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Curatorial Note:: This fragmentary Passione di Cristo, a series of Italian prayers, each facing a metalcut scene from the Passion, came to light in the Munich booktrade in the 1920s. Its large and eccentric rotunda font, with body size equal to that of Gutenberg’s DK font, is otherwise unrecorded. The metalcuts are of Bavarian origin, where they were used to print various editions of a German Leiden Cristi in the same layout as the Passione di Cristo. The square gothic font of the Bavarian Leiden Cristi editions is a variant of that used to print the Vienna Bloodletting Calendar for 1462. The Passione paper stock with watermark of a half-figure Unicorn is appropriate for a mill in the Romagna in the early 1460s. Our working picture is that a printer brought the Passion metalcuts south, fashioned a new type, and re-used the cuts for an Italian prayer book translated from the Leiden Christi, several years before Sweynheym and Pannartz began to print at Subiaco.

Curatorial Note:: It has been presumed but not proved that the printer Johann Neumeister, apparently a native of Mainz, began in the printing trade as a worker in the printing shops of Gutenberg or of Fust and Schoeffer. In any case, he is likely to have arrived to Foligno in Umbria from Rome, 75 miles to the south, for his type font is nearly identical to that of a printing shop formed the same year in Rome by a wealthy papal official, Johannes Philippus de Lignamine. The financial patron of the first Foligno press, Emiliano Orfini, was a papal mintmaster. Curiously, in the same year, 1470, a pamphlet for pilgrims to Assisi was printed only a few miles away, in the small neighboring town of Trevi, using a type that, though different, shows stylistic similarities to Neumeister’s.

Curatorial Note:: Johannes de Spira’s monopoly on printing in Venice was short-lived. After his death in 1470, others were allowed to establish presses there, and by the mid-1470s Venice was the publishing capitol of Europe. The city’s leading printer was Nicolas Jenson, former master of the French royal mint. According to 16th century records, in 1458 Charles VII had dispatched Jenson to learn Gutenberg’s craft in Mainz. By 1470 Jenson was in Venice, using a roman font of unusually high quality; it continues to influence type design today. His first publication was the exhibited 4th century refutation of pagan theology by Eusebius, “Father of Church History.” Princeton’s copy bears hand-stamped woodcut initials that Italian booksellers occasionally added to provide patterns for hand-coloring.

Curatorial Note:: Lactantius (ca. 240–320 CE) was a Roman rhetorician who served as tutor to the son of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor. The first edition of his works, which recommended Christian beliefs to Roman men of letters, was printed concurrently with Cicero’s De Oratore, but this much longer work was not completed until several weeks later in 1465. It was one of the first two books (along with Fust and Schoeffer’s Cicero, De Officiis of 1465) to contain Greek printing. As seen in the word ἀνθρωπος (anthropos) on the exhibited right-hand page, the Subiaco type handled Greek letter forms much more accurately than Fust and Schoeffer did the same year. This very tall Median folio is preserved in its original Italian binding.

Curatorial Note:: Somewhat improbably, the Foligno press produced the first edition of a masterwork of world literature, the Divine Comedy, one of three editions of that year (the other two from Venice and Mantua), each set from a different manuscript. Neumeister refers in the colophon to his subordinate, “Evangelista meo,” who can be identified as a Foligno notary, Evangelista Angelini. Their printing enterprise ended with the Dante, and Neumeister departed in debt to his original patron Emiliano Orfini, who had him imprisoned in Rome. Neumeister then disappears from historical record until 1479, when he printed in Mainz, moving on to Albi in Languedoc in 1481, and to Lyons in 1488, where he died a pauper.

Curatorial Note:: In 1469 printing was established for the first time not merely in a city on a river, but in a major mercantile center with a seacoast harbor. On 18 September of that year, the Venetian government granted Johannes de Spira, a German émigré from Speyer, the exclusive privilege to print books within their city for the next five years. He had already published two editions of Cicero’s Epistolae ad familiares as well as Pliny’s Historia naturalis, using a good roman typeface. The exhibited copy of Pliny’s compendium of natural history was illuminated in the Italian “white-vine” style and bears an unidentified armorial. It was bound in the 18th century for Göttweig Abbey in Austria.

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