Читать книгу Giambattista Bodoni - Valerie Lester - Страница 13

College of the Propaganda Fide.

2

Rome 1758–1766

The man fit to make a fortune in this ancient capital of Italy must be a chameleon sensitive to all the colors which the light casts on his surroundings. He must be flexible, insinuating, a great dissimulator, impenetrable, obliging, often base, ostensibly sincere, always pretending to know less than he does, keeping to one tone of voice, patient, in complete control of his countenance, cold as ice when another in his place would be on fire; and if he is so unfortunate as not to have religion in his heart, he must have it in his mind, and, if he is an honest man, accept the painful necessity of admitting to himself that he is a hypocrite. If he loathes the pretense, he should leave Rome and seek his fortune in England.

GIACOMO CASANOVA

IT RAINS once or twice a week in Rome in February, torrential, lashing rain. Water gushes and spews, and not just from fountains. A person can be walking along, completely unprepared for rain and, all of a sudden, sodden. Rain streams through the eye of the Pantheon, the Tiber swells, and trees along its banks drown in the swift, swirling, muddy water. The usually easy-going river becomes a raging torrent, and floods the city. Plaques on churches record the heights reached by the water over the centuries, and you crane your neck to see some of them.

Rain may have streamed down on Giambattista and Domenico as they made their way down the Janiculum hill, across the Tiber, and into the thick of things, but if they were lucky it was a sparkling winter day in which the air was mild and bright, the ochre and red buildings glowed in the sunshine, the white of ancient columns drew the eye skyward, almond and cherry trees were in blossom, and oranges were ripening on trees all over the city.

Gorgeous though it appeared, the city stank.

The population, which during the heady years of the Roman empire had reached more than two million, had declined precipitously to approximately 160,000 by 1758. Rome was experiencing rural sprawl as the countryside crept back into the city and weeds sprouted among the ruins. Previously inhabited land returned to pasture, vineyards, and wasteland. The Forum became the site of rock-throwing battles. Farm animals mooed, baa-ed, and honked their way through the streets, leaving a trail of excrement behind them. Despite the considerable available space, the Roman people crowded together near the bend in the Tiber and on the Quirinal hill, their homes surrounded by elegant churches and palazzi, even as they lived cheek by jowl with their livestock. “The corridores [sic], arcades, and even staircases of their most elegant palaces, are depositories of nastiness, and indeed in summer smell as strong as spirit of hartshorn,”¹⁹ grumbled Smollett, and with justification.

Certainly, Rome was warmer, smellier, louder, more crowded, and more bewitching than Saluzzo. The new arrivals found it crammed with clerics, venders, artists, dealers, writers, aristocrats, foreigners, shepherds and shepherdesses (often elegantly dressed and without sheep), servants, and the omnipresent poor. They had landed in the religious omphalos, the cultural magnet, the academy of Europe, at a moment when Rome was the apogee of the Grand Tour. Participants in the Tour were drawn to Rome by Piranesi’s engravings, which circulated all over Europe and lured pale, northern moths to a city that reeked of the decay that accompanies monumental splendor and the sweat of romantically inspired artistic endeavor. But the Grand Tourists were mainly drawn to Rome by the itch for possession. They wanted to see Rome and buy, and agents like the Scottish artist/archaeologist Gavin Hamilton were only too pleased to assist them.

That the city was crammed with clerics is no overstatement; forty percent of the population consisted of clergy, including at least thirty orders of monks. The Capuchins, with their recognizable hoods, brown habits, beards, and bare feet, were the most beloved. They took on tasks that others avoided: pulling teeth, attending the funerals of the poor, and acting as models for artists who could ill afford the going rate. Even men who were not members of the clergy often dressed as if they were. Ministering to the poor by both clergy and lay people was a Christian duty and taken seriously for the indulgences it bestowed, but the beggars’ omnipresence struck visitors forcibly. “It is execrable to see the amount of beggars by whom one is assailed in the streets of Rome,” laments Charles de Brosses, on his visit to Rome in 1739.²⁰

When Bodoni arrived in 1758, Pope Benedict XIV (Prospero Lambertini) was nearing the end of his reign. Regarded as the most erudite of all the popes, he made his particular mark with his ecclesiastical writings. Learned in a wide range of topics including science and mathematics, he was also a diplomat and skilled negotiator, even on occasion capable of reconciling Catholics and Protestants. A witty and sometimes racy conversationalist, he sought the company of clever people in all levels of society. He was well acquainted with the poor with whom he conversed during his walks into the more unsavory parts of Rome.

