CHAPTER FIVE, CONCLUDED

When Aldus' workshop went into production, it seems to have inherited its tone more from the humanist background of its manager than from predecessors or contemporaries in the world of printing. Producing a clear judgement of such an emotive and intangible issue is naturally difficult: and Aldus may have distorted our vision in the carefully devised introductions which he added to almost all of his editions, and in which stress was always laid on the care and collaboration that had gone into the text. Previously, the introduction had been a matter for the academic editor: the printer was lucky to receive more than a few words of praise for the singular qualities which separated him from his shoddy and avaricious colleagues. As a result, we know virtually nothing about the personal relationship between [Nicholas] Jenson and [Andrea] Torresani on the one hand, Merula, Sabellico, Squarciafico and many more on the other. But the mere fact that Aldus made the change suggests a new approach. The discussion of the correct order of Aristotle's works, or the collation of manuscripts in Padua and Ferrara, are plainly activities which derived immediately from the philological work of Valla's scribal circle. The close coincidence of the earlier Aldine editions with contemporary academic tastes is hardly surprising, and it is also noticeable that many of the printer's first editors and contributors -- Bembo and Gabriel, Leoniceno and Alessandro Benedetti -- were associates or pupils of Giorgio Valla. But the situation was changing, and there is perhaps some sign of what was happening in William Latimer's desperate appeal for the return of his borrowed bed: Aldus' house in Sant'Agostino was becoming a place where scholars came not only to leave corrected proofs, but to eat, sleep and talk. In other words, it was becoming an intellectual centre in its own right.

The stages by which this process was accomplished are so subtle and delicate that they cannot be completely unravelled now. The decisive year was almost certainly 1502, but the four or five which preceded were hardly less important, and from 1495 on the fortunes of Aldus and his associates become so thoroughly entangled with the greater events of the period that they can only be explained against a European background. The underlying fact is that, even as Aldus was organising his company and publishig his earliest editions, the foundations of the intellectual world that had produced him were crumbling.

One of his idols, Eromolao Barbaro, died in exile during the summer of 1493. Pico della Mirandola, the "phoenix among men" and Aldus' first patron, passed away as the French armies tramped into Florence on 17 November 1494. Poliziano had gone the same way barely two months before. Ficino, as we have seen, survived long enough to cast an eye over the Aldine text of some of his translations, but his single letter to the printer is haunted by references to ill-health, famine, and books scattered abroad in a city to which he dared not return for fear of plague and violence. The exile of the Medici and the dispersal of their court-circle were now accomplished facts, and Ficino's letter sounds the death-knell over an epoch of Florentine culture.

Other centres had been as severely stricken. In 1495 the French had swept away the Aragonese kingdom of Naples: the royal library was carried off as plunder, only to be plundered again on the battlefield of Fornovo, then yet again by various individuals when it reached France. In 1498 Rome lost Pomponio Leto, for whose make-believe imitations of Cincinnatus Aldus had little sympathy, but who had dominated Roman intellectual life for a generation. The library of the dukes of Milan was carried off to Blois by the French conquerors in 1499: and in 1502 the famous collection of the Montefeltro dukes or Urbino was looted by the troops of Cesare Borgia. It is not surprising that Aldus' prefaces are full of flames, war, the loss of friends and the destruction of books: not only scholars, but entire cultural centres were being swept away.

[COMMENT: If all of these libraries were being looted or plundered and taken off to France, then perhaps the copy of Philostratus was saved from San Marco by Zanobi and taken to Venice. <?> ]

It is true that Venice escaped foreign occupation and political upheaval, becoming something of a haven for scholarly and even princely exiles. But she did not escape as completely from the general misfortunes as her historians have often assumed. We have already seen how the expenses of war sparked the commercial crisis of 1499, and how that crisis affected the printing industry: at the same time the triumvirate of public teachers which had enriched Venetian intellectual life at so many points during the previous fifteen years, began to break down. During the spring of 1496 the Council of Ten became alarmed about a leakage of information to Milan, and instructed one of its secret agents to enquire among the schools for a certain "Placidio", and approach him with a pretended offer of employment as a nobleman's tutor. The trail led to Placidio Amerino, a pupil and close friend of Giorgio Valla. Both were immediately arrested. No case was brought against Valla since the evidence against him was not thought conclusive, and he was held in custody for only a few months: but his editorial work and teaching were badly interrupted, and it seems probable that his health and prestige also suffered. His correspondence dwindles, and he died in early 1500.

