This is a series of email messages that I sent to Nicolas Verger in Bordeaux, France, during November 2001, as I began to read the book by Martin Lowry. I was looking for specific information regarding from whom Aldus acquired the Philostratus biography of Apollonius and for some indication of what Aldus himself had to say in his Preface to this book. All of my comments were therefore made before I established contact with Professor Roberto Espinosa at BYU in December 2001 (after finishing the book), who sent me JPGs of the Latin/Greek pages of the Preface, which was subsequently translated into English by Professor David Armstrong in March 2002 and into French by Professeur François Gadeyne in June 2002. Thus, my comments must be considered in that context. No permission has been requested from Mr. Lowry's publishers to place these transcriptions at this website; however, no attempt has been made to "plagiarize" Mr. Lowry. If you would like to get a complete copy of this book, you are advised to contact Amazon.Com or your local bookseller or library.

Bonjour, Nicolas! Your name was very popular at the time of Aldus, as you will see when you read some of the following. Did you have a past life in Venice around 1500? I am writing this part of the message last, after I have already transcribed the following items and made some comments below. When you see Page #, then I am quoting directly. Other items are my personal comments.

At first glance, unfortunately, there seems to be no information remaining on the exact Aldine origin of Philostratus' Life of Apollonius. Here is a short quote from page 148:

"But meanwhile, this rush to publish with Aldus was becoming a force in itself: a positive force, perhaps, since it brought new material forward, but often an embarrassment to both commercial and academic planning, and a severe strain on the printer's nerve. We do not know the exact story behind the edition of Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana: Aldus finished printing the text in March 1501 but did not publish it until May 1504, and sent it out with an introduction which attacked the work point by point and declared it the worst thing he had ever read."

That is most interesting. Aldus was a pious Christian. As such, did he publish this "pagan biography" merely for the sake of scholarship, despite his own prejudices?

However, early in this chapter (Chapter Four, noted below, which I am going to read tomorrow), we find the following on page 127:

"In contrast to this, the story of Gabriel of Brasichella has an intriguing flavour of drama and espionage. In 1497 he is honourably mentioned by Aldus as a collaborator: on 7 March of the following year he obtained a ten-year copyright on his own projected editions of Pollux, Philostratus, the Letters of Brutus and Phalaris, and the Fables of Aesop; but on 20 May he felt it wise to seek confirmation of his privilege, hinting darkly that his plans were suspected 'by those who are too devoted to their own advantage'. The new concession was granted, and the Letters of Brutus and Phalaris appeared in June, printed in a type which bore a dangerous resemblance to the Aldine cursive -- itself protected by the privilege of 1496. Gabriel disappeared from sight immediately and irrevocably. In September, Alberto Pio was inquiring about Aldus' 'lawsuit with the men of Carpi', and we can reasonably infer what this means from the fact that Gabriel's collaborators, Benedetto de Manzi and Giovanni Bissolo, both of Carpi, had been obliged to leave Venice for Milan by the following spring. There must have been a head-on collision between two irreconcilable copyrights, with the victory going to the party with the greater influence: and that issue at least can never have been in doubt. Bissolo and de Manzi did not forgive Aldus, and devoted the next few years to a vain quest for revenge: in 1499 they formed a company with Demetrius Chalcondylas to print the 'Suda', only to have their enterprise snuffed out by the Franco-Venetian invasion of Milan; and in 1506 de Manzi made a brief appearance in Carpi, where he printed two editions with a blatant imitation of the Aldine Italic fount. On this occasion, Aldus does not appear to have taken any serious action. The facts suggest that, of the three men involved, Gabriel of Brasichella may have been a sinister industrial spy of the kind we met in the first chapter: Bissolo and de Manzi were probably no more than victims of a system which was still too vague to realise the implications of the numerous copyrights it was granting."

If there was this "controversy" or "conflict" between Gabriel and Aldus (and as is noted, Gabriel disappeared), then perhaps Aldus "stole" the "copyright" to the Philostratus biography from Gabriel. We need to do some peripheral research on this Gabriel. But first, let me read all of Chapter Four tomorrow.