Horace Walpole, one of Pope Benedict’s most dedicated admirers, composed the following words about him for an inscription: “A priest without insolence, a prince without favorites, a pope without nepotism, an author without vanity. In short, a man whom neither wit nor power could spoil.”²¹ When the pope saw a copy of this inscription, he is said to have smiled and shaken his head, declaring, “Alas! I am like the statues of the Piazza S. Pietro — admirable at a distance but monstrous when seen at close quarters!”²²

Benedict XIV was determined that Rome should be the city where art and religion flourished in seamless magnificence. He supervised urban beautification projects, including most of the construction of the Trevi fountain, and initiated the restoration of many of Rome’s major churches. He spent time and money supporting archaeological excavations, procuring antiquities, and buying hundreds of paintings for his new public museums. Giambattista Bodoni had arrived in a city that was humming with activity.

Pope Benedict XIV.

Even as foreigners chafed against a government ruled entirely by a clerical gerontocracy, they thrived on Rome’s artistic opportunities. Collectors and dealers found treasures to buy and sell. Artists profited from ecclesiastical commissions; there was no apparent prejudice against foreign artists, although they were required to bow to a timetable that ordained countless feast days and elaborate religious festivals that included processions, ephemeral buildings, street theatre, fireworks, and free wine and food, all of which, though enjoyable, resulted in time wasted and lost productivity.

Other pastimes included conversazioni, nocturnal parties where sparkling conversation was enhanced by gaming, music, and refreshments. Pleasure could be had, too, in cafés and the city squares, but sometimes the entertainment could be gruesome when the squares became sites for public punishments such as flagellation and execution.

In opposition to any lack of taste (say over-enthusiasm for flagellation and execution), the Accademia dell’Arcadia was formed in Rome in 1690 and waved its banner on behalf of good taste. Arcadia refers to an actual, secluded, pastoral region of the Peloponnesus in Greece that became a proverbial utopia, immortalized by Virgil in his Eclogues. Members of the Accademia considered Arcadia their spiritual homeland, chose a district in Arcadia to hail from, took names from bucolic classical literature, and dressed up as those pastori and pastorelle (shepherds and shepherdesses) who could be seen herding their imaginary sheep all over town.

At the time of Bodoni’s arrival, Arcadianism was in full flower, and it permeated fashion and the arts. The Accademia’s aims were a return to a simpler way of life and the promotion of good taste according to classical precepts; its members were required to find a sensible balance between nature and reason, passion and intellect, truth and imagination. It is hard to overestimate its influence during the eighteenth century and the prestige it conferred upon its members. An Arcadian possessed an automatic entry into society. Naturally enough, the ever-ambitious Bodoni eventually became a member.

Giambattista Bodoni and Domenico Costa stumbled into this roiling, seamy stew of ecclesiastical fervor, Arcadianism, and assertive commerce. They shouldered their way past beggars, jumped out of the paths of rich men’s carriages, and inhaled the heady aromas of grilled fish and meat, and boiled cabbage. Even as they admired the column of Marcus Aurelius, they were overwhelmed by the smell of coffee. The foot of the column was the preferred site for roasting beans for the entire city.

Rome was indeed a city of smells, in part because eighteenth-century Romans did not appreciate the smell of food being prepared inside their houses (or, indeed, smells of any kind indoors, particularly perfume, which they regarded as a disgusting French phenomenon). Grilling was performed out of doors at fish or meat stalls, with separate stalls for sauces. Huge vats of tripe, enough to satisfy the entire city, were stewed in front of the church of San Marcello,²³ and special cabbage cooks set up cauldrons in the Piazza Colonna, sometimes enhancing the flavor of the vegetable with bacon fat and garlic. Young boys would then hurry the aromatic, steaming cabbage to its destination, in the manner of pizza delivery today.

In the Piazza Navona, the din of venders even overpowered the sound of Bernini’s gigantic Fountain of the Four Rivers. Because it was still Lent when Bodoni arrived, bakers loudly hawked their maritozzi, specially baked but extremely dry buns. Farmers from the countryside and fishermen from the shore jostled with each other, yelling out their wares: eggs, fish, eels, snails, cheese, corn meal, bread, and vegetables, especially those of the early spring season, such as artichokes and a variety of salad greens. The true star of the spring was puntarelle, a form of chicory even now deeply loved in Rome and eaten with a pesto of anchovies, garlic, and olive oil.

