record is not to be found in the past unless possibly in the secret records of ancient China.
At Venice Aldo gathered an army of Greek scholars and compositors around him. His trade was carried on by Greeks and Greek was the language of his household. Instructions to typesetters and binders were given in Greek. The prefaces to his editions were written in Greek. Greeks from Crete collated MSS., read proofs, and gave models of calligraphy for casts of Greek type.
Not counting the craftsmen employed in merely manual labor, Aldo entertained as many as thirty of these Greek assistants in his family.
His own energy and industry were unremitting. In 1495 he issued the first volume of his Aristotle. Four more volumes completed the work in 1497-98. Nine comedies of Aristophanes appeared in 1498. Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus followed in 1502; Xenophon's Hellenics and Euripides in 1503; Demosthenes in 1504.
The troubles of Italy, which pressed heavily on Venice, suspended Aldo's labors for awhile. But in 1508 he resumed his work with an edition of the minor Greek orators; and in 1509 appeared the lesser works of Plutarch.
Then came another stoppage. The league of Cambray had driven Venice back to her lagoons, and all the forces of the republic were concentrated on a struggle to the death with the allied powers of Europe. In 1513 Aldo reappeared with Plato ... in a preface eloquently and earnestly comparing the miseries of warfare and the woes of Italy with the sublime and tranquil objects of a student's life. Pindar, Hesychius, and Athenaeus followed in 1514.
But Aldo's enthusiasm for the classics was not confined to those of Greece. He issued superb editions of the principal Latin and Italian classics as well, in an exquisite type especially cast for his Press and which it is said he had copied from the very handwriting of Petrarch.
There is something very reminiscent of the Orient in Aldo's reverence for beautiful calligraphy. To the Chinese scholar the ideograph is sacred and to write it well demands art and philosophy both. There is an ancient Chinese legend which says that once upon a time certain ideographs "came down from their tablets and spoke unto mankind." Curious, that one should recall it here. But not to know Aldo is to miss a great light upon the spirit that made Venice what it became, the spirit that animated every soul in that wonderful city—devotion to a high ideal, absolute unselfishness and service. Where is the Press today that combines these unpurchasable qualities with the acme of scholarship? We know of one—but only one.
Even in a short article, with Venice herself a subject for volumes, libraries, it is impossible to omit the following—also from Symonds:
Aldo ... burned with a humanist's enthusiasm for the books he printed; and we may well pause astonished at his industry, when we remember what a task it was in that age to prepare texts of authors so numerous and so voluminous from MSS. Whatever the students of this century may think of Aldo's scholarship, they must allow that only vast erudition and thorough familiarity with the Greek language could have enabled him to accomplish what he did. In his own days Aldo's learning won the hearty acknowledgment of ripe scholars.
To his fellow workers he was uniformly generous, free from jealousy and prodigal of praise. His stores of MSS. were as open to the learned as his printed books were liberally given to the public. While aiming at that excellence of typography which renders his editions the treasures of the book-collector, he strove at the same time to make them cheap.... His great undertaking was carried on under continual difficulties, arising from strikes among his workmen, the piracies of rivals, and the interruptions of war. When he died, bequeathing Greek literature as an inalienable possession to the world, he was a poor man.
To touch with any show of justice upon the architecture of Venice would task the eloquence of a Ruskin. But it is possible to indicate a few of the causes that contributed to make Venice the architectural marvel of Europe and her palaces and churches unique in the world.
According to tradition, there were both castles and "churches" in Venice several centuries before the earliest examples that survive. The first "church," it is said, was founded in 432 by one Giacomo del Rialto, but the earliest of which we have tangible evidence—and it is still standing—was built in the eleventh century. Of the eleventh and twelfth century castles or palaces, a number still may be seen.