Bonjour, Nicolas! Here are excerpts from Chapter Six. The rest of the book will be easy to complete in a couple of days. Then I plan to look through all the hundreds of footnotes for miscellaneous information and perhaps read some of the beginning a second time. We have the answer we want somewhere by now. If Piero cannot help us, then we must find the needle in the haystack. More a bit later, as usual. R.

Page 217 -- At the outset of his printing career he [Aldus] dreamed of texts which would be more accurate than the exemplars on which they were based: in terms reminiscent of Poliziano or Merula, he spoke of comparing numerous exemplars, adding nothing and removing nothing, but printing the text in its purest possible form. He wanted his books to be both beautiful and correct, and towards the end of his life admitted that he had never produced an edition which fully satisfied him. Like many of his contemporaries, Aldus longed to raise his own age to the cultural level of the ancient world by restoring the traditions of that world. And in spite of occasional private reservations, his contemporaries publicly acclaimed his efforts.

Page 223 -- Some writers [contemporaries published by Aldus] carried overpowering recommendations in their own pedigree: this was clearly the case with Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, the nephew of the famous Giovanni Pico and a relative of Alberto Pio.

Page 224 -- Now the [Lascaris Grammar] manuscript which Aldus used can be identified almost beyond doubt as No. 1401 in the Greek holdings of the Vatican Library.

[COMMENT: This Lascaris Grammar was published in 1495, six years prior to Philostratus.]

Page 227 -- The manuscript of Lascaris was [Carlo] Bembo's property: the Petrarch, as we know from Lorenzo da Pavia, belonged to a Paduan gentleman who "esteemed it highly", and it is quite possible that the Aldine editors only had time for the most cursory recension.

Page 229 -- As it turned out, Aldus never did publish [Matteo] Bandello's "Novelle". But it is interesting to find him [Aldus] acting as mentor to an author who went on to become one of the most lively and successful Italian writers of the century, and one cannot help wondering how far his underground influence really extended. What part, for example, did he [Aldus] play in the discussions on the future of Italian as a literary language which were led by Pietro Bembo and his circle? We have no means of knowing. But we can be quite sure that Aldus was a much more active and positive force in the literary world of his time than he would ever have admitted.

Pages 229-230 -- In 1468 the Papal legate Cardinal Bessarion, a Greek intellectual who had accepted the re-unification of the Eastern and Western Churches negotiated in 1439, bequeathed his library to the Venetian Republic. The size of the collection was impressive enough. The total of 752 manuscripts bore comparison with many of the princely libraries of the period, and the 482 Greek items formed an exceptionally large proportion. But it was the quality of the material and the terms of the bequest which gave the acquisition its special importance for Venetian cultural life. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bessarion did not equate the value of a manuscript with its appearance and the amount of costly decoration it contained. He claimed in his will to have made a planned effort to save as much of the Greek heritage as he could after the fall of Constantinople, and to have collected "not numerous books, so much as the best books, and individual copies of particular works: and so I brought together almost all the works of the wise men of Greece, especially those which were rare or difficult to find".

His collection did, indeed, cover almost the entire range of classical Greek philosophy, rhetoric, drama, and history. He also gained possession of a number of items which remain almost as precious to the classical heritage today as they were in Bessarion's own time: the famous "Venetus A", a tenth-century manuscript of Homer which is still the main source for the text of the "Iliad" and the early commentaries on it; the slightly later, but hardly less important "Venetus V" of Aristophanes; Planudes' autograph copy of the Anthology which was named after him; the earliest know copy of Athenaeus' "Deipnosophistae".

Cardinal Bessarion's attitude to this treasure was extremely generous. He seems to have been much influenced by that belief in the civilising force of literature which was common among the intellectual liberals of his time, and took particular care in his deed of gift to ensure that the government turned his books into a truly public library. There must be "free access to all who wish to read and study", so that "the minds of many may be enlightened, and the books of use to all, and to posterity". The implications of this for the editorial effort which Aldus set in motion some twenty years later need no further comment. The Biblioteca Marciana offered the best, and most comprehensive range of Greek codices available anywhere in Western Europe at the time. The ideals and intentions of its founder were almost exactly those of Aldus himself. It is not surprising that generations of scholars have written of the Aldine Greek editions as the extension of Bessarion's manuscripts into society at large, and assumed that they were excellent because of the undoubted excellence of the exemplars on which they were based.