Everywhere they looked, the boys saw new sights: a barber holding high his blade as he shaved a customer; a scrivener dutifully writing letters at the bidding of the illiterate; Jesuits praying; acrobats; fortune tellers; drummers (useful for their ability to mask the screams of those having their teeth pulled); quacks touting their miracle cures; performing goats; lottery ticket sellers; lemonade venders; astrologers; strolling musicians; and the cavalletto, a torture rack with a mechanical thrashing component that acted as a threat to and a punishment for wrongdoers.²⁴ The sheer number of clerics on the streets was stunning, but most important for Bodoni was the stone lettering everywhere, beautiful letters, square and clear, huge capital Roman letters, marching across façades, advertising the city itself.

Tired, stunned, hungry, and almost penniless, Bodoni and Costa sought out their uncles. First they hunted down Costa’s, “ma l’effeto non corrispose” (to no effect).²⁵ But surely Bodoni’s uncle, the very man who had baptized him, his father’s own dear brother, would prove more welcoming? No. Carlo Bodoni was nowhere to be found in Rome. He was away in the Sabine hills outside the city, working as a Lenten preacher.²⁶ (It turns out that his greatest claim to fame was his indefatigable effort in trying to convert Jews to Christianity.)²⁷

No record remains of where the boys found lodging, but during the days that followed, an increasingly destitute Bodoni went from print shop to print shop, selling the last of his wood engravings. In a squishily hagiographic piece celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of Bodoni’s birth, Alfonso M. Begheldo says that Bodoni gave Rome his little works in wood and that Rome gave him its spirit and a sense of catholicity that knew no bounds.²⁸ At this point Bodoni would more likely have appreciated a loaf of bread; but perhaps the situation was not too dire. Modesto Paroletti, a lawyer and author from Turin, claims that a man named Bima decided to become a Capuchin monk and, upon taking his vow of poverty, handed over a healthy sum to Bodoni.²⁹ Bodoni had an uncanny knack for bettering himself through the benefit of clergy.

Pope Clement XIII.

With the rest of Rome, he and Costa celebrated Easter on 26 March 1758. Weeks passed. With the rest of Rome, they became obsessed with the death on 3 May of Pope Benedict XIV and the subsequent rituals to ensure his safe passage to heaven. With the rest of Rome they waited through June and July for the election of a new pope. Finally, on July 16, puffs of white smoke emerged from the roof of the Sistine chapel. The cardinals had chosen Carlo della Torre di Rezzonico, the super-modest Pope Clement XIII, who today is best remembered for his moral strength, for championing the Jesuits in the face of increasing opposition, and for fig-leafing Vatican statuary, all the while resembling, in James Boswell’s words, “a jolly landlord.”

None of the boys’ ambitious plans for advancement and fame bore fruit. Finally, rejecting the idea of an ignominious retreat to their maternal bosoms, they decided to seek their fortunes elsewhere and move to another city.³⁰ Bodoni was well aware that Rome and its surroundings were no longer the hotbed of Italian printing, even though Subiaco, just 40 kilometers away had been the first city in Italy to attract printers from Germany, shortly after Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type in 1450. Perhaps they would have better luck in Florence, Milan, or Venice.

Bodoni made one last ditch visit to the distinguished press of Generoso Salomini.³¹ Although Salomini had no work to offer Bodoni, he was impressed by the boy’s lively personality and way with words, and immediately saw a future for him. He decided to introduce him to Abbé Costantino Ruggieri, the superintendent of the press at the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), which was the missionary arm of the Vatican. Ruggieri was also the secretary to Cardinal Spinelli, the prefect of the Propaganda Fide. Salomini marched Bodoni over to the cardinal’s palace, where they had the good fortune to run into Abbé Ruggieri on the main staircase. Salomini asked Ruggieri if he would intervene with the cardinal and seek help and protection for the young man. Ruggieri questioned Bodoni closely on various aspects of printing, and particularly about his woodcuts. As it was midday, he gave Bodoni some money for lunch, and told him to come back afterwards to meet the cardinal.