Though the loss of Valla was in itself a severe blow to Greek studies in Venice, the chaos which followed it may well have done more damage and certainly had a greater effect on the fears and ambitions of Aldus' friends. Sabellico was naturally elevated to the senior public lectureship. There remained the question of the vacant post, and as Giambattista Scita, Raphael Regius, Demetrius Chalcondylas and Constantine Lascaris were named as possible candidates, the atmosphere became sticky with an intrigue which illustrates more clearly than any rhetoric the influence which these public lectureships exercised in Venetian society. Aldus' old friend Scita was appointed in March, but apparently failed to keep his audiences content and was sacked after barely a month. Next came Gregorio Amasco, who managed to survive for three years: but he had the disadvantage of being another Latinist, and the slightly shabby quality of his appointment brought rivals such as Regius into his lectures to shout down every point he made. Finally, his election was declared out of order because there had been no proper advertisement of the post or competition for it, and yet another candidate was produced in Gerolamo Calbero of Forli, whose recent services on an embassy in Hungary gave him some political leverage. A competition was staged: no contestant appeared; and Calbero was declared elected. But he, too, seems to have been a bird of passage. Some kind of stability returned in 1504 when Gerolamo Donato hectored the Senate into appointing Leonicus Tomaeus, the Paduan Hellenist, after a contest with Musurus, but in the meantime Benedetto Brugnolo had died and Sabellico was sinking into a last illness which prevented him from lecturing. No successors were appointed. Public instruction in the humanities had suffered a series of bad blows.

Throughout Italy, scholars reacted to the changing times in the only possible ways: by regrouping wherever they could, and often by endeavouring to close their ranks with the help of some half-formal organisation. In Naples, the statesman Giangioviano Pontano gathered the relics of Panormita's old circle around him, read his poems to them, and apparently composed a statute as well as a formal ceremony of admission to his "Academia Pontoniana". In Rome interest began to centre on a wealthy young dilettante named Angelo Colocci who seems already to have had some acquaintance with the Neapolitan circle, bought his way into papal service in 1497, and in due course also bought Leto's villa on the Quirinal. He cut a wide swathe across Italian cultural life during the next three decades, and we shall meet him again. In Venice, Aldus became the natural rallying-point. Probably in its early stages the process was wholly spontaneous: interested noblemen such as Marin Sanudo called in at the print-shop in Sant'Angostino to find how plans were proceeding; foreign visitors like Linacre made their ways home and spoke to their friends, who in their turn wrote respectfully, as did William Grocyn and Conrad Celtis, or came to present their greetings personally, as Reuchlin did in the summer of 1498. Greek expatriates unhesitatingly used Aldus' workshop as a mail-box. And the collapse of the Callierges/Vlastos organisation, following immediately on the death of Valla, left Aldus as the main hope of a Venetian Hellenism which seemed threatened on every side.

[COMMENT: This is all very very interesting. If you think about it, these events happened over a very short period of time, from about 1494 till about 1503, when Rodrigo Borgia died or was murdered, during this French invasion. These "Greek expatriates" were undoubtedly refugees from Constantinople/Istanbul, who were fleeing from the Ottomans.]