[COMMENT: Certainly Cardinal Bessarion cannot be ruled out as a source for the Philostratus manuscript. In fact, he is a very likely candidate for this. We must wait to hear from Piero. At any rate, after this bequest to the Venetian Government, there was trouble in establishing an "official library"; and many of these manuscripts were stolen. A hundred years later, the library was assembled again by recovery of lost property. To continue.]

Pages 231-232 -- This of course does not mean that Aldus could not have used the Greek texts [of Bessarion]. It is quite clear that books were accessible to those with the contacts and the influence to get them, and the leverage which Aldus was able to exert through his partners and friends among the governing class has been one of the constant themes of this study. ... If Aldus never mentions the Marciana, that need not surprise us too much: any material that he did use will almost certainly have been obtained through private contacts, and in contravention of the increasingly restrictive measures which hedged the library round. Such tactics could not be declared publicly.

But incredible though it may seem, all the signs suggest that Aldus never gained access to the Marciana, or at least never learned enough about its contents to use them as a regular and reliable source. Sometimes his own words provide a clue. When editing parts of Theophrastus in 1497, and Quintus of Smyrna in 1505, he lamented his difficulties with "torn and defective" manuscripts which were the only exemplars he could find in the whole of Italy. Clearly, he cannot have been referring to the complete, unstained and carefully written codices of the works concerned which survive to this day in the Marciana, and the texts which he printed prove that he did not know of them. The steadily expanding evidence of textual criticism reinforces the argument time and again. Renouard noticed that Aldus omitted twenty-three letters of Crates, which he could have found in the Marciana, from his collection of Greek letters: detailed research on the texts of Aristophanes, Plutarch, and Athenaeus has proved that he was unable to refer to the vital manuscripts of those authors which Bessarion had collected; and his edition of Bessarion's own "In Calumniatorem Platonis" is perhaps the strangest case of all.

This was one of the instances where Aldus claimed to have had an autograph manuscript brought to him, and the Marciana contains three manuscripts of the relevant work, at least one of which was definitely in the collection at this time and has been corrected by the author. Not only did Aldus fail to use this source: he printed a draft of the work which differed entirely from that presented by the Venetian codices. It has yet to be proved that any of the editions produced during Aldus' lifetime was derived from the manuscripts of Bessarion's collection, and even if it could be so proved the counter-examples would still forbid us to make any general conclusions about the excellence of his editions on the basis of the Marciana and its unquestionable virtues. Even for his Greek editions, Aldus had no special privileges. He had to rely, like his contemporaries, on the open market.

[COMMENT: Well, this seems to contradict the idea that the Marciana collection of Bessarion's manuscripts was a source for Aldus. The mystery deepens.]

A word of caution here -- like most open markets in Venice, the manuscript-market was exceptionally rich, and Aldus' high social connections enabled him to exploit it at every level. Bernardo Bembo, the excellence of whose library has become a recurrent theme in this study, showed much of Bessarion's discernment in his quest for early manuscripts of individual authors.

[COMMENT: This brings me up to page 233, just four pages from the last mention of Philostratus in Lowry's book on page 237. So, I'll transcribe everything for the next 5 pages. Perhaps some clue will emerge.]

Pages 233-138 -- But the lesson is clear enough: the neglect of the Marciana does not by itself mean that material of the same, or comparable quality was not available elsewhere. By a curious paradox, these "private" libraries appear to have been far more accessible to the public than the Marciana, whatever the terms of Bessarion's will and the Senate's undertakings to him. During the 1450s a nobleman named Gerolamo da Molin was operating something very like a lending library, with a brisk circulation of literary, religious and philosophical texts among his fellow-patricians and other interested parties such as students and clerics. Judging from his correspondence with Leoniceno, Valla seems to have been running his library in much the same way in the 1490s: Aldus, as we have seen, played some part in the process and by his involvement in it placed himself strategically at the junction of many other channels of communication. So his ability to find a variety of good material need not be seriously questioned, in spite of his own complaints of insuperable difficulties: the real problem is to find what use he made of his opportunities.

