Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice.

The year 1995 was a big one in Aldine studies, for this was the five-hundredth anniversary of the first dated book to be published by the most famous printer of the Italian Renaissance. The quincentennial has been marked by several exhibitions whose catalogues make noteworthy contributions to Aldine scholarship: Susy Marcon and Marino Zorzi, Aldo Manuzio e l'ambiente veneziano, 1494-1515 (Venice, 1994), the catalogue of the exhibition at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana; Robert G. Babcock and Mark L. Sosower, Learning from the Greeks: An Exhibition Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of the Founding of the Aldine Press (New Haven, 1994); Luciana Bigliazzi, Angela Dillon Bussi, Giancarlo Savino, and Piero Scapecchi, Aldo Manuzio tipografo, 1494-1515 (Florence, 1994), from the exhibition at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana; and H. George Fletcher, In Praise of Aldus Manutius: A Quincentenary Exhibition (New York; Los Angeles, 1995). At least one other catalogue, connected to the exhibition at the University of Texas, is in preparation. The British Library, whose Aldine holdings include books illuminated for Isabella d'Este and annotated by Erasmus, held an exhibition as well, but Martin Davies has chosen not to prepare a catalogue of the exhibition itself; instead, he offers a more general introduction to Aldus Manutius and his work, self-standing but with illustrations of many items in the exhibit.

In theory at least, the resulting publication is not intended as an original work of scholarship, but in steering an independent course through the controversies surrounding Aldus and his press, Davies shows that books aimed at stimulating a broader interest in Renaissance studies can maintain high scholarly standards along the way. The major outlines of Aldus's life and career emerge clearly: first the move to Venice, the entrance into the circle of Venetian erudition surrounding Ermolao Barbaro, and the preparations to yoke that erudition to the new art of printing; then the commissioning of Francesco Griffo to carve a new Greek fount, the first efforts to use that fount in Constantine Lascaris's Erotemata, and the solid success attained by the monumental edition of Aristode; and finally the change in direction that financed the continued printing of Greek with the publication of Latin and Italian authors in smaller, more affordable octavo editions. The usual successes are duly noted, including the Greek editiones principes which changed the face of European scholarship, the transferral of the octavo format from devotional to literary texts, and the development of roman and italic type founts, both influential and pleasing. At the same time, Davies also includes a frank discussion of the shortcomings in Aldus's program: the decision to base the Greek fount on a current cursive hand whose illegibility frustrates every modern scholar who has tried to work with it; the high prices of the books and the exaggerated claims to correctness and originality, both of which Aldus's friend Antonio Urceo was complaining about even in his own day; and the grand plans for priming in Hebrew, which led to the stillborn trilingual Bible.

What Davies has accomplished emerges clearly in comparison with the other recent effort to introduce Aldus to a wider audience, Helen Barolini's Aldus and His Dream Book (New York, 1992), reviewed in RQ by Peter S. Graham (48 [1995]: 153-55). As Graham points out, Barolini's reliance on outdated scholarship leads both to questionable conclusions and an overly appreciative tone. Davies gives us a balanced appraisal, reliable enough to serve as an introduction for scholars in other fields as well as the general reader. This is a significant accomplishment, and I commend him for it.

CRAIG KALLENDORF Texas A&M University