Cardinal Giuseppe Spinelli.

When Cardinal Spinelli saw Bodoni’s woodcuts, he felt they were too good to have been created by such a young man. He decided to put him to the test. He set him up in a room alone, and asked him to prove his worth by cutting a coat of arms. Bodoni first drew the design, and then with just a few tools managed to incise a perfect woodcut in the space of three hours. The cardinal and the abbé were astonished and delighted with the result.³² They were so pleased that they hired Bodoni on the spot as an assistant compositor (typesetter), and Cardinal Spinelli even invited Bodoni to live with him at the Palazzo Valentini.

The Palazzo Valentini is monumental. Now the seat of the Province of Rome, it is situated on the Via IV Novembre near the Piazza Venezia,³³ just a stone’s throw from where Ruggieri lived in the Piazza SS. XII Apostoli. The palace is built around a rectangular courtyard, with its back flanking Trajan’s forum. Cardinal Spinelli established a library of 28,000 volumes on the ground floor, a library not just for the use of scholars such as J. J. Winckelmann, who had already been working with Spinelli for years, but also for the general public.

With Trajan’s column just a few meters away, Bodoni could simply roll out of bed in the morning, let himself out the back door of the palace, and come face to face with bas reliefs of the Dacians and the Romans fighting their way up the column. A few steps more, around to its front, he could read the inscription, cut in large Roman capitals, strong and pure, those famous letters that have imprinted themselves on the minds of generations of type designers.

Bodoni had landed on his feet. Living in a cardinal’s palace suited him very well and, as Carlo Martini so charmingly concludes, the Propaganda Fide press was the springboard for his immortal flight.³⁴

Meanwhile, Costa gave up on finding his way in Rome, but he did not give up on the church. He returned to Piedmont, became a parish priest, and remained in close contact with his friend.

The inscription at the base of Trajan’s column.

The press buzzed with activity. It was housed in the building owned by the Propaganda Fide, itself an organization established by Pope Gregory XV in 1622 as a means of strengthening and uniting the various missions that were spreading the Catholic faith throughout the world. This missionary work was particularly important in the battle for souls in Africa and Asia, where Protestantism was beginning to take hold as a result of Dutch and British commerce and colonialism. Naturally, Catholic missionaries going to those fronts needed weapons — bibles and missals printed in the vernacular — and this requirement meant the Propaganda Fide had a steady need for types cut in non-Latin alphabets in various sizes. Fortunately, it already owned punches and matrices for 23 languages, including an Illyrian face, a gift from Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1578-1637).³⁵ For its printer’s mark, the press used the armorial bearings of the Propaganda Fide: a globe, a cross, and the words from Saint Matthew 28:19, “Euntes docete omnes gentes.” [Go and make disciples of all people.]

The building is even now located at the north end of the Piazza di Spagna.³⁶ In shape, it is a raffish rhomboid, thanks to its challenging site, to the work of various architects, to additions over time, and to Borromini’s high baroque, curvy brilliance. With its shortest side on the Piazza di Spagna, it widens between the Via della Propaganda Fide and the Via Due Macelli. The site was originally occupied by the Palazzo Ferratini, which in 1633 was donated by its owner, a Monsignor Vives, to the Congregation. In the subsequent 30 years, it underwent considerable alteration and construction, overseen at first by the great architect and sculptor Bernini, who added a small, oval chapel to the existing building and redesigned the short façade on the Piazza di Spagna, while the architect Gaspare de Vecchi redesigned the whole east wing. Out went Bernini and in came his rival, Borromini, who designed a flamboyantly original façade on the Via della Propaganda Fide, which is difficult to appreciate because of the narrowness of the street. Then, in an act that was true to his art but grossly unkind, Borromini knocked down Bernini’s chapel and replaced it with a larger, rectilinear building of his own design, the Rei Magi chapel (said to have been given that name in honor of the three kings who were Christianity’s first converts). Poor Bernini. Each day he had to suffer the ignominy of the destruction of his chapel and the erection of Borromini’s, all of which he witnessed from the palazzo he had built for himself one street away.