Sometimes, the opportunities themselves were poor and Aldus frankly admitted it. If his texts of Theophrastus and Quintus of Smyrna were each based on a single damaged exemplar, we should not be surprised to find that the texts are of rather inferior quality: but we should notice that Aldus did not differ from his contemporaries in his willingness to base an edition on such narrow authority. His method of work, too, excites occasional suspicion: he is too rushed to eat or wipe his nose; Erasmus is too busy to scratch his ears, and hands the drafted pages of the "Adagia" straight to the compositors; Navagero revised the notoriously difficult text of Quintilian "hurriedly, with little rest", to satisfy the demands of the press-operators. Can there have been time for a proper collation of manuscripts, and had there been much progress since de Bussi revised the text of Silius Italicus in a fortnight? Some of the texts hardly suggest it. The Theocritus of 1495 exists in two separate versions, both based on Accursius' Milanese edition, into which some variants were introduced from an undistinguished manuscript now in the Vatican library. In his first version, Aldus was able to print only thirteen lines of the Idyll "Megara", so he filled out the gap by inserting a section of the earlier "Lament for Bion"; but some time before the press-run was completed another manuscript was produced, two quires reprinted, and the necessary additions and corrections made. This is still the scissors and paste world of Lascaris' Greek Grammar.

Was the process always as haphazard as this, and what different stages did it involve? Occasionally, we are able to follow the editors step by step in the pages of a surviving press-copy -- a manuscript which by the page-markings and corrections in its margins, the smudges and finger-marks on its surface, reveals that it was used actually by the compositors to set up the text. Naturally, there are not many of these specimens: the eleven traced so far account for less than a tenth of Aldus' output, and several of them are no more than bundles of fragments which have been "passed to the printers to be ripped apart, and to die like vipers in the act of birth" -- the fate which Aldus considered normal for an exemplar. But these eleven span the twenty years of his publishing-career from the first volume of Aristotle down to the Hesychius of 1514, and they can supply us with three vital clues to the editorial techniques which were being applied: in the manuscripts themselves we can judge the quality of the material that Aldus and his associates had at their disposal; from the notes and corrections they added we can form an opinion of their philological skills; and from the correspondence between the corrected manuscripts and the printed versions we can see how far they succeeded in transmitting their knowledge through the compositors onto the paper, and so eventually to the public.

Appropriately, the great edition of Aristotle on which Aldus based his bid for fame now offers the best opportunities of reconstructing his method, and since these have recently been exploited to the full by Professor Martin Sicherl, I can confine myself to summarising his arguments, adding a few observations of my own, and referring this specialist to his exhaustive researches. The largest range of material refers to the two volumes of the scientific works of Aristotle and Theophrastus which appeared in 1497. For the "De Historia Animalium" Aldus' main source was a manuscript now classified as Suppl. Graec. No. 212 in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. It was copied by an unidentified scribe at a time which can be dated roughly to 1450-69 from the water-marks in the paper, and carries quire-markings for the section of the third volume that extends from f.b3 up to d30. The text is now fragmentary, and the pages disordered. The codex itself is a composite jumble of extracts which no doubt was part of the debris in the workshop and probably came to Paris, along with several others owned by the Torresani, as a result of purchases made by the French ambassadors during the 1530s. But as a witness to Aristotle's text it is by no means without value. Though a recent copy in Aldus' time, it was derived from the oldest known manuscript of the "De Historia Animalium", the thirteen-century Marcianus Graecus 208 which must still have been in Cardinal Bessarion's possession when the copy was taken.

