INCUNABULA. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo.

De Civitate Dei.

      Mathias Moravus, Naples. 1477. . . Folio (266 x 209 mm), a8 b10; a-z10 aa-dd10, 298 leaves, a1, b10, dd10 blank, (this copy wanting the three blank leaves), 43 lines to the page, spaces for initials with printed guide-letters, a wide-margin copy, a few wormholes at beginning and end, 4 leaves repaired in margins just reaching text, nineteenth century blue polished calf, embossed in blind within gilt roll-tooled border, spine elaborately gilt in six compartments, a nice copy. Floral border on the inner margin on (2)a1 recto at the beginning of the text of Book I, with flowers in blue and dark pink, green leaves, extended with gold balls. Eight-line Initial I in gold on a squared background of pink and blue with small white penwork decoration. The beginning of each of the 21 following books is marked with a 6-line initial in gold with infills in pink, blue or green, all with white penwork decoration. The gold initial marking the beginning of Book XXI (aa 5 verso) is not filled in with colour. The painted initials are protected with tissue paper, probably inserted at the time of the present binding. Within the books each chapter is marked with a 3-line plain initial, alternating in red and blue.Comparison with other work by Mathias Moravus yields strong arguments for assuming that the illumination and decoration were carried out in his printing house. (see below).Some early notes, partly erased or washed. There are no marks of early ownership. After the colophon the figures '7,1 - 6 -' are written in a hand of the nineteenth, possibly late eighteenth century. This is probably the notation of a price in pounds, shillings and pence, indicating the presence of this volume in the British Isles at this time. The elegant binding does not contradict this. On the verso of the first fly-leaf the bookplate of Charles and Mary Lacaita and their children, Selham, Sussex. Charles Carmichael Lacaita, Liberal MP for Dundee and botanist (1853-1933) was the only son of Sir James Philip Lacaita (1813-95), a Neapolitan lawyer and statesman, for a long time living in exile in England (ODNB). The elder Lacaita was a scholar and had a reputation as an excellent bibliographer. Presumably he was the buyer of this book associated with his home-town, and it was later owned by his son and his family. On several points the present book, its printer, its type, as well as its illumination are remarkable witnesses to the movement of craftsmen, their materials, and their stylistic traditions over Europe in the first decades after the invention of printing. Such movement existed already in the world of scribal traditions, but was exponentially accelerated once books were multiplied in print. Book production became a veritable melting pot of influences: printers and artists adapted to new environments while at the same time maintaining skills and styles brought from elsewhere. This can well be shown in the present volume. The text, St Augustine's De Civitate Dei, was, and still is, one of the most widely read patristic texts; the plain text was ten years earlier printed at the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco among the first books printed in Italy, and this version was steadily reprinted in Rome and Venice. The present edition is the eighth in this sequence, and both the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke and BMC note that it is a page-for page reprint of the edition printed in Venice in 1475 by Gabriele di Pietro. Meanwhile a version with the commentary of Thomas Waleys was printed from 1468 in Strasbourg, Mainz and Basel.The Naples edition does not follow the layout of its exemplar, which was printed over two columns, but by printing it with long lines the book was given a more humanistic character. The type, however, resembled that used for its model, and also a type Mathias Moravus had used himself for the two books he printed in 1474 in Genoa before moving to Naples. It is a 'fere-humanistica' appropriate for this kind of texts and for classics, and economical in use. After Moravus used it in Naples in 1476 and 1477, the fount passed on to Rome where, with slight adaptations, we see it in 1478 and 1479 in the hands of the printer there named 'Johannes Bulle de Bremen'. His identity is problematic, for when we see the same fount again, in 1480 and 1481, it is in the first books printed in London, also printed by a printer named Johannes but this time with the surname 'Lettou', which may indicate his origin from Latvia. He is recorded as Theutonicus' in the London registers of aliens. Whatever the identity of the printer, we find the first books printed in London printed in types first selected a few years earlier by Mathias Moravus in Naples. Naples is not the birthplace of Mathias Moravus. He was a friar, born in the village of Cetechowitz near Olomouc in Moravia, in the east of the modern Czech Republic. Before settling as a printer he left a (sporadic) trail as a scribe and probably illuminator. The main source is a two-volume manuscript of the letters of St Jerome, written in 1468, probably in Vicenza, for Moses Buffarello, bishop of Belluno and temporarily of Vicenza. It is now in the Musee Conde in Chantilly. It is written in a fine rotunda hand, and we shall return to its outstanding illumination. Another manuscript, probably written in Verona and containing miscellaneous Latin texts (including one by Cicero), was sold in 1927 in Milan at an auction by Hoepli; from an illustration we can see that its script is rather similar to the style of the type of the St Augustine. Apparently it was not decorated, but we can learn from it at least that as a scribe Mathias Moravus was able to vary his styles as the occasion demanded, in the same way as printers could vary their founts (provided they possessed them). Thus we can follow what must be the final part of Mathias's itinerary from Moravia to the Veneto in the late 1460s, hence to Genoa, where he printed two very substantial books in 1474 (one in association with a Michael de Monacho), to settle for good in Naples, where he produced between 1475 and 1492 more than 60 titles. Printing in Naples had a character unique among the Italian centres of printing due to its royal court, a court that showed an active interest in book production and protected printers. Mathias Moravus was the second major printer to settle there, preceded in 1471 by Sixtus Riessinger, who worked in partnership with an Italian, Francesco del Tuppo, who later took over the business supported by his three 'fidelissimi Germani' who stayed after Riessinger had left. Naples had in common with all printing in Italy that in the early decades it was overwhelmingly carried out by Germans and others from north of the Alps, and del Tuppo's 'fidelissimi' may remind us that not only the named printers moved to Italy, but that they took with them craftsmen to work in their printers shops, contributing their skills and their own traditions. In Naples alone there were in the fifteenth century about twenty named printers from north of the Alps, many of them staying for only a short time. How many workmen they brought remains a matter for speculation. Mathias Moravus was a very competent printer, with perhaps a slight penchant for technical bravura: his formats range from very large (royal) folio to a miniature book of hours in 320 - highly exceptional at that date. One of the special skills he brought to book production may have been refined illumination. When we compare a sample of illuminated copies of his books (to date admittedly a small sample, based on those available in the British Library), and also compare them with the manuscript of 1468 (of which the two opening leaves of the two volumes are available in reproductions), we find characteristic elements common to them all. Perhaps the most striking characteristic is the mixture of Italian and North-European, or rather German stylistic elements. The other not less striking element is th...