But the dreams which would lead to a regrouping were already in the air. Some of Aldus' earliest collaborators -- Fortiguerra, Arsenios Apostolios and Marcus Musurus -- had worked in Florence under Chalcondylas or Poliziano and known something of Ficino's circle. Alberto Pio's ambitions knew no bounds. Shortly before his house in Carpi was sacked by a howling mob of his cousin's partisans, he was promising to establish Aldus in his principality as chief of "an Academy where barbarism would be left behind, and sound literature and sciences studied". We have positive proof that these dreams had taken some more solid form in Venice by the late summer of 1502: in August, the first edition of Sophocles was published with the colophon "Venetiis in Aldi Romani Academia", and in November the ducal letter of Leonardo Loredan mentioned among Aldus' other services to literature the fact that "he now even has a New Academy". These references are in their turn explained by a single surviving sheet, now in the binding of a volume in the Vatican library and bearing at the head of its Greek text the imposing title NEAKADEMIAS NOMOS -- the Statute of the New Academy.

This document has been published on a number of occasions, translated, and discussed with every degree of exaggerationa and understatement: but we are still very far from understanding it, for the words plainly say much less than they mean. Read at its face-value, and aligned with what we know of similar and contemporary associations, the forty-nine line statue appears almost entirely devoid of significance, or indeed of anything except enthusiasm. Seven names are mentioned: those of Aldus himself, who is called the "leader"; of Fortiguerra, who appears to have drafted the document; of a certain "John the Cretan", who may be either Rhosos or Gregoropoulos; then those of Baptista Egnazio, Paolo da Canal, Hironimo Menochio, and Francesco Rosetto. The signatories bind themselves to speak only in Greek when in one another's company, to pay a small fine if they lapse, and to collect the fines until they are sufficient to finance an "Academicians' banquet". There are some generally worded clauses on admitting other "philhellenes", or visitors who may wish to learn the language, and the statute closes with an oblique reference to "many others who are longing to learn and eager for a New Academy."

[COMMENT: This is very peculiar. It is almost as if Aldus and friends were forming some sort of "secret society" to protect the Greek manuscripts, as well as to give them a "secret" way to talk to one another when in the presence of those who did not know Greek.]

But there is no hint of how members might qualify, or of what form the instruction would take. In early 1498 the lawyers of Udine submitted to the Venetian Senate a statute which covers six full folios in the register, giving details of qualification, election, subscriptions, the conduct expected of members, and the procedure for a wide range of social activities. The academies of Leto and Pontano apparently possessed statutes, which have not survived. But contemporaries write of the ceremonial acceptance of a new member after he has proved his worth by a formal recitation: he is crowned with laurel; he is given a new, Latinised name, which is then inscribed in the register of the academy; then the company adjourns to a banquet, during which odes are sung in honour of the new academician. Aldus' association, with its fussy preoccupation with Greek accents and its parties financed from a sort of swear-box, sounds a rather shabby and makeshift affair in comparison.

To put the statute in its true perspective we must first remember the crucial importance of the spoken word in contemporary language teaching: what seems frivolous and pedantic now was vital to the plans of a company which, as we have seen, consisted largely of professional teachers and their more interested students. Next, though the plans as they are recorded are those of teachers and involve only the teaching of Greek, it is fairly clear that the activities of the group came to include a good deal more than the conversation of which the statute speaks. We catch occasional glimpses of meetings, with the academicians sitting in tense conversation round the fire: there is a lecture on a Greek grammarian, an examination of some Latin text, probably the recitation of speeches and poems of which we hear in the academies of Pontano and Colocci, also played some part in the Aldine circle. Its bias may have been more philological, and it must certainly have been a useful forum for the preparation of work for the press: but there is no reason in the statute or elsewhere for believing that the activities of the academy were restricted by those of the print-shop.

Such descriptions as we have of the Aldine circle suggest that it hardly differed from the loosely organised groups of friends which we have already seen clustering round an influential figure in Venice or Padua. Indeed we know from a poem of Giampietro Valeriani that at least five of Aldus' closest associates belonged to some kind of poetic sodality in Padua during the early years of the sixteenth century, and the printer himself was plainly accepted in the university' highest society. In 1502 Aldus dedicated his edition of Valerius Maximus to John Lubranski, whose virtues he had first realised at Padua.

" ... when I was sitting in a group in your lodgings ... along with our friend Raphael Regius, a man full of learning and integrity, and a few others: you promised, whatever the cost, to send and search for books in the land of the Dacians, where men say there is a tower full of ancient books."