Corrections were introduced to the printed edition from two other sources, the fourteen-century Vaticanus Graecus 262 and Ambrosianus I 56 supra, which was copied for the wealthy Florentine dilettante Palla Strozzi and presents a different version of the manuscript-tradition. Altogether, the assessment of the Paris manuscript and the text based on it is very evenly balanced. Aldus had some good material to hand, and he tried, as he claimed, to establish the correct tradition by comparing different witnesses. But when we descend to details, his methods and those of his collaborators still seem very arbitrary. In a four-page section of the printed text Sicherl reckons that the Aldine editors corrected their press-copy at proof stage on twenty-five occasions and introduced eleven new errors on their own account. Finally, one cannot help wondering why they failed to use the archetype, Marcianus Graecus 208, which must have been in Venice at the time.

In this case, Aldus worked from manuscripts which were already in existence: in others, he had to multiply the risk of error by having copies specially made for the press. This happened with the botanical works of Theophrastus, whose "single, mutilated exemplar" we have already seen causing their publisher a good deal of anxiety. By a strange irony, both the original and the copy which Aldus had made have survived to provide an illustration of the dangers of working rapidly from inferior material. The original is identified by Sicherl as Graecus 2069 in the Bibliothèque Nationale: it was once the property of Aldus' friend, Niccolo Leoniceno, for whom it appears to have been copied during the 1460s or 1470s; and sure enough, it lacks the end of "De Causius Plantarum". The press-copy, now MS.17 in the Greek collection of the Harvard library, is another composite codex containing various fragments rescued by John Cuno during his stay in Venice: his notes and directions indicate that the contents were already fragmentary and in disorder by 1509. Both from the water-marks and on wider historical grounds, we can probably date this particular section to the early 1490s and to the intense period of preparatory work which is reflected in Leoniceno's letters to Valla. The use of a very ordinary paper, the amount of abbreviation, and the lack of any ornament, all suggest that the unknown scribe worked at speed: so does the fact that he omitted three passages in "De Causis Plantarum", and had to enter them in the margin later. More serious still, the Harvard manuscript makes it quite clear that there were as yet no accepted symbols or procedures for correcting copy before printing. ...

The further we search, the more marked these tendencies become. For the "Metaphysics" of Aristotle, which they printed along with Theophrastus' botanical works, the Aldine editors used what is now Graecus 1848 in the Bibliothèque Nationale. This was evidently a manuscript to which they attached some importance: apart from the quire-markings for the fourth volume, it shows few signs of damage; it was written by Michael Apostolis, one of the best known scribes of the mid-fifteenth century, and since it carries the signature of Gianfrancesco Torresani, Andrea's son and successor, there is every likelihood that it once formed part of a family- or company-collection before passing into the French Royal Library. But the manuscript was still used in a very free and easy fashion by the editors: Sicherl notes seventeen doubtful passages in the first three chapters of the work where the Aldine agrees with its exemplar, and eleven where it differs, six of these being simple omissions. Once again, we have the obvious hints of haphazard conjecture and careless presswork.

[COMMENT: Does this Bibliothèque Nationale or this French Royal Library still exist? Lowry seems to imply that they do and that these old manuscripts are still preserved today. I wonder if either library also houses the original manuscript of Philostratus, which was used by Aldus. <?> Incidentally, I have now reached page 237, containing the mention of the "love letters" by Philostratus. And does this next reference to "Nichomachean Ethics" somehow refer to the "Nycthemeron"?]

By the time we reach the "Nichomachean Ethics", which formed part of the final volume and were printed in 1498 [Aldus' Aristotle Volume V], the evidence becomes absolutely damning. We have in this case only a short section of the exemplar for comparison: seven folios of the Harvard manuscript, which seem to have been copied in the later 1480s by the Cretan scribe Thomas Bitzimanos and cover the early chapters of the first book up to 1,102 a 14 [sic]. But even within this narrow compass Sicherl has detected 112 places where the Aldine deviates from the manuscript: twenty of these appear to be simple printing errors; the remains are random corrections introduced from other authorities or editors' emendations jotted down at proof-stage. It is clear that this text, and those of several minor works such as the pseudo-Aristotelian "De Physionomia" and Porphyrius' "Eisagoge", of which the Harvard manuscript also preserves a few fragments, are hopelessly and incurably contaminated. Our conclusion must be that, at this stage of its development, Aldine editorship was more like an academic wheel of fortune than a controlled system of scholarly criticism: when the editors had good material, they generally had it by accident; they had little or no idea of how to use it; and they still had a lot to learn about communicating with their press-operators. The availability of Greek scribes in Venice, long considered as one of Aldus' main advantages, seems to have served mainly to flood the market with inferior copies.

