#tim p

This copy of Ovid’s De arte amandi and De remedio amoris (On the Art of Love and On the Remedy for Love) has passed though many hands since its printing in 1512. One of the book’s owners has seen fit to add to the title page a warning to the unwary reader about the perils of love, taken from a poem by the German humanist Heinrich Bebel:

In genus omne mali per mille pericula rerum

Scandere non fugiat quisquis amare cupit.

Magnanimum calidae Veneris commercia poscunt,

Non sunt haec pavidis arma petenda viris.

“Whoever wishes to love may not avoid climbing through a thousand perils into every kind of calamity. Boldly they seek traffic with lustful Venus -- these arms are not to be sought by fearful men.”

Bound together with Ovid’s love poetry is a much sterner work: Johann Wigand’s Syntagma, seu corpus doctrinae veri & omnipotentis Dei. Wigand was a Lutheran theologian, and his Syntagma covers various religious topics, with a heavy emphasis on sin. The inclusion of two such disparate works within a single binding is no doubt meant as a joke.

- Tim

Although the woodcut illustrations of early printed books were occasionally printed in color -- Erhard Ratdolt was an early pioneer, issuing woodcuts in up to five colors -- it was much more usual for illustrations to be printed in black alone. But color could easily be added after the fact, as these three examples show. All three are from books printed by the German goldsmith-turned-printer Anton Koberger:

1) Neunte Deutsche Bibel, Nuremberg, 1483

2) Schatzbehalter, Nuremberg, 1491

3) Weltchronik, Nuremberg, 1493 [The Nuremberg Chronicle]

Koberger was one of the most successful German printers of the incunable period -- the period from the development of printing with movable type in the middle of the 15th century to the end of the year 1500.

- Tim

The Italian humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino is perhaps best known today for his tragedy Sophonisba, which provided a model for much subsequent drama.

In his own time he was just as well known for his ideas on linguistics, and especially for his attempt to reform Italian orthography by adding a number of new letters. One of the works that he had published using his extended alphabet was this translation of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia. The Greek characters ε and ω (for closed e and o respectively) are particularly prominent, but Trissino also added the consonants j and v (which previously had not been distinguished from i and u), as well as ç (voiced z).

The book is printed in the beautiful chancery type designed by Tolomeo Janiculo on the pattern of the type cut by the famous calligrapher Ludovico degli Arrighi.

- Tim