Textmanuscripts - Les Enluminures
i + 78 + i folios on paper, octavo, original quire markings printed throughout, complete, watermarks, mountains topped by a cross, similar to Briquet 11806 (Hohentann, 1482; Padua, 1484-88; Treviso, 1485; Venice, 1486, 1490, and 1513), letter A, similar to Briquet 7919 (Venice, 1503) and 7922 (Verona, 1515), collation (A8-G8 H10 a8 b4), printed in Aldine italic type (UCLA, I1 = 80), Roman capitals used for titles and at the beginning of lines, 30 lines per page plus headline and quire mark line (justification 67 x 121 mm), space for six-line and three-line capitals, slight staining in lower right margin throughout, otherwise good condition. Early Venetian brown morocco binding, gilded tooling in three compartments, a knotwork rhombus in the center, floral tooling in top and bottom compartments, surrounded by gilded floral tooling, blind tooling with vine motif in outer border, slight fading in corners, spine in four compartments, slight fading and wear at top and bottom, good condition. Dimensions 156 x 96 mm.
One of Aldus Manutius’s libri portatiles, this edition of Juvenal and Persius presents the text of these Roman satirists in a slim, new octavo format in attractive Italic type. The contemporary Venetian binding with gold tooling attests to the high value an early owner placed in the book. Another early owner entered critical notes and some commentary on the Roman cook, Apicius, into this copy. This book is an excellent example of the combination of craftsmanship and scholarship found in the Aldine octavos of classical authors.
1. Printed in August 1501 in Venice at the workshop of Aldus Manutius as stated on f. b4. This edition of Juvenal and Persius is one of the first classical authors printed by Aldus in octavo format; he began with an edition of Virgil printed in April of 1501. Aldus Manutius (c. 1449/1452 – 1515) began his career as a teacher of grammar but later became the foremost printer in Renaissance Venice. His editions of Greek, Latin, and Italian authors are highly esteemed for their typographical clarity and philological accuracy. Even within Aldus’s lifetime his editions were highly sought after for their inherent worth and as collectors’ items (which gave rise to many counterfeiters). Aldus was particularly successful with his libelli portatiles or enchiridia (portable or pocketbooks), like this book, which present philologically exact texts without a commentary or critical apparatus.
2. An owner in the sixteenth century supplied a brown morocco binding with gold tooling with knot work and floral motifs. The decoration is similar to the Venetian tooling set (‘b’) analyzed by Mazzucco (1994, p. 142) and is broadly comparable to what Anthony Hobson (1989, pp. 60-90) calls the “classical” style of binding.
.Another sixteenth-century owner has left the ex libris, now quite faded, “Ad usu[m] Joannis Baptistae Cas…” on the title page (f. A1). The hand is a rapid cursive and is likely the same as that which left notes on f. H10v and notes on f. F7 and f. a1.
4 .A faded circular stamp from the eighteenth or nineteenth century with the words “Biblioteca Arezzo” visible along with a rearing horse within a shield at the center.
5. The name “Rosenthal” is circled on the front flyleaf. This book belonged to Bernard M. Rosenthal (1920-2017), a bibliophile, scholar, and bookseller, who catalogued early print editions with manuscript annotations and was a revered member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America.
6. Sold to T. Kimball Brooker in New York, 1965. Thomas Kimball Brooker amassed one of the largest private collections of Aldine editions outside of Europe. Brooker joined the Grolier Club in 1962, served as president of the Association Internationale de Bibliophile from 2006 to 2013, and became an important American bibliophile and bibliographer. This book contains Brooker’s bookplate on the front flyleaf.
f. A1v, Aldus Manutius, [dedicatory epistle], incipit, “I. Iuuenalis et A. Persii Satyras, ut commodius…quam digitos unguesque tuos,” f. A1 titlepage;
f. A2-H10, Juvenal, Satires, incipit, “SEMPER EGO AVDITOR tantum? Nunquam ne reponam…Vt laeti phaleris omnes, & torquibus omnes. VENETIIS APVD ALDVM”; f. H10v, blank;
f. a1-b4, Persius, Satires, incipit, “NEC FONTE labra prolui caballino…Inuentus Chrysippe tui finiter acerui”;
f. b4, colophon, [corrigenda to Persius], incipit, “Heliconidasque Pallidamque Pyrenen…& μέλος apud eundem ratione immutabilis”; f. b4v, blank.