[COMMENT: That paragraph throws some doubt on the /total/ authenticity of everything passing through Aldus, implying Philostratus as well. So, /if/ there was any "tampering" with Philostratus, I would place this "tampering" at the time of the "editing" by Aldus, rather than earlier. On the other hand, the Philostratus book is so long, so clean and so complete, it makes me think that this was a "good-quality" manuscript from which Aldus worked, with very little editorial work involved. Note the next paragraph.]

Similar conclusions are suggested by fragments of a manuscript which was used as copy for the "Epistolarum Graecarum Collectio" of 1499 and is now Suppl. Graecum 924 in the Bibliothèque Nationale. This is another composite codex, whose history appears to be rather different from that of its counterparts in Paris: the opening folio bears the inscription "Beati Rhenani sum", and since Beatus Rhenanus studied under Cuno in Basel, it is likely that we have here another of the irrepressible Dominican's gleanings from his years in Venice and Padua. The second component of the manuscript, covering only folios 33r to 39v, is the most important for the present enquiry. It carries an incomplete text of thirty-two amorous letters of Philostratus, copied rather hurriedly on a paper which can be dated from its five-petaled watermark to 1499 and which must therefore suggest that this apograph was taken specifically for the Aldine edition. The pages are marked for quire u of this edition, and there is a note at the beginning directing the compositors to set the heading in capital letters. Beyond this, the editorial instructions are very scanty. Only six passages have been glossed, one with no more than a Latin note to identify the festival of the goddess Flora. there is the same failure to distinguish between emendations and observations which we have already seen Theophrastus, the same inconsistency in transferring them into print, and the same tendency to compound errors as a result.

[COMMENT: And the rest of this chapter appears to be rather irrelevant to our personal inquiry. It contains lots of details about people and editors and libraries, some of which I'll transcribe; but as far as I am concerned, the ultimate source of the Philostratus material (including Lives of the Sophists) has already been discussed in connection with other matters in this book. We must now wait for Piero's answer. As for these "amorous letters" of Philostratus, I have no idea at all of what they refer to, or where these were published amongst all the 130 books printed by Aldus. Apparently, though, they still exist at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. You should check on it.]

Pages 243-244 -- In their more flamboyant moments Aldus and his colleagues probably exaggerated the extent of the help they received from "Poles and Hungarians" who sent valuable manuscripts from long-lost "castles in the land of the Dacians". In or outside Italy, intellectual cooperation was a constant gamble, subject to both the misfortunes and the misunderstandings that we have already met. The trick was to spread the stakes widely enough to be sure of drawing some winners. Sometimes the editors failed to recognise their own luck. Early in 1500, more than a year before this first octavo was published, Aldus submitted some printed sheets of Virgil to the judgement of his Florentine friends. Pietro Ricci was enthusiastic: he wrote back to approve the whole scheme, and to offer corrections of his own to six passages in the "Aeneid". All his suggestions were sound, and there is the strongest possibility that they were based on the fifth-century Codex Mediceus, to which he might well have had access: but his strongest argument for the readings he proposed was that they had been approved by Poliziano or Ermolao Barbaro. He did nothing to show the identity or the importance of his manuscript authority, and it is not entirely surprising that neither in 1501 nor in 1514, when he had the shrewder judgement of Navagero to guide him, did Aldus show any eagerness to incorporate these daring conjectures, as they must have seemed, in his own text.

