Subiaco: [Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz], 29 October 1465
The first printed edition of the works of Lactantius, a Church Father called by Italian humanists ‘the Christian Cicero’, was the first dated book printed in Italy. This copy is decorated throughout with characteristic illuminated initials and borders in foliate designs of gold and colours. The inclusion of distinctive multi-coloured birds in the decoration of this and other copies has led Martin Davies to identify the illuminator employed by the publishers as the Master of the Barbo Missal, a successful Italian illuminator.
Inc.3.B.1.1[1122], fol. [a1] recto
In the early 1460s, two journeymen took up residence in the abbey of Subiaco with the intention of printing books, probably in consequence of violent political upheavals in Mainz, the birthplace of printing. Nobody knows what took Sweynheym and Pannartz to this secluded spot in the Apennine foothills fifty miles east of Rome, but they found there a thriving community of Benedictine monks, mostly Germans like themselves, and a site of international pilgrimage as the first foundation of St Benedict. From a later list of their publications, we know that their first book was a Donatus, all trace of which has long disappeared. Other documentary evidence shows that they completed an undated Cicero, De oratore before 30 September 1465. The Lactantius which followed is the first Italian printed book with a date, in absolute terms the third book printed in Italy. It is also the only one of the three surviving editions (the last being Augustine’s City of God of 1467) to mention the place of printing; the Subiaco printers never revealed their own names.
The fourth-century Church Father Lactantius became known to the Renaissance as ‘the Christian Cicero’ for the stylistic purity of his apologetic works. He was extraordinarily popular with the humanists and clerics at whom the products of the first Italian press were aimed. Following their move to Rome in 1467, Sweynheym and Pannartz published two further editions over the course of their nine-year partnership, totalling over 800 copies. The 1465 Lactantius was set in a type of surpassing beauty, essentially roman but retaining gothic traits from their German homeland. Good judges have thought it the finest of all Renaissance types. A further distinction was the first appearance anywhere of a complete Greek font to render quotations in the text.
The Cambridge Lactantius is one of 20 copies (among 53 extant) finely illuminated by a north Italian artist known as the Master of the Barbo Missal. He also illuminated several copies of the Subiaco Cicero and one of the Augustine, besides plentiful manuscript work. Surprisingly, his hand is found in a number of books printed in Mainz by Fust and Schöffer, the supposed masters of Sweynheym and Pannartz, in the years 1459 to 1462. The most probable explanation is that the two Germans initially came to Italy to sell Mainz books and, finding a market for these novel products, decided to take up printing on their own account.
Essay by Dr Martin Davies
