Book Publishing and the circulation of information

© 2013 Koninklijke Brill NV ISBN 978-90-04-25251-6

A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797

Edited by

Eric R. Dursteler

LEIDEN •• BOSTON2013


CONTENTS

List of Maps and Figures .............................................................................. ixContributors ..................................................................................................... xiiiAcknowledgements ........................................................................................ xxi

Introduction: A Brief Survey of Histories of Venice ............................. 1Eric R. Dursteler

Venice and Its Surroundings ....................................................................... 25Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan

Politics and Constitution .............................................................................. 47Alfredo Viggiano

The Terraferma State ..................................................................................... 85Michael Knapton

Venice’s Maritime Empire in the Early Modern Period ..................... 125Benjamin Arbel

The Venetian Economy ................................................................................. 255Luciano Pezzolo

Industry and Production in the Venetian Terraferma (15th–18th Centuries) ............................................................................... 291Edoardo Demo

Family and SocietyAnna Bellavitis ............................................................................................. 319

Society and the Sexes in the Venetian Republic ................................... 353Anne Jacobson Schutte

Religious LifeCecilia Cristellon and Silvana Seidel Menchi ....................................... 379

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Charity and Confraternities ......................................................................... 421David D’Andrea

Venice and its Minorities ............................................................................. 449Benjamin Ravid

The Anthropology of Venice ....................................................................... 487Edward Muir

Liturgies of Violence: Social Control and Power Relationships in the Republic of Venice between the 16th and 18th Centuries ............................................................................................. 513Claudio Povolo

Wayfarers in Wonderland: The Sexual Worlds of Renaissance Venice Revisited ......................................................................................... 543Guido Ruggiero

The Venetian Intellectual World ................................................................ 571Margaret L. King

Venetian Literature and Publishing .......................................................... 615Linda L. Carroll

Book Publishing and the Circulation of Information .......................... 651Mario Infelise

Education in the Republic of Venice ........................................................ 675Paul F. Grendler

Science and Medicine in Early Modern Venice .................................... 701William Eamon

Venetian Architecture ................................................................................... 743Deborah Howard

Art in Venice, 1400–1600 ............................................................................... 779Wolfgang Wolters

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Venetian Art, 1600–1797 ................................................................................ 811Massimo Favilla, Ruggero Rugolo, and Dulcia Meijers

Music in Venice: A Historigraphical Overview ...................................... 865Jonathan Glixon

Clothing, Fashion, Dress, and Costume in Venice (c.1450–1650) ..... 889Margaret F. Rosenthal

Venetian Language ......................................................................................... 929Ronnie Ferguson

Appendix One: Venetian Doges 1400–1797 ............................................. 959Appendix Two: Patriarchs of Grado 1400–1451 and Patriarchs

of Venice 1451–1800 ................................................................................... 960

Index ................................................................................................................... 961


BOOK PUBLISHING AND THE CIRCULATION OF INFORMATION

Mario Infelise

The Cosmopolitan City

According to Aldo Manuzio, one of the most ingenious publishers in history, Venice in 1498 was “a place more like an entire world than a city.”1 The city he had chosen only a few years earlier to be the center of his publishing activity was then at the height of its wealth and power and could boast the most efffĳicient publishing industry in all of Europe, with dozens of booksellers and printers engaged in a voluminous production. Based on surviving incunables catalogues, the volumes printed in Italy accounted for between 35 and 41 per cent of the total of all printed works at the time, and the Venetians alone contributed 40 per cent of the Italian share. At the time, no other European city enjoyed a comparable production capacity.2

Yet Venice had not been among the fĳirst European cities to introduce the printing press. The fĳirst German printers to venture into Italy had set-tled in destinations already recognized as centers of manuscript produc-tion, perhaps thinking of the printed book as an object altogether similar to the handwritten version. Arnolf Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheim had thus tried their fortunes in the Benedictine monastery of Subiaco in 1461, and shortly thereafter in Rome. But a printing press was not a scriptorium, and the printed book, though it may have born the same text as a manu-script, was proving to be a product of a very diffferent sort. A printshop needed to be connected to a precise economic and cultural context of the sort that soon became clear. It was not until 1469 with the arrival of John of Speyer, likely invited by a group of Venetian patricians of human-ist background, that the publishing industry could truly take offf in the lagoon. The necessary preconditions for its success, however, were already in place: a fĳinancial system with accessible credit, insurance companies

1 Aldo Manuzio described Venice thus in dedicating to Marin Sanudo the 1498 edition of the works of Angelo Poliziano.

2 For bibliographical statistics, see Neil Harris, “Ombre della storia del libro italiano,” in L. Pon and C. Kallendorf, eds., The Book of Venice. Il libro veneziano (Venezia/New Castle, Del., 2008), pp. 454–516.

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able and willing to guarantee risky transactions, ease and frequency of transport and connections to all of Europe and the Mediterranean, and a dynamic and literate local clientele. These circumstances permitted the enduring success of the Venetian book.

Despite the long tradition of studies dedicated to the Venetian pub-lishing industry, with the exception of Horatio F. Brown’s 1891 The Vene-tian Printing Press (London, 1891), a good general account of the topic is still wanting. Indeed, the abundance of documentation conserved in the Venetian archives and libraries and the multiplicity of possible analyti-cal trajectories have long impeded a synthetic treatment of this story of undoubted importance. To this it must be added that scholarly interest for the topic in the 19th and 20th centuries was only intermittent. The last decades of the 19th century saw a particular blossoming of studies of the 15th and 16th centuries. It was part of a renewed interest in re-evaluating the history of the Venetian Republic and founded on the twin pillars of archival research and the publication of particularly important sources, and many were the scholars who took particular interest in the golden age of the Venetian book. It was the period of the great printed collections of the documents conserved in the archives of the Frari, such as those of Fulin, which grouped together the most important offfĳicial documents regarding Venetian publishing up to 1526.3 There were also attempts at synthesis, such as Brown’s above-mentioned volume, which also gave signifĳicant attention to the search for and publication of original sources. Also of note were the great research projects dedicated to the production of single publishers, like that of Salvatore Bongi on the Annali of the Giolito,4 or studies of particular aspects of the book trade, such as the prince of Essling’s early 20th-century monumental work on illustrated editions.5

