The Content Machine by Michael Bhaskar

Author:Michael Bhaskar
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85728-111-1
Publisher: Anthem Press (Perseus)

Amplification I

Venice, circa 1500: Europe’s entrepôt is a maritime power, mercantile hub, cultural centre and, not least, a publishing dynamo. Previously, Venice occupied a vital but occasionally secondary role in the long unfolding of the Renaissance against the munificent patronage of the Medici in Florence, the ecclesiastical might of Rome and the Holy See, the military pedigree of Milan and the scholarly backdrop of Bologna, Ferrara or Padua. Until, that is, the coming of a hitherto little-known scholar called Aldo Manuzio (or Teobaldo Mannucci) – Latinised as Aldus Manutius – in the 1490s. Within a few years around the turn of the sixteenth century he was to revolutionise classical scholarship, Hellenic studies, the form of the book, typography, reading and publishing. His achievements rippled across Europe and arguably still reverberate in the literary culture of the present. Venice was to become the centre of not only European publishing, but the intellectual engine and guarantor of the revival of classical learning initiated by Petrarch some 150 years earlier. How did he do it?

Aldus was born in Rome and later studied at Ferrara before arriving in Venice aged about forty. By the later fifteenth century, Latin authors were already common in Italy, with writers like Virgil, Horace, Livy and Cicero forming an emergent canon of the classics. While Greek had a growing stature throughout the quattrocento, it had fallen far behind Latin in terms of use, knowledge and influence. Experts were rare, Greek type rarer still. It was the mission to spread Greek learning that animated Aldus. Venice was the perfect location – it had aristocratic and mercantile capital, Greek refugees and texts fleeing the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 and, more significantly, expertise in print, having quickly become the major printing centre of the region.2 The Frenchman Nicolas Jenson, once Master of the Royal Mint at Tours, had already made a mark with his well-regarded Venetian printing house opening in 1470. Jensen’s breakthrough Roman type, a huge advance on the then-standard Gothic which simply aped manuscripts, was to have a lasting impact on both Aldus and the wider world of letters. Once Aldus had made the decision to turn publisher he quickly found the partners, connections and content to forge the most iconic house of the era.

From the beginning the Aldine press was a business making the most of what Venice could offer. Crucially, Aldus partnered with established printer Andrea Torresani, and the son and nephew of successive Doges, Pierfrancesco Barbarigo. They probably had controlling stakes, but Aldus wasn’t in it for the money. Barbarigo brought serious investment and connections; Torresani had the printing background; Aldus the scholarly and editorial heft. In the early 1490s, Aldus worked to create a Greek type-font, unafraid to pursue new innovations and technical challenges working (often acrimoniously) with the talented punch cutter Francesco Griffo. Aldus also created an extraordinary environment at the press, where wandering scholars like the humanists Erasmus or Thomas Linacre mingled with hard-bitten pressmen, conditions memorably described by Martin

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