During my research for an upcoming book on the life and work of German Renaissance typographer Erhard Ratdolt, I spent quite some time looking at the introduction of printing to Italy (Ratdolt worked in Venice from 1476 to 1486, thereafter returning to his native Augsburg. The first printers in Italy were, unsurprisingly, from Germany, and they likely were associated with Gutenberg, Fust and Shoeffer. I won’t go into the details about the introduction of printing to Italy. Suffice to say, in 1465 (perhaps at the close of 1464) Sweynheym and Pannartz arrived at the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco, about 60 km east of Rome. Later in the same year they printed a Latin Grammar (a schoolbook that had been incredibly popular throughout the Middle Ages) by the fourth-century tutor of Jerome, the Roman Grammarian Aelius Donatus, of which, sadly, no copy has survived. Some time before the end of September 1465, they printed Cicero’s De oratore, the first extant book printed on Italian soil. Lastly, before moving their press to Rome, they printed their first dated book (29 October, 1465), Opera by the third-century author, Lactantius.
The page below is from their De oratore:
Photo credit: University of Barcelona.
This is the first Roman type. More accurately it is a semi-Roman or semi-Gothic, the letterforms modeled on contemporary Italian bookhands. The capitals are clearly roman; the N is unusual in that its diagonal stroke meets the right stem quite high — like that found in Rustic capitals (though Rustic capitals are more condensed). In the lowercase there are more than traces of the uncial letter, especially in the form of the h with its toes turned in. The lowercase still retains some of the angularity and lateral compression of the Gothic letter. Though the type is quite dark (and has low contrast), it is tightly spaced and rather condensed, but appears much lighter than a page of Gothic type owing to the relatively long descenders, creating more interlinear white space.
I think it’s quite incredible that that this book and its type has survived, and that just about all of the type we read today owes a debt to typographers like Sweynheym and Pannartz.
Sponsored by H&FJ.
The first book printed in Italy