The first illustrated Aldine Dante counterfeited by a Venetian printer

Dante, Le terze rime de Dante con sito, et forma de lo Inferno novamente in restampito. [Venice, Gregorio de’ Gregori, after August 1515].

The first illustrated Aldine Dante counterfeited by a Venetian printer. See the complete description of this copy here.

In light of the urge to counterfeit the celebrated Aldine editions in parva forma, a phenomenon illustrated in our post on the Lyonnais counterfeit of the 1501 Aldine Petrarch, it is no surprise that such a monument of Italian vernacular poetry as Dante’s Commedia would be of particular interest for the pirating press.

Announced by Manutius in the postscript appended to his Petrarch of July 1501, the first Aldine edition of the Commedia appeared in August 1502 as Le terze rime di Dante. This unprecedented title was not the only groundbreaking feature of the book.

Dante, Le terze rime, Venice, Aldus Manutius, Venice 1502. Presented in the 2016 catalogue Raccolta di Edizioni dantesche, n. 4.

Like the Le cose vulgari di Messer Francesco Petrarcha, Dante’s masterpiece is considered an undeniable literary classic and was therefore included – along with the major Greek and Latin writers and poets – in the series of celebrated pocket-sized editions inaugurated by the Virgil of April 1501. These were portable and elegant volumes published without any commentary and set in the fine italic type designed for Aldus by the Bolognese punch-cutter and type-founder Francesco Griffo (1450-1518). For the first time the Commedia was offered unencumbered by the extensive commentary which, starting with the edition printed by Vindelinus de Spira in 1477, had always accompanied Dante’s cantiche in the earlier larger format editions.

Departing from the common practice in the fifteenth century of reading Dante with the assistance of summaries, biographies, and commentaries, Aldus focused attention onto recovering the original text. The editorial work was entrusted to one of his close friends and collaborators, the Venetian patrician and humanist Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), who had carefully prepared the Petrarca for the Aldine Press in 1501. For his primary source, Bembo used an authoritative mid-fourteenth-century manuscript taken from the library of his father Bernardo, which Boccaccio had sent as a gift to Petrarch between 1351 and 1353 (Biblioteca Vaticana, Vat.lat. 3199). The second identified source is the Landino edition of 1481, which had become the standard text of the Commedia by the end of the fifteenth century. According to Bembo’s own notes in the copy-text – now in the Vatican Library – the editorial work began on 6 July 1501 and was finished on 26 July 1502.  

Aldus’ unconventional Commedia was perfectly suited to the taste of his educated clientele, and the portable size of the volume widely extended the reading of Dante, liberating him from desks or book-stands. It is not surprising that one of the first buyers of this edition was a woman: the learned Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, bought a copy of the Aldine Dante on November 1502, after having already acquired, in July 1501, the Virgil and the Petrarch “in forma picola, de letera minuta”, i.e. “in small format, and small letters” (cfr. C. M. Brown, Isabella d’Este and Lorenzo da Pavia. Documents for the History of Art and Culture in Renaissance Mantua, Genève 1982, p. 45).

Dante, Le terze rime, Venice, Aldus Manutius, Venice 1502. Presented in the 2016 catalogue Raccolta di Edizioni dantesche, n. 4.

The ten-year privilege granted to Aldus by the Venetian Senate on March 1501 in order to protect both his inventions – his octavo-size volumes and the innovative italic font – should also have worked for Le terze rime as well. Aldus was, however, mindful of the misadventure that had occurred with Le cose volgari di Messer Francesco Petrarcha, which was counterfeited in Lyon only a few months after its publication in Venice in July 1501. He therefore included a firm warning against unauthorized reprinting in the colophon of his Dante:

Cautum est ne quis hunc impune imprimat,

uendat ue librum nobis inuitis

Despite Aldus’ warning and the state-granted privilege, a counterfeit of the Aldine Commedia inexorably appeared in Lyon. Although issued entirely anonymously and without date, its printing is attributed to Balthasar de Gabiano from Asti (Piedmont) – according to Baudrier the originator of the Lyonnais italic type – and Barthélemy Troth, a dealer working in Lyon for various Italian printers who probably financed the publication. On 16 March 1503, Aldus printed his Monitum in Lugdunenses typographos, a broadside against the astute and unfair Lyonnais printers and booksellers, which includes Aldus’s own advice for distinguishing piracies from his genuine editions. These latter, he avers, are textually more accurate, printed on paper of the highest quality, and incomparably finer in layout and type.