In general, the late 19th century was a period of extraordinary vitality for studies of the Italian book, a dynamism destined to wane signifĳicantly in the early 1900s. Scholarly interest has picked up again particularly in the last few decades, thanks to a Europe-wide revival of the History of the Book and has followed the paths set by the French historians Luc-ien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, as well as the suggestions of Anglo-

3 Rinaldo Fulin, “Documenti per la storia della tipografĳia veneziana,” Archivio veneto (1881), 84–202, 390–405.

4 Salvatore Bongi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito (Rome, 1890–95).5 Victor Massena Essling [Prince d’], Les livres à fĳigures vénitiens de la fĳin du XV siècle et

du commencent du XVI (Florence/Paris, 1907–14).

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Saxon analytic studies of the book. The English historian Martin Lowry was among the fĳirst of this new wave to make important contributions to the history of Venetian printing between the 15th and 16th centuries with two fundamental works. The fĳirst takes on the complex personality of Aldo Manuzio, while the second treats Aldo’s 15th-century predeces-sors, particularly the French printer Nicolas Jenson, active in Venice from 1470, whose story is essential for a proper understanding of the early years of Venetian printing and its establishment in the city.6 Though works on Manuzio’s fortuna were not lacking, Lowry created a particularly vivid picture of Aldo’s activity and the complex relationship that developed between the printer and his host city. The importance of Manuzio went far beyond the city of Venice, such that it would not be far-fetched to accredit him as the true inventor of the early modern book. If Gutenberg had invented a technique without concerning himself with its implica-tions and uses, Aldo excogitated and put into practice a series of solutions that marked a decisive rupture with the world of the manuscript, ren-dering the printed book the most potent communication tool of the last 500 years, in certain ways still unsurpassed by even the most influential technological advancements of recent years. Our debts to Aldo include his attention to the design of textual characters and impagination, the defĳinition of methods of punctuation, and the adoption of smaller formats to make books more manageable and accessible and end the formerly almost-exclusive clerical monopoly of the book. He was also able to com-bine text and image for the fĳirst time in print, and with a surprising aes-thetic sensibility, in one of the most beautiful and mysterious editions of all time, the 1499 Hipnerotomachia Poliphili.7

Yet, as is normally the case, influential innovations do not long remain under the exclusive control of those responsible for them. All of Manuzio’s most important contributions were quickly imitated or copied, despite his attempts to protect them. However, it was also by such means that

6 Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1979); and Lowry, Nicholas Jenson and the Rise of Venetian Publishing in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1991).

7 The bibliography regarding Aldo is enormous and dates back centuries. His editions garnered him such fame within his own lifetime that his person became a cult fĳigure before the end of the 16th century. It became the custom of book collectors to give special attention to his editions, separating them from the others. Such prestige has guaranteed an interest in his catalogue and biography unequalled among publishers in the 15th and 16th centuries. The fĳirst monographs dedicated to him date back to the 18th century. For a fĳirst bibliographical study, see Mario Infelise, “Manuzio, Aldo il vecchio,” in Dizionario Biografĳico degli Italiani, vol. 69 (Rome, 2007), pp. 236–45.

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his contribution to the afffĳirmation and spread of the printed book remained decisive.

Even with Aldo’s death in 1515, the Venetian book industry did not lose its earlier dynamism. An estimate based on the Italian editions possessed by the British Library calculates that 74 per cent of the books published in Italy between 1526 and 1550 were printed in Venice.8 This period wit-nessed both the creation of new publishing houses and the continued development of existing ones, characterized by an extraordinary vitality despite the diffferent fĳields in which individual publishers worked. They experimented with new techniques, invented new products, perfected commercial and production systems, and thus contributed to the rein-forcement of Venice as a great publishing center. The Giunti constructed a truly international operation centered in Venice, but with multiple economic interests in Europe and along the entire Mediterranean basin; Alessandro Paganino tested new formats and used Arabic letters to print a Koran with which he hoped to penetrate the Ottoman and middle-eastern markets;9 Marcolini and Giolito focused predominantly on vernacular literature;10 Ottaviano Petrucci invented a method for printing polyphonic music; and the Frenchman Antonio Gardano, after having perfected that method, moved to Venice to start a printing house specialized in musical editions.11 Still others tried their hand at printing maps and atlases and in the reproduction of images.12 The list is lengthy indeed.

8 Marino Zorzi, “Dal manoscritto al libro,” in Gino Benzoni and Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Storia di Venezia. Dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, 14 vols (Rome, 1992–2002), vol. 4 (1996): Il Rinascimento. Politica e cultura, ed. Alberto Tenenti and Ugo Tucci, pp. 817–958. On 16th-century production data, however, see Harris, “Ombre della storia del libro italiano,” pp. 472–85.

9 Angela Nuovo, Alessandro Paganino (1509–1538) (Padua, 1990). See also Giorgio Vercellin, Venezia e l’origine della stampa in caratteri arabi (Padua, 2001).

10 See also the works of Amedeo Quondam, “Mercanzia d’onore/Mercanzia d’utile. Produzione libraria e lavoro intellettuale a Venezia nel Cinquecento,” in A. Petrucci, Libri, editori e pubblico nell’Europa moderna (Rome/Bari, 1977), pp. 51–104; and “Nel giardino del Marcolini. Un editore veneziano tra Aretino e Doni,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 157 (1980), 75–116.

11 On musical editions, see Iain Fenlon, Music, Print and Culture in Early Sixteenth-Century Italy (London, 1995). On Gardano, see Elisa Bonaldi, “La famiglia Gardano e l’editoria musicale veneziana (1538–1611),” Studi veneziani n.s. 20 (1990), 272–302; and Mary S. Lewis, Antonio Gardano, Venetian Music Printer, 1538–1569: A Descriptive Bibliography and Historical Study, 3 vols (New York, 1988, 1997, 2005).