Lubranski was Bishop of Poznán, councillor to the King of Poland. The discussions of the Aldine Academy were probably as many-sided as those of the mercurial groups from which it had sprung. But the existence of a statute, and the very sound of the word "Academy", with its magical echoes of Platonic Athens, do seem to have generated a new sense of excitement and purpose. A Venetian noble, Bernardo Zorzi, wrote anxiously to Fortiguerra of the Academy's health: an imperial bishop's secretary swore an oath "by our New Academy"; a Cisterican, Henry Urbanus, wrote from Erfurt importing Aldus to accept him among "the swarm of your friends". Whatever its puzzling qualities, we must face the fact that this statute was meant seriously and taken seriously. We must also recall that, unlike any of its predecessors or contemporaries, it was circulated in print.

There is a strong possibility that the statute was designed to advertise as well as organise, and that this may explain both its vague format and its publication. As we have seen, Aldus' editorial activity reached its zenith between 1502 and 1504: but the loss of Valla and Brugnolo meant that there was no longer a Hellenist among the public lecturers to provide discreet publicity for new works. Remembering the strongly didactic bias of the statute, and the turbulent state of the School of San Marco during these years, it is hard to resist the view that Aldus and his associates were trying to keep the claims of Greek scholarship in the public eye, and the idea gains strength when we find that Fortiguerra, who drafted the statute, was also one of those who hoped to secure the disputed lectureship.

If publicity was one of the aims, then the edition of Demosthenes which appeared in November 1504 had been preceded by a series of lectures delivered by Fortiguerra. During January the same scholar had pronounced a rousing "Oratio de laudibus literarum Graecarum", in which he laid due stress on Aldus' services to humanity in providing more sound texts than had been available at any time since the fall of the Roman Empire. At the same time foreigners were being taught Greek, as the statute had promised. The German Dominican and friend of Reuchlin, John Cuno, lived and studied with Aldus at Sant'Agostino, and the notes which he took from John Gregoropoulos' lectures on Aristophanes survive as proof of his activity. It is very tempting to regard Leonico Tomeo's appointment to the vacant lectureship in December 1504 as the culmination of a campaign mounted by Aldus and his circle. Though there is not the slightest positive evidence for this, the colophon "In Aldi Academia" does vanish at the end of that year. The almost contemporaneous arrival of Lascaris as French ambassador to Venice must have given Greek studies a powerful stimulus form without.

Unfortunately, Aldus' career during the next twelve months presents so complex a pattern that it is foolish to pretend we can understand his motives precisely. The disappearance of the colophon could be due to negative rather than positive factors: the commercial problems noticed in the previous chapter, for instance, or intellectual disagreement between Aldus' associates over the true aims of their Academy. Committed classicists such as Fortiguerra or Cuno seem to have regarded Greek as all-important. But Bembo, his literary companions from Padua, and Aldus himself all had interests both in contemporary Latin literature and in the directions which the still unformed Italian vernacular might take. Perhaps the most important factor was a shift of emphasis: for just as mention of an Academy in Venice was dying away during 1505, more ambitious plans were beginning to take shape elsewhere. The world of the statute was simply swallowed up in a golden vision.

[COMMENT: It seems that this is the period of time that the Italian language split away from Latin. I always wondered about that. Many people in my parents' generation, and especially their parents', all studied Latin in school, and it was considered a "language necessity" for educated people, only a short 100 years ago! My parents tried to get me to take Latin when I was a young boy, but I saw absolutely no point in it and didn't.]

About seven months after his visit to Aldus during the late summer of 1498, John Reuchlin composed a rapid note to his Italian colleague. Since he was referring to a private conversation, Reuchlin had no need to be explicit, but his account of efforts to interest the King of the Romans and others in "your cause" and his conclusion: "Accept the truth in a few words, my Aldus: we are not worthy of you", leave the main issue in little doubt. Even before he and his associates declared their aims in Venice, Aldus had plans to move to the Empire. During the following years these plans were steadily elaborated. In June 1503 Aldus referred in a letter to Conrad Celtis to a scheme which would make Germany "another Athens for the men of out time", and which he had recently set out in detail for a mutual friend, Johan Spiesshammer of Vienna. Infuriatingly, the letter to Spiesshammer has disappeared and though it is obvious that lobbying was being intensified, the plans themselves remain vague. The dedication of Theodorus Gaza's translations from Aristotle to Matthew Lang, a powerful imperial councillor, looks like a calculated gesture by Aldus: and barely two months later, in May 1504, he received a short note from another contact in the imperial chancellory, the secretary John Collauer, who promised to do everything in his power to encourage the interest of both Lang and Maximilian himself.