Bodoni started work at the Propaganda Fide press one day near the end of 1758.³⁷ By chance, it was a perfect moment to arrive. Cardinal Spinelli, the prefect, was deeply committed to spreading the Catholic faith and enlarging the press. On 1 September 1758, he had appointed the indefatigable Costantino Ruggieri as superintendent. Ruggieri hailed from Santarcangelo, a small town on the Via Emilia in Romagna, not far from Rimini. He was a philologist, a man of intelligence and erudition, who had the respect of a range of scholars, among them the pope himself.³⁸ He was also referred to as a tipo cupo, a gloomy chap. He came to Rome from Padre Martini’s enormous music library in Bologna to work in the library of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (1667-1740). Here was a cardinal devoted to music, art, architecture, and sexual congress. (It is said that his bedroom sported portraits of his mistresses dressed up as saints, and that he fathered between 60 and 70 children.)

Ottoboni had a particular task in mind for Ruggieri. As cardinal-bishop of Portus, he had become interested in Saint Hippolytus, an earlier bishop of that town, and he needed someone to write a dissertation on the saint, proving for all time Hippolytus’s connection with Portus and not Aden (on the southwest tip of the Arabian peninsula) as had been claimed. Ruggieri proved to be the perfect man for the task. Already an antiquarian, an accomplished scholar, and a scrupulous researcher, and with Ottoboni’s huge collection of books and historical material at his disposal, he set to work with enthusiasm. By 1740, the dissertation was deemed ready for printing by the Vatican press. Just before this could happen, Ottoboni fell sick of a fever and died, and the dissertation languished for decades before it was published. The sensitive Ruggieri sank into a spell of deep melancholy. However, his reputation for competence and scholarly exactitude preceded him, and his melancholy lifted when Cardinal Spinelli invited him to Rome to run the Propaganda Fide press.

Piazza di Spagna. The Propaganda Fide is the building in the central background and the Spanish Steps are on the left.

With the return of physical and intellectual vigor, Ruggieri began to breathe new life into the establishment. He quickly recognized that a great deal of hard work was necessary to bring the press back to its former glory and capacity after years of decline. He was the new broom sweeping clean; he had grand ideas for the press, and they required talented helpers.

BODONI, THE YOUNG MAN preparing to step across the threshold of his new life, was tall, virile, well proportioned, and so agile that, during his years in Rome, he was nicknamed “the deer.”³⁹ He had a head of rich, reddish-brown hair; his forehead was wide; his nose was rather long (but dignified); his eyes were moderately large, keenly expressive, and contained the glint of ambition; his mouth was ready to smile.⁴⁰ Think, then, of a dashing Bodoni with that glint in his eye striding through Borromini’s enormous entrance, with the chapel of the Rei Magi to his left, the grand staircase to his right, and the enormous courtyard facing him. The place was alive: missionaries, functionaries, librarians, servants, and proto-priests from all over the world bustled around. Bodoni sought out the press and found it on the opposite side of the courtyard, established in two dark, cramped rooms on the ground floor.⁴¹ The setting was far too small to contain the superintendent’s ambitious plans.

Ruggieri was determined that the compositors and printers should have space and light so they could do their work with exactitude. He ordered new presses, and in January 1759, shortly after Bodoni’s arrival, he moved the printing house to five spacious, light-filled rooms on the fifth floor, allotting one room to the two compositors, and the rest to the three casters, four punchcutters, an engraver, and the presses themselves.⁴² The book store remained on the first floor where it attracted street trade, while customers could visit a room on the second floor to browse through examples of all the publications published by the Propaganda Fide press. Arriving just as Ruggieri’s new broom was sweeping clean, Bodoni’s timing was impeccable. He soon became indispensable both as a technician and an artist, fulfilling any task he was given with confidence and skill: assistant, printer, compositor, and woodcutter of letters and decorations. Passerini, writing in 1804, notes that the woodcuts Bodoni made there “are still today jealously guarded and saved because they are of a fineness just less than if they had been made on copper.”⁴³

The prefect and the superintendent kept a close eye on Bodoni, noticing his skill and his enthusiasm for typesetting in foreign languages. They quickly recognized that he would be the man for a finicky job that was long overdue. Stuffed away in the nether regions of the Propaganda Fide were boxes and boxes of punches (see Appendix 1, “Cutting a Punch”) in a wide variety of languages, all jumbled up, rusted, and filthy.