12 David Woodward, Maps and Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors, and Consumers (London, 1996).



Information and Journalism

While I have focused so far on the novelty of print, we must not forget the endurance of the manuscript in sectors that maintained a notable production even after Gutenberg’s invention. It is widely known that Venice, in the very years in which it was becoming one of the most prolifĳic European publishing centers, was also a focal point for the collection, production, and difffusion of political and military news, such that the tool destined to be the principal vehicle for such news in the following centuries, the gazette, is generally attributed Venetian origins.13 But the gazettes, or avvisi, as these periodical sheets dedicated to news-gathering were commonly called, long remained hand-written, and it was only well into the 17th century that they began to appear in print. Even those responsible for compiling them often had a role in the production of the manuscript. In this sector the advantages of the manuscript with respect to print were beyond doubt, and for two principal reasons: greater production speed and less censorship.14

This custom of compiling and sending out sheets that collected letter excerpts and news of general interest is documented even in the 15th century.15 Over the course of the 16th century the demand for these newsletters tended to increase, especially in the bigger cities. In Venice, those who worked in the news industry often operated within small work-shops of copiers. They collected the pieces of news and compiled them in a weekly avviso. These newsletters were then recopied by hand a cer-tain number of times and sent out by post to their subscribers, who were

13 Peter Burke, Early Modern Venice as a Centre of Information and Communication, in John Martin and Dennis Romano, eds., Venice Reconsidered. The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State 1297–1797 (Baltimore/London, 2000), pp. 389–419. An original study regarding the multiple implications of communication and information can be found in Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007).

14 On the organization of the transmission of political information, see my studies: Prima dei giornali. Alle origini della pubblica informazione (secoli XVI e XVII) (Rome/Bari, 2002); “From Merchants’ Letters to Handwritten Political Avvisi: Notes on the Origins of Public Information,” in Robert Muchembled and E. William Monter, Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, vol. 3: Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe 1400–1700, ed. F. Bethencourt and F. Egmond (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 33–52; and “News Networks between Italy and Europe,” in B. Dooley, ed., The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe (London, 2010), pp. 51–67.

15 Georg Christ, “A Newsletter in 1419? Antonio Morosini’s Chronicle in the Light of Commercial Correspondence between Venice and Alexandria,” Mediterranean Historical Review 20 (2005), 35–66.

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generally persons of elevated social rank, such as princely ministers, cardi-nals, great merchants, and postmasters. Some of these workshops became veritable news agencies, specialized in the commercialization of informa-tion. At the same time, they positioned themselves to provide other writ-ten products as well, such as political and satirical texts that struggled to fĳind space in the book market for reasons of censorship but which enjoyed enduring success in manuscript form. Recent research on Venetian aris-tocratic libraries has found, for example, that a Venetian noble with an important political career focused his studies not only on books but also notably on writings of diverse genre and provenance that documented the actual practice of politics.16 Many of these were reproduced by hand and circulated by the gazetteers. The more organized of these newsmen even possessed actual catalogues of their products which could be reproduced on commission, with the corresponding prices. In Venice, the writings most in demand were always ambassadorial relazioni. It is well known that at the end of each diplomatic mission, every Venetian ambassador had to present the Senate with a report on the court or nation where he had served. From the 16th century on, these periodical overviews, which contained political but also geographical and anthropological information and were composed according to precise formulas of humanist deriva-tion, aroused notable interest even outside of Venice and despite their supposed secrecy.

During the 17th century, printed gazettes began to appear alongside hand-written versions, which nonetheless continued to be compiled until the late 18th century, often by journalists who were simultaneously work-ing on printed periodicals. The activity of Domenico Caminer, the true founder of modern Italian journalism, is signifĳicant in this light, as he was the author of a multitude of printed periodicals, but until 1780 he contin-ued to compile well-informed and widely read handwritten gazettes.

Printed gazettes underwent a notable development as a result of the war against the Ottomans in the last decades of the 17th century, and par-ticularly after the siege of Vienna in 1683, which in the years immediately following nurtured an unprecedented “news fever” in all ranks of society. It was just such a combination of hand-written and printed gazettes that generated conflicting rumors and constituted the principal stimulus for

16 Dorit Raines, “L’arte di ben informarsi. Carriera politica e pratiche documentarie nell’archivio familiare di patrizi veneziani: I Molin di San Pantalon,” in L. Casella and Roberto Navarrini, eds., Archivi nobiliari e domestici. Conservazione, metodologie di riordino e prospettive di ricerca storica (Udine, 2000), pp. 187–210.



public discussion in the city among the most disparate social groups, and on a wide variety of subjects from politics to religion.17 From the end of the 17th century through the entire century to follow, there came to flour-ish in Venice a multiform market of information that was a notable char-acteristic of the Venetian cultural life of the time.18

The Venetian Book between the 16th and the 18th Centuries

Returning to the history of the printed book, its period of greatest development was shaken by the religious conflicts of the 16th century when, on the heels of the Roman Church’s reaction, Venice too had to confront the difffusion of Protestant thought and the need to impose a system of control that might prevent the spread of heresy.19 The great European division caused by the Protestant Reformation had signifĳicant consequences on book production. As we shall see, while the Republic of Venice always attempted to restrain the growing demands of the Roman Church, newly reorganized after the Council of Trent, the overall cultural climate and the demand for books underwent important changes. In Catholic states, publishers’ catalogues changed, substituting potentially risky titles—including the majority of books in the vernacular languages—with devotional works and others of a religious or liturgical nature. The very geography of European publishing changed as well. While new great publishing centers were developing in central and northern Europe, Venice progressively lost contact with the North and particularly with Protestant-controlled areas, though it was able to maintain a marked supremacy in Italy and a position of some importance in the Mediterranean. The Iberian peninsula continued to be an especially key market for Venetian publishers, given the dearth of important local publishers. Alongside the Venetian printers, in fact, many of the great continental publishing houses competed for supremacy there; fĳirst among these were the Plantin of

17 On military newspapers from the late 17th century, see Mario Infelise, “The War, the News and the Curious: Military Gazettes in Italy,” in B. Dooley and S. Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London/New York, 2001), pp. 216–36. On the debates stimulated by such newsletters, see Federico Barbierato, Politici e ateisti, Percorsi della miscredenza a Venezia fra Sei e Settecento (Milan, 2006), Engl. trans., The Inquisitor in the Hat Shop. Inquisition, Forbidden Books and Unbelief in Early Modern Venice (Farnham, 2012).