It was a hopeless battle, and the piracies followed one after another in subsequent years. Nor was the competition exhausted with Manuzio’s death on 6 February 1515. Rather, the publication – we adopt here the distinction proposed by William Kemp – of ‘pseudo-Aldines’ or ‘quasi-Aldines’ was also to follow the activity of Aldo’s heirs. The volumes produced by the printing press now run by his father-in-law from Asola, Andrea Torresano, maintained their prestige, and continued to be counterfeited with impunity by other printers, not only in Lyon, but now even in Venice itself.

This is the case for the second edition of the Commedia, issued by the Aldine Press in August 1515, this time with  the more elaborate title of Dante col sito, et forma dell’Inferno tratta dalla istessa descrittione del poeta.

The text, which had been edited by Bembo for the 1502 edition, was only slightly revised, and the volume opens with a dedicatory epistle by Andrea Torresano to a woman, the poetess Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547), in which the printer stresses the greatness of Dante, the ‘Divine Poet’. More importantly, this edition is one of the few Aldines to be illustrated, containing three woodcuts, including one that depicts the Sito et forma della valle inferna (‘Site and shape of the infernal valley’).

Sito et forma della valle inferna (‘Site and shape of the infernal valley’), from de’ Gregori’s counterfeit of the Aldine Dante.

The decision to supplement the volume with illustrations was the Aldine reply to their eternal rivals, the Giunti of Florence. In 1506, the first edition of the Commedia appeared from the press of Filippo Giunta. Like the Terze rime of 1502, it was printed in octavo format and with italic type, but it also contained the first topographical woodcuts of Hell, which for Dante was a real place, shaped in the form of a funnel and situated underneath the city of Jerusalem. In an appendix, the Giuntina also includes the posthumous edition of the Dialogo circa el sito, forma et misure dello Inferno di Dante Alighieri by the Florentine mathematician, architect, and member of the Accademia Fiorentina Antonio di Tuccio Manetti (1423-1497). This included, for the first time in the iconographical tradition of the Commedia, woodcut cross-sections and maps of Hell based on Manetti’s unpublished calculations and designs. Only after the 1506 Giuntina did the vogue for measuring and mapping Hell become widespread, as testified by the Aldine Dante of 1515, whose title already recalls the visualization of the poem.

The two other woodcuts, schematically showing the categories of sins punished in Hell and Purgatory, are an original feature of the Torresano edition. These charts were once ascribed to Bembo himself, although it is now believed they may have been realized by his friend Gabriele Trifone (1470-1549).

Categories of sins punished in Purgatory, from de’ Gregori’s counterfeit of the Aldine Dante.

Of course, an illustrated Aldine edition of the ‘Divine Poet’ was a tantalizing notion for other printers, and a counterfeit edition was soon to follow. Only a few months later an octavo book, printed in italics and including the three identical woodcuts, but slightly reduced in size and overall less accurate, appeared on the market: Le terze rime de Dante con sito, et forma de lo Inferno novamente in restampito, a title which seems to summarize those of both the Aldine Commedia.

Title page of de’ Gregori’s counterfeit of the Aldine Dante.

The responsibility for this rare piracy, of which we are pleased to offer a copy (see the complete description here), is generally attributed to Gregorio de’ Gregori, the printer from Forlì who was active in Venice between 1480 and 1528, and who often worked in partnership with his brother Giovanni and Bernardino Stagnino. His production focused on juridical and theological books intended for academic audience, religious and devotional texts, and vernacular literature, often mere reprints of editions already issued by other Venetian presses.