Obviously, someone who is mentioned in this book possessed the library of "Rhetores Graeci" published by Aldus. So, we have once again narrowed the historical "missing period" to 900 years -- from Apollonius Sidonius in 500 to the Italian library in 1400. That is one more century out of the way. Slowly, progress is made, n'est-ce pas?

This is an excellent book! It is due back at my library on December 3, but I have the option of renewing it for another two weeks. So I have 4 weeks to keePage it and analyze it. This is only the first day. I am sure that more will follow in the next 4 weeks. Roberto

On page 8, we read that Marin Sanudo, a diarist (or journalist, I suppose), and Cardinal Domenico Grimani had two of the largest private libraries in Venice in the late 1400s.

Venice and Paris were the two most important publishing centers of that era, and they produced together about 15% of all the books in Europe.

Page 9 -- The names of two noblemen, Andrea Badoer and Francesco Viaro, stand on Venetian copyrights of the 1490s.

Pages 14-15 -- There is a particularly interesting case in the Florentine Berolamo Strozzi, who in 1474 received from his clients in London a request for some vernacular translations of the Florentine Histories of Bruni and Poggio. Since he already dealt in books, Strozzi had manuscripts by the following June. But his business interests took him to Venice and there, for unknown reasons, he decided on a far more ambitious investment. The two Florentine Histories were handed over to the printer Jacques le Rouge, and an edition of Landino's Italian translation of Pliny's "Natural Histories" was ordered from Nicholas Jenson. But by the summer of 1476 the original order had grown to more than 1,500 volumes, which were being distributed by Strozzi's agents in Rome, Siena, Pisa and Naples, or transported to customers in Bruges and London aboard the state-owned galleys of the Venetian Republic.

Page 16 -- Francesco da Madiis was a noted Venetian bookseller of the late 1400s.

Page 17 -- In 1478 Leonardus of Ratisbon and Nicholas of Frankfurt, both resident in Venice, entered an agreement to produce 930 copies of the Bible over the following nine months. ... Andrea Torresani was active as a printer, bookseller and underwriter for more than a decade before he formed a partnershiPage with Aldus, and he continued to print independently of Aldus for twelve years afterwards.

The demand for classical texts between 1470-1500 remained enormous.

Page 21 -- On several occasions Francesco da Madiis sold virtually complete libraries of classics, and few even of his specialist customers, who came for legal or theological texts, left the shoPage without taking some Latin literature to leaven the academic lump.

NOTE : The books being sold in Venice were split about half-and-half between classical works and purely "theological" works approved by the Catholic Church. One of the Catholic patriarchs issued an edict to produce 500 religious books for distribution to the clergy. So, certainly Venice was a "hotbed" of intellectual activity at this time.

There sure are a lot of men named Nic(h)olas in this story! On page 25, there is a Cardinal Nicholas of Cues during this period. And on page 26, there is a Venetian Doge named Nicolo Marcello. All these men named Nicolas were contemporaries of Aldus.

Alberto Pio was a very handsome man, very well-bred looking, as we say in English. There are pictures of him and Aldus in this book. I'll scan the pictures and send them to you.

Page 32 -- [Jacobo Filippo Foresti in about 1485] proudly claimed to have summarised the contents of both the Old and New Testaments, the works of Josephus, Herodotus, Diogenes Laertius, Plutarch, Valerius Maximum, Livy, Pliny, Strabo, Solinus, Suetonius, Aelian, Julius Capitolinus, Aulus Gellius, Justin, Orosius, Eutropius, Polycrates, Paul the Lombard, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory, Eusebius, Isodore of Seville, Bede, Gratian, Leonardo Bruni, Flavio Biondo, and Platina, to say nothing of Virgil and Ovid. Here indeed is the ancestor of the "Readers' Digest" mentality.

Do you know what "Readers' Digest" is? It is a monthly magazine published in the USA that condenses or summarizes longer works, so that people can read a summary of them, often in serialized format.