18 Marino Berengo, Giornali veneziani del Settecento (Milan, 1962).19 Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605 (Princeton,

1977).

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Antwerp, who continued to enjoy the protection of royal privileges under Philip II.20

From the mid-16th century on, Venice was thus on its way to losing its place as “an entire world” that it had enjoyed in Manuzio’s day. Other European metropolises were growing, especially as the capitals of great territorial states and empires that extended far beyond the confĳines of Europe and the Mediterranean. However, the decline of Venice was slow and not always perceived as such by those who experienced it. Between highs and lows, Venice remained one of the richest, most cosmopolitan, and most culturally vibrant cities on the continent until the fall of the Republic at the end of the 18th century, a must-see destination on every “grand tour,” and with an overall publishing output that lived up to its reputation. As the most important center in Italy and among the top in Europe, Venice remained a focal point for the book market.

Taking a closer look, the 17th century was the period of truly epochal transformations. Until 1620, Venetian production remained high and con-tinued to surpass English publishers for number of titles produced. In the period 1620–50, however, the situation changed decisively as a grave cri-sis hit the sector. In this period, the number of active presses in Venice, which at the height of 16th-century production had risen to 125, fell to 15–20, and the quantity of titles produced annually went from an average of 350 to just a few dozen. This resulted both from an increasingly fĳierce international competition and from the constant political instability of the time. In 1622, Venetian printers complained of the Spanish king’s deci-sion to prohibit his subjects having their works published abroad. The situation was further worsened by the Thirty Years’ War, which gravely impeded long-distance continental commerce, and the terrible plague of 1630 and its economic and demographic repercussions. These decades of depression witnessed the ultimate decline of the great Renaissance pub-lishing houses such as the Giunti and the Giolito, both of whom defĳini-tively closed shop.21

20 On the general trends in Italian and Venetian publishing in the 17th and 18th centuries in the European context, see Mario Infelise, “La librairie italienne (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles),” in F. Barbier, S. Juratic, and D. Varry, eds., L’Europe et le livre. Réseaux et pratiques du négoce de librairie XVIe–XIXe siècles (Langres, 1996), pp. 81–97; and Henri Jean Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (1598–1701) (Geneva, 1969), pp. 5–31, 296–330. More in detail on Venice: Mario Infelise, L’editoria veneziana nel ’700 (Milan, 1989), also recommended for a more detailed bibliography.

21 Mario Infelise, “La crise de la librairie vénitienne, 1620–1650,” in Frédéric Barbier et al., eds., Le livre et l’historien: études offfertes en l’honneur du professeur Henri-Jean Martin (Geneva, 1997), pp. 343–52.



This crisis brought about a long-term reorganization of the entire Venetian publishing system, which began to give signals of recovery in the last decades of the 17th century. This period saw new forms of invest-ment in the publishing sector, and new modes of publicizing products. First of all, there was a notable move to increase production of religious books, undoubtedly the most profĳitable genre. Exploiting the inexhaust-ible demand for such texts in the Catholic world, several great publish-ers were able to weather the storm and ultimately reanimate the city’s publishing industry as a whole. A useful example would be the parabola of the Venetian house of the Baglioni, the greatest Italian company in the years around the turn of the 18th century. At the end of the 16th century, the dynasty’s founder Tommaso had been closely associated with circles in Venice and Padua particularly interested in scientifĳic debates and of a strongly anti-clerical political stance. He represented Roberto Meietti, publisher of the Republic’s chief theologian and fĳierce adversary of the papal court Paolo Sarpi, and attended the major German book fairs from which he imported non-orthodox books into Venice. Among the other works in his catalogue were also several of Galileo’s, principally the 1610 Sidereus Nuncius. After Tommaso’s death from plague in 1631, his heirs chose a radically new direction more in line with the changing times. These would be years in which Venice, weakened by a long, exhausting war against the Ottomans in defense of the island of Candia (Crete), would have to moderate its previously intransigent aversion to clerical interfer-ence in order to obtain aid from the Holy See. The Baglioni thus chose to focus their effforts on liturgical and theological texts, which enjoyed a more profĳitable and secure market and were more difffĳicult to counterfeit. In only a few decades, they created one of the most successful commer-cial enterprises in Europe, such that within two generations the heirs of the agent of small printer accustomed to wander about the book fairs of Europe acquired enough wealth to purchase a title of Venetian nobility. In the wake of the Baglioni, the greatest book entrepreneurs of the day were nearly always those who serviced the enormous ecclesiastical market, in a period also notable for the massive rebuilding of numerous extremely wealthy monastic libraries.22

22 See the studies of Antonella Barzazi: “Ordini religiosi e biblioteche a Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento,” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 21 (1995), 141–228; and Gli afffanni dell’erudizione. Studi e organizzazione culturale degli ordini religiosi a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento (Venice, 2004).

