Chapter VI: Third Period of Humanism (3)

The great Dutch scholar who made an epoch in the history of learning, and transferred the sovereignty of letters to the north of Europe, paid a visit in 1508 to the house of Aldo, where he personally superintended the re-impression of his 'Proverbs.'[358] We have a lively picture of the printing of this celebrated book in Aldo's workshop. 'Together we attacked the work,' says Erasmus, 'I writing, while Aldo gave my copy to the press.' In one corner of the room sat the scholar at his desk, with the thin keen face so well portrayed by Holbein, improvising new paragraphs, and making additions to his previous collections in the brilliant Latin style that no one else could write. Aldo took the MS. from his hand, and passed it on to the compositors, revising the proofs as they came fresh from the press, or conferring with his reader Seraphinus.[359] Erasmus had already gained the reputation of a dangerous freethinker and opponent to the Church. As years advanced, and the Reformation spread in Northern Europe, he became more and more odious to ecclesiastical authority. The spirit of revolt was incarnate in this Voltaire of the sixteenth century, nor could the clergy raise other arms than those of persecution against so radiant a champion of pure reason. All reprints of the 'Adagia' were therefore forbidden by the bishops. Paulus Manutius had to quote it on his catalogues as the work of _Batavus quidam homo_. To such an extent were liberal studies now gagged and downtrodden by the tyrants of the Counter-Reformation in that Italy which for two previous centuries had been the champion of free culture for Europe.

[Footnote 358: The _Adagia_ were first printed in 1500 at Paris by John Philippi. After the Aldine edition eleven were issued between 1509 and 1520 by Matthew Schürer, ten by Froben between 1513 and 1539, while seven or eight others appeared in various parts of Germany.]

[Footnote 359: See the passage quoted by Didot, pp. 297-299.]

Before concluding the biography of Aldo Manuzio it may be well to give some account of the more illustrious assistants and collaborators whom he gathered around him in his academy at Venice.[360] The New Academy, or Aldine Academy of Hellenists, was founded in 1500 for the special purpose of promoting Greek studies and furthering the publication of Greek authors. Its rules were written in Greek; the members were obliged to speak Greek; their official titles were Greek; and their names were Grecised. Thus Scipione Fortiguerra, of Pistoja, who prepared the text of Demosthenes for Aldo, styled himself Carteromachos: and Alessandro Bondini, the Venetian physician who worked upon the edition of Aristotle, bore the name of Agathemeros.[361] The most distinguished Greeks at that time resident in Italy could be counted among the Neacademicians. John Lascaris, of Imperial blood, the teacher of Hellenism in France under three kings, was an honorary member. To this great scholar Aldo dedicated his first edition of Sophocles. Marcus Musurus occupied a post of more practical importance.[362] We have seen that his handwriting formed the model of Aldo's Greek type. To his scholarship the editions of Aristophanes, Plato, Pindar, Hesychius, Athenæus, and Pausanias owed their critical accuracy; while, in concert with Nicolaos Blastos and Zacharias Calliergi, two Cretan printers settled in Venice, he published the first Latin and Greek lexicon.[363] It will be observed that the Cretans play a prominent part in this Venetian revival of Greek learning. Aristoboulos Apostolios, Joannes Gregoropoulos, Joannes Rhosos, and Demetrius Doucas, all of them natives of Crete, were members of the Neacademy. The first as a compositor, the second as a reader, the third as a scribe, the fourth as editor of the Greek Orators, rendered Aldo effective assistance. Among Italians, Pietro Bembo, Aleander, and Alberto Pio occupied positions of honorary distinction rather than of active industry. Those who worked in earnest for the Aldine press were chiefly Venetians. Girolamo Avanzi, professor of philosophy at Padua, revised the texts of Catullus, Seneca, and Ausonius. Andrea Navagero, the noble Venetian poet, corrected Lucretius, Ovid, Terence, Quintilian, Horace, and Virgil. Giambattista Egnazio performed the same service for Valerius Maximus, the Letters of Pliny, Lactantius, Tertullian, Aulus Gellius, and other Latin authors. To mention all the eminent Venetians who played their part in this Academy would be tedious; yet the two names of Marino Sanudo, the famous diarist, and of Marco Antonio Coccio, called Sabellicus, the historian of the Republic, cannot be omitted. Of northern foreigners the most illustrious was Erasmus; to Englishmen the most interesting is Thomas Linacre. Born in 1460 at Canterbury, he travelled into Italy, and studied at Florence under Poliziano and Chalcondylas. On his return to England he founded the Greek Chair at Oxford, and died in London in the year 1524. His translation into Latin of the 'Sphere' of Proclus was published by Aldus in 1499. To him and to Grocin belongs the credit of having sought to plant the culture of Italy in the universities of England.

[Footnote 360: Didot, pp. 147-151, 436-470, gives ample details concerning the foundation, constitution, and members of the Aldine Academy.]

[Footnote 361: We may compare the name of Melanchthon.]

[Footnote 362: A native of Rotino, in Crete (b. 1470, d. at Rome 1517). He acquired Latin so thoroughly that Erasmus wrote of him: 'Latinæ linguæ usque ad miraculum doctus, quod vix ulli Græco contigit præter Theodorum Gazam et Joannem Lascarem.' John Lascaris was his master.]

