Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [8]
Nicolas Jenson, the master of the Royal Mint at Tours, was sent by King Charles VII of France to Mainz in 1458 to learn the new art of printing. But instead of returning to France, Jenson spent the rest of his life in Venice, where he set up the most famous printing press in the world. He cut superb examples of Roman types, which were imitated all over Europe. From 1490 his presses were rivaled in Venice by those of Aldus Manutius, who not only designed a serviceable Greek type for printing ancient texts in the original, but also designed and popularized a type based on the cursive handwriting used in the fifteenth-century papal chancery. This is characterized by a sharp inclination to the right and exaggerated serifs, and the type based on it became known as italic. Aldus used it first in 1501, uppercase only. Lowercase followed around 1520, and some books were produced entirely in italic. Later it slipped comfortably into its modern role of use for emphasis, contrast and quotation.
The speed at which printing spread, the quality and quantity of the production, and the extraordinary mechanical ingenuity displayed together constituted a kind of industrial revolution. By 1500, less than half a century after the first printed book, there were printing firms in sixty German towns, and Venice alone had 150 presses. German workmen took printing to Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1470, Budapest in Hungary in 1473 and Krakow in Poland in 1474. Printing reached Valencia in Spain in 1473, and a quarter century later, under the patronage of Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, Spain began to produce what remains to this day one of the most remarkable books ever devised, the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, in five languages of antiquity, Hebrew, Syriac, Latin, Greek and Chaldee, the texts running in parallel columns. At the other end of the market, Manutius was producing cheap Latin texts for the use of poor scholars. The spread of printing in the vernacular was one way in which the market expanded. Thus William Caxton, who learned printing in Cologne and ran his first press at Bruges in 1474, brought printing to England in 1476 with an eye to the vernacular readership. Of the ninety or so books he published, seventy-four were in English, of which twenty-two were his own translations.
The printed book trade, then, might be described as the first really efficient and innovative pan-European industry. Advertisements for books began to appear in 1466, and publishers’ catalogs soon afterward. The quantitative impact was overwhelming. Before printing, only the very largest libraries contained as many as six hundred books, and the total number of books in Europe was well under one hundred thousand. By 1500, after forty-five years of the printed book, the total has been calculated at nine million.
Hence, the background to what we call the Renaissance was a cumulative growth and spread of wealth never before experienced in world history and the rise of a society in which intermediate technology was becoming the norm, producing in due course a startling revolution in the way words were published and distributed. But this does not mean the Renaissance was an economic, let alone a technological, event. Without economic and technological developments it could not have taken the form it did, and so it has been necessary to describe the material background first. But it must be grasped that the Renaissance was primarily a human event, propelled forward by a number of individuals of outstanding talent, which in some cases amounted to genius. We turn now to the human foreground, and in the first place to the writers.
PART 2
THE RENAISSANCE IN LITERATURE AND SCHOLARSHIP
The Renaissance was the work of individuals, and in a sense it was about individualism. And the first and greatest of those individuals was Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Dante was a Florentine, appropriately because Florence played a more important role in the Renaissance than any other city. He also embodies the central paradox of the Renaissance: