A Curator s Perspective: Merchants of Print: from Venice to Manchester January July 2015

Transcription

1 A Curator s Perspective: Merchants of Print: from Venice to Manchester January July 2015 JULIANNE SIMPSON, COLLECTIONS MANAGER, EARLY PRINTED BOOKS AND MAPS, JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY; STEPHEN J. MILNER, SERENA PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN, DEPARTMENT OF ITALIAN; CAROLINE CHECKLEY-SCOTT, CONSERVATION MANAGER, JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER The year 2015 marked the 500th anniversary of the death of Aldus Manutius (c ), the world s most famous commercial printer who was responsible, among other innovations, for introducing the world to italic type; pioneering the secular pocket book format we now take for granted (the so-called libelli portatiles); and bringing the Greek and Roman classics to the masses through the new technology of print. The exhibition Merchants of Print: from Venice to Manchester presents volumes drawn from the world class Aldine collection housed at the John Rylands Library and celebrates the legacy of Aldus as an innovative scholar-businessman who founded the Aldine Press in Venice at the end of the fifteenth century. From the outset, Aldus s texts were sought after by book collectors from across Europe and the exhibition seeks to tell the story of how such a rich collection was amassed in a city more famous for its textiles than its texts and more associated with mills than libraries. Since its inception, the John Rylands Library has held a discrete collection of Aldines that were originally housed in an octagonal room in one of the towers at the front of the building. This collection arrived as part of the outstanding library of George John, 2nd Earl Spencer ( ), which was purchased from his grandson, the 5th Earl, by Enriqueta Rylands in After the construction of the new extension to the Rylands in 2007, the Spencer Aldines along with the incunabula and other significant collections, were moved into the modern store and in 2010, following a bequest from Professor Douglas Farnie, the library began a project to reorganise, rehouse and re-catalogue all of the Aldines held in the Rylands. This involved uniting the Spencer copies with the significant Aldine collection gifted to Owen s College in 1901 by Professor Richard Copley Christie, which was especially rich in Greek texts and Aldine counterfeit editions. To these were added numerous copies located in other smaller historic collections gifted to the library over more than a century. The result of this work has been the formation of a distinct Rylands Aldine collection of just over 2,000 volumes representing some 1,200 separate editions. The aim of the exhibition, therefore, is not only to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Aldus s death, but also to present this newly constituted Rylands Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Volume 91, No. 2 (Autumn 2015), pp , published by Manchester University Press.

2 78 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY Aldine collection and celebrate the end of almost five years work of reorganisation and re-cataloguing following the arrangement used by the published catalogue of the Ahmanson-Murphy Aldine Collection at UCLA. 1 In collaboration with the Collection Care team, minor repairs have been completed where necessary and the books boxed by our Preservation Team. Each item now has a detailed description on the library catalogue, following internationally recognised standards for rare books cataloguing, including information on editors, translators, inscriptions, annotations, previous owners, bindings and reference to the standard bibliographies from Renouard in the early nineteenth century to the most recent descriptive catalogues. 2 The systematic re-cataloguing to include binding and provenance information for all copies has revealed more clearly than ever the significance of the Aldine collection at Manchester both in terms of its quality and depth and especially in relation to the existence of multiple copies of editions. The collection has always been inclusive, going beyond editions printed by Aldus, his son Paolo, and grandson Aldus, to include other editions associated with the press (such as those by his in-laws, the Torresani) and also editions identified as counterfeits. This particular strength provides a major resource for the study of the distribution and impact of a single press, and offers a microcosm for the history of collecting and book collectors over five centuries. Attention in the past has mostly been focused on the collection s high spots, of which there are many, including the beautifully decorated early classical texts attributed to Benedetto Bordone (Figure 1). One example is the first Italian work published in the Aldine octavo series Le cose volgari by Petrarch in The collection includes two copies, one (JRL 20957) displays the arms of the editor, Pietro Bembo, and also has a long trail of provenance almost complete from publication to the present day. It moved from Venice to Vienna, Leiden, Rome, Naples, London, Northamptonshire and finally to Manchester. The second copy (JRL 15442) has the arms of the Barbarigo family, who had provided financial support for the press. Lord Spencer briefly owned another copy decorated by his wife Lavinia with a gem engraved by Nathaniel Marchant. He presented this to his fellow bibliophile Thomas Grenville in 1796 and it is now in the British Library. Significantly, all three are parchment copies. The benefits of re-visiting catalogue entries for editions soon became apparent. In cross-checking marked-up sales catalogues with existing volumes, we were able to confirm that the Spencer copy of Lorenzo de Medici s Poesie volgari of 1554 (JRL Spencer 16855) (Figure 2) was in fact the copy originally owned by the Liverpudlian lawyer and Italophile William Roscoe ( ) whose reputation as a historical biographer was based upon his magisterial Life of Lorenzo de Medici published in 1796, and that Roscoe had himself purchased the text from the famous Crevenna sale of Yet the expansion of the collection to include Aldines outside the core holdings gathered together by Spencer and Christie has also provided the opportunity to highlight other collectors and draw attention to the literary, religious and

