by Linda Proud
Miscomini looked close to tears.
‘You cannot think in numbers? Here, let me show you.’ I took a piece of paper and folded it once lengthwise and twice sidewise. I did this with the dexterity of a marketplace trickster, making sure my hands were a blur before his eyes. I opened it out and wrote the two sequences, one on one side, one on the other, and folded it up again. ‘Then you give it the slice of the cross,’ I said, pulling a knife through the middle fold, lengthwise and sidewise. Eight pages dropped from my hands to the table, with numbers written on them. ‘Then you put it all together. Go on, put it together so that the numbers are sequential.’ The poor man was all fingers and thumbs and exasperation. I took the pages back and did it for him. ‘At the moment you print two pages on two formes. Here you have a quire of sixteen pages in quarto, also done on two formes.’
Miscomini’s eyes bulged and he struggled for breath. ‘This is magic. What was that formula again?’
‘Take me on and I will demonstrate it to you. In time, if you allow me to do the tasks of my choice, I will reveal to you the secret of the octavo book and give you the formula for a quire of thirty-two pages.’
Stupid fool. Had he only folded a sheet of paper once, twice or three times himself, and numbered each page sequentially as usual, once he opened up the sheet he would have seen for himself my ‘cabalistic formula’. Still, it won me a place in his printing house – although the rest of the men gave me a wide bearing.
54
AN INVENTION OF THE DEVIL
1491
IN MISCOMINI’S PRINTING HOUSE THE ONLY SOUNDS WERE the squeak of the great wooden screw on each press, the turn of the wheel as the press stone was moved out on its rails for inking, and the rhythmic clicking sound of the otherwise silent compositors. In the depth of concentration familiar to scribes, with the right hand they picked out tiny metal letters from the case and put them into the ‘stick’ they held in the left. They had to work quickly, more quickly than the brain: their hands knew the case intimately, the position and location of its many compartments, the capital letters in the upper case, the small letters in the lower case, the compartments ordered more or less alphabetically, and the ligatures set apart in their own compartments at the sides. They plucked letters with the tender confidence of a musician. The central part of the case had larger compartments that held the letters used most often in our language, and with these compartments as ‘home’, the hands of the compositors moved out two to the left or three to the right, so instinctively that it was said that a good compositor could do it blind. Which is all very well, so long as the letters have been put in the right compartments.
After a forme had been printed, it had to be untied and its letters released back into the case, since a dozen or so pages would take anything up to ten thousand sorts. Putting them back into the cases was the work of the compositor’s assistant and for a month I chose it to be my job, distributing the letters at first carefully, and then more quickly, and at last without looking or thinking. A disser who puts any letters back in the wrong compartments was liable to be smacked around the ear, no matter what his age or social standing, as I can testify. Such a thing costs the compositor time – since he is paid by the line – but often these mistakes went undetected. So here was the chief imp of printing – the compositor’s assistant.
While his right hand picked out the letters, the compositor gazed steadily at the stick in his left hand. Although he could not fill the line without looking, since it was too easy to put the letters in upside down, he soon trained himself to do it without thinking, to translate each line of the original manuscript and load it into the stick back to front. Compositors never read words: they see letters. Click-click-click they go, swaying back and forward like rowers for two hours or more at a time, whereupon they rise groaning from their stools and go outside and wave their limbs around to ease the pain.
Once a stick was filled, it had to be placed in a galley frame, building up line by line into a page in a forme. Between each line were placed leads which, being lower than the letters, do not print. Leads are the secret of spacing. Even some of the letters in the stick were separated by leads, for a good compositor knows which letters can sit together well and which require extra space. And then each line had to end at the same place on the right hand side – to be ‘justified right’. Scribes know how to do this by judging the script as they write it down, stretching letters or using abbreviations as they come to the end of a line; the compositor does the same with leads and ligatures. Once the galley is complete, it is placed into the forme and made tight with wooden blocks in a huge variety of size, wedged with them until it fits tightly into the forme without moving.
