Chapter Five, Academic Dreams, is 27 pages, plus several pages of footnotes. After looking at it, I think I am going to transcribe the whole chapter, just to have it, as well as to let you read it, with my comments. The Venetian School of San Marco is a part of this history. R.

Aldus' fame as a printer leads easily to the error of regarding him only as a printer. In fact, he spent more than half of his working life as a professional scholar and teacher, continuing as such for some time after his arrival in Venice. One of the debts which he renounced in 1510 was the sum of twenty-five ducats for the outstanding school-fees of his partner's natural son Santo Barbarigo, who "came to my school for an entire year, ate his dinner at my house, and in the evening went to supper at the house of his said father". We have shown in earlier chapters that Aldus had stood on the edges of the most sophisticated intellectual groups of the later Quattrocento, that he apparently saw printing as a development, rather than a change of his teaching vocation, and that he strove to the very end to gear his editions to the needs of an educational ideal. It will be the business of this chapter to show that he lived and worked in Venice amongst professional teachers, and to describe the effects which their society may have had on Aldus' ultimate ambitions.

What, first of all, did it mean to be a teacher in Venice around 1490? According to the exactly contemporary account of Marin Sanudo, there were three possibilities: you were a salaried lecturer employed by the Republic itself; you were a free-lance schoolmaster; or you were a private tutor in a noble household. The first category was an élite group of three or four men, so prestigious and exclusive as to be largely separable from the others. The second and third lacked any stable composition, and intermingled largely with one another. But the overall numbers were considerable. When the religious authorities called for a profession of Faith in 1587, 258 teachers took the oath. Even when we have reduced this figure to allow for the lower population and less developed education of the previous century, we must clearly reckon with an occupational group of around 100 professional teachers, constantly in flux but kept vaguely aware of an identity by mutual interests and rivalries.

The history of the Venetian public lectureships begins during the first decade of the fifteenth century, when a school of logic and natural philosophy was established near the Rialto as a result of bequests by Tomaso Talenti, one of Petrarch's opponents in the celebrated humanistic dialogue "De sua ipsius et multorum ignorantia". Somewhat surprisingly, in view of his contribution to Aristotelianism, Aldus appears to have had few connections with this foundation. Perhaps its sternly traditional approach was hostile to his humanist convictions. But it will be sufficient to say that the school was almost immediately successful, and gained such prestige that from 1455 it was constantly in the charge of a Venetian patrician.

Education in the humanities had a later and more difficult start. During the 1440s a broad movement developed to improve the standard of secretarial work in the ducal Chancellery by training young men specially, and in 1446 the Senate decided to hire a schoolmaster, provide lodgings for him near San Marco, and give him the task of instructing sixteen non-noble youths of good character in grammar and rhetoric. But there were the usual delays, disputes and unlucky deaths. It was not until 1466 that the School of San Marco began to realise its potential under the firm guidance of Benedetto Brugnolo, a Veronese pupil of Ognibene da Lonigo who had already served as assistant master and was to hold the headship with the greatest credit until he died in 1502, universally lamented and aged over ninety. In 1460 the Senate determined to complement the work of the School by founding a lectureship in poetry and rhetoric, and produced very similar results. Gianmario Filelfo and George of Trebizond came and left, grumbling, within five years. But the erudite and irascible Giorgio Merula, whose ambiguous relationship with the early presses has already been mentioned, stayed from 1465 until 1482, achieving results which persuaded the Senate to make two appointments rather than one when he left for Milan. The work of Giorgio Valla and Marcantonio Sabellico continued until the end of the century, in Sabellico's case beyond it. With two public lecturers backed by a highly competent and respected grammar-school master, the last fifteen years of the Quattrocento were something of a golden age for Venetian public education.