Chapter Two "The Wandering Scholar" begins on page 48. The whole book is 350 pages. Probably I'll photocopy parts of this chapter, rather than transcribe them. This book is filled with names of people -- quite amazing! One of Aldus' teachers at Sapienza was a rhetorician named Gaspare da Verona, an acquaintance of Rodrigo Borgia and a former student of the future Pope Nicholas V!

Page 50 -- When Aldus appeals to the good of all mankind, or speaks of supplying the books which will restore all fields of knowledge to their ancient splendour, or looks uPage from his books in the din of the print-shoPage to tell Erasmus that he is studying, the reader naturally recalls de Bussi's hopes of taking part in a universal enlightenment.

Page 51 -- When he [Aldus] arrived in Venice around 1490, one of those best placed to assist him was Marcantonio Sabellico, whose experience of the publishing world has been discussed in the previous chapter and who, as librarian of the Marciana, was in charge of the richest collection of Greek manuscripts in the Western world. He was a fellow-Roman, and a pupil of both Gaspare da Verona and Calderini. A connection would have been obvious, and highly advantageous. But the only evidence we have that contact was made lies in the request of another scholar to Aldus, who is asked to pay respects to Sabellico. Rather than cultivating his influential senior, Aldus made a life-long friend of his main rival Giambattista Egnazio, who in his "Racemationes" of 1502 sharply attacked Sabellico's scholarship, and his attempts to undermine Egnazio's own popularity. We can only speculate about the reasons for Aldus' apparent hostility to the Roman school. A SINCERELY PIOUS CHRISTIAN, HE MAY HAVE BEEN DISTURBED BY THE MORE BIZARRE ANTIQUARIAN POSTURING OF POMPONIO LETO AND HIS CIRCLE, AND BY THE SUSPICIONS OF PAGANISM OR CONSPIRACY WHICH HAD FASTENED ONTO THEM IN 1468. But this could hardly have affected his feelings about Garpare or de Bussi. Whatever the reasons, it is clearly more unsafe to attach any decisive importance to Aldus' period of study in Rome.

Page 52 -- To such a man [as Aldus], Ferrara must have offered good prospects during the 1470s and 1480s. Though the university could not rival Bologna or Padua [FRANCESCO "ORO" FRANCONERI LIVES IN PADUA!] in numbers or prestige, it had made steady progress during the fifteenth century thanks to the interest and protection of the ruling Este family. ... The university also had its particular areas of excellence: Niccolo Leoniceno's research on the text of Pliny's "Natural Histories" made the medical faculty the focus of considerable interest and controversy during the later years of the century.

Another Nicolas!

Page 57 -- It is vital to remember, and almost impossible to express, the absolute faith which these men placed in their philological skills, and the soaring hopes which they erected over its narrow foundation. [Angelo] Poliziano corresponded with Leoniceno about the texts of Pliny and Dioscurides: but he addressed him as the new Asclepius, whose knowledge would rescue his generation from disease and death. If rightly understood, there was nothing which the word, that supreme expression of the rational faculty which separated man from beast, might not accomplish. [Giovanni] Pico's [della Mirandola] dream of reconciling all faiths in a single ultimate mystery rested on the same conviction. No doubt Aldus, the client and intellectual shield-bearer of the great men, had seen the same visions and dreamed the same dreams.

Pages 58-59 -- It is somewhat less than just that Alberto Pio should now be remembered chiefly as the pupil of Aldus, a young man who perhaps took himself and the world rather too seriously, a bitter opponent of Erasmus, and a tragic casualty of repeated foreign intervention in Italy. His absolute commitment to literature and the arts is difficult to appreciate outside his native Emilia, and a casual observer might wonder how he had time for such interests. During the 1490s, his early manhood was taken uPage in a vicious feud with his cousin Giberto for the possession of Carpi: in July 1497 his house was sacked and he was forced to take refuge in Ferrara. Yet even as a refugee, Alberto was able to maintain a considerable household, to spend nearly fifty florins in five months on the purchase and decoration of books, and to employ Musurus as Greek tutor and librarian. In 1500 a new Ferrarese initiative followed by the providential death of his cousin meant that Alberto could return home in comparative safety: so he celebrated the occasion by spending 800 gold crowns on the library of the deceased Giorgio Valla, and set immediately about transforming the city of Carpi. He resided there for only seven years. ... So anxious was Alberto to establish Carpi as a centre of all the liberal arts that he eventually invited the typographer Benedetto Dolcibello de Manzi, a native of the place who had already been prosecuted for violating Aldus' Greek copyright, and immediately violated another by printing Latin texts in cursive.