[Footnote 363: _Etymologicon Magnum_, 1499. Didot, pp. 544-578, may be consulted for information about this Greek press. Musurus boasts in his encomiastic verses that the work was accomplished entirely by Cretans. [Greek: analômasi Blastou ponô kai dexiotêti Kalliergou] in the colophon.]

During a severe illness in the year 1498 Aldo vowed to take holy orders if he should recover. From this obligation he subsequently obtained release by a brief of Alexander VI., and in the following year he married Maria, daughter of Andrea Torresano, of Asola. Andrea, some years earlier, had bought the press established by Nicholas Jenson in Venice, so that Aldo's marriage to his daughter combined the interests of two important firms. Henceforth the names of Aldus and of Asolanus were associated on the title-pages of the Aldine publications. When Aldo died in 1514 (1515 new style), he left three sons--Manutio, in orders at Asola; Antonio, a bookseller at Bologna;[364] and Paolo Manuzio. The last of these sons, born at Venice in 1512, was educated by his grandfather Andrea till the year of the old man's death (1529). He carried on the press at Venice and at Rome, separating in the year 1540 from his uncles the Asolani, and bequeathing his business to his son named Aldo. This grandson of Aldo Manuzio, called by Scaliger a 'wretched and slow wit, the mimic of his father,' began his career by printing, at the age of eleven, a treatise on the 'Eleganze della Lingua Toscana e Latina.' He married Francesca Lucrezia Giunta, of the famous house of printers, and died, without surviving issue, at Rome in 1597. Thus the industry of Aldo was continued through two generations till the close of the sixteenth century. The device of the dolphin and the anchor, intended to symbolise quickness of execution combined with firmness of deliberation, and the motto _Festina lente_, which Sir Thomas Browne has rendered by 'Celerity contempered with cunctation,' though changed to suit varieties of taste from time to time, were never altogether abandoned by the Aldines.[365] As years went on, however, their publications became of less importance, and the beauty of their books degenerated.

[Footnote 364: There is some discrepancy about this Antonio between Renouard and Didot.]

[Footnote 365: 'Sum ipse mihi optimus testis me semper habere comites, ut oportere aiunt, delphinum et anchoram; nam et dedimus multa cunctando, et damus assidue.' Preface to the _Astronomici_, dedicated to Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino, 1499. The observations of Erasmus on the motto deserve to be read with attention. See Didot, p. 299.]

In tracing the history of Aldo's enterprise, I have been carried beyond the limits of the period included in this chapter. Yet I knew not how to describe the activity of the press in Italy better than by concentrating attention upon the greatest publisher who ever lived. Aldo Manuzio was no mere bookseller or printer. His learning won the hearty praises of ripe scholars, nor did any student of the age express more nobly and with fuller conviction his deep sense of the dignity conferred by learning on the soul of man.[366] That he was amiable in private life is proved by the intimate relations he maintained with humanists, than whom even poets are not a more irritable race of men.[367] To his fellow-workers he was uniformly generous in pecuniary matters, free from jealousy, and prodigal of praise. Seeking even less than his due share of credit, he desired that the great work of his life should pass for the common achievement of himself and his learned associates. Therefore he called his Greek library the fruits of the Neacademia, though no man could have known better than he did that his own genius was the life and spirit of the undertaking. His stores of MSS. were as open to the instruction of scholars as his printed books were given liberally to the public.[368] 'Aldo,' writes Erasmus, 'had nothing in his treasury but what he readily communicated.' Those who read the estimate of his services to learning made by eminent contemporaries, will find the language of Nicholas Leonicenus, Erasmus, and Anton Francesco Doni not exaggerated.[369] But, in order to comprehend their true value, we must bear in mind that until the year 1516, when Froben printed the Greek Testament at Basle, none but insignificant Greek reprints had appeared in Northern Europe.[370] Finally, what makes the place of Aldus in the history of Italian humanism all-important is the fact that, after about 1520, Greek studies began to decline in Italy all together. As though exhausted by the enormous energy wherewith Florence had acquired and Venice had disseminated Greek culture, the Italians relapsed into apathy. Posterity may be thankful that their pupils, Grocin and Linacre, Reuchlin and Erasmus, the Stephani and Budæus, had by this time transplanted erudition beyond the Alps, while Aldo had secured the literature of ancient Greece against the possibility of destruction.

[Footnote 366: See the passages from his letters and prefaces quoted and referred to on p. 239, above, note 2.]

[Footnote 367: The prospect of his visit to Milan in 1509 called forth these pretty April verses from Antiquari:--

Aldus venit en, Aldus ecce venit!
Nunc, O nunc, juvenes, ubique in urbe
Flores spargite. Vere namque primo
Aldus venit en, Aldus ecce venit.]

[Footnote 368: See above, p. 275, for his hatred of the [Greek: bibliotaphoi]. He was the very opposite of Henri Estienne the younger, who closed his library against his son-in-law Casaubon.]

[Footnote 369: Didot, pp. 89, 299, 423.]

[Footnote 370: _Priscian_, at Erfurt, 1501; _Alphabet_, _Batrachomyomachia_, Musæus, Theocritus, Grammar of Chrysoloras, Hesiod's _Works and Days_, Paris, 1507; Aristotle on _Divination by Dreams_, Cracow, 1529; Lucian, [Greek: peri dipsadôn], Oxford, 1521, are among the earliest Greek books printed out of Italy. The grammars of the Greek humanists were frequently reprinted in the first quarter of the sixteenth century in Germany.]