Filippo Cavagni da Lavagna: Editore, tipografo, commerciante a Milano nel Quattrocento (review)

The latest book by Arnaldo Ganda is a highly detailed reconstruction of the life and career of Filippo Cavagni da Lavagna, a bookseller, merchant, goldsmith, convicted murderer, and possibly the prototypographer of Milan. Like the numerous studies on the early Milanese book trade published by the author over the last three decades, this volume is based on extensive archival documentation, painstakingly collected and diligently interpreted. It offers a wealth of new information, and it represents a valuable contribution to the scholarship on fifteenth-century printing in Italy.

Ganda draws most of his evidence from material in the state archives at Milan and Pavia. In the six chapters that compose the main section of the book, we learn that Filippo was born in 1434 or 1435 into a family of prosperous merchants based in Milan but originally from the town of Lavagna in the Lodigiano. Although the Cavagni’s main commercial activity was the sale of foodstuffs, candles, and tallow, Filippo was apprenticed in 1458 to the goldsmith Gottardo Crivelli, who taught him the art of niello engraving. In 1465, he and an accomplice were found guilty of murdering a fellow citizen and were banished from the Duchy of Milan. We do not know where he spent the years of his exile, but it is clear that he learned the art of printing during this period, for he set up a significant printing operation soon after his return to the Lombard capital in late 1469 or 1470. The production of his press in the 1470s and 1480s was typical of the printing houses of the period: it included a number of medical and legal textbooks as well as the odd devotional and chivalric title, but it was heavily weighed in favor of classical and humanist texts in Latin. As a printer, Filippo often worked on commission, but he also undertook editions that he financed entirely on his own or in association with others. Among his partners in publishing ventures were the humanist Cola Montano and the publishers Pietro Antonio Castiglione and Marco Roma; among the printers they employed — when Filippo did not perform this role — were Leonard Pachel, Ulrich Scinzenzeler, and Cristoforo Valdarfer. As is to be expected, Filippo was active as a bookseller, with operations in Milan and Pavia and an agent in the Monferrato. In fact, by late 1480s the sale of books had all but replaced his printing and publishing activities. He was also involved in commerce of textiles, gold, silver, tin, and copper. Ever the rigorous and exacting scholar, Ganda refrains from making assertions not supported by the available evidence, but he is sensitive to those passages in the documents indicating that his subject was a rather difficult man to deal with, and he allows himself to suggest that Filippo’s character may have been a factor in the chronic financial difficulties that plagued him throughout most of his career. He was certainly not trusted by his brothers or his business partners to manage his own finances. Increasingly beset by debts in the last decade of his life, he died a poor man in 1505.

Ganda considers the question whether Filippo da Lavagna was the first printer in Milan. That honor has traditionally belonged to Antonio Zarotto, who printed the De verborum significatione of Sextus Pompeius Festus in 1471. However, in the colophon of his 1473 edition of Avicenna’s Canones medicinae, Filippo claimed that he had brought the art of printing to the city. The assertion seemed an empty boast until Piero Scapecchi’s discovery in the 1990s of the ownership note “1468 Georgij Antonij Vespucij liber” in a book held by the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence. This is a copy of a quarto edition of the Chronicon of Eusebius of Caesarea, printed by Filippo but undated; Vespucci was the owner of a private...