3 A CURATOR S PERSPECTIVE 79 Figure 1 Juvenal and Persius, Satires. Aldus Manutius, 1501 (JRL Spencer 8666). Decoration attributed to Benedetto Bordone.

4 80 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY Figure 2 Lorenzo de Medici, Poesie volgari. Paulus Manutius, 1554 (JRL Spencer 16855). Formerly owned by William Roscoe.

5 A CURATOR S PERSPECTIVE 81 educational cultures of nineteenth-century Manchester that drew Aldines to the city long before Mrs Rylands purchased Spencer s library. Parallels between the trading empire of the Renaissance Venetian republic and the merchant cities of the industrial revolution were often made and Manchester s civic architecture is liberally sprinkled with Venetian gothic buildings, so it came as no surprise that such associations extended to the mechanical production and circulation of printed books. It is to the members of the Manchester Medical Society founded in 1843 that we owe copies of the 1528 edition of De medicina by Aulus Cornelius Celsus (JRL R213234) and the 1526 Omnia opera of Hippocrates (JRL R213246). Manchester s first Church of England bishop, Dr James Prince Lee, bequeathed a number of Aldines in 1871 as part of his gift to help establish the library of Owen s College, including a 1518 Biblia sacrae (JRL ) and a 1488 edition of the letters of St Jerome published by Torresani (JRL ). Similarly, the analysis of the provenance data has shed light on lesser-known Mancunian contemporaries of Mrs Rylands such as Alderman Joseph Thompson (d. 1910) a cotton manufacturer and bibliophile who gifted a copy of the 1498 Comoediae novem of Aristophanes (JRL R213277) to the Lancashire Independent College and Dr David Lloyd Roberts ( ) a lecturer in clinical midwifery at Owen s College who bequeathed a portion of his collection to the Rylands, including a number of Aldines some of which, like the 1502 Aldine edition of Dante s Comedy (JRL R52150) carry fake Grolier bindings. The gift of over 2,600 early printed books to the Rylands by Walter Llewellyn Bullock, Serena Professor of Italian at Manchester between , added further to the Aldine holdings including a fine 1515 edition of Dante s Comedy (JRL R213743) gifted to him by his Chicago friend Graham Aldis, who had studied with Bullock at Harvard. In the recent past the Aldine collection at the Rylands received a setback with the much discussed Sotheby s auction of April 1988 that saw a number of prize copies leave the collection. Several of these copies featured at the Grolier Club s exhibition Aldus Manutius: A Legacy More Lasting Than Bronze having passed into the collection of leading American Aldine collectors. 3 More recently, however, there has been renewed investment in the collection and we will continue to add to the collection when we can, attempting to fill the gaps of missing editions and variant issues a very difficult task, but mostly focusing on adding other interesting copies. The 1541 copy of Baldassare Castiglione s Il cortegiano (JRL R220959), for example, was purchased at the Kenneth Rapoport sale in New York in October 2012 and contains extensive annotations in Latin, Greek and Italian by the courtier Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton ( ). From 1667 to 1873 it was in the library of the Royal Society and more recently the book was owned by the Oxford physician and bibliophile Bent Juel-Jensen. Such purchases have the additional benefit of enhancing the collection-led teaching of undergraduate units allowing students following courses on the Italian Renaissance to attend close-up sessions at the library and trace the production history and early use of set texts, adding a valuable dimension to their learning. The same applies to opening up the research potential of the collection. Already