But as with many Venetian institutions it is far easier to follow the ripples of activity on the surface than the stronger currents below. How, precisely, were the lectureships linked to the school and how were both linked to the Chancellery? What was the range of the curriculum? How widely were the effects felt in Venetian society? Gianmario Filelfo's appointment in 1460 left the scope of the lectureship virtually unrestricted, obliging him only to deliver "two appropriate lectures daily, one in poetry, the other in rhetoric or history" for the benefit of "our nobles, their sons, and the sons of our citizens". Early documents on the Chancellery school concentrate entirely on the sixteen trainee secretaries. But it is completely clear that the school took in a far greateer number and variety of pupils, and also that the apparently unlimited lecture audiences soon acquired a rather club-like quality.

Men who never entered the Venetian government service appear to have been Brugnolo's pupils. They included patrician intellectuals like Zuane Querini, Daniel Renier, or Zuane Bembo, and scholars from the mainland cities such as Raphael Regius and Domizio Calderini of Verona, who later lectured to Aldus in Rome. We have no figures: but one of the orators at Brugnolo's funeral revealed that his revered headmaster had first gained experience as one of two "hypodidascali", or assistant masters, working under Giampietro of Lucca during the early and relatively difficult days after the school's foundation. More than half a century later John Colet was to think the high master, his assistant, and a chaplain perfectly sufficient to deal with the 153 boys of his foundation at St. Paul's. At the other end of the scale, the daily lectures by the Campanile might seem on the face of it a slightly comic free-for-all, a kind of academic sideshow competing for attention with the hucksters and strolling-players who thronged the Piazza San Marco. But the audiences had a definite identity and esprit de corps. Men spoke of themselves as pupils of Valla or Sabellico. Andrea Mocenigo, a precocious exponent of old-school loyalties, addressed a valedictory poem to Sabellico and received the thanks of both his schoolfellows and his teacher, who gave them all the significant title of "the Academy".

The success of the grammar-school and the lectureships depended on the quality and initiative of the individuals. But it is perfectly clear that from the mid-1480s Venice possessed three individuals who could command the attention of a considerable number and variety of men, while radiating a definite cultural influence in society. Brugnolo as grammar-school teacher was thoroughly qualified to prepare the ground for the lecturers. Devoted to the business of teaching rather than to philological research or controversy, he contented himself with editing or correcting other men's work. But his scholarship gained the respect of Poliziano, and his pupils record that he taught poetry, rhetoric and moral philosophy in both the ancient languages, with a liberal approach which pointed out but did not remove passages whose pagan background made them suspect. More important still, his personality carried a formidable impact, sufficient to affect the conduct of his pupils.

[COMMENT: Brugnolo taught rhetoric and pointed out passages that were considered "pagan". Conclusion -- he had read the books of Philostratus.]

Sabellico, the second of the two lecturers to be appointed and the speaker during the less important afternoon period, was also the less important contributor to that more rarefied philological scholarship with which this study is principally concerned. Roman-born and educated, he belonged to the purely Latin school of Pomponio Leto, and his tendency to publish racey dialogues or popular accounts of local scenery and antiquities brought him, even before his arrival in Venice, a reputation for sensationalism which he never lived down thereafter. Bilingual scholars such as Ermoleo Barbaro and Gaimbattista Egnazio plainly thought him superifcial, and Egnazio said so. Sabellico's correspondence does not suggest that his lectures extended beyond the normal range of Latin prose and poetry, and his publications in this field -- some notes on Pliny the Elder, emendations to the text of Valerius Maximum, and a paraphrase of Suetonius' "Lives of the Caesars" -- also show a keen eye for the topical and saleable. The term "journalist" would be an anachronism: but it roughly conveys the reputation he enjoyed in his own time.

[COMMENT: Obviously then, Sabellico had never read Philostratus because he did not know Greek. And Philostratus was not translated and published in Latin/Italian until 1549, after Sabellico's death. Thus, Sabellico can be ruled out as the supplier of this manuscript to Aldus.]