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The success of religious books also contributed to the revival of other genres, and Venice once again became a principal center for the Euro-pean book trade, benefĳitting as well from the new-found dynamism of the Republic of Letters in which intellectual exchange became ever more frequent and intense. Literary journalism thus came to play a fundamen-tal role in bringing together and informing European litterati, function-ing simultaneously as a tool of scientifĳic and literary dissemination and commercial promotion. Such operations were numerous in the late 17th century, and the 30 years after 1710 saw the afffĳirmation of the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, which became one of the primary tools of information for the scientifĳic world.23

This period produced numerous editions of great prestige. There appeared imposing works of erudition, large-format atlases, and multi-volume encyclopedias and dictionaries in every branch of knowledge. Illustrators and engravers took on renewed importance, working con-stantly to satisfy the demands of printers and booksellers, and in doing so gave a unique luster to the editorial production of the time. In the late 17th century, the Franciscan cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli’s tireless work gave birth to an innumerable quantity of large illustrated atlases, city plans, and vedute of Mediterranean and European fortresses. The same period witnessed the initial successes of the great Venetian vedutisti, from Antonio Carlevaris to Canaletto, whose works were systematically circu-lated by an army of engravers looking to satisfy the growing European demand for such images. Equally lively was the development of book illus-trations, a trend which continued throughout the 18th century and made Venice a European capital of copper engraving. The painter Giambattista Piazzetta, for example, collaborated with various printers illustrating the works of Bossuet, a famous edition of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, and a notably refĳined Beatae Mariae Verginis Offfĳicium published by Giambat-tista Pasquali. In other cases, veritable équipes of illustrators and engrav-ers were formed, as happened in 1756 for Petrarch’s Rime published by Antonio Zatta.24 Publishers such as Pasquali and Albrizzi lent particular attention to this sort of production, sought after as it was by great Euro-pean collectors. The British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, protector of

23 Brendan Dooley, Science, Politics and Society Society in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia and its World (New York, 1991).

24 On the 18th-century illustrated book, see Giuseppe Morazzoni, Il libro illustrato veneziano del Settecento (Milan, 1943); on engravers, see Dario Succi, ed., Da Carlevaris al Tiepolo. Incisori veneti e friulani del Settecento (Venice, 1983).



Canaletto and supplier of works of art to the British Crown, was long the fĳinancier of Pasquali’s Venetian fĳirm whose store-front sign, designed by Antonio Visentini, read La felicità delle lettere [the happiness of literature/the humanities].25 The success of engravings contributed as well to the trend of event announcements, which quickly became occasions for great families to demonstrate their wealth and prestige.26

Nor did illustrations remain the monopoly of the most expensive books. Many were the engraved frontispieces, pleasant cartoons, and anteporte that accompanied theatrical collections in small-format editions intended for an audience of middle-class tastes in those years in which this group was rising in importance.

This amazing recovery continued through to the mid-18th century and allowed the Venetian book to fĳind its proper place once again on the European market, particularly in the Mediterranean areas, where it took particular advantage of the weakening of historic competitors Antwerp and Lyon.27 Growth of exports to Spain was especially consistent. In 1763, Antoine Boudet, a Parisian publisher with conspicuous interests in the Iberian peninsula, wrote that “with respect to books, Spain is supplied mainly by foreigners.” He estimated book imports to amount to 750,000 livres tournois [french money] divided among the following export cen-ters: Venice, 46.6 per cent; Rome, Milan, and Lucca 6.6 per cent; Antwerp 26.6 per cent; Lusanne, Geneva, Lyon, and Paris 13.3 per cent; and Avignon 6.6 per cent.28 More recent studies of the Spanish book have largely cor-roborated such data through analyses of books conserved in libraries. The old collections of the University Library of Santiago de Compostela show, for example, that in the period 1700–49, 38.4 per cent of its books were published in Italy, followed by 32.9 per cent in France. Venice produced the greatest share of books of Italian provenance, 12.6 per cent to the

25 Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters. A Study in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (London, 1963); and Frances Vivian, Il console Smith mercante e collezionista (Vicenza, 1971).

26 See the case of the last doge Lodovico Manin, see Dorit Raines, La famiglia Manin e la cultura libraria tra Friuli e Venezia nel ’700 (Udine, 1997). On prints for special events, see Alberta Pettoello, Libri illustrati veneziani del Settecento. Le pubblicazioni d’occasione (Venice, 2005).

27 Jacqueline Roubert, “La situation de l’imprimerie lyonnaise à la fĳin du XVIIe siècle,” in Cinq études lyonnaises (Geneva, 1966), pp. 77–111.

28 Paul Guinard, “Le livre dans la péninsule ibérique au XVIIIe siècle. Témoignage d’un libraire français,” Bulletin hispanique 59 (1957), 176–98.

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12.4 per cent of Rome.29 Such books were, for the most part, in Latin and constituted mainly classical texts for use in schools, prayer books, and liturgical, theological, and juridical works.

Direct contacts with monastic orders and with Spanish booksellers con-tributed signifĳicantly to the Venetian book’s success. The Aragonese clergy employed a Rezo ecclesiastico printed in Venice on commission. Then, in 1766, the minister general of the Franciscans gave the Baglioni the exclu-sive right to print breviaries, missals, and diurni for the order’s use, and in 1773 the Remondini published the works of St Thomas at the request of the Spanish Dominicans with an investment of over 18,000 ducats.30 In some cases these Venetian exports were camouflaged with false places of printing to mask their true origins, and indeed the above-mentioned version of St Thomas’ Summa claimed to have been printed in Rome. In other circumstances, Spanish bookmen, unable to take on the burden of printing the works for which they had won the rights, entrusted the work to agents sent by Venetian publishers for that very purpose. Antonio de Castro was the Spanish agent for the publisher Orazio Poletti, and he trav-eled around Spain acquiring the publishing rights from struggling Span-ish bookmen, organized their printing in Venice, and fĳinally exported the entire stock back to Spain with the publishing information desired by the Spanish client. Such a system required a dense network of connections between Spain and Venice, and indeed the Baglioni maintained their own shop in Madrid, while many other great Venetian publishers had various correspondents throughout Iberia, especially in the principal ports such as Barcelona, Malaga, Cadiz, and Lisbon, with the last two specializing in shipments to Latin America. The Remondini enjoyed particular dis-tinction in such commerce, as they specialized not only in the religious genre but also in selling popular prints in enormous volumes, which they distributed via hundreds of wandering salesmen from the Val Tesino in the Prince-Bishopric of Trent. The mobility of these vendors allowed them to sell such prints from America to the furthest regions of the Russian Empire.31

29 Lucien Domergue, “Les livres importés en Galice au XVIIIe siècle,” in De l’alphabètisation aux circuits du livre en Espagne. XVIe–XIXe siècles (Paris, 1987), pp. 433–46.

