Pope Nicholas V, Poggio, Gianozzo
Manetti, Niccolo Niccoli, and other distinguished scholars, themselves
wrote a beautiful hand, and desired and tolerated none other. The
decorative adjuncts, even when miniatures formed no part of them, were
full of taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts,
with the light and graceful scrolls which begin and end the lines. The
material used to write on, when the work was ordered by great or
wealthy people, was always parchment; the binding, both in the Vatican
and at Urbino, was a uniform crimson velvet with silver clasps. Where
there was so much care to show honour to the contents of a book by the
beauty of its outward form, it is intelligible that the sudden
appearance of printed books was greeted at first with anything but
favour. Federigo of Urbino 'would have been ashamed to own a printed
book.'
But the weary copyists--not those who lived by the trade, but the many
who were forced to copy a book in order to have it--rejoiced at the
German invention. It was soon applied in Italy to the multiplication
first of the Latin and then of the Greek authors, and for a long period
nowhere but in Italy, yet it spread with by no means the rapidity which
might have been expected from the general enthusiasm for these works.
After a while the modern relation between author and publisher began to
develop itself, and under Alexander VI, when it was no longer easy to
destroy a book, as Cosimo could make Filelfo promise to do, the
prohibitive censorship made its appearance.
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