Like the punches themselves, stories about their provenance are jumbled. The received wisdom, handed down from biographer to biographer, is that Pope Sixtus V (1520-1590), that absolute tornado of ruthless reform, commissioned the Frenchmen Claude Garamond and Guillaume Le Bé to come to Rome and cut punches in the exotic languages (that is, languages other than those in Roman type) necessary to propagate the Catholic faith in countries where Protestantism was gaining an increasing foothold. However, James Mosley, the great historian of type, points out that Garamond never left France, and Le Bé, who may have made it to Rome, is not on record as having cut any punches there. Mosley also comments that Sixtus V, who was pope from 1585-1590, would have had trouble in bringing Garamond to Rome because the Frenchman had died in Paris in 1561. Just where the jumbled punches came from, and who cut them, remains a mystery.⁴⁴

After a flurry of useful activity during the pontificates of Gregory and Sixtus, they had fallen into disuse. A hundred and fifty years later, these were the punches (“an immense typographic arsenal”⁴⁵) that Ruggieri handed over to Bodoni. What a rush of nostalgia for Bodoni as he handled the dirty, rusty objects and recalled his childhood self on the gallery of his home in Saluzzo, playing with his grandfather’s collection of old punches. He started to play again, to clean, to repair, to sort this printers’ tower of Babel, and to place the letters safely in their proper cases. In the course of this work, fondling and ultimately revivifying neglected objects, Bodoni found his true love.

It was time to design a face and to cut punches himself. Lacking experience with steel (until then he had only cut wood letters and decorations), he enlisted the help of a friend, a German engraver of medals, one Bernardo Bergher. It was a poor choice. Though an expert with medals, Bergher was a dunce with punches. He rushed the job, and the punches ended up shoddily cut and poorly justified. To make things worse, after the proofs were taken, sad affairs that they were, Bodoni examined the pieces of type and found they had completely broken down, either from poor casting or poor metal, or a combination of both. He learned from the experience, and it sharpened his determination to shift for himself. He picked up graver and file, and working entirely on his own, cut a decoration, cast it, and printed it — and it was beautiful. Heady with success, he started to cut and cast more letters, some simple, some elaborate, some exquisitely small. He was critical of his first small typeface, which he cut in the style of Garamond, but it was much admired and praised all over Rome.⁴⁶ He became a magician with his tools, and soon acquired a reputation for skill and perfectionism. He joined the ranks of the punchcutters at the press, and was rewarded for his efforts, as the following record of payment attests: “To Gio. Battista Bodoni . . . in payment for various decorations, tailpieces, and miniature alphabets and other services to the said printing office, the sum of 10 scudi.”⁴⁷

Cardinal Spinelli decided to broaden Bodoni’s skills by sending him to university for the study of exotic languages. The University of Rome, “La Sapienza” [wisdom], was then located in the Palazzo della Sapienza. Set squarely, or rather, rectangularly, between the Pantheon and the Piazza Navona, it was founded in 1303 by Pope Boniface VII, making it almost as old as the Sorbonne.⁴⁸ It offered a range of disciplines in addition to its prime subjects, theology and religious history. Law, literature, medicine, and foreign languages flourished, but the hard sciences, although taught, were regarded with suspicion, while natural sciences were largely ignored. Astronomy was anathema.

Bodoni duly reported to the university and plunged into the study of Arabic and Hebrew.⁴⁹ Focusing closely on how the scripts were constructed, he quickly gained a visual knowledge of the languages, and this knowledge became the foundation for his lifelong obsession with foreign type.

Bodoni was not only absorbed in the study of languages, he was also influenced by his surroundings at La Sapienza. Each day as he entered the quadrangle, he came face to face with the astonishing university chapel of Saint Ivo. Just as Borromini’s Rei Magi chapel at the Propaganda Fide loomed large in Bodoni’s personal geography of Rome, so now did Saint Ivo, also designed by Borromini, and completed in 1660. The building is pure geometry: its footprint is a circle and two superimposed equilateral triangles, making up a Star of David. On the other hand, it is a novel masterpiece of the High Baroque, full of striking originality and organic movement, provided in large part by Borromini’s signature convex and concave undulations, and the lighthearted riff on Trajan’s column that his spire displays.

Saint Ivo’s is a bride of a church, white, white, white — a place in which to sit and to dream of paper (if you were Bodoni), as in the pure white of the interior; and of ink, as in the sharp black and white of the floor tiles; and of letters, as in the complex geometry of the structure. But it seems as though something of the coils and countercoils of the High Baroque began to disturb Bodoni. Although his own wood engravings were full of the fashionable twirls and curlicues of the period, he was continually drawn to what he saw in purely classical buildings and monuments, but more importantly, to the inscriptions on them.