From de’ Gregori’s counterfeit of the Aldine Dante.

The Le terze rime de Dante con sito, et forma de lo Inferno novamente in restampito appeared entirely anonymously, without mention of date or place of printing, and the identity of its printer remained veiled for about three centuries. Catalogues and bibliographies recognized it as a counterfeit, but without providing any details regarding as to its publication. Nicola Francesco Haym simply described this edition “senza nota di Stampa” as a bad reprint of the 1515 Aldine, set with a “less fine italic type” (N.F. Haym, Biblioteca Italiana, o sia Notizia de’ libri rari Italiani, vol. 1, Milano 1781, p. 185). The sale catalogue of the outstanding library amassed by the Venetian bibliophile and printer Maffeo Pinelli (1735-1785) – auctioned in 1789 by the London booksellers James Edward and James Robson. – offered the genuine Aldine Commedia of 1515 (lot 2615), followed by its counterfeit, simply described as “La stessa. Senza data, Sec. xvi, 8vo” (lots 2616 and 2617).

Meanwhile, in the second edition of his successful Manuel du libraire et de l’amateur de livres, Jacques-Charles Brunet tentatively attributed its printing to Gregorio de’ Gregori.

J.-C. Brunet, Manuel du libraire et de l’amateur de livres, vol. 1, Paris 1814, p. 388.

In 1803, Antoine-Augustin Renouard, one of the greatest collectors of books printed by Manuzio, published the first edition of his Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde, ou histoire des trois Manuce et de leurs éditions. The second volume of this still precious bibliographical repertoire contains a section devoted to the counterfeits, or “Editions faites en imitation de celles de Alde”, produced mainly by Lyonnais printers between 1501 and 1526. The 1803 list does not mention the pirated Dante of 1515. Its title is however included in the third volume Catalogue de la Bibliothèque d’un amateur, published by Renouard in 1819, which also included an impressive number of editions published by ‘les trois Manuce’.

A.-A. Renouard, Catalogue de la Bibliothèque d’un amateur, avec notes bibliographiques, critiques et littéraires, vol. 3, part 2, Paris 1819, p. 76.

Following Brunet’s suggestion, the printing of the counterfeit is attributed to de’ Gregori, whose chosen title for the edition – Le terze rime de Dante con sito, et forma de lo Inferno novamente in restampito – is said to be composed of ‘barbarian words’. The curious, possibly dialectal form ‘novamente in restampito’ (i.e. ‘newly reprinted’) might sound almost insulting compared to the elegance of the genuine production of the prestigious Venetian press, as well as to the refined collecting taste of Renouard, who loved to have his Aldines bound in finely tooled morocco by the most sought-after masters then active in Paris.

The de’ Gregori counterfeit found its place in the third and definitive edition of the Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde, issued in 1834. Its attribution to Gregorio de’ Gregori was accepted by the eminent Dante scholar Paul Colomb de Batines, who mentions the edition in  his Bibliografia dantesca ossia catalogo delle edizioni, traduzioni, codici manoscritti e comenti della Divina Commedia e delle opere minori di Dante, sharing Renouard’s opinion on the outrageous, or indecorous use of a word like ‘restampito’, and on the title-page of Dante’s eternal masterpiece no less. Despite such blighting barbarisms, Batines stresses the rarity of the counterfeit, noting that, “Checchè sia di ciò, questa contraffazione è rara, e più difficile da trovarsi che l’edizione originale”, “despite that, this counterfeit is rare, and more difficult to be found that the genuine edition” (Bibliografia dantesca, vol. 1, Prato 1845, p. 76).

Bibliography and bibliophily are closely intertwined. In fact, Renouard’s inclusion of piracies in his Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde as an integral part of the history of the Aldine Press phenomenon is also why they became collectable. Indeed, although ‘moins estimables’, these editions are exceedingly rare, and deserve “sous plus d’un rapport, de piquer la curiosité des amateurs” (Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde, Paris 1803, vol. 2, p. 196).