‘Do you not make a sample printing of the completed page before putting it on the press?’ I asked in my innocence.
‘Of course,’ said Antonio Miscomini. ‘We call it a proof.’
‘And then? Do you read it?’
‘We check for the evenness of the impression and for any movement in the forme. That is why it is so important to tie the forme up tight – mustn’t let anything move.’
‘But do you read it?’
‘Yes, of course we check for errors.’
‘So how come you don’t find them?’
‘We do find them.’
‘But many evade your eye.’
‘No, none evade my eye. But in between the proof and the printing, the printer’s devils get to work, taking out a letter here, adding one in there. There is nothing we can do about it.’
The compositors and assistants sat back from their work to grin at me.
‘There are your devils!’ I said, pointing to them. ‘If I am going to show you the formula for an octavo quire, I want to read your proofs for you, at least for Ficino’s translation of Plotinus.’
‘Not before you have learnt to compose yourself.’
‘I would not be able to do that. My arm is damaged, or else I would still be a scribe. If I tried to pick up letters, I would drop them.’ It was true – but I was also keen to avoid the pain suffered by the compositors as they bent over their cases. I had already tried holding a stick and filling it – each sort added to the stick’s weight and by the time you had finished a line your muscles were beginning to scream. ‘Do you want that formula or not?’ I asked Miscomini.
In an adjoining shop, letter punches were engraved by ex- goldsmiths, made into matrices and cast by foundry men, each matrix providing hundreds of sorts, made of an alloy that was constantly being adjusted and experimented with, for the aim was to find a metal that did not wear out after a few printings. We did not make our own paper and getting sufficient supplies of the right quality was a testing job of administration. Ink had to be mixed, and I was taught how to dab the thick, viscous stuff on the forme with a pad in each hand – a most tedious job given to apprentices or men who deserved punishment. I learnt everything I required as quickly as possible, then refused to do it any more, all the time withholding the octavo formula.
I studied alone at night those things that really interested me. The letters were being engraved at apparently random heights: no one in this shop had considered the letter-to-page ratio which is vital to beauty. The same with the leadings between lines. Here all was arbitrary and the laws of proportion, if ever known, were quite forgotten. Miscomini believed beauty was appearance: if something looked right, then it was. He was a master of fiddling, interfering with other men’s work to put in an extra lead here and there, shifting letters along and words down until the page ‘looks right’. He would leave a space for a capital letter and have a mediocre scribe fill it in on the printed page – a job surely as tedious as ink-dabbing when you have to do a hundred or more identical capital letters at a time. Such jobs I avoided, dangling my formula before Miscomini as a carrot before a donkey. And I gave him no advice about beauty at all, for I had no intention of staying in this shop. I was on my way to V
enice, to present myself to Aldo Manuzio as an editor with printing experience.
Such were my dreams. In reality I spent my days bowed over pages of Plotinus, reading proofs and learning humility. After a month I went to Miscomini and apologised for my arrogance. ‘You are right. There are such things as printer’s devils. I believe.’ For no matter how carefully I read, I missed mistakes. Many of them. By some devilish law errors only become apparent when you take the top printed sheet off a stack of hundreds, but even at that stage not all of them are seen. The worst mistakes only dance naked before your eyes once the pages have been trimmed, stitched and bound together. It is only when you open the finished book that you see them, standing out as if printed in a different colour. Publication day in any printing house is, I believe, a day of groaning and lamentation.
We experimented. We used two proof-readers. Although both found an equal amount of mistakes, they were rarely the same mistakes, and both missed more than they found. We tried three proof-readers, with more success and more failure – more mistakes found, just as many missed. I tried reading a page line by line from right to left, to avoid the temptation to read the text – perhaps, like the compositor, it would help to see words as letters rather than meanings. Nothing, I swear to you, worked. Forgive printers, Erasmo. There is something in the human brain – a Great Corrector – who will see things spelt right even when they are not. But even that does not explain why errors, invisible on the proof, become manifest in the edition. Some things are truly beyond our understanding.