In the elegant surroundings of Borromini’s High Baroque church and library, Bodoni began to change. The young man from Piedmont was on his way to becoming very classical in his tastes and intentions, very elegant, and very, very grand.

WHEN CARDINAL SPINELLI and Abbé Ruggieri saw how adept Bodoni was at working with exotic alphabets, they decided he should replace the current aged and incompetent compositor of foreign languages. One of the first volumes they assigned to him was Bishop Raffaele Tuki’s Pontificale copto-arabo (a pontifical contains the rites performed by bishops). For this work, he was greatly assisted by Father Giorgi, his Arabic teacher at La Sapienza. Bodoni was required not only to design the book but to provide a title page and various decorations throughout. For the title page, he cut the letters and decorations in wood, but for the text he used metal letters in Coptic and Arabic which were already on hand at the Propaganda Fide.⁵⁰ He placed the languages in two columns, and printed the book in two colors, black and red. Ruggieri, on seeing the first printing, insisted that Bodoni place his name and city on the title page of subsequent printings. This was an astonishing accolade for a lowly apprentice and salient evidence of Ruggieri’s appreciation of the young man’s work (Plates 20 & 21).

Saint Ivo. Interior of dome.

Beautiful though Bodoni’s bold and colorful title page is, the head- and tailpieces are disconcerting. They have absolutely nothing to do with pontifical rites in the Arabo/Coptic church and everything to do with High Baroque excess. In one, two lions with human heads flank the torso of a hermaphroditic Flora spewing forth from a sunflower, head laden with a basket of fruit. But look closely, and you’ll find a neat Roman B, set in the middle of a triangle below the torso, at what would be knee level if Flora’s lower half were not subsumed in a sunflower stalk. With this Roman B, set in a stylistically discordant engraving within a particularly complex and serious religious work, Bodoni revealed his presence. The letter looks superimposed on the engraving, tacked on in a moment of self-congratulation.

Tail-piece with “B” in Pontificale arabo-copto.

The only rationale possible for this jeu d’esprit (and the excuse is a real stretch) is that the B might reflect the squareness of the Coptic characters, while the Baroque flourishes of the decoration reflect the undulations of Arabic script. Perhaps Bodoni was in a flurry of typesetting when Ruggieri asked him to include some decorations, so he sought out something he had already in hand. Finding a decoration the right size for his purpose, he inserted Flora (a tiny touch of carnality) and his Roman B (Look at me! Look at me!) into the august surroundings of the Pontificale copto-arabo.

BODONI WORKED concurrently on another book, the Alphabetum Tibetanum, by the aforementioned Father Antonio Agostino Giorgi (1711-1797). A good friend to Ruggieri, Giorgi was director of the Biblioteca Angelica, procurator general of the Augustinians, and a seasoned warrior against any threat that challenged the precepts of his order, especially Protestantism.⁵¹ A professor of exotic languages, a linguistic phenomenon who spoke eleven languages fluently, Giorgi was also an esteemed scholar in Greek and Roman classics, Christian theology, and science. But he was at heart an orientalist, engaged in the preparation of a compendium that eventually became his colossal Alphabetum Tibetanum.

The first edition of this work, which came out in 1759 (a year after Bodoni’s arrival at the press) is a relatively short 208-page examination of the Tibetan language, but the second edition, to which the first is attached at the end, reaches 820 pages, and is a lengthy discourse on Manichaeism, the evils of divine emanation, the origin of the Buddha, Japanese and Indian divinities, and of course, the power and glory of the Catholic faith.⁵² It is based on reports sent back to Rome from Lhasa by the Capuchin missionaries, Francisco Orazio della Penna di Billi and Cassiano di Macerata, and is still in circulation today. Throughout the work, Father Giorgi wastes no time in flaunting the superiority of the Catholic Church over the teachings of the Buddha; nor does he hesitate to make some astonishing, far-reaching cross-cultural linguistic comparisons, thus displaying to advantage his immense erudition, if less than logical judgment.