30 Gasparo Gozzi, “Col più devoto ossequio.” Interventi sull’editoria (1762–1780), ed. M. Infelise and F. Soldini (Venice, 2003).

31 On travelling book-salesmen in Europe, see Laurence Fontaine, Histoire du colportage en Europe: XV–XIX siècles (Paris, 1993). For those from the Val Tesino, see Elda Fietta Ielen, Con la cassella in spalla. Gli ambulanti di Tesino (Ivrea, 1987).



Another important Mediterranean outlet was the Levant. From the 16th to the 18th century, 80 per cent of books printed with Greek charac-ters came from Venice. Several Greek publishers, residing in Venice and specializing in the production of liturgical texts for the Orthodox church, were consistently among the greatest book entrepreneurs of the later 17th and 18th centuries. These same publishers were also engaged in printing texts in the Slavic languages, which they circulated from the Balkans to Moscow while hiding their Venetian origins behind false origins in Mos-cow or St Petersburg.

The Enlightenment brought still more profound transformations. The 1760s saw a quite rapid decline of religious book production which, as already noted, had been a cornerstone of the market. The crisis of the Jesuit order, fĳirst expelled from the Iberian and Bourbon realms in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV, had particularly notable consequences in Venice, as nearly one-third of religious book demand was suddenly lost. Other problems derived from the suppression of many convents and a general secularization of society, not to mention the heightened competition both within Italy and abroad and the increasing copyright infringements that accompanied it.

The new context clearly reflected the contradictions between the book production that characterized the Enlightenment and that of the Counter Reformation, which had been the principal engine in Venetian publish-ing during the previous half century. A more secular society drove a dif-ferent demand that publishers did everything possible to satisfy, though such effforts could not compensate for losses in the religious book sector. These were decades characterized by interesting experiments in many directions; novels, series dealing with current events, French and Eng-lish translations, gazettes, journals, almanacs, pamphlets of every sort, “Enlightened” essays, and theatrical collections all contributed to a great renewal of publishers’ catalogues and was a fact often noted by foreigners coming to Venice.

But there was also another important phenomenon that helped ring in the changes in Venetian publishing. From the second half of the 16th century, there developed an increasing number of smaller publishers whose products sold big on purely local markets, and this European trend took root in smaller Italian centers as well. These materials were repetitive, cheap to produce, and of interest to all parts of society: booklets for prayer or for school, almanacs and lunar calendars, and images both religious and profane which were generally sold at fairs of little concern to major pub-lishers. Nonetheless, such texts played a crucial role among low-literacy

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populations by bringing such persons into contact with the printed text and stimulating their desire to learn to read and write. These initiatives were usually extremely circumscribed geographically. In one case, how-ever, a small entrepreneur from the Venetian terraferma, starting from just such a small-scale operation, constructed a veritable publishing empire which a century later would be considered one of the largest in Europe.32 It was in Bassano, a town in the pre-alpine region about 60 kilometers from Venice, that Giovanni Antonio Remondini opened a small print-shop that in the fĳirst few decades produced devotional booklets, saint’s lives, poetry collections, chivalric tales, school texts, practical use manu-als, and, most of all, sacred images. With a catalogue of this sort, includ-ing hundreds of titles and more than 10,000 diffferent printed images, the Remondini built up a commercial network extending from Latin America to the Russian Empire. Their business reached its maximum expansion in the second half of the 18th century. But even when Giuseppe Remon-dini moved his company’s headquarters from Bassano to Venice in 1750, he maintained his entire industrial complex in the terraferma hinterland and with it the competitive advantages of using laborers unprotected by urban guild norms. Such tactics took the older Venetian publishers by sur-prise, accustomed as they were to a much slower production process. In contrast to the older publishers, the Remondini controlled every phase of production, from the paper itself to the selling of the fĳinished prod-uct, and they took full advantage of the previously mentioned colporteurs, supplying them with merchandise and advancing them the money with which to set out around the world. They opened shops to distribute their literary and visual wares around Europe and supplied their workshops in Bassano with the necessary information about local religious cults, which allowed their illustrators in the Veneto to produce accurate images of forms of religious devotion in many centers of the Iberian peninsula and Latin America.

For the entire second half of the 18th century, the Remondini’s opera-tions allowed Venetian presses to reinforce their presence on the interna-tional book markets. It was ultimately the fall of the Republic in 1797 that put an end to Venice’s dynamic publishing industry. In the Napoleonic years, Venice was no longer a capital, and in a radically changed political

32 On the Remondini, Mario Infelise, I Remondini di Bassano. Stampa e industria nel Veneto del Settecento, 2nd ed. (Bassano, 1990); Mario Infelise and Paola Marini, eds., Remondini. Un editore del Settecento (Milan, 1990).



and economic context, it lost its publishing supremacy as well, in this case to the dynamic expansion of Milan.

Censorship

The historiography of the last few decades has spilled much ink over the argument of literary censorship as part of a more general interest in systems of political and cultural control, and in defĳining church-state relations in Catholic Europe. Moreover, in the last decade, the opening of the Roman Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose holdings include the papers of the Holy Offfĳice and the Congregation of the Index, has given even greater stimulus to such studies.

The fĳirst move in this direction belongs to an important article by Antonio Rotondò in the early 1970s, which fĳirst sketched the outlines of the problem in modern terms and underlined the influence ecclesiastical censorship had exerted on Italian culture.33 In the same years, Paul F. Grendler published his important study on the Roman Inquisition and the Venetian publishing industry in the 16th century, which was one of the fĳirst analytical monographs on the relationship between Rome and Venice with regard to censorship.34 Previously, the prevailing notions had been mythical constructions of Venetian liberty, with the constant nour-ishment of a literary tradition going back to the 16th century, and with such distinguished contributors as Bodin and Voltaire.35 This image was countered by the contrastingly negative representation proposed during the 19th century by the French historian Pierre Daru in his Histoire de la République de Venise, fĳirst published in 1817. The work took up themes from the anti-Venetian press campaigns of the 17th century, portraying the Republic as a place of shadows and suspicion governed by an arrogant and despotic oligarchy, a depiction which had had great influence on the image of Venice’s history for the entire 19th century.36

33 Antonio Rotondò, “La censura ecclesiastica e la cultura,” in Storia d’Italia, vol. 5, “I Documenti” (Turin, 1973), pp. 1397–1492.