[COMMENT: First, here again is a reference to "long-lost castles" and their libraries in Dacia, or modern Eastern Europe. Perhaps Aldus /did/ obtain some of his manuscripts from sources in the East that had survived the destruction of the periods of Emperor Theodosius and the later Catholic Inquisition. Who knows? Second, it is obvious from the preceding paragraph that Aldus had contacts in Florence, so the Philostratus manuscript, by the scribe Zanobi Acciaioli, could have been what Aldus used in 1501. Now, pay special attention to the first sentences in the next paragraph. Maybe other of these manuscripts had been "lying neglected" in other places, also!]

In direct and bitter contrast, Aldus often overvalued a relatively modest prize. He was delighted with his exemplar of Prudentius, which had been summoned "all the way from Britain, after lying there neglected for eleven hundred years and more". It is a rather sad comment on the naïve enthusiasms to which even the most serious scholars were still subject. What Aldus received from England was probably an apograph taken from an eleventh-century codex, and there is every indication that he could have done better had he directed his research towards Milan or Rome.

At times, this painstaking quest for what should have been immediately available reaches almost comical proportions. In 1508 and again in 1513, Aldus paid eloquent tributes to Janus Lascaris and his late patron, Lorenzo de'Medici, for their efforts in bringing manuscripts of the Attic orators back from Greece, since the printer realised that in securing access to this material he had made a very lucky coup. By rights, the manuscripts should have been in the private library of the Medici, but the death of Lorenzo, the comparative indifference of Piero, and the collapse of the régime in 1494 had made it possible for Lascaris to retain them indefinitely. So Aldus had every reason to feel pleased -- with Lascaris for preserving the manuscripts, with himself for having sought Lascaris' friendship at an early stage, and with Louis XII for sending the Greek to Venice as his ambassador. But would Aldus have felt so lucky if he had known that copies as good, if not better than these, should have been available to him in Bessarion's library, within a few minutes walk of his own front door?

[COMMENT: Here we are back at the Bessarion Library question again. It is difficult for me to believe Lowry when he writes that Aldus did not use the books of Bessarion, but who knows?]

Pages 247-248 -- The reader who has persevered thus far with this most intricate section of an already intricate study will, I hope, have realised by now that in this field of editorship I have found it almost impossible to be both accurate and fair. It is not just that the material is scarce: the rules have changed. By our standards, there cannot be the slightest doubt that Aldus overstated his claims. He savaged the texts of contemporary authors when he was claiming to follow them letter by letter. He failed completely to recognise the real status and importance of the ancient authorities he professed to revere. Worse still, he expressed his claims in the most persuasive language. So the modern textual critic has two options. He accepts Aldus' claims in general terms, but does not turn to him as a serious authority: or he approaches a text that Aldus once edited, armed with wholly new technological aids and marching ahead of a coherent system of manuscript-catalogues, palaeographical handbooks and accumulated philological expertise. He know Aldus' reputation. He turns to his text, hoping for dazzling feats of scholarship; failing to find them, he treats these primitive efforts with a gigantic condescension, forgetting to ask how far the formidable armoury which he can deploy was prepared by the exchange of information that Aldus and his friends encouraged. Accustomed to think of Aldine editorship as a coherent system, he then finds it easy to condemn that system on the strength of one or two examples. ...

And if Aldus seems naïve in his treatment of Greek and Latin manuscripts, we must remember, first, that information about manuscripts was a good deal harder to come by in 1500 than it is today, and second, that a powerful current of opinion thought that reference to manuscripts implied a lack of confidence in one's own judgement. Aldus clearly never discovered what was in the Marciana [that is, the library that Cardinal Bessarion bequeathed to the Republic of Venice]. ...

An Aldine text is as good as its exemplar, its editor, and the use he made for it, and every case has to be treated independently. Aldus' services to scholarship lay less in improving the quality of texts, though he certainly achieved that in certain cases, than in vastly extending the quantity of material available for general study. And it is only fair to say, in conclusion, that he did not deny his deficiencies.

END OF CHAPTER SIX, AT PAGE 256