Pages 61-62 -- There is one trait in Aldus' character of which we can be absolutely sure and which, though it cannot by itself explain why he began printing, may shed some light on the working of his mind and on the principle which ruled him. He was fascinated by language: not by language as the expression of man's rational faculty, though he would no doubt have paid lip-service to that fashionable idea, but by language in itself, as a pattern of sounds with music in its rhythms and riches in its variety. Perhaps as a result of this, perhaps because of the many years he had spent in the school-room, he was almost morbidly sensitive about grammatical accuracy and correct pronunciation. ... Aldus was meticulous to a fault. But in a publisher, it might prove to be a good fault.

Pages 65-66 -- The notion that reading directly frames character had passed very early into the Western educational tradition from Plato and St. Basil, and been widely discussed by the liberal theorists of fifteenth-century Italy: it will almost certainly have reached Aldus through Battista Guarino. ... The more good literature is made available, the more characters will be improved. To Aldus, printing was not a break in his activity as an educator, but a continuation of it into a new dimension. We have no means of knowing how or when he came to this conclusion: six years of teaching must certainly have affected him; so, perhaps, did the examples of Pico, Poliziano and Barbaro, though it is hard to be sure. All we can know for certain is that by the end of the 1480s, Aldus had formed his conviction and was ready to put it into practice.

That is the end of Chapter Two, at page 71. There are numerous footnotes that accompany each chapter. Chapter Two has 80 footnotes. After I have gone over this book quickly, as I am doing now, then I'll go back and check some of these details. I am certain that there is "something" in this book that will provide the clue to the origin of Philostratus.

The next chapter "Barbarigo, Torresani and Manuzio" ends on page 108 and contains 111 footnotes. Chapter Four will need a careful reading and analysis because it includes the material on the origins of various manuscripts. The quotes at the beginning of this email are from Chapter Four. I'll get to that tomorrow, but I'll finish with Chapter Three this evening.

Page 78 -- When he was paying tribute to Lascaris' work for the Florentine press, Amaseo drew some significant conclusions: " ... there is no doubt that more [Greek] books will soon be published, since Italy is daily becoming more inflamed with interest in Greek literature."

Page 84 -- Pierfrancesco Barbarigo was not merely a sympathiser who helped Aldus out on one occasion, but a shareholder who put the weight of his capital and the influence of his ducal family name behind the company from its very beginning.

Barbarigo and Andrea Torresani were partners with Aldus in the establishment of the printing company.

Pages 84-85 -- Readers of Erasmus' "Adagia", or Aldus' own prefaces, were almost bound to think of the printing company as an embattled citadel of enlightened scholarshiPage struggling to hold its own in a hostile world: in fact it was a powerful organisation underwitten by one of the most successful publishers of the age [Torresani] and the nephew [Pierfrancesco] of the titular head of the Venetian state. But this discovery, though removing many uncertainties, leaves us to face a question of far graver implications -- how far did Aldus really control the organisation?

Next there follows a discussion of the business arrangements connected with the founding of the Aldine Press.

The ultimate point of this book is to describe the evolution of the age of publishing in Venice. Long discussions are given regarding which new fonts were developed, and who developed them and who cast them for printing. Also, who financed which company and who was educated by whom, and who had connections with one family or another. From the pure specialist point of view of, for example, a modern university professor instructing a graduate class in, for example, journalism, this would be the kind of book that would be studied. It is very technical and historical. But it contains literally thousands of obscure details. This "mystery" is far from solved.

And, incidentally, Aldus married Maria Torresani, who (I suppose) was the sister or daughter of Andrea Torresani.