The third and definitive edition of Renouard’s Annales de l’imprimerie des Alde, Paris 1834.

As a result, the number of sale catalogues presenting not only the genuine production of the Aldine Press, but also pseudo- or quasi-Aldine grew significantly.

In 1828, one of the major London booksellers Thomas Thorpe (1791-1851) published his Bibliotheca Aldina. A Catalogue of an Extensive and Magnificent Assemblage of Books, Printed by Aldus Manutius, from 1495 to 1629, which contained – as the title-page indicates – “also a Most Curious Collection of Counterfeited Aldine Editions, Anchor Books, &c, &c”.

Later, in 1880, a similar, special catalogue was issued by another renowned London bookseller, James Toovey (1814-1893). Toovey’s Bibliotheca Aldina includes, as announced on its title-page, “Lyonese and Venetian Counterfeits”. The vogue became common among Italian booksellers as well: an interesting example of this is offered by the Catalogo delle Opere Antiche e Moderne Italiane e Forestiere published in 1856 by Giovanni Gallarini, a ‘Libraio-Bibliografo’ based in Rome, which includes a special section devoted to “Edizioni Aldine, ed altre che a queste si annettono, comprese quelle di Andrea d’Asola, dei Torresani, Colombel, le contrafatte di Lione, ecc.”.

About fifty years later, one of the finest sets of Aldine editions came onto the market: the magnificent collection assembled by Edward Herbert, 2nd Earl of Powis (1785-1848). Herbert’s library was offered for sale in 1923 in the rooms of Sotheby’s: the Aldines were offered as a single lot, which was bought by Quaritch bookshop. Through this acquisition and subsequent purchases from the Holford library, sold at Sotheby’s in 1927/28, Quaritch was able to publish in 1929 his immense catalogue entirely devoted to Aldus, the Catalogue of a Most Important Collection of Publications of the Aldine Press 1495-1595.

Quaritch catalogue features all 535 Aldine editions, as well as an appended section of ‘Counterfeit Editions’. This section includes nineteen counterfeits on offer, among them the Dante issued from the printing press run by de’ Gregori.

It would be highly interesting to know why, or even for whom Gregorio de’ Gregori produced his pirated Dante, especially given that this was not his only Aldine counterfeit. In fact, his counterfeit of the Petrarch published by Aldus’ heirs in 1521 followed in about 1522, a volume issued – like the Commedia – entirely anonymously and without date. In 1515, de’ Gregori also printed an edition of works by Ioannes Duns Scotus for the Venetian bookseller Giovanni Bartolomeo Gabiano, the uncle of that Balthasar active in Lyon, the main figure behind the Aldine piracy. Balthasar had maintained very close ties in Venice, and the circumstance may suggest the existence of de’ Gregori’s commercial relationships with Gabiano’s branch in Lyon, his possible involvement in common, unscrupulous ventures, or the sharing of clientele, in Venice or abroad, interested in such editions.

Despite the lesser beauty of the italic type used for setting Dante’s cantiche, the low quality of paper, and above all the barbaric ‘restampito’ on its title-page which had so offended Renouard and Batines, the Commedia printed by de’ Gregori represents a tangible sign of the fashion for the anchor and dolphin productions, and contributed – like  the Lyonnais  counterfeits – to the spread of Aldus’ octavo classics. It therefore entirely and inextricably belongs to the history of the Aldine Press, offering striking testimony the lasting charm of the Aldine octavos, so variously and enduringly able to arouse “la curiosité des amateurs”.

Dante, Le terze rime, Venice, Aldus Manutius, Venice 1502. Presented in the 2016 catalogue Raccolta di Edizioni dantesche, n. 4.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on 27 May 2020.

How to cite this information

Margherita Palumbo, “The first illustrated Aldine Dante counterfeited by a Venetian printer” PRPH Books, 27 May 2020, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/aldine-dante-counterfeit. Accessed [date].

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