The texts of Juvenal and Persius often circulated together in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Both authors’ satires were used as school texts and were widely popular because of their pithy moral sentiments and linguistic difficulty. Persius and Juvenal are the two primary authors of Imperial satire in Rome. Persius (34-62 CE) had a very limited literary output of only six satires due to his early death. He adopts “a tone of anger and isolation in his poetry,” which is also marked by its indebtedness to Stoic philosophy and the forefathers of Imperial satire, Lucilius and Horace (Osgood, 2012, p. 2). His satires remained a common school text from late Antiquity to the Renaissance. Juvenal’s (fl. 110-130 CE) satires were also widely read in schools of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but his brand of satire is more social and ribald. Both authors’ moral sentiments notwithstanding, their satires often digress into offensive and sexually frank language laced heavily with misogyny that has provoked censure and concern from schoolmasters for centuries. Nonetheless, the mixture of wit, comedy, bile, philosophy, and an unflinching gaze upon Imperial Roman society has made both Persius and Juvenal mainstays in the Latin literary canon.
In the course of the fifteenth century Juvenal and Persius secured a central place in Italian humanist education (Black, 2001, pp. 252-54). The editio princeps of Juvenal was printed in Rome by Ulrich Han “not after 1469” (Bühler, 1955, p. 94). Ulrich Han also printed the editio princeps of Persius in Rome in 1469 or 1470 (von Albrecht, 1997, p. 1016). Early print and late manuscript copies of Juvenal and Persius often contain ample commentary and glosses, which attest to their use as school texts. (See, for example, the late manuscript copy of Persius listed on this site, TM 1052.) In contrast, this Aldine edition of Juvenal and Persius is printed in a slim octavo format with no commentary, besides a brief set of corrigenda on f. b4. Aldus himself tells his dedicatee, Scipio Carteromachus Forteguerri (1466-1515), that the satires have been “printed in the smallest format” (f. a1v, “minima forma excusas”), i.e. the Aldine octavo. Aldus printed another text of Juvenal and Persius sometime after 1515, but these copies contain the Aldine device and the addition of Andrea Torresani’s name in the colophon. Since both are absent, this book is a 1501 edition of the text. The USTC lists 68 copies of this edition, not including the present volume. (USTC, no. 762303; UCLA, no. 44; Renouard, 29/6; EDIT16, no. 36104; Aldo Manuzio tipografo, no. 48a; Clemons, Aldus, no. 53; Lugato, no. 48; Kallendorf, no. 39)
A sixteenth-century owner supplied the book with a fine brown morocco binding with gold tooling in knot work and floral motifs. The high quality of the binding attests to the value the owner placed on this book and the tooling aligns with Anthony Hobson’s “classical” style (1989, pp. 60-90). Another early owner added some commentary on the name Apicius, the famed Roman cookbook author, at f. F7 (Juv. Sat. 11.3). In a hasty cursive hand, the annotator writes in Italian about “Questo Apicio e la sua golosità…” (“This Apicius and his gluttony…”) The note discusses how Apicius lost his estate in pursuit of culinary novelties and provides context for Apicius’s relationship to the Roman dining scene. The same hand also enters a correct reading in Persius’s prologue (f. a1), printed in the corrigenda on f. b4.
Adams, H.M. Catalogue of Books Printed on the Continent of Europe, 1501-1600 in Cambridge Libraries, 2 vol., Cambridge, 1967.
Bigliazzi, Luciana, Angela Dillon Bussi, Giancarlo Savino, Piero Scapecchi, eds. Aldo Manuzio tipografo, 1494-1515, Florence, 1994.