55
BANISH HIM!
1491
PICO AND POLIZIANO RETURNED TO FLORENCE WITH A wagon-load of books for Lorenzo’s library that included Aristotle’s Poetics. They arrived at the Palazzo de’ Medici when Lorenzo was facing a decision and consulting advisers. ‘I have here details of the election of Fra Girolamo Savonarola as the new prior of San Marco,’ he told his two friends. ‘It only awaits my approval. Everyone here thinks I should seal it, except for my son who says I should banish the friar. What do you say?’
‘Trust God and put your seal on the parchment,’ said Pico immediately.
‘Banish him,’ said Angelo, glancing with approval at Piero de’ Medici, his erstwhile pupil.
‘Why? And remember, when you answer I want it in one sentence.’
Angelo went to speak, then stopped, confounded. Lorenzo looked to his son. ‘Piero?’
‘Banish him, Father. Flog him naked in the streets for his presumption. Ever since you invited him to Florence he has done nothing but insult you. Banish him.’
Lorenzo drew some papers from his desk. He softened some wax and let it drip on to the parchment. ‘Let him stay. If he speaks the truth, I must bear it. If he speaks the untruth, he must bear it. Either way, I leave the matter to God.’ He winced from pain as he stamped the wax with his ring.
After his election as prior, Savonarola was invited to visit Lorenzo. It was traditional, he was told, for new priors to visit the Medici, for the health and well-being of San Marco were due to their patronage.
‘I am going to my prayers,’ replied Savonarola. ‘For it was God who elected me, not Lorenzo de’ Medici.’
Orléans, August 12th, 1506
Erasmus wanted to remain in Paris until his Adages were off the press, but the courier said that, if we do not move on immediately, he will leave without us, for he has letters to deliver in Rome. Clyfton likewise insisted that we continue the journey at once, saying he no longer believes in Erasmus’s headaches.
‘If you are that sick, take yourself off to hospital and let the rest of us go on without you.’
So now the Adages are left to the clumsy ministrations of Bade and we have moved on.
56
BOTTICELLI IN THE ARNO
1491
SANDRO BOTTICELLI, MARRIED TO HIS ART, WAS OBLIVIOUS to his surroundings and lived in squalor. Although the workshop was as you would expect it, full of pigment and paint, jars, sacks of lime, it also had remnants of meals not cleared away, odd shoes under benches, a film of dust on any surface that was not frequently used. In his living quarters above, the floor of his chamber was strewn with clothes that had missed the cassone meant for their storage. The chest sat with its lid open in the hope of something falling into it. Those things that had fallen in lay drooped over its sides as if trying to crawl out again. His bed was never made, the sheets never changed. It was not that he did not have assistance, he just neglected to give the boy any instructions, and the boy did not trouble to ask for them.
Worried about his friend’s health, Filippino Lippi asked Angelo Poliziano, who was Sandro’s landlord, to contrive a visit to the workshop.
‘Have you come to be harsh about the rent?’ Sandro asked, through a brush clamped in his mouth.
‘No, I’ve come to be harsh about you. You cannot live like this, not unless you want the company of rats and cockroaches.’
‘It’s not as bad as it looks. I clear it up occasionally.’
Angelo studied Sandro, trying to ascertain the cause of his delinquency. Finally he diagnosed absence of mind. ‘He is living elsewhere,’ he told Filippino Lippi later. ‘This world is beneath his notice.’
Filippino, however, believed that the fault lay with Domenico Ghirlandaio. ‘Since Sandro worked with him at the Vatican he has not done fresco again, not for public view. Does he envy me the commission for the Strozzi Chapel, do you think? If he does, he has made no sign of it. I think he’s given up. He does smaller and smaller things, and for private men, not for churches or public places. I think he’s avoiding being compared with Ghirlandaio and found lacking. That’s my opinion.’