Giorgio Valla was a man of wholly different stamp: more self-effacing than Sabellico, less forceful than Brugnolo, he left few traces of an activity which affected Venetian cultural life profoundly and perhaps contributed more than any other factor to the intellectual side of Aldus' achievement. Having studied Greek under Constantine Lascaris in Milan and been brought to Venice through the influence of Ermolao Barbaro, Valla was the perfect mouthpiece for that expertise in both Greek and Latin which Barbaro personified and Aldus strove to emulate. The range of his teaching and editorship was vast. He left commentaries on Juvenal, various works of Cicero, Pliny and Ptolemy: Latin translations of Aristotle's "Magna Moralia" and "Poetics", and of a large variety of later Greek scientific and medical writers; and a massive compilation of views on scientific and mathematical subjects entitled "De expetendis et fugiendis rebus", which was eagerly awaited at the time and eventually published by Aldus in 1501. His correspondence shows that he lectured on Vitruvius, Archimedes, and the history of Greek poetry: and his manuscripts of Dioscurides, Theocritus and Sophocles are annotated in a manner which leaves little doubt that they were used for teaching purposes. Valla's collection of Greek texts, which survives almost intact in the library of Modena, must have been as important and significant as his teaching, for the manuscripts show that he gathered a loose circle of Greek scribes who enabled him both to expand his own collection and become, in his turn, a focus for the further diffusion of literary material and Greek works in particular.

[COMMENT: If Valla's collection of books survives "almost intact in the library of Modena", then it would be a simple thing to contact this museum and see if Valla's collection includes Philostratus' Life of Apollonius.]

Some of his associates can be identified: Michael Suliardes of Argos copied and signed two commentaries on Ptolemy in 1490 and the poems of Theognis in 1492. A more surprising name is that of Nicholas Vlastos, the highly placed Cretan whom we have already met as financial supporter of the Callierges press in 1499 but who was active twelve years earlier, when he helped Valla and at least two other scribes to copy a manuscript of medical writings. Most of the men are simply script-forms in the surviving manuscripts, and presumably hands to satisfy the numerous requests which were addressed to the compliant Valla. It is well known that Janus Lascaris inspected his library carefully during his long quest for rare Greek texts in 1491, and that Poliziano was fascinated by his manuscripts of Heron and Archimedes. But many other scholars sought his help. Pico and Alberto Pio both sent requests for specific copies. Antiquario, the Milanese secretary, was in constant touch. Constantine Lascaris asked for transcripts of several Greek mathematical writers. Soon after his arrival in Venice Aldus was asked by his friend Niccolo Leoniceno of Ferrara to arrange for some of Valla's books to be copied, and it is clear that Valla's circle provided Aldus both with his entrée to Venetian intellectual society and with the nucleus of what would, in its time, become a following of his own.

[COMMENT: Valla is a PRIME CANDIDATE to have provided this book to Aldus.]

But before tracing this process in detail we must say something of the less exalted and lesser known echelons of Venetian education. As has been said, the publicly employed teachers were privileged men with assured positions and a guaranteed salary of 150 ducats per year. But they did not teach a different type of pupil, or indeed live a life which was fundamentally different from that of their less fortunate colleagues. The whole of Venetian education at this period shows a fluidity which is surprising in an hierarchical society and almost incomprehensible to a later age which regards educational advantage as one of the first prizes which money and social position will seek. Two of the best known and apparently most successful free-lance teachers were Fra Urbano Valeriani and Giambattista Egnazio, both of them pupils of Brugnolo. The ease with which they were able to set up their own schools provides some sign of the demand for instruction: Egnazio was barely into his twenties when he began to attract his own group of students, but he attracted so many that Sabellico himself felt threatened and there was a growling exchange of scholary insults which the audience seems rather to have enjoyed. It was Egnazio's schoolfellow Zuane Bembo who arranged for the publication of both versions in a single volume. This particular incident ended in a touching death-bed reconciliation, and, since Egnazio was no ordinary man, we cannot draw any conclusions from it about the status of the great majority of teachers. But the story does serve to show that the public lecturers enjoyed no special immunities, and formed only the pinnacle of a wider intellectual world in which they might have to compete for attention with the rest.

Sanudo wrote of "teachers in the parishes and in the palaces of the nobles", but it is fairly clear that the distinction was logical rather than real. A number of possible combinations are revealed in the sixteenth-century profession of Faith: some class-conscious individuals allotted part of the day to noble pupils, the remainder to their inferiors; others were allowed to take a dozen or so extra children into the palace class-room as companions for their young charges; many simply opened their own doors to such nobles as cared to come along with the others. A century earlier the situation was probably even less clearly defined. This is certainly suggested by the list of creditors drawn up in 1442 for Vittore Bonapace, whose pupils included the sons of a boatman and a bricklayer as well as two young members of Venice's older noble families. Here again, the degree of social fluidity is startling. Conditions were obviously less secure than those of the public lecturers, but since the normal fees during the fifteenth century ranged from two to four ducats per child for a year's schooling, the master who could gather twenty to thirty pupils could hope to make a reasonable living.

How many patrician families employed a tutor exclusively for their own children is not clear, but it does appear that this was becoming a symbol of prestige, cultivated mainly by those of financial and political influence. Among the most powerful families in Venice at this period were the Corner, whose members included the titular Queen of Cyprus and her brother Zorzi, one of the most widely employed and respected statesmen in the Republic. Zorzi had a history of connections with scholars of an earlier generation such as George of Trebizond and Merula, so when it became known in 1484 that he was seeking a tutor for his sons, the post was eagerly sought. Ermolao Barbaro and Gerolamo Donato were asked to intercede. Bartolomeo Merula, the successful candidate, gained a certain status in Venetian intellectual society, editing a number of Latin texts for the press of Tacuinus during the 1490s and 1500s. When his main charge, Marco Corner, was given a cardinalcy in 1500, Bartolomeo simply became his secretary instead of his tutor and was in due course rewarded for his services by the appointment of apostolic protonotary. Of all his contemporaries in Venice, he is perhaps the man who bears the closest resemblance to the court-humanists of the mainland.

But his case seems to have been exceptional. As a rule, appointments were very short-lived, and carried no guarantee of future favours. Leonardo Loredan, member of a family hardly less illustrious than the Corner and a future doge, brought the Trevisan poet-laureate Francesco di Rolandello to Venice as his sons' tutor in 1478, but retained his services for only about a year. Cardinal Domenico Grimani, son of the doge who would succeed Loredan, employed a whole series of private teachers for his nephew Marin, including Gerolamo Aleander and Aldus' friend Scipio Fortiguerra. He also tried to tempt Erasmus. Short-term, almost informal engagements of this type appear to have been the rule, and they also appear to have been relatively easy to come by: within a single year Aleander's diary records his holding a Latin class for a group of young patricians and receiving offers from two older men.

But the hand-to-mouth existence was not an enviable one. "Poverty forced me to become a slave to noblemen," wrote Fra Urgano's nephew Giampietro Valeriani, who ran through his money in a few months, took to teaching as a last resort, and wrote with the bitterness of a Roman satirist of coughing his way up the backstairs of rich mens' houses. The loss of independence was oppressive, and there was no security to compensate. Those who found their pupils with a genuine literary interest were probably the lucky few. "The boy is a little savage: ... he is coming to you to have it knocked out of him," Barbaro warned a prospective tutor of one of his Vendramin cousins. Grinding Latin grammar into a young oaf whose social position could only encourage indiscipline must indeed have been a dreadful way of earning a living.

Possibly the most striking point about this whole picture is the perpetual ebb and flow of personalities, the absence of fixed points, and the readiness of intellectual activity to gather round any focus that emerged. The School of San Marco was of course the most important nucleus, but even it, as we have seen and shall see again, had varied fortunes. Change and instability began at the highest level of society: patrician intellectuals who could have, and did become centres of scholarly activity were kept so busy on foreign embassies that their work was frequently interrupted, and in 1490 Gerolamo Donato drew a significant comparison between his own distractions and the concentrated research which his friend Poliziano could pursue: "Public and private business so tie me down that I do not study so much as steal a few moments. I congratulate you on the time you can devote to the finest arts and letters."

