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Bembo’s collection of literature and art, begun by his father, was legendary in his lifetime.īembo’s pamphlet De Aetna recounts a journey up the volcano Mount Etna that he undertook in company with a student friend. Besides his scholarly classical work, his writings influenced the development and spread of a single Italian language (based on Tuscan), and his musical tastes helped to establish the madrigal as the most important secular musical form of the 16 th century. In later life Bembo was named a cardinal by Pope Paul III. Pietro Bembo as a cardinal in a portrait by Titian.īembo was raised in an aristocratic Venetian family and when young traveled with his father Bernardo, a diplomat, to posts in Burgundy, Florence, and Ravenna. It is believed that Griffo was executed for the crime. There, in 1518, in circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery, he beat his son-in-law to death with an iron bar - or so claims an indictment from the city authorities. Griffo then moved to the city of Fano and thence on to Perugia, where he worked for other publishers, and in 1516 returned to his home city to start his own publishing operation. This was just as Aldus had scored a Venetian government monopoly on the printing of Greek literature. Griffo worked with Aldus in Venice from 1494 until the two had a falling-out in 1502 - Aldus had pulled a fast one and sewn up the rights to use Griffo’s italic type for 10 years, without further compensation to the designer. Jenson for the title of most influential type designer can sound like football fans.) He got his start creating fonts inspired by the work of Nicolas Jenson, a French engraver, printer, and type designer working in Venice who had created one of the first Roman type faces a century before. Griffo was the premier punch-cutter of his age. Aldus also introduced what today we would call the paperback: portable, relatively inexpensive editions of books in a size referred to as “octavo.”Īldine put out 132 titles on Aldus’s watch (he died in 1515): Latin and Greek classics, dictionaries, and a few more modern works. Aldus was the first to use an italic typeface in print - type he commissioned from Griffo in 1501.