Aldus Manutius

About Aldus Manutius

Aldus Manutius (c. 1450 to 1515) was a Venetian scholar-printer whose Aldine Press, set up in Venice in 1494, printed the first editions of many ancient Greek texts and introduced italic type and small portable octavo books.

The press was a partnership: Andrea Torresani and Pier Francesco Barbarigo were co-owners alongside Aldus. Its first book, the Greek grammar Erotemata of Constantine Lascaris, appeared in March 1495. Over roughly twenty years the press issued about 132 books, including some thirty editiones principes of Greek authors: a five-volume Aristotle in folio (1495 to 1498), Herodotus, Thucydides and Sophocles in 1502, and the complete Plato in 1513. It also printed Francesco Colonna's illustrated Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in December 1499.

The punchcutter Francesco Griffo of Bologna cut the press's roman, Greek and italic types. The 1501 Virgil was the first book set entirely in italic and also marked the move to the compact octavo format. The press adopted a printer's device of a dolphin coiled round an anchor, with the motto festina lente (make haste slowly).

After Aldus died in 1515, Torresani and his sons ran the firm until Aldus's son Paulus took charge; Paulus led it under the "Sons of Aldus" name from 1539 until his death in 1574. His son, Aldus Manutius the Younger, kept the business going until his own death in 1597, which ended the family's printing line.