Scholar, Printer, Publisher
To commemorate the 500th anniversary of the death of the great humanist printer Aldus Manutius, the Chapin Library, in conjunction with Williams Classics professor Edan Dekel, has mounted the exhibition Aldus Manutius: Scholar, Printer, Publisher: A Quincentenary Celebration. This will be on view in the Chapin Gallery (Sawyer Room 406) and the adjacent Archives/Chapin Instruction Gallery through April 24th.
Aldus (as he is familiarly called) was the leading publisher in Renaissance Venice, and his Aldine Press was responsible for issuing the first printed editions of nearly every major classical Greek author. Among his innovations were the development of italic type, the introduction of inexpensive, small-format editions of Greek and Latin authors that could be carried in one’s pocket, and the application of scholarly standards to the editing of the texts Aldus published.
Above all, Aldus strove to make the great works of classical literature, as well as important Italian ones, widely available to readers in the Renaissance. In that respect, he is perhaps the person most responsible for the spread of Greek learning in the sixteenth century and beyond, and he stands at the head of a tradition that established classical texts as one of the foundations of the liberal arts education as we know it to this day. – WGH
Shown is the opening of Vergil’s Aeneid in the “pocket” edition published by Aldus in 1501. A complementary article by Julia Menemo may be read here.