L’umanesimo in tipografia: Alessandro Minuziano e il genero Leonardo Vegio editori e stampatori (Milano, 1485–1521) by Arnaldo Ganda (review)

The author of this book, who has been well known to the present reviewer for forty years, may safely be said to be Italy’s leading expert in the difficult task of locating, transcribing, and interpreting original archival documents which concern early printing. He has systematically and steadfastly restricted his researches to the one city where he lives: Milan. He has previously published three monographs and twenty or more articles, all on the history of printing in Milan between 1470 and 1550, all based primarily on documents kept in the Archivio di Stato and elsewhere in the city. His first book, I primordi della tipografia Milanese: Antonio Zarotto da Parma (1471–1507) was published in 1984 and is in folio format with 245 pages. Then came Niccolò Gorgonzola, editore e libraio in Milano (1496–1536) in 1988 with 233 pages; and more recently Filippo Cavagni da Lavagna, editore, tipografo, commerciante a Milano nel Quattrocento, 2006, with 289 pages. The volume under review is more than twice the length of the first two, with 495 pages. This is due to the incredible number of documents—202—found by Ganda which concern in one respect or another the ‘humanist’ publisher-printer Alessandro Minuziano, who was born about 1447 at San Severo near Foggia in Apulia. As a young man he moved to Venice, where he taught and studied under the famous humanist Giorgio Merula who died in March 1494. In 1485 he settled in Milan, and by 1486 he had entered the printing trade, although his first appearance in print was not as the printer himself of a rare edition of Horace; instead he paid for this edition which Antonio Zarotto printed on 11 March 1486.

Ganda was never dissuaded from his researches into documents concerning printing, even when Teresa Rogledi Manni (at that time Director of the Soprintendenza Bibliografica of Milan) published her volume La tipografia a Milano nel xv secolo (1980) which lists 1121 Milanese incunabula. It is instructive to compare the following results: Rogledi Manni does not consider Minuziano or his son-in-law Leonardo Vegio as printers, because they did not actually begin to print until the sixteenth century. However Ganda and the British Library as well as the IGI correctly regard Minuziano’s first printed edition as the Luchinus de Aretio of 12 November 1500. Vegio certainly did not begin printing until 1507. The British Library lists five fifteenth-century editions in which Minuziano was involved; Ganda lists nine. The BL has 39 sixteenth-century Minuziano editions; Ganda has 81, followed by twenty doubtful. The BL has nine editions by Leonardo Vegio, Ganda has 30. But of course Ganda is counting the holdings of libraries and collections worldwide: the BL is only one library. Ganda’s long introduction (pp. 1–160) gives every possible detail about Minuziano’s private life: he had three wives, and he died most probably in the autumn of 1531. Ganda’s transcription of no fewer than 202 documents occupies pp. 163–383. This is followed by a list of Minuziano’s letters taken from Cod. AD.XI.31 of the Biblioteca Braidense, Milan (pp. 385–430). The Annals comprise pp. 431–72.

This book, which obviously took many years to compile, shows Arnaldo Ganda as a completely accurate bibliographer: for once, I find in it no misprints, although one becomes rather tired of seeing so often the subject of this monograph referred to as ‘Il nostro personaggio’.