Until 19 June 2016, at Gallerie dell'accademia, the exhibition Aldus Manutius. The Renaissance of Venice, curated by Guido Beltramini, Davide Gasparotto, Giulio Manieri Elia, retraces, through over one hundred works of art on loan from major Italian and foreign museums and more than thirty very rare editions printed between the end of the 150th and the first years of the XNUMXth century, a unique and unrepeatable season in the history of European and Western culture. A veritable Golden Age, during which the book proved capable of transforming the world, giving life to the Renaissance of Venice, an effervescent city – exceeding XNUMX inhabitants and in the sixteenth century it was among the richest and most populous on the continent – where every type of artistic language manages, in the space of a few decades, to find its most effective expression.
It is in this historical period that Venice conquers and definitively affirms its role as a hinge between East and West, going from being a simple platform for commercial exchanges to a place where cultures, traditions and knowledge mix. A truly extraordinary wealth of ideas, represented in the exhibition by a great variety of expressive languages: painting, sculpture, engraving, sumptuary art, cartography. Naturally arriving at the press, with some of the most precious specimens attributed to the activity of Aldus Manuzio, such as the finely illuminated editions arriving from Manchester or the very rare Aristotle of 1496 on loan from the Escorial collections.
Exploiting the impressive logistic network available only to a mercantile city like Venice, Manuzio managed to imagine and implement his extraordinary program which for the first time envisaged making the great classics of the Greek culture, from Homer to Aristotle, from Sophocles to Euripides to Thucydides, to then collect the Latin texts from Virgil to Cicero, from Horace to Ovid, to Catullus, to Propertius, Lucretius, Juvenal, Martial, and again Jewish and Italian of the new vernacular literature.
Precisely thanks to Manuzio and his collaboration with Pietro Bembo, the vernacular established itself, alongside Latin, as the language of contemporaneity throughout Europe, confirming itself as such according to the canon that chose Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio as models.
The circulation of this patrimony of texts and ideas not only contributed to the creation of a common European culture, capable of integrating the classical Greco-Roman sphere with the modern and contemporary world, but also favored the emergence of absolutely new themes and motifs in the field of the figurative arts; masters such as Giovanni Bellini, Cima da Conegliano, Jacopo de' Barbari drew decisive inspiration from the texts of Greek and Latin classicism, now finally usable easily even by a lay public.
Following the rediscovery of Greek and Latin poetry, painting now also takes a new look at nature: having abandoned the medieval suggestions that depicted a hostile, harsh nature, populated by ferocious beasts, art opens up to a representation of the landscape understood as cradle of civilization, as an earthly paradise in which man is destined to live.
The exhibition bears witness to this passage through the very modern landscapes of Giorgione, the drawings of the young Titian, the engravings of Giulio Campagnola, the small bronzes of Andrea Briosco.
An important section of the exhibition itinerary is dedicated to the intense relationship that bound Aldo to the culture of northern Europe and to Erasmus of Rotterdam. The Dutch philosopher – who lived in Venice to publish the new and definitive edition of his Adagia, as a guest of Manutius' family for almost a year – as well as appreciating the care taken by the Aldine editions, believed that it was of fundamental importance for the circulation of his thought throughout Europe, that his works were printed by Manutius. The relationship of esteem between the two is symbolized, in the exhibition, by the presence of the copy of the Poeti Cristiani printed by Aldo in 1504 and which belonged to Erasmo himself.
The exhibition does not fail to propose other treasures of great cultural value: such as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the most famous and refined illustrated book by Aldo Manuzio with imaginative woodcuts perhaps prepared from a design by the miniaturist Benedetto Bordon; but above all one of the only two examples left in the world of untrimmed aldine after its printing. A book of inestimable historical value (a Euripides owned by the Morgan Library in New York, exhibited for the first time in Europe) capable of demonstrating in its purity and linearity the idea of harmony and the sense of composition that Aldo had in designing the graphic architecture of the different pages, before these ended up being re-framed by the binders. It is precisely this piece that highlights Manuzio's refined culture, his knowledge of perspective theories canonized by Luca Pacioli and which became the key to redesigning the world during the Renaissance.