By the end of July Aldus was confident enough to claim imperial citizenship when he approached the ambassador on behalf of his imprisoned servant Federigo da Ceresara. But not until the following August did the direction of all this manoeuvring come into the open. In a short dedication of Pontano's "Urania", Aldus thanked Collauer "for the support you have given to my plan for founding an Academy, at the court of Maximilian Caesar", and even mentioned personal letters on the subject from Lang and Maximilian. But he had also to admit that nothing definite had been arranged as yet: and there is some suspicion that the dedication itself was an attempt to force the issue, for the negotiations of the next few months have a slightly desperate quality which one connects naturally with the gradual retrenchment of the company. During the autumn John Cuno was dispatched to Germany with letters to Maximilian, Lang, and Collauer, but by early December Aldus was still waiting for a reply, and wrote directly to Collauer in a state of considerable alarm. A fortnight later Cuno reported to Willibald Pirckheimer that Aldus was actually preparing for the move to Germany: but at the end of the following February Jacob Speigel, secretary to the Bishop of Trieste, was promising Aldus to use his imminent mission to the imperial court as a means of settling a situation that was still unresolved. A month later the printer closed his workshop at Sant'Agostino, made a will, merged his assets with those of his partner Torresani, and set off on a journey for his own purposes. The implication must be that he had now abandoned hope of imperial patronage: and by the end of the year, even the optimistic Cuno was disillusioned.

[COMMENT: If you recall, Marin Sanudo received five dedications in Aldus' books during 1501 and 1502. Several other dedications are mentioned above, so these books can be eliminated from the ones dedicated to Sanudo. Thus, for the moment, I am guessing that the Philostratus book was dedicated to Marin Sanudo. We MUST find this out.]

The crucial letter to Spiesshammer is lost, the dedication to Collauer is expressed in the most general terms, and our only account of Aldus' plans is contained in the letter which Cuno wrote to Pirckheimer on 21 December 1505:

"Aldus is preparing to move to Germany, to found a New Academy under the protection of the King of the Romans, in some place determined by him. With him will be various other men, some highly learned in Greek, and some in Hebrew, who, while Aldus prints all the best books, will instruct the youth of Germany not only in sound scholarship, but, as Aldus claims, in military skill and exercises, so that those who are well versed in literature may not be proved unwarlike."

This is plainly the language of a scholarly dream-world, and it is not surprising that the mention of Hebrew and military exercises in the same sentence has led some critics to relegate both Cuno's summary and the scheme it describes to a world of humanist fantasy. But we cannot escape from the problem so easily. Cuno had lived with Aldus for several years, he was acting as his official messenger, and his Latin states explicitly that the plans stemmed from Aldus. The phrase "military exercise" need not be pressed: it probably meant no more than the fencing, dancing and javelin-throwing which had played a part in the educational system of Vittorino da Feltre and derived ultimately from the "music and gymnastics" of Plato's "Republic". Hebrew was a new, but growing force in contemporary education. Pico's interest had lent the subject prestige, and probably suggested to Aldus a field of publications which he never exploited successfully but never entirely abandoned. The language had its place in the curricula of the "trilingual colleges" founded by Cardinal Ximenes at Alcala in 1502, at Oxford by Bishop Fox in 1516, and at Louvain by Erasmus' friend Jerome Busleyden in 1517.

