11/28/2023 0 Comments Pietro bembo de aetna![]() For the first time two Italian vernacular writers were elevated to classical heights, and their works were edited with the same degree of care and scrupulousness as that given to the antique texts. The decision to include two masterpieces of Italian literature in the new octavo series along with works by classical authors was extremely significant. Both works were edited by Bembo who, for the first time in the history of philology, based his editorial work on the collation of different manuscripts rather than on the authority of a single codex, as had previously been the case. The Bembo family also provided manuscripts of Petrarch and Dante that helped bring about Aldus’s next revolutionary publications: pocket-sized editions of Le cose volgari di Messer Francesco Petrarca, published in July 1501, and Dante’s Commedia, untraditionally titled Le Terze rime di Dante, which appeared in August 1502 and whose publication had been announced by the printer in his postscript to Petrarch. Indeed, Bembo can rightly be defined as a sort of alter ego of Manutius, and it was he who showed Aldus a Roman coin with a dolphin and anchor carved on one side, an episode that marks the ‘birth’ of Aldus’s anchor and dolphin device, the most famous emblem in the history of printing. In his address to Bembo in the 1514 edition of Virgil, Aldus remarks how he was inspired to expand its use by the smaller format manuscripts of classical texts in the Bembo library. Prior to this, the format had been used mainly for religious books. The octavo format can in fact be traced back to the Bembo library. The series was inaugurated with the celebrated edition of Virgil, printed in April 1501, soon followed by editions of Horace (May 1501), Juvenal (August 1501), and other Greek and Latin writers. In 1501, Manutius revolutionized book printing with his libri portatiles in formam Enchiridii: classical texts issued in the highly portable octavo size and printed in Griffo’s small italic type that allowed for more compact text that was both highly clear and highly legible. In 1499, Griffo modified the Bembo typeface slightly and it is this modified version that was used in the celebrated Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. ![]() The typeface was created for Manutius by Francesco Griffo (1450-1518), who was also responsible for creating the famous Aldine italic. Bembo also gave Aldus Lascaris’s Greek grammar, which Aldus published in February of 1495.ĭe Aetna was the first book published by Manutius in the Latin alphabet, and with it he introduced a new roman typeface called, appropriately, Bembo. ![]() ![]() Upon his return from Sicily, Bembo became a member of the Academy, as indeed would Navagero. Manutius had arrived in Venice in 1493 and established a Greek-speaking, intellectual circle that met together and would become the New Academy in 1501. ![]() It was published by Aldus Manutius in 1496 (1495 by the Venetian calendar) and signals the beginning of an extremely important friendship and collaboration between the two men. This provided the basis for his first written work, composed upon his return in 1494: a short account of his stay in Sicily and ascent of Etna written in Latin, in a dialogue format between him and his father. There he met Nicola Bruno (known as Cola), who would become his private secretary and lifelong companion, and he began his literary career by translating an important text of the Greek rhetorical tradition, Gorgias’s Encomium to Helen, into the generally more readable Latin.Īt the end of a strenuous 14-month period of study, Bembo also climbed Mount Etna. Much of Pietro’s studies were thereafter split between Padua and Venice, and he went to Sicily to work on his Greek in 1492. He wanted his son to learn Tuscan, and the move would ultimately have enormous consequences for the Italian language. It was on his second assignment in Florence in 1478 that Bernardo brought along his young son Pietro, then eight years old. ![]()
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