We know too little at present about the cultural attitudes of the leading noble families to be able to tell whether this situation was deliberately planned in some way, or whether it developed naturally out of the social structure of the Republic. But it is only fair to say that the fluidity and instability had a credit, as well as a debit-side. The involvement of patricians on every level of intellectual life as pupils or employers, students or sponsors, no doubt dispersed effort which might have been concentrated, and perhaps stifled discussion which might have become challenging. It also provided an enormous range of opportunities for intellectuals to seek various kinds of employment, for interested groups to cluster round a sympathetic gentleman, and for ideas to pass easily up and down the different ranks of society represented or sideways between many different groups. Fra Urbano's wanderings through the Near East seem to have been made possible by his position as private secretary to the future doge Andrea Gritti, who was then a corn-merchant in Constantinople. Lorenzo Loredan, the pupil of Rolandello and son of the doge Leonardo, became an habitual member of Giorgio Valla's audiences. He clearly used the lecturer as a means of exerting leverage on his fellow-nobles during a career which earned him an ugly reputation as a manipulator: this, in itself, is an interesting comment on the indirect influence which a man like Valla might wield. But meantime Loredan absorbed enough interest to commission a superb manuscript of Pindar's "Odes" from John Rhosos in 1487.

Venetian patronage had many sides: it could also take many directions. Valla and Sabellico seem always to have sent five or six copies of a new work to different interested parties, and the letter of thanks which Valla received from Pietro Barozzi for his translation of Euclid might serve as a model of that discreet and informed persuasion which writers on patronage have often idealised but rarely pinpointed. The Bishop of Padua thanked Valla politely, and hoped that he would soon have time to read Euclid more carefully: he then enquired whether the translator had thought of turning his attention to Archimedes' works on geometry and on bodies floating in water "which would be extremely useful to men in their everyday life if they were available in Latin". Even the diplomatic missions of which Donato complained had their uses: Bernardo Bembo's travels gave him opportunities to assemble one of the century's most important collections of bibliographically useful, rather than ostentatious, manuscripts, which in due course became available for study by scholars such as Poliziano and Aldus. Whatever its faults, Venetian "free enterprise" did provide some kind of framework up which a vigorous intellectual and cultural life could grow on its own.

[COMMENT: Again the Bembo family is mentioned as possessing a large collection of manuscripts -- first Carlo, and now Bernardo.]

Of the nature of that life we are very imperfectly informed, and it is only possible to reconstruct it by a kind of romantic involvement in the enthusiasms of the time. As a starting-point we should remind ourselves of the strongly personal nature of all medieval teaching and the importance of the spoken word. Latin and Greek were still living languages, and much attention was paid to their correct pronunciation. Everything centred around a dialogue: the master read aloud from a text, the students recited what they had learned back to him, and a number of Valla's manuscripts still bear traces of this intoning of principal parts and explanation of difficult words. Then, from 1470, the flow of printed texts began, and from 1480 the flow became a torrent. By 1493 Raphael Regius, one of the most esteemed classical scholars at the university of Padua, could declare that any student who had passed beyond the earliest stages might now buy his own copy and jot down his own notes. Ultimately, this invasion by the mass-produced book would demolish the entire structure of group-learning by undermining the dependence of scholars upon each other and beckoning them away, as individuals, to a well equipped study.

But for a while the printed text was a fascinating new toy. It encouraged its owners to enquire, compare and discuss, whirling the enthusiasm of the groups into a fierce spiral of intellectual energy which the teachers did not need to command and seem to have been unable to control. Sabellico's emendations to Pliny were being broadcast and discussed by his students long before he published them. And when Valla was asked by Antiquario when his edition of Vitruvius was appearing, he had to reply that he had no idea: he had plans to publish when his lectures were finished, but some of his students had been taking such careful notes that, for all he knew, the text might appear complete with commentary at almost any moment. Obviously, evidence like this is subjective, piecemeal, and difficult to assess precisely: but when we combine it with the anxieties of men like Filippo di Strata, and the constant complaints about the rush to print, we seem to be in the presence of an almost uncontrollable burst of enthusiasm for the world of classical antiquity.