It is not the ideas which Cuno records that are surprising: it is their connection to Aldus. For the association of such advanced educational ideas with the printer suggests that his ambitions ranged far beyond the world of the press and the rather makeshift statute which he and his friends had drafted around 1502. Even allowing for the extravagance of Cuno's language, it is plain that he was not describing an open-ended group of philological enthusiasts, like Aldus' circle in Venice, or a literary society, like Pontano's Academy or the "Sodalitas Danubiana" of Celtis and Spiesshammer, which Aldus will certainly have known by reputation. This was to be an educational institution, with a salaried staff and its own press, relying on royal patronage, not the chances of the market. A number of contemporaries dreamed similar dreams: Ximenes actually realised them at Alcala, where the trilingual college printed the first Bible in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Celtis came fairly close in 1501, when he persuaded Maximilian to establish a "Poets' College" to provide instruction in literature and mathematics within the Arts Faculty of the University of Vienna. We have no means of knowing if Aldus' plans were connected in any way to those of Celtis: but we do know that Maximilian, on whom the success of both schemes ultimately depended, lacked funds for every project he undertook.

Coming immediately after a year of growing commercial uncertainty, the breakdown of negotiations with the imperial court must have been a severe blow to Aldus and it is not surprising that he suspended business during 1506. By the time of Erasmus' visit in 1508 the very word "academy" had become a household joke: Aldus would utter it in a squeaky, broken voice, hinting that he would be senile if he ever lived to see such an institution. But in fact he never abandoned hope, and the difficulties of his later years seem, if anything, to have given the fleeting ideal an even stronger hold over his mind. Barely a year after the collapse of the German project there are signs that other possibilities were being explored. The evidence is so scarce that it is hard to evaluate precisely, and there is the further problem of guessing how far the various contacts or intermediaries were interested in Aldus' plans, and how far they were pressing their own designs. But Aldus seems to have been ready to explore almost any possibility.

Some of the schemes were obviously unrealistic, and recognised as such at the time. The younger Aldus -- not always a very reliable witness -- mentioned that his grandfather had once received an advantageous offer from the Prince of Salerno, and a letter of July 1507 from another Neapolitan nobleman, the Duke of Atri, gave the printer a clear invitation. The scholarly traditions of the Neapolitan court were extremely strong. But the kingdom was a battleground, and liable to remain so as long as the Franco-Argonese dispute over the crown remained an open issue: the Duke of Atri himself had just returned from a long period of captivity in Spanish hands.

Milan suffered from many of the same drawbacks, though Aldus received from this quarter some far more specific proposals, which he seems to have considered seriously. He visited the city during his travels in 1506, received an enthusiastic welcome, and made a great number of friends including the influential secretary Jacopo Antiquario, a correspondent of both Poliziano and Giorgio Valla, the novelist Matteo Bandello, and various members of the French administration such as Jean Grolier and Jeffroy Charles. Some important plans were apparently laid, and one of the participants remembered them with eager concern in June 1511. About the same time Aldus received a letter from Bandello which, though different in detail and much less precise in form, bears some resemblance to Cuno's report of Aldus' plans in 1505. The contacts, Bandello claimed, were now complete: " ... we may see in our time an Academy which will be the main means of keeping good Greek and Latin literature alive in Italy. ... What shall I say of the vernacular tongue?" In a courtly rather than scholarly circle, Hebrew would have to be sacrificed. But when Aldus drew up a new will on 24 August 1511, he was "about to ride to Milan", and it is natural to connect this journey with Bandello's new initiative.

Events soon swept away whatever plans were developed: the following April brought the Pyrrhic victory of Ravenna, and the position of the French conquerors in Italy collapsed so rapidly that by the end of June Milan was even less secure a centre than Naples had been. The other main prospect, Ferrara, was in hardly better case. It will be remembered that Aldus' connections there reached back for more than thirty years, and that when disaster struck Venice in May 1509 he immediately sought refuge in Ferrara. The humanist tradition of the Este court was strong: literary patronage was given a further stimulus by the vivacious and pleasure-loving duchess Lucretia Borgia, who at some time between 1509 and 1512 made Aldus a spontaneous offer to "establish at your own expense and from your own resources the Academy which I have striven to found for so many years -- if only the times will allow it". In 1513 the printer thanked his patroness warmly, and sang the praises of that notorious lady's bounty and holiness as loudly as any court humanist. But he knew how many uncertainties were covered by that phrase "if only the times will allow it". Ferrara had joined the League of Cambrai, and inflicted a humiliating reverse on the Venetians during the winter of 1509: but when the Pope shifted alliances during the following year, Ferrara clung to the French cause and was left trapped between the vengeance of a resurgent Venice and the ambition of a Pope who regarded the duchy as a rebellious subject state, and placed it under an interdict.

