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10. Свго/теті'ш«ж/е [217]

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I Roman I

Li Li

Û VENETIAN û

German printers spread the new art all over Europe in a little over a
generation, the sack of the city of Mainz in 1462 accelerating the pro¬
cess. Of this disaster Mr Updike says that it 'influenced the spread of
typography, for it wiped out commerce there, and the consequent
lack of money led printers, who were established in a kind of indus¬
trial group, to scatter widely.This accounts for the German names we
find among the earliest printers in other countries throughout Europe. '1

Many of these printers went to Italy, the country which in the pre¬
vious century had witnessed the birth of the Renaissance—that'fructi¬
fying of the human mind through contact with the classical world of
Greece and Rome.' The Renaissance humanists, in transcribing the
works of classical authors had rejected the gothic hand and copied the
script in which many of these works were written out—a clear, regular
hand perfected some centuries earlier in the reign of Charlemagne
(b.743—d.814) and known to us as the Caroline minuscule—a style of
writing which we have no difficulty in recognizing as the forbear of
our upper- & lower-case today.The scribes modified this hand, making
it even more beautiful.Thus it is understandable why this neo-caroline
minuscule had, by the time the first printers arrived from the North, to
some extent ousted the gothic script in Italy.

When Conrad Sweynheym & Arnold Pannartz set up the first print¬
ing press in Italy at the Benedictine Monastery at Subiaco near Rome

4n Printing Types, Their History, Forms, and Use. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
(Mass.) Vol I. Second Edition 1937.

19

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