Such excitement could not be kept within the formal bounds of school and lecture-room: of its own accord, it frothed over into the wider social world beyond, and an interest in the ancient world soon became a mark of fashion as well as a badge of intellect. High Renaissance Venice was rich in clubs and associations, from the glamorous patrician clubs, with their jewelled costumes of parti-coloured velvet and their water-born banquets on the Grand Canal, down through sober gatherings of lawyers to open-ended groups of friends like the fifty-nine "good and learned men" whom Zuane Bembo listed at the end of his collection of ancient inscriptions. As we have seen, such informal groups could easily focus on a popular teacher or an influential patrician. So a lecture might continue as a heated argument under the portico of the Ducal Palace, like that described by Sabellico in "De Latinae Linguae Reparatione": as a languid afternoon reading Quintus Curtius in the Corners' formal garden; or as a visit to the bewitching poetess Cassandra Fedele, whose recitations formed the centre-piece of doge Barbarigo's public banquets, and whose very appearance reduced Poliziano to stammering helplessness.

[COMMENT: Nicolas, here is a peculiar personal thought. There are a lot of Italian families in New York City, particularly in Brooklyn. I have a good friend there named Giovanni whose family came from Sicily about a hundred years ago. Well, there is an excellent Italian restaurant in this Italian area called "The Corners". I have always wondered why an Italian restaurant would have such a "non-Italian-looking" name as that. Now, I am wondering if it was named after this "Corner" family in Venice. "Corner" is a very unusual surname for an Italian family, no? Ask your friend Alberto about this name. Grazie!]

Many of the topics of conversation, which are fairly well known to us from correspondence or dialogues, now seem restricted and arid: the precise words in which the elder Pliny described King Mithridates' antidote against all known poisons no longer poses a question of pressing medical importance. But we cannot afford to forget that a knowledge of classical literature underlays every area of academic specialisation, that the boundaries of ancient literature had expanded prodigiously over the previous century, and that the Greek and Roman authors could command the hearts, as well as the heads, of their disciples. An interest in the ancient botanical writers could easily become an experimental interest in botany, as happened in the cases of Ermolao Barbaro and Andrea Navagero. Mathematics might mean a study of Euclid and Archimedes, or gazing at the stars through a clear summer sky in the hills above Verona, with copies of Aratus and Virgil to hand. [In America, we say "on hand", meaning available.] Literary experiments of various kinds were extremely popular, and here judgement becomes most hazardous because the range of choice was so wide. One young poet name Lydus Cattus dramatised a lovers' quarrel as a legal hearing, which he then set out in an agonising pastiche of Latin and Italian, hexameters, elegiacs and terza rima. He dedicated it to Vicenzo Querini, whose interests also turned towards poetry and the directions it should take. But Querini and his friends Paolo da Canal, Nicolo Tiepolo, and Andrea Navagero experimented with Petrarchan forms, collaborated in the preliminary stages of Bembo's "Prose della volgar lingua", and so played a direct part in settling the subsequent development of the Italian language.

Beyond Venice itself lay the academic empyrean of Padua. The story of the university's steady progress during the fifteenth century is still known only in general outline, and we shall in any case be concerned less with formal academic affairs than with the social life which developed round their edges. From the moment in 1407 when the Venetian government obliged its subjects to pursue their studies at Padua unless they intended to go to one of the Northern universities, interest appears to have built up gradually. Many nobleman took degrees: many more went simply to savour the atmosphere. By the end of the century Sanudo's diary describes numerous invasions of friends and relatives from Venice to celebrate the award of a doctorate with days of feasting, and a local proverb foretold that the ferry which plied daily up and down the Brenta would sink if it did not carry a monk, a whore, and a student: so close had connections between the university and the metropolis become. Each autumn the Northern visitors poured down from the other direction: numerous Germans, whom the Republic favoured as its best customers and who still lacked really prestigious universities of their own; but also Poles, Hungarians, Englishmen and others. The aim of the wealthy student was to:

"Keep house and ply his book, welcome his friends, Visit his countrymen, and banquet them."