The times allowed little room for the arts of peace. When Aldus drew up his new will in 1511 he made arrangements for his son to be educated by Giambattista Egnazio, but added "I pray God to grant me the favour of taking this task upon myself, and of bringing into being the Academy which I long to create". The prayer, and the circumstances in which it was made, show both the strength of Aldus' ambitions and the pathetic position in which he found himself.

But one possible centre, the papal court, offered a better chance. The negotiations here cannot be treated as a unity, for they extend over six or seven years, cover two pontificates, and appear frigid and feverish by turns. As early as April 1507 the indefatigable Scipio Fortiguerra was beginning to lobby some of the influential cardinals whose patronage he had enjoyed since leaving Venice in the autumn of 1504, and Aldus may have been assessing the usefulness of these preliminary contacts when he made a hurried journey to meet Erasmus in Siena as the Dutchman travelled north in the late summer of 1509. But attention soon began to focus on Angelo Colocci, by now Procurator of the Sacred Penitentiary and a growing force in Roman cultural life. Though the extent of his own learning remains uncertain, he advanced his reputation as a patron by protecting men of letters who were in difficulty or by sponsoring editions of their works, and by the summer of 1510 Fortiguerra reported to Aldus that he had the "greatest confidence" in Colocci's support. But the web of connections was exceedingly fragile. The letter just mentioned, and another written by Colocci himself in May of the following year, show that this promising patron was no more than another intermediary through whom pressure was being applied to the papal secretary Sigismondo Conti. Also, though Colocci wrote of doing everything he could for Aldus, and of bringing the New Academy to Rome as soon as the court reassembled, he spoke in the same letter of a scheme to establish a Greek press in Rome and mentioned the name of Zacharias Callierges. One wonders how large a part Aldus really had in plans which were soon swept aside by the political events of the winter and the following spring.

The revival of the printing company during the second half of 1512 must certainly be linked to the disappointment of these various hopes and the turbulence of the Italian mainland after the Battle of Ravenna. It will be remembered that, commercially, the company staged a remarkable recovery: Aldus' academic dreams recovered as quickly, and for many of the same reasons. Musurus' presence at the School of San Marco brought back the Greek scholarship, the editorial activity, and the copying of manuscripts which had passed from the institution with the death of Giorgio Valla. But Musurus was only the main feature of an intellectual scene that was beginning to show much of the richness and variety of an earlier age. The architect and antiquarian Fra Giocondo of Verona, who had returned from France in 1504 to become military engineer to the Republic of Venice, brought with him extensive notes on the ancient grammarians, the Roman agricultural writers, and the text of Caesar, all of which became available for discussion and publication. Andrea Navagero, one of the young poets from the Paduan circle, was now temporarily set on the career of a professional scholar: working in the closest collusion with Aldus on the texts of Cicero, Quintilian, Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid, he emerged as one of the ablest Latin editors of his time and, as librarian of the Marciana, played a great part in the re-organisation of the long-neglected manuscripts. Egnazio, meanwhile, had been made a public notary: Fra Urbano was still active. That feeling of cooperation between intellectuals and the press which had produced the ebullience of 1502 was making itself felt once again. The circumstances had of course changed greatly, and Aldus did not bring back the old colophon "ex Academia": but a certain buoyancy appears when, in January 1513, he dedicates a volume to Navagero, and wishes Pindar "to come from our Academy under your name".