6 82 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY the project and exhibition have led to new research on collectors, bindings and the extremely rare editions such as the group of texts published by Paolo Manuzio for the Accademia Veneziana. One particular focus of research has seen the coming together of humanists and scientists to investigate the Aldines printed on parchment. The Rylands collection boasts an impressive collection of over thirty copies printed on animal skin and with support from the John Rylands Research Institute we were able to launch a project entitled Venetian vellum to work in conjunction with a team from the University of York to deploy an innovative non-invasive sampling technique to secure animal species identification. Initial findings were particularly interesting and the hope is to take the work further to identify animal DNA, moving the material history of the book in wholly new directions. Another benefit of the anniversary year and the pre-eminence of the Rylands Aldine collection has been our ability to participate in international events centred on Aldus and the history of the press, and present the work undertaken with the collection at conferences and seminars at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, the Warburg Institute in London and the Worth Library in Dublin. In addition, we have been able to organise an Aldus week during the annual Montefiascone Conservation Project summer school in August where classes will be given over to the making of a Fountainbleau Aldine replete with alla greca binding. 4 Our ambition for the exhibition and related activities is that they will serve as a catalyst for further work on this internationally important resource beyond the specific timeframe of the event itself and enable a continued engagement with a wider public audience. Erasmus is often quoted as crediting Aldus with creating a library without walls by making individual texts available to a general readership at an affordable price. 5 In the current digital age, we have sought to continue in this same spirit of publication through multiple media. Since its launch in April 2014, the Manutius in Manchester blog ( wordpress.com) has received over 16,000 viewings from over seventy countries worldwide, and over 4,000 exhibition pamphlets have been distributed to visitors and participants in the curatorial tours and education events run by the library s Education Team. Special viewings have been undertaken for visitors and scholars from Japan, Singapore, Italy, France, Egypt and America and a short film will ensure a heritage presence for the exhibition itself and continue to showcase the work which has been done to consolidate and make the collection even more accessible. In this respect we hope to continue Aldus s own knowledge transfer project by using new technologies to bring learning and delight to as wide an audience as possible. Notes 1 Paul G. Naiditch and Sue A. Kaplan (eds), A Catalogue of the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection at UCLA (Los Angeles, University of California, Los Angeles, ). 2 Antoine-Augustin Renouard, Annales de l imprimerie des Alde, 3rd edn (Paris, 1834; reprinted New Castle, Oak Knoll, 1991).

7 A CURATOR S PERSPECTIVE 83 3 The exhibition was curated by G. Scott Clemons and H. George Fletcher and ran from 25 February to 25 April 2015 at the Grolier Club, New York. 4 The study-day The Afterlife of Aldus: Posthumous Fame, Collectors, and the Book Trade was held at the Warburg Institute, University of London, 6 February The international conference Aldo Manuzio e la costruzione del mito was held at the Università Ca Foscari and the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, February The 2015 annual online exhibition of the Edward Worth Library entitled Aldines at the Worth Library can be accessed at 5 Martin Lowry, The Manutius Publicity Campaign, in David S. Zeidberg (ed.), Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture (Florence, Olschki, 1998), pp (p. 31).