It comes as no surprise that Bodoni was chosen to work on this book, having studied with Father Giorgi and profited from his help while working on the Arabo-Coptic pontifical. The Alphabetum Tibetanum was a brute to typeset, containing as it did many foreign languages interspersed with the Latin narrative, as well as text diagrams and six fascinating engraved plates by Alexius Giardoni of subjects such as prayer wheels, the crucified Indra, and the Bhudda’s toenails. Once again, Bodoni provided some ill-suited head- and tail-pieces.⁵³

It is hard to assess how many more books Bodoni worked on during his years at the Propaganda press. We know about the Pontificiale and the Alphabetum Tibetanum because they are mentioned by his biographers and scrupulously scrutinized by Sergio Samek Ludovici,⁵⁴ but it is impossible to ascertain what other publications he typeset and decorated. It is, however, easy to speculate that his fellow compositors became resentful about seeing his name on publications while they remained anonymous, and this resentment could have caused Ruggieri to stop singling him out. Whatever the case, Bodoni’s subsequent work at the press is unacknowledged. We know he’s there, but he’s a shadow figure.⁵⁵

YOUNG GIAMBATTISTA was far from dull, and this begs the question: What was he up to in his spare time in a city that was rife with variety and known for its sexual license?

De Lama states that in his hours of leisure Bodoni cut decorations and flowery capitals, and cut tiny characters, which were highly admired in Rome. Is this believable? Certainly, to some extent. But Bodoni was an attractive young man at the height of his sexual powers, living in Rome at a vibrant moment in the city’s history, and it is hard to believe that he spent all his time whittling away when all Rome was on offer.⁵⁶

Outside the building lay the Piazza di Spagna, from which the Spanish Steps, like a backdrop for an opera, climbed towards the church of the Trinità dei Monti. The piazza and its immediate surroundings were the favored home of expatriates, including those who had dealings with Cardinal Spinelli and the Propaganda Fide press. Among them was archaeologist, librarian, art historian, and pederast J.J. Winckelmann, who lived in the Palazzo Zuccari, at the top of the Steps, from where he could survey the whole city. His view, however, did nothing to mitigate his complaints about lack of sleep because of the frightful noise of shouting, shooting, and fireworks that often lasted until daybreak.

The Piazza di Spagna was indeed the noisy meeting place of Rome. Working at the Propaganda Fide, Bodoni was aware of its powerful draw during the day, but what about his nighttime activities? After a day’s work, all he had to do was to walk out the door of the press to find himself confronted with . . . Life! Gorgeous Roman women! Pretty girls and their mothers! Foreigners! Elegant shepherds and shepherdesses! Homosexuals! Castrati! Transvestites! Harlequins! Actors! (but no actresses—the Church, which turned a blind eye to adultery and courtesans, was firm about outlawing actresses). And pretty young boys dressed as girls, who spoke with flutelike voices and, with some anatomical adjustments, acquired “plump, round hips, buttocks, and necks.”⁵⁷ It became extremely difficult to tell the boys from the girls as they strutted about the Piazza di Spagna but, as Giacomo Casanova, who was in Rome at the same time as Bodoni, knew only too well, the challenge was so enticing.

Roman women, whatever their age or station in life, took care to present “bella figura.” That is, they paid close attention to their appearance, but in a far more natural manner than French women, whose opulent, panniered fashions the Roman upper classes admired and emulated to a certain degree, while the lower classes usually wore traditional costumes. Roman women adored unguents but eschewed rouge and perfume, having “an unconquerable revulsion for odors, maintaining that the use of perfume is pernicious in this climate, and makes them faint.”⁵⁸ The naturalness of Roman women, their air of comfortably inhabiting their bodies, made the rest of Europe suspicious and uncomfortable. Roman matrons frequently had lovers, an arrangement condoned by their husbands, who often married them for money or prestige. However, the chastity of young, unmarried women was zealously guarded by their mothers, and it took the charm, skill, and determination of a Casanova to make a conquest.⁵⁹

While Cardinal Spinelli and Abbé Ruggieri may have averted Bodoni’s gaze from Roman women, they certainly made sure that he met cardinals, gentlemen, and scholars, and that he moved in ever higher social, ecclesiastical, and scholarly circles.⁶⁰ One of the most influential ecclesiastics he met was a fellow Piemontese, Father Paolo Maria Paciaudi, Cardinal Spinelli’s librarian. This meeting with Father Paciaudