ERHARD RATDOLT RENAISSANCE TYPOGRAPHER. John D. Boardley

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1 ERHARD RATDOLT RENAISSANCE TYPOGRAPHER John D. Boardley 3

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3 WAKING THE DEAD I have always been fascinated by origins, in how ideas and things actually get started, whether that be the origins of words, ideas, the universe, or how a particular letterform or style of script came to be. My laterdeveloped interest in typography has at its kernel that same fascination with origins. The origins of typography and of printing with movable type is a story well-known and often told, and I need not repeat it at length here. For those even casually acquainted with the European incunabula, Johann Gutenberg, Nicholas Jenson, and the great printer, publisher and scholar, Aldus Manutius are familiar names. Gutenberg is credited with the invention of a new mode of production and for producing the very first printed books from the 1450s; Jenson for his significant contribution to the aesthetic development of the roman typeface; and Aldus, for the first italic type, his early Greek types (both with Francesco Griffo), and for his libelli portatiles, small octavo-format classics. This trinity of characters from Germany, France, and Italy dominate many a preliminary history of the first decades of the printed book, and deservedly so. But my work is devoted to a fourth protagonist who deserves the company of our aforementioned prototypographers. Erhard Ratdolt ( /8) has only once been the subject of a detailed study and that by Gilbert Redgrave in And while Redgrave s book is an excellent survey of Ratdolt s work and innovations, it focuses, as is explicit in its title, only on his work in Venice between 1476 and Ratdolt left quite an impression on Redgrave, for he describes him as one of the most wonderful masters of the art of printing during the fifteenth century. Little is known about Ratdolt beyond the artifacts books and broadsides that he bequeathed to us, and no portrait 1 Erhard Ratdolt and his Work at Venice, Redgrave (1894). 5

4 of him exists. That more record of Ratdolt s personal life has not survived is a great pity. However, in the nineteenth century, hitherto hidden away for the best part of 500 years was a document, a memorandum penned by Ratdolt himself the only one in existence. It reveals little about his work, but does provide some insight into his personal life, including a spell in Mainz as a teenager, and records details of his two marriages and the births of his children and grandchildren. Besides this short three-page memorandum, official tax records, and scant details in his colophons and title-pages, little else is known about Ratdolt the man. However, in surveying his work we can begin to assemble a picture of a passionate craftsman, an astute businessman and, above all, a great innovator. Half a millennium hence and many of his innovations, owing to their present-day universal adoption, might not appear particularly revolutionary or even innovative, but I hope that by the end of this short book, you will come to agree that Ratdolt is indeed one of history s greatest printer-typographers. For more than a thousand years, from the introduction of the codex, through the long Dark Ages to the close of the Medieval period, books were handwritten and relatively scarce. The fifteenth century revolutionized the making and distribution of books and the incunabula is punctuated by some remarkable typographic innovations, a good number of them attributable to Ratdolt. Ernst Goldschmidt wrote of him: Of all the fifteenth-century printers Ratdolt stands out as the most inventive experimenter and as the originator of a greater number of technical innovations than any other. His whole career is distinguished by his constant willingness to tackle any new technical printing problem that presented itself. This book began as little more than a comprehensive bibliography of Ratdolt s books and printed ephemera and a detailed conspectus of his typefaces, in addition to a survey of his most notable innovations. But my account of 6

5 his work was missing context, wanting the stories and Renaissance la vie quotidienne that might illuminate both the man and the significance of his typographic innovations. Therefore, I shall endeavor to tell Ratdolt s story in the context of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe. Besides my fascination with Ratdolt, the fifteenth century is for me one of the most enthralling in Pre-Modern history. And not only because it signals the beginning of Western typography and the subsequent transition from manuscript to printed book, but too because of the cultural, political, religious, and economic changes that surround it. At the beginning of Ratdolt s career in Venice, the Renaissance is in full swing, Europe is on the cusp of a cultural and spiritual upheaval. The fifteenth century marks the beginning of a new Europe, a modern Europe unshackling itself from the Middle Ages; an age of diplomacy, of intellectual inquiry and artistic expression. A population that is finally recovering from the decimation wrought by the catastrophic Black Death in the fourteenth century, the fifteenth is one of innovation and re-invigoration, of renaissance. This is the era of inventors and artists like Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, and Dürer; of architects like Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Palladio; of explorers Vasco da Gama and Columbus; of mathematicians and astronomers like Regiomontanus, Copernicus, Toscanelli, and Pacioli. Thus new continents, heretofore the stuff of hearsay and fable, were explored and exploited, antiquity rediscovered, celebrated, and re-assimilated. In astronomy the heavens too were re-imagined and reshaped from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican. Back on earth Christendom stood on the brink of a Reformation that would tear Europe asunder. We witness too the death throes of feudalism, increasing literacy rates, the expansion of banking and commerce and the growth of cities and city states. Planted in Florence, the seed of Renaissance bloomed throughout Europe. Its ideas and its achievements ran like an ineradicable dye through the fabric of Europe, wrote historian, J. H. Plumb. But that dye was often crimson and the most noble aspects of the Renaissance should not blind us to its 7

6 concomitant horrors: its despots, its enthusiastic bloodletting, pestilences and internecine wars. In Italy, Venice was at war with Milan and Genoa, Milan with Naples, Rome with Florence, Florence with Pisa; Perugia a near permanent bloodbath of the most unimaginable deeds of cruelty and blood lust. In France and England the final episodes of the Hundred Years War; Bohemia at war with Hungary; in Germany feuding archbishops and the subsequent Sack of Mainz. Add to this the constant and real threat of the Ottomans poised to the east, and a pervasive atmosphere of brutality, murder, corruption and frequent assassinations. These events are an inseparable facet of the Janus-faced Renaissance: the cruelty, self-indulgence and bellicosity of its patricians, politicians and Popes who at the same time were generous and enthusiastic patrons of the arts and sciences. Their patrimony a violent and sublime coalescence of blood and art. My interest in Ratdolt began as admiration for his books, his mise en page, his typography and his numerous beautiful and charming woodcut borders and initials. But the more I learned of this incunable printer, the more I came to admire his innovations and his enthusiastic willingness to tackle even the most difficult of typographic challenges. But to concern ourselves only with the form of the book or its typography to pass over their contents is to do their authors, editors, translators and artists a great disservice and to reduce the printer s role to one who presses ink into paper and vellum. Each and every book, beyond its substrate and ink the artefact has its own pre-history. With every edition and with every copy issued from the printing press its history is prolonged and amplified. Though space, time and the limits of readers patience do not permit exhaustive descriptions of Ratdolt s more than 270 books and printed ephemera, the only extant and tangible monument to his legacy, a survey of a select number will prove, on the one hand, enlightening from an historical and literary perspective; and second, reveal something of the printers and patrons behind their publication. If much is to be gleaned from the perusal 8

7 of a person s library, then we might also conclude that much can be learned about the printer from those books he chooses to print. When asked why I should devote so much time to researching and writing a book about Ratdolt, I must appropriate the words of the brilliantly curious Ciriaco de Pizzicolli (c ), the Italian Humanist, indefatigable epigrapher and avid collector of antiquities, who, when asked why he should sojourn so far afield to painstakingly catalogue ancient treasures, responded, to wake the dead. Erhard Ratdolt died in his hometown of Augsburg in southern Germany at the close of 1527 or during the course of 1528 at the age of eighty after a career spanning almost five decades. This little book is an attempt to wake the dead, to resurrect the spirit and make permanent the legacy of my favorite Renaissance printer-typographer, Erhard Ratdolt. 9