John, from within the town of Spires, was the first to print books in Venice from bronze types. See, O Reader, how much hope there is of future works when this, the first,
has surpassed the art of penmanship
There was Tortelli’s Orthographia dictionum e Græcia tractarum, printed in Venice by Nicolas Jenson, showing the first use of Greek characters in a printed book. The Aldine volumes introduced me to the first appearance of Italic type. No wonder that Italy laid so firm a hand upon the scepter of the new art, when Naples, Milan, Ferrara, Florence, Piedmont, Cremona, and Turin vied with Venice in producing such examples!
“You must come back and study them at your leisure,” the librarian suggested, noting my reluctance to relinquish the volume I was inspecting to receive from him some other example equally interesting. “Now I will introduce you to the prisoners, who have never once complained of their bondage during all these centuries.”
In the great hall we moved in and out among the plutei, where Biagi indicated first one manuscript and then another, with a few words of explanation as to the significance of each.
“No matter what the personal bent of any man,” my guide continued, “we have here in the Library that which will satisfy his intellectual desires. If he is a student of the Scriptures, he will find inspiration from our sixth-century Syriac Gospels, or the Biblia Amiatina. For the lawyer, we have the Pandects of Justinian, also of the sixth century, which even today form the absolute basis of Roman law. What classical scholar could fail to be thrilled by the fourth-century Medicean Virgil, with its romantic history, which I will tell you some day; what lover of literature would not consider himself privileged to examine Boccaccio’s manuscript copy of the Decameron, or the Petrarch manuscript on vellum, in which appear the famous portraits of Laura and Petrarch; or Benvenuto Cellini’s own handwriting in his autobiography? We must talk about all these, but it would be too much for one day.”
Leading the way back to his sanctum, Biagi left me for a moment. He returned with some manuscript poems, which he turned over to me.
“This shall be the climax of your first day in the Laurenziana,” he exclaimed. “You are now holding Michelangelo in your lap!”
Can you wonder that the week I had allotted to Florence began to seem too brief a space of time? In response to the librarian’s suggestion I returned to the Library day after day. He was profligate in the time he gave me. Together we studied the Biblia Amiatina, the very copy brought from England to Rome in 716 by Ceolfrid, Abbot of Wearmouth, intended as a votive offering at the Holy Sepulchre of Saint Peter. By this identification at the Laurenziana in 1887 the volume became one of the most famous in the world. In the plate opposite, the Prophet Ezra is shown by the artist sitting before a book press filled with volumes bound in crimson covers of present-day fashion, and even the book in which Ezra is writing has a binding. It was a new thought to me that the binding of books, such as we know it, was in practice as early as the eighth century.