Page 92 -- After finding investors and overcoming the basic problems of technique, Aldus' next concern must have been a place of business. He discovered what he needed in the San Polo area of Venice, near the church of Sant'Agostino: it was some distance from the parishes of San Zulian and San Paternian, where the booksellers were thoroughly entrenched by the 1490s, but still fairly convenient for the main business-centre at the Rialto, or for Andrea Torresani's shoPage which stood close by the bridge "at the sign of the Tower". Two inscriptions now dignify No. 2133 as Aldus' house and workshop.

Pages 94-95 -- In many ways the scene resembles some timeless student world rather than the centre of a business organisation. But the strange fusion of spontaneity and prejudice, of personalities and of activities was being re-enacted all around, and although Aldus' workshoPage was a remarkable place even in its own times, it will not have seemed in Renaissance Venice the bizarre union of opposites which it appears today. Aldus' immediate neighbourhood, indeed the whole of Venice, was one vast mixture, in which the distinctions of rank still held sway. Directly opposite the workshoPage stood a palace owned by the Pisani family: the great houses of the da Molin, Donà and Bernardo were all within a minute's walk; just across Campo San Giacomo lived the amazing Marin Sanudo, who in the later 1490s must have been beginning work on his fifty-eight volume diary and his library of 6,500 books. Members of these patrician families would in due course show the keenest interest, and a degree of pride, in the rising fame of their neighbour. But so, apparently, did Aldus' humbler "compatres", Antonio, Petro da Cafa, and Marco da Capodistria, the tailor.

Also on page 95, Lowry mentions that Aldus criticized the "Lyon press-pirates" who were treacherously stealing his ideas, "led on by that mother of all evils, Greed".

Page 98 -- Payments made by the booksellers to the company were channelled through the bank of Mafio Agostini.

That is interesting. One wonders if this "Mafio Agostini" was the father of the Mafia and all its modern money-laundering worldwide! I don't doubt it.

And following is another Nicolas!

Page 98 -- We have a useful point of comparison in the tax-declaration returned in 1537 by Nicolo Bernardo, Procurator, one of the most powerful political figures in Venice, and, incidentally, an ex-neighbour of Aldus, since he lived in the huge Palazzo Bernardo which still stands between Sant'Agostino and Campo San Polo. He reckoned his income from property in the city and a small estate near Mestre at 239 ducats a year.

Most of the following information comes from two tables on pages 144-145 and 150-151, listing the Aldine publications by year and by language. G - Greek. L - Latin. I - Italian. There are 98 titles. None was published in 1506. These various books are discussed in detail in the text.

This first part of the list provides the books that were published between 1494 and 1500. These years obviously represent that "preparation period" which is discussed in Chapter Four. This early table is on pages 112-113. This list contains 36 books. That brings the total of both lists to 98 books. If the grand total was about 130 books, then the other 32 would have been published after 1509.

So, technically, the Philostratus biography was not the first one published, but only the first of the second period, which represents the greatest period of the Aldine Press.

1494?

Musaeus, 10f 4°, 12f 4° (G)
Galaeomyomachia, 10f 4° (G)

1495

Lascaris, Grammar, 166f 4° (G)
Gaza, Grammar, 198f fol. (G)
Thecritus etc., 140f fol. (G)
Bembo, De Aetna, 30f 4° (L)
Aristotle I, 234f fol. (G)

1496

Benedetti, Diaria, 68f 4° (L)
Grammatici Veteres, 270f fol. (G)

1497

Aristotle II, 268f fol. (G)
Aristotle III, 475f fol. (G)
Aristotle IV, 517f fol. (G)
Valeriani, Grammar, 212f 4° (G)
Iamblichus, 184f. fol (L)
Epiphyllides, 54f 4° (L)
Dictionarium, 243f fol. (G)
De conversione propositionum, 72f 4° (L)
Quaestio Averrois, 32f 4° (L)
De Gradibus medicinarum, 55f 4° (L)
De Morbo Gallico, 29f 4° (L)
De Tiro seu Vipera, 8f 4° (L)
Horae Virginis, 112f 16° (G)
Psalterium, 150f 4° (G)