34 Grendler, The Roman Inquisition.35 Limiting the citations to a pair of famous exemplars, Jean Bodin celebrated Venetian

liberty in the Colloquium heptaplomeres. Two centuries later, Voltaire defĳined the city “refuge of liberty.” Franco Venturi, “Venise, et par occasion de la liberté,” in Alan Ryan, ed., The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honor of Isaiah Berlin (Oxford, 1978), pp. 196–209.

36 Claudio Povolo, “The Creation of Venetian Historiography,” in J. Martin and D. Romano, eds., Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State 1297–1797 (Baltimore/London, 2000), pp. 491–519; and Mario Infelise, “Venezia e il suo

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Only in recent times have scholars abandoned such ideological visions and been able, fĳinally, to contextualize the themes of censorship and lib-erty within the greater political and religious questions of the early modern period in a comparative analysis that has brought together developments in Venice with those in the other European states.

Attention to jurisdictional aspects has been the point of departure for many studies on censorship in the early modern period, aiming to defĳine the responsibilities of the institutions charged with these sorts of control. There has been a return to the old debates of whether it was the Church with its hierarchical structure that should decide which books might be read, or if the state could have the right to evade such supervision, all the while keeping in mind that the political and ecclesiastical powers were not systematically antagonistic. Indeed, early modern governments were long sustained by the deep conviction that the spread of heresy threat-ened secular authority as well.

In comparison to the other Italian states, more sensitive to papal pres-sures and with much weaker publishing industries, Venice was largely able to maintain greater autonomy and limit the interference of the Holy See. It was also the only Italian state which paid constant attention to the problems of censorship, as the modern scholar can follow in great detail thanks to the abundant archival sources that began to appear with the introduction of the fĳirst printing houses and continued for more than three centuries.

Before 1527 there was no organized system of control, apart from a few sporadic attempts by the Church to intervene with regard to doctrinal and religious books. If the spread of Luther’s theses starting in 1517 began to arouse concern, in 1518 Bernardino Stagnino had no problem printing his Appelatio ad Concilium, and in 1520 the Wittenberg reformer’s three principal treatises were sold openly. Luther’s excommunication in 1521 changed everything, even though until the mid-16th century the system of control was far from perfect, given the problems of enforcement in a city with a flourishing book industry and the constant presence of men of all religious faiths. In 1527 the government introduced restrictions for all books printed in Venice, as well as for imports. The Holy Offfĳice was re-established in 1543, and in 1548 the Republic formally accepted the authority of the Inquisition in its dominions, though under the control

passato. Storie miti ‘fole,’ ” in M. Isnenghi and S. Woolf, eds., Storia di Venezia. L’Ottocento e il Novecento (Rome, 2002), pp. 967–88.



of the public authority in the form of a specifĳic magistracy in Venice and of the city rectors in the rest of the state. Other measures followed in the coming years, and in 1559 the fĳirst Roman Index was promulgated. The procedure for issuing the license to print books was fĳinally made offfĳicial in 1562, and it would remain in force, with some partial revisions, until the end of the 18th century. Each new manuscript to be printed had fĳirst to be read by three revisori: the Inquisitor of the Holy Offfĳice for religious arguments, a public lettore for moral ones, and a ducal secretary for politi-cal questions. Each of these gave a judgment which was presented to the magistrate of the Riformatori of the University of Padua, who would then issue the permit to be registered by the Council of Ten. This procedure was partially simplifĳied in the 17th century. The revisori were cut to two, and the Riformatori took on the entire responsibility, which along with the other similar tasks recently given them, made them the primary politi-cal organ for cultural supervision.

With regard to publishing licenses, it is also important to consider that in a similar context the ecclesiastical authority’s judgment was only one of the conditions for the defĳinitive license; it was not the fĳinal act. In fact, the fĳinal permit was issued by the state. Thus the traditional ecclesiastical formula for the imprimatur was not accepted, even though this triggered endless jurisdictional conflicts in which the relations between Venice and the Holy See were constantly renegotiated in the light of the contingent political situation.37 As such, between the end of the 16th and the end of the 18th century, there was no single procedure; rather, the disputes tended to favor the Roman or Venetian positions depending on the spe-cifĳic circumstances and the current state of their relations. Certainly, between 1596 and 1606, Venetian policy under the influence of Paolo Sarpi and Doge Leonardo Donà was more aggressive in the construction of a strong state censorship; but in other periods, such as the mid-17th century, the Republic was more docile with regard to the claims of the Roman court. It must also be underlined that, even in the moments of greatest political tension, the Republic’s position did not move towards a more lax censorship. Consonant with the authoritarian ideas of the time, even such men as Sarpi, constantly accused by the Roman curia of being masked Protestants, maintained that controlling the circulation of ideas was fundamental to the conservation of the state. In their view, the

37 Mario Infelise, “A proposito di imprimatur. Una controversia giurisdizionale di fĳine ’600 tra Venezia e Roma,” in Studi veneti offferti a Gaetano Cozzi (Venice, 1992), pp. 287–99.

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government needed to maintain constant checks in this area, and above all it had to prevent churchmen from augmenting an ecclesiastical juris-diction that was in competition with that of the secular authority.38 It must be kept in mind, though, that this endemic conflict between the Church and Republic also ensured that Venice would maintain a more autonomous publishing industry and, especially, a greater circulation of books than anywhere else in Italy.