Some two months later the bellicose Pope Julius II, whose political ambitions had done much to ruin Aldus' hopes and plunge Europe into war, died and was replaced by the younger and more pacific Leo X. For Aldus, as for many other men of letters, it was a moment full of golden visions. Not only was the new pontiff Giovanni dei Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, pupil of Poliziano, Ficino, and Fra Urbano: during his exile after the fall of his brother Piero in 1494 he had made a number of friends in Venice, was known to have a particularly high opinion of the patrician ascetic and one-time poet Vicenzo Querini, and almost immediately appointed Pietro Bembo to contact Musurus about the possibility of establishing a Greek College in Rome, and Aldus seems to have felt that his moment had come at last. A month later the first edition of Plato's complete works appeared, and was dedicated to the Pope with one of the most elaborate addresses ever to come from the Aldine press. Musurus' Greek elegiac poem has been considered one of the finest written since the decline of classical civilization: and Aldus' Latin letter is one of the most comprehensive statements of the humanist position to be found outside Erasmus. He reminded the Pope of his past, and the favours his father had shown to Ficino. He pointed to the opportunities which the future might hold for a Christendom at peace with itself, to the part which learning might play in promoting that peace and in extending Christian knowledge among converted infidels and newly discovered peoples: and finally, he asked the Pope for funds to establish the Academy which would create and propagate the necessary learning.

The Pope's reply -- or failure to reply -- to this eloquent request is a matter of considerable mystery. For the Greek College was founded. It premises were established in Angelo Colocci's house on the Quirinal, its organiser was Janus Lascaris, and its first professor Musurus. The institution itself had an educational aim with which Aldus would certainly have sympathised: ten or more young Greek expatriates were to be instructed in both their own language and Latin as a nucleus of teachers from whom the proper pronunciation and use of Greek could be learned. If it were not for the fact that he never received any further communication on the subject, we might fairly consider this College the realisation of all Aldus' dreams, especially when we find that it had its own press. But the press was run by Aldus' old colleague and competitor, Zacharias Callierges. It must be admitted that we know relatively little about the preparatory stages of the Greek College, that Callierges' first Roman edition, the Pindar of August 1515, appeared more than six months after Aldus' death, and that Aldus' apparent failure to sway the Pope may simply have been an accident of time.

But even before Bembo wrote to Musurus, Paolo Bombasio had suspected that Aldus and all non-Greeks would be excluded from the new College, and if there had been the slightest gesture in the printer's direction during the year and a half of life that remained to him after September 1513, some hint of it would surely have survived. Perhaps if Aldus had lived to see the flourishing Greek College dissolved by a Pope who lacked his predecessor's humanist interests, he would have realised that patronage offered no surer support than commercial sense: and if he had known that, within a year of so, Callierges and Lascaris would be dumping their Greek texts in hundreds on an apathetic market, he would have agreed that his own diversified programme of publications had its advantages. But the black despair which shows in the "Ad Herennium" of March 1514 may well derive in part from a final disappointment of his academic dreams.

On the face of it, these dreams would appear to have brought Aldus repeated disappointments, and very few tangible results. A loosely organised system of scholarly exchange and cooperation with the press had existed long before 1500, and it is hard to see how the statute of 1502 could have altered it significantly. In any case, that document seems to have been little more than an improvisation: whatever it brought into being soon passed into oblivion, and greater plans had been afoot even before the statute was drafted. But those plans in their turn all came to nothing. Aldus' appeals to Leo X and Lucretia Borgia, his own will, and even some of the tributes paid to his memory, all speak of the Academy as a vision constantly fading.

However, judging a dream such as this by severely practical standards is misleading. At its face value, the statute of 1502 may seem affected, trivial, even a shade ridiculous. But as a comment on the enthusiasm of the men who drafted it, the statute carries a significance far beyond its mere words. The word "Academy" became a rallying-point for men of many different nations, an illusion perhaps, but still a kind of fiery pillar which gave both purpose and direction to scholarly endeavour. In the dream of an Academy we have the symbolic union of what had been divided worlds -- the world of business and the world of letters -- in the pursuit of an ideal -- the spread of literacy and learning.

END OF CHAPTER FIVE AT PAGE 216.