1498

Aristotle V, 316f fol. (G)
Aristophanes, 339f fol. (G)
Politiani Opera, 425f fol. (L)
Reuchlin Oratio, 12f 4° (L)
Catalogus, 1f fol. (L)

1499

Epistolographi Craeci, 266f & 137f 4° (G)
Perotti, Cornucopia, 321f fol. (L)
Aratus, Theon, Proclus, Astronomici Veteres, 376f fol. (G)
Dioscurides, Nicander, 167f fol. (G)
Amasei Poema, 12f 4° (L)
Hypnerotomachia Polifili, 234f fol. (I)

1500

Lucretius, 101f 4° (L)
Epistole de Sancta Catherina, 412f fol. (I)

1501

Poetae Christiani, I 4° (L)
Philostratus, Vita Apollonii, 73f fol. (G)
Virgilii Opera, 228f 8° (L)
Horatii Opera, 143f 8° (L)
Petrarch, Cose volgari, 180f 8° (I)
Juvenalis et Perii Satirae, 78f 8° (L)
Martialis, 192f 8° (L)
Valla, De exp. et fug. rebus, 300f fol. + 336f. fol. (L)
Aldi Rudimenta Grammatices, 88f 4° (L)
Donati Oratio, 4f 8° (L)
Io. Francisci Pici De Imaginatione, 39f 4° (L)

1502

Pollucis Vocabularium, 104f fol. (G)
Cicero, Epistulae Familiares, 267 f 8° (L)
Lucani Pharsalia, 140f 8° (L)
Thucydides, 124f fol. (G) Dante, 244f 8° (I)
Sophocles, 196f 8° (G) Statius, 256f 8° (L)
Herodotus, 140f. fol. (G)
Interiani, Vita de zichi, 8f 8° (I)
Valerius Maximus, 215f 8° (L)
Egnatii Oratio, 8f 8° (L)
Ovidii Metamorphoseos, 267 f. 8° (L)
Ovidii Fasti, 203f 8° (L)
Stephani De Urbibus, 80f fol. (G)
Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, 150f 8° (L)
Poetae Christiani, II Admonitum, 1f fol. (L)

1503

Catalogus, 2f. fol. (L)
Luciani Opera, 286f fol. (G)
Ammonii Commentaria, 146f fol. (G)
Bessarion, In Calumniatoren Platonis, 112f fol. (L)
Ulpiani Commentarioli, 172f fol. (G)
Xenophon/Plethon, 156f fol. (G)
Florilegium Epigrammatum, 290f 8° (G)
Euripides Traoediae, 268f 8° & 190f 8° (G)
Originis Homeliae, 182f fol. (L)

1504

Iohannes Grammaticus in Aristotelis Analytica, 148f fol. (G)
Theodorus Gaza, 274f fol. (L)
Carteromachi Oratio, 15f 8° (L)
Gregorii Nazanzeni Carmina, 4° (G)
Cimbriaci Encomiastica, 24f 8° (L)
Homeri Opera I, 277f 8° (G)
Homeri Opera II, 306f 8° (G)
Demosthenis Orationes I, 160f fol. (G)
Demosthenis Orationes II, 144f. fol. (G)

1505

Bembo, Asolani, 96f 4° (I)
Augurelli Carmina, 128f 8° (L)
Horae Virginis, 160f 32° (G)
Pontani Urania, 241f 8° (L)
Adriani Venatio, 8f 8° (L)
Aesopi Fabellae, 150f fol. (G)
Virgilii Opera, 304f 8° (L)
Quinti Calabri Paralipomena Homeri, 172f 8° (G)

1507

Hecuba et Iphigenia interprete Erasmo, 80f 8° (L)

1508

Aldi Grammatica, 192f 4° (L)
Erasmi Adagia, 249f fol. (L)
Plinii Epistolae, 263f 8° (L)
Rhetores Graeci I, 367f fol. (G)
Rhetores Graeci II, 209f fol. (G)

1509

Plutarchi Opuscula, 525f fol. (G)
Horatii Opera, 155f 8° (L)
Sallustii Opera, 104f 8° (L)