After the great controversies of the Interdict years and the conces-sions to the papacy in the mid-17th century during the War of Candia, the Republic resumed its anti-curial stance towards the end of the cen-tury. Its jurisdictional politics maintained this more aggressive stance throughout the fĳirst half of the 18th century, culminating in 1765 with the drastic limitations imposed on the powers of the Venetian Holy Offfĳice. It must be noted that the reform of censorship took place in what was now a completely transformed political and cultural climate. By the mid-18th century, those responsible for censorship were nearly always litterati chosen because of their intellectual openness. Men such as Carlo Lodoli, Gasparo Gozzi, and Giovanni Francesco Scottoni were supported by the reformist faction of the patriciate, which desired a more state-sponsored system of control for reasons both political and commercial, in the hopes of reanimating the Venetian publishing industry. Even those controlling book imports from abroad showed a new willingness to experiment, and in doing so defĳinitively shook the protectionist system conceived in the fĳirst years of the Counter Reformation.

It was only in the last decade of the 18th century, with fears that the ideas of Revolutionary France might spread and infect Italy as well, that the Republic tried, alongside other Italian princes, to turn back the clock. But this efffort met with little success in the wake of the great curiosity which the revolutionary fervor aroused.

Book Consumption and Popular Literature

Carlo Ginzburg’s well-known work The Cheese and the Worms (1976), which recounts the dramatic story of Menocchio, a miller from Friuli tried and condemned by the Inquisition for having read orthodox texts and interpreted them heretically, used a novel methodological approach to

38 Paolo Sarpi, “Sopra l’offfĳicio dell’inquisizione,” in Sarpi, Scritti giurisdizionalisti (Bari, 1958), pp. 119–212.



highlight the theme of popular literary consumption and, in the process, greatly influenced similar studies, many of which have continued to draw on Venetian material.39 While the adjective popular is not an exact defĳinition for goods that, whatever their original target audience, enjoyed signifĳicant circulation among diverse social groups, it is beyond doubt that there existed a large body of texts which might have ended up in anyone’s hands, and much Venetian production consisted of such material, as the case of the Remondini has shown. From the standpoint of the overall industry, the Bassano printers were certainly an exception, given the lack of other similar enterprises at the time. One cannot say the same, however, for the contents of their catalogue, which offfered titles of proven popularity that had long been present not only in theirs but also in many other publishers’ catalogues from the 16th to early 19th century.

Recently, many scholars have looked at this group of long-neglected questions, particularly because book catalogues have always struggled to document such texts, given the difffĳiculties in fĳinding works often not conserved in libraries. In addition, the world of written texts that might have passed through the hands of someone living between the 16th and 18th centuries was not only constituted by printed books. The previous pages have already noted the enduring survival of the manuscript in the particular case of the avvisi, but there were also other genres that endured for centuries in hand-written form. Such was the case of the Clavicula Salomonis, a title used and reused from the Middle Ages forward to pro-pose diverse magical texts of enormous popularity. Federico Barbierato’s studies not only have unveiled the modes of circulation of these works, omnipresent in 17th-century Venetian inquisitorial cases involving pro-hibited books, but also have shown their centrality to a world of magical practices in which elite and popular culture systemically converged.40

Coming back to the printed book, hundreds of devotional works, saints’ lives, chivalric tales, and poems in octave rhyme were considered texts of transitory consumption, and not necessarily intended for conservation by their readers. Such texts constitute a particularly interesting aspect of social history, and defĳining the relationship that developed between these works and their readers would help to highlight a series of important char-acteristics and cultural habits in Catholic Europe. From the earliest years

39 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore/London, 1982; Ital. ed. Turin, 1976).

40 Federico Barbierato, Nella stanza dei circoli. Clavicula Salomonis e libri di magia a Venezia nei secoli XVII e XVIII (Milan, 2002).

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of the printing press there had existed an ample production of fliers and other printed sheets whose circulation was ensured by the most varied social characters.41 Those decades witnessed a particular experimenta-tion with vernacular texts, such that the dynamism of the printing press contributed to higher literacy rates and the establishment of a linguistic canon for literary Tuscan.42 Indeed, in this area more than elsewhere, the consequences of increased ecclesiastical control determined by the Coun-cil of Trent would be felt, and such measures ended up penalizing, above all, written works in the spoken language. The prohibition of vernacular bibles was merely the most visible episode of this trend. Publishers soon adapted to the new climate and modifĳied their catalogues so as to be in harmony with the spirit of Trent, most obviously in the new prevalence of devotional works. Such a situation clearly emerges from the Remon-dini’s catalogue of libri da risma as reconstructed by Laura Carnelos. They constitute the Italian equivalent of the English chapbooks or the French Bibliothèque bleue, and their persistence over time provides evidence with which to trace the most-used texts in families of every social group.43 Directions of research in this area, nonetheless, are many. In the early modern period too, for example, texts could be combined with images to create products of popular consumption. Sabrina Minuzzi has been able to wander through the shop of an “average” bookseller with the help of an extraordinary late 17th-century inventory. She has thus recomposed the surprising and forgotten universe of texts and images that animated the Venice of the time, and reconstructed from the ground up the system of cultural consumption in the years of the European crisis of conscience, as well as the many possible combinations of prints, fliers, books, and objects that might have colored the collective imaginary.44

Scholarship has now developed its sensibilities to the extent that the peculiarity of Venice and its territory are no longer the center of attention;

41 Rosa Salzberg, “The Lyre, the Pen and the Press: Performers and Cheap Print in Cinquecento Venice,” in Pon and Kallendorf, eds., The Book of Venice. Il Libro Veneziano, pp. 251–76.

42 On the contribution of the Venetian publishers to the establishment of the literary vernacular, see Paolo Trovato, Con ogni diligenza corretto. La stampa e le revisioni editoriali dei testi letterari italiani (1470–1570) (Bologna, 1991). In more popular material, of interest is the case of Niccolò Zoppino: Luigi Severi, Sitibondo nel stampar de’ libri. Niccolò Zoppino tra lingua volgare, letteratura cortigiana e questione della lingua (Manziana, 2009).

43 Laura Carnelos, I libri da risma. Catalogo delle edizioni Remondini a larga difffusione (1650–1850) (Milan, 2007).

44 Sabrina Minuzzi, Il secolo di carta. Antonio Bosio artigiano di testi e immagini nella Venezia del Seicento (Milan, 2009).



rather, the rich Venetian documentation provides a point of departure for tackling more general questions of culture and comparing the Venetian experience with those of other European centers.

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