Aldus Manutius

Aldus Pius Manutius, known in Italian as Aldo Pio Manuzio, lived from around 1449 or 1452 until 6 February 1515. He was an Italian printer and humanist who established the Aldine Press. In his later years, Manutius focused on publishing and spreading rare texts. His dedication to saving Greek manuscripts made him a forward-thinking publisher for his time. He created the small, portable book format called enchiridia, which changed how people read personally and led to the modern paperback. He also helped make punctuation more standard, including the comma and semicolon.

Manutius wanted to offer Greek texts to readers because he felt works by authors like Aristotle and Aristophanes were pure in their original Greek, not altered by translation. Before him, publishers rarely printed Greek volumes, mainly because it was hard to create a standard Greek typeface. He published rare manuscripts in both Greek and Latin. He had typefaces made in Greek and Latin that looked like the humanist handwriting of the era, and these are the earliest known forerunners of italic type. As the Aldine Press became popular, others in Italy quickly copied his innovations, even though he tried to stop piracy of his editions.

Because the Aldine Press earned a reputation for careful, accurate publications, the Dutch philosopher Erasmus asked Manutius to print his translations of *Iphigenia in Aulis*.

As a young man, Manutius studied in Rome to become a humanist scholar. He was friends with Giovanni Pico and tutored Pico’s nephews, Alberto and Leonello Pio, who were lords of Carpi. While tutoring, he published two works for his pupils and their mother. In his late thirties or early forties, he moved to Venice to become a print publisher. There he met Andrea Torresano, and together they founded the Aldine Press.

Manutius is also called "Aldus Manutius the Elder" to set him apart from his grandson, Aldus Manutius the Younger.

**Early life**

Manutius was born near Rome in Bassiano between 1449 and 1452. He grew up in a wealthy family during the Italian Renaissance and was sent to Rome as a youth to become a humanist scholar. In Rome, he studied Latin under Gaspare da Verona and attended lectures by Domizio Calderini in the early 1470s. From 1475 to 1478, he studied Greek in Ferrara with Battista Guarino as his teacher.

Much of Manutius’s early life is not well known. According to John Addington Symonds in the *Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition*, Manutius was granted citizenship of Carpi on 8 March 1480, where he owned property. In 1482, he traveled to Mirandola for a time with his longtime friend and fellow student Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, staying two years to study Greek literature. Pico recommended Manutius to tutor his nephews, Alberto and Leonello Pio, princes of Carpi. In Carpi, Manutius became close with his student Alberto Pio. At the end of the 1480s, he published two works for his pupils and their mother, Caterina Pico—both printed in Venice by Baptista de Tortis: *Musarum Panagyris* with its *Epistola Catherinae Piae* (between March 1487 and March 1491) and the *Paraenesis* (1490).

The families of Giovanni Pico and Alberto Pio helped fund the start of Manutius’s printing press and gave him land in Carpi. Manutius decided Venice was the best place for his work and settled there in 1490. In Venice, he began gathering publishing contracts and met Andrea Torresano, who was also in print publishing. Torresano and Manutius became lifelong business partners. For their first contract, Manutius hired Torresano to print the first edition of his Latin grammar book, the *Institutiones grammaticae*, published on 9 March 1493.

**Aldine Press**

The Aldine Press was founded in 1494, and its first publication came out in March 1495: *Erotemata cum interpretatione Latina* by Constantine Lascaris. Andrea Torresano and Pier Francesco Barbarigo, nephew of Doge Agostino Barbarigo, each owned fifty percent of the press. From Torresano’s share, Manutius was given one-fifth, but it is unclear whether this meant ten percent of the Aldine Press or just one-fifth of Torresano’s portion.

The press’s first major achievement was a five-volume folio edition of Aristotle. Manutius began the first volume in 1495, and the other four volumes were published together in 1497 and 1498. The Aldine Press produced nine comedies of Aristophanes in 1498, and Pietro Bembo edited Petrarch’s poems, which Manutius published in July 1501. Besides editing Greek manuscripts, Manutius corrected and improved texts originally printed in Florence, Rome, and Milan.

The Second Italian War paused the press for a time. During this period, Desiderius Erasmus asked Manutius to publish his translations of *Hecuba* and *Iphigenia in Aulis* through the Aldine Press. Erasmus’s original letter to Manutius asked about the printer’s planned projects: a Greek Plato and a polyglot bible. Through letters, they reached an agreement. In December 1507, the Aldine Press published *Iphigenia in Aulis* as an 80-page octavo with Erasmus’s translation from Greek into Latin. Because this first collaboration was successful and accurate, Manutius agreed to publish the expanded version of Erasmus’s *Adagiorum collectanea*. Erasmus traveled to Venice and spent his first ten months working at the Aldine Press. He lived in Manutius and Torresano’s home, sharing a room with Girolamo Aleandro. Using Manutius’s resources and Greek scholars, Erasmus expanded his collection of proverbs from 819 entries to 3,260 entries.