Poorer scholars had to rely on patronage. But since the Northerners sometimes rented entire palaces to house personal followings of twenty or thirty, and the Venetian nobles regularly brought their own tutor/servants, there was a variety of opportunities. Aleander and Giampietro Valeriani both went to Padua as personal attendants to young noblemen whom they had already taught and served in Venice. No doubt the poor student's life had its grim side, but on the whole contemporary descriptions of Renaissance Padua reflect the kind of yearning nostalgia for a world of sophisticated calm which one associates with the romantic novels of a later age. Ermolao Barbaro gave an hour-by-hour account of his routine during an interval of academic repose in summer, 1484. The morning was spent in intensive study of Aristotle and the Greek orators or poets: then came a light lunch of broth, eggs and fruit; afterwards, more relaxed reading or dictation, followed by conversation with any friends who cared to call for a literary or philosophical discussion; finally, a supper of roast game, a stroll in his botanical garden to ponder the herbal lore of Dioscurides, and so to bed. Against such a background texts, coins, and inscriptions could be examined, poems or speeches recited and criticised as easily as in the Venetian circles, and by many of the same men: indeed it is often difficult to say which society was an extension of which, for the foreign visitors joined in wherever they could, eager to make their mark on these cultured Italians by offering something of their own experience. Constantly in search of some new focus, the circles whirled and regrouped like the spindles of conversation at a Tolstoyan soirée.

[COMMENT: This man Martin Lowry is an excellent writer. As for Padova/Venice, I suppose that in those days they seemed like two different places. But now, they have grown together into one large metropolis. The train ride between them takes only about a half-hour, and there is very little "countryside" in between.]

This, then, was the world to which Aldus came in 1490 and he fitted into it with the effortless grace of one who knows something of his worth, is equipped with impeccable introductions, and has a rare facility for avoiding enmity. Whether or not he knew Giorgio Valla already, it is in Valla's circle that he first appears. During the summer of 1491 Leoniceno mentioned Aldus to Valla twice as a man to whom manuscripts might be passed for copying, and though in this case he seems to have been acting on behalf of Leoniceno and Poliziano, it is hard to believe that he did not turn the resources of Valla's library and the skills of his Greek scribes to some future use. Poliziano definitely appreciated his help. The name "Alto Manuccio" is scrawled in the margin of his notebook alongside those of the procurators Alvise Barbaro and Leonardo Loredan; of Antonio Pizzamano, the friend of Domenico Grimani who would later organise the purchase of Pico's library; and the two young nobles Pietro Bembo and Angelo Gabriel, pupils of Valla who would shortly depart to study Greek with Constantine Lascaris in Messina, and bring back with them the manuscript-copy for Aldus' first publication.

Slightly more than a year later Aldus was asked by the Hellenist Codrus Urceus to pass on his greetings to Sabellico, Raphael Regius, and the patrician Daniel Renier. Codrus mentioned discussion of certain joint plans which linked him to both Aldus and Leoniceno: he explained that his Greek scribe was otherwise engaged, and that there would be some delay before the Greek manuscripts required could be sent to Aldus; and he gave some useful advice on a difficult line of Theocritus. Aldus was now completely accepted in Venetian academic society, and stood very close to the centre of its network.

It is unfortunate that we do not know the exact connection between the "entire year" of teaching that Santo Barbarigo received from Aldus, and the printing-contract which father and tutor signed in 1495; but the general sequence of events is clear enough. With the aid of his contacts and the discreet self-advertisement of the "Epistola ad Catherinam Piam", Aldus was able to establish himself very quickly and took in an assortment of pupils. His work left time for scholarly pursuits: and, whether the teaching or the printing contract with Barbarigo came first, he was evidently able to take advantage of that opportunist Venetian patronage which, as one of its critics acidly remarked, made learning into a business commodity not basically different from a sack of pepper.

[COMMENT: That is about the middle of this chapter. I'll finish it up over the weekend. This is fascinating reading, I think. A Demain Matin! Roberto]