Black, Robert. Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge, 2001.
Bühler, Curt F. “The Earliest Editions of Juvenal,” Studies in the Renaissance 2 (1955), pp. 84-95.
Burnhill, Peter. Type Spaces: In-House Norms in the Typography of Aldus Manutius, London, 2003.
Clausen, W. V. ed. A. Persi Flacci et D. Iuni Iuvenalis: Saturae, Oxford, 1992.
Clemons, G. Scott and H. George Fletcher. Aldus Manutius: A Legacy more Lasting than Bronze, New York, 2015.
Clemons, G. Scott. “Aldine Tributaries: Collecting Aldus Manutius in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Afterlife of Aldus: Posthumous Fame, Collectors and the Book Trade, ed. Jill Kraye and Paolo Sachet, London, 2018, pp. 171-79.
Hobson, Anthony. Humanists and Bookbinders: The Origins and Diffusion of the Humanistic Bookbinding 1459-1559 with a Census of Historiated Plaquette and Medallion Bindings of the Renaissance, Cambridge, 1989.
Kallendorf, Craig W. and Maria X. Wells. Aldine Press Books at the Harry Ransom Center The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, 1998.
Lowry, Martin. The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice, Ithaca, NY, 1979.
Lugato, Elisabetta. “Catalogo,” in Aldo Manuzio e l’ambiente veneziano 1494-1515, ed. Susy Marcon and Marino Zorzi, Venice, 1994, pp. 207-48.
Mazzucco, Gabriele. “Legature Rinascimentali di Edizioni di Aldo Manuzio,” in Aldo Manuzio e l’ambiente veneziano 1494-1515, ed. Susy Marcon and Marino Zorzi, Venice, 1994, pp. 135-82.
Marshall, P.K. “Persius,” in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of Latin Classics, ed. L.D. Reynolds, Oxford, 1983, pp. 293-95.
Morgan, M.H. A Bibliography of Persius, Cambridge, 1909.
Needham, Paul. “Aldus Manutius Paper Stocks: The Evidence of Two Uncut Books,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 55.2 (1994), pp. 287-307.
Osgood, Josiah. “Introduction: Persius and Juvenal as Satiric Successors,” in A Companion to Persius and Juvenal, ed. Susanna Braund and Josiah Osgood, Oxford, 2012,pp. 1-16.
Renouard, Antoine-Augustin. Annales de l’Imprimerie des Alde, ou Histoire des trois Manuce et de leurs Éditions, 3rd ed., Paris, 1834.
Tarrant, R.J. “Juvenal,” in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of Latin Classics, ed. L.D. Reynolds, Oxford, 1983, pp. 199-203.
Tinto, Alberto. Il Corsivo nella Tipographia del Cinquecento dai Caratteri Italiani ai Modelli Germanici e Francesi, Milan, 1972.
UCLA = The Aldine Press: Catalogue of the Ahmanson-Murphy Collection of Books by or relating to the Press in the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles Incorporating Works Recorded Elsewhere, Berkeley, CA, 2001.
von Albrecht, Michael. A History of Roman Literature From Livius Andronicus to Boethius, 2 vol., Leiden, 1997.
“Aldus Manutius: A Humanist Printer for Humanist Readers,” Cambridge University Library Exhibition, 2009-2025.
https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/manutius/case/introduction/
EDIT16, CNCE 36104
https://edit16.iccu.sbn.it/titolo/CNCE036104
“In Memoriam: Bernard Rosenthal (1920-2017),” The New Antiquarian, January 23, 2017
https://www.abaa.org/blog/post/in-memoriam-bernard-rosenthal-1920-2017
Piovan, Francesco. “FORTEGUERRI, Scipione,” Dizionario Biographico degli Italiani, 1997
https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/scipione-forteguerri_(Dizionario-Biografico)/
Universal Short Title Catalogue, no. 762303
https://www.ustc.ac.uk/editions/762303
TM 1400
