icolas Jenson’s death in 1480 cut short his career as a printer and might have ended his influence entirely, except that his success as a marketer and the quality of his types had already been recognized and imitated. We will ignore imitations of his Gothic types and look at a few examples of printers who imitated his famous Roman face.Aldus Manutius was the single most influential Italian printer of the fifteenth century (b. ca. 1450; active in Venice, 1490-1515). Aldus introduced Italic and Greek types of distinction and popularized small, pocket-sized editions of poetry in the famous Aldine format.
Less known, but equally influential in their day, were his standard editions of classical authors in a Roman face that closely imitated Jenson’s. As one writer put it in the flowery prose of the early sixteenth century:
Years ago Jenson the Frenchman was famous among the Venetians for learned books inscribed with the bronzes of Minerva, books which he made with the counsel of learned men. After him, barbarity invaded the noble art of printing...but now Aldus, noble offspring of Apollo and the Muses, is rescuing our age from such infamy.The goddess Minerva was patron of the liberal arts and of metallurgy, so this author compares the two printers both for the technical beauty of their printing and the learnedness of their texts. Aldus, he claims, imitated and surpassed the achievement of Jenson.
Through Aldus’ types (and probably also directly through copies of his own books that circulated in Italy and France), Jenson’s Roman influenced a variety of later faces. Harry Carter counted at least thirty direct imitations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. When the Parisian printers Simon de Collines and Robert Estienne decided to commit themselves to Roman type faces about 1530, their direct model was Aldus. Their types, in turn, influenced the punchcutter Garamond and the French school was born.
Copyright ©1997 Paul Baker and Paul Gehl
1st revision September 21, 1996