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

Ever since he began in 1975 to publish the results of his detailed researches in the Archivio di Stato, Milan, Professor Arnaldo Ganda of the University of Parma has been recognized as the leading authority on fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century printing and publishing in the Lombard capital. He has unearthed literally hundreds of documents bearing upon this subject, and, what is most important considering their appalling handwriting and perpetual abbreviations, he knows how to read and interpret them, as well as to fit them into the ever expanding picture of Milanese bibliography, extracting from them whatever is new and relevant. His volume on Antonio Zarotto, published in 1984 at a time when it was still thought that Zarotto was the first printer in Milan (1471), shows clearly the depth of his scholarship and the accuracy of his presentation. Then there have been a host of articles, each adding something new and important to the story. Victor Scholderer's essay 'Printing at Milan in the Fifteenth Century' (The Library, iv, 7 (1927), 355–75), brilliant though it is, would have been very different if Ganda's work had preceded it.

When Ganda recently discovered that the printer Filippo da Lavagna died on 27 December 1505 in Milan aged seventy (born therefore in 1434 or 1435), the Commune of Comazzo, province of Lodi, of which Lavagna is a frazione, decided that there was a good cause for celebration in 2005 and 2006. A one-day conference was arranged, and Professor Ganda was commissioned to write this book. Although he had so little time to ensure that his volume would be presented to the public in Milan on 16 October 2006, the volume itself shows no sign of hasty composition, for the research was already completed.

After a lengthy account of the Cavagni family and the life of Filippo, Ganda prints all the relevant documents, seventeen in all, dating from 16 December 1469 to 1 July 1490; and then come the annals: forty-four editions printed by Filippo, 1472–90; fourteen editions financed in part or wholly by him, 1475–88; and thirty-four editions unsigned but attributed to him, 1471–94.

But a few years ago a tremendous complication arose, and Ganda was the first to be informed of it. Piero Scapecchi, the incunabulist of the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence, who has almost completed his catalogue of the three thousand or so incunabula in that library, came across a copy of the Chronicon of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea, undated but printed in the types of Filippo da Lavagna. The British Museum had long ago catalogued this book as '[Milan, 1475?]', the date being nothing more than a very rough guess; but the copy in Florence bears a manuscript note reading quite clearly '1468 Georgij Antonij vespucij liber'. The extensive library of Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, uncle of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci, has been studied by a number of scholars; and those to whom Scapecchi showed this inscription (including the late Professor Albinia de la Mare) declared it in their opinion to be genuine.

Did Filippo da Lavagna therefore print a book in 1468, and did printing come to Milan before it came to Venice in 1469? In the colophon of his Avicenna of 12 February 1473 (GW 3115) Filippo da Lavagna boasts that he was the first man to bring the new art of printing into the city of Milan, but is this true? As Victor Scholderer remarked of Allan Stevenson over the dating of the Constance Missal that 'his caution is extreme', so can the same be said of Ganda, who still catalogues the Eusebius as '[1468?]', not simply '1468'. Then there is the case of the Miraculi de la gloriosa verzene Maria, signed by Filippo da Lavagna and dated 19 May 1469. All the authorities have assumed that this date is a mere misprint for 1479. Ganda places...