Angelo agreed that it was a fine diagnosis to put Sandro’s messy house down to envy and despair. After all, who would not feel the same? While Domenico Ghirlandaio strode abroad in tunics and capes of fine wool, in startling combinations of colour such as rose, plum and mustard, day after day Sandro Botticelli wore the same linen shirt and brown hose until someone complained of the smell. He had his beard shaved only when the stubble grew too rough for comfort, while his hair, now fading to grey, was never combed but hung from his head in matted coils. Thin on the top but falling thickly down round his shoulders, it looked as if it had been worn out on the pate by the wearing of his cap.
His last great work had been the Coronation of the Virgin, tempera on panel, for the altar to the left of the main door of San Marco. Since then it was true that he had done only small, private pieces, such as the decoration of a cassone for the Vespucci. However, I did not believe Sandro was suffering from envy. While he had been doing the Coronation, he had kept company with the Dominicans, heard what they had to say and had been impressed. I called on him one day after work at the printing shop and, sharing some ham, bread and olives with him at his bench, told him about my becoming a printer’s apprentice and how humbling it was to go back to the beginning at this stage in life.
‘Be thankful,’ he said, eating off the blade of his knife. ‘All one needs is good work to do and enough money to live on. All the rest is vanity. Seek only the praise of men you admire. Those who long for the crowd to cry “Hosannah!” forget that soon enough that same crowd will be shouting, “Crucify him!” ’ He concentrated on prising pips out of a pomegranate.
‘So, if a big commission came your way…’
‘For a fresco? I’d ignore it. I hate fresco – all those broad sweeps with a fat brush. I will always prefer tempera on panel. But right now I want only to be left alone with a stylus and a pen to do my Dante. Of course, I have to live and so I do small things that do not require me to sweat blood. Small things in tempera with the finest of brushstrokes. Eggshell pigments on smooth, smooth gesso – nothing like it. The feel of it, Maso, the chalkiness. Paint on wet plaster? Meh! Fresco painters are always exhausted at the end of the day, whereas I am refreshed.’
After we had eaten he showed me what he w
as working on: a small picture of the Mass of St Jerome. Where was Venus here, and her lascivious tresses? The scene was one of simple Christianity, the mass taking place in a chapel made of humble wattle. I remarked on its simplicity and Sandro said that it was what the commissioner had wanted. That the head of the saint was out of proportion to his body was not, I knew, incompetence on the part of the painter. Sandro was resorting to an earlier tradition where that which is the most sacred is emphasised.
‘Filippino thinks I avoid painting architecture because I cannot compete with him.’
‘Is it true?’
He smiled wryly. ‘It is not the architecture which is important. It is the figures – more, it is the soul of the figures. These painters today, with their lifelike portraits, their vanishing points, their landscapes… Landscapes! Have you seen anything of Leonardo’s recent work? Do you know how it’s done, those misty landscapes in the background? I’ll tell you. He loads a sponge with various tints of green, grey and blue and throws it at the panel. While the paint is wet he works it into sea and hills. Once it’s dried, he puts a few trees in. Ecco! Una bella vista!’
‘This is one of your jokes! I see you’ve not lost your sense of humour.’
Botticelli snuffled like a bear.
‘If that story gets back to Leonardo, he’ll be furious.’
‘Will he?’ Botticelli grinned at the thought. ‘It’s my job to throw sponges at puffed-up painters who swagger about calling themselves “artificers”. Artisans is what we are. All this perspective nonsense, the depiction of space, capturing a likeness – it’s all the wrong reality.’
As the shadows gathered into night, he lit candles. Their flames danced in the cool evening air coming in through the open door, their light flickering over his earnest face.
‘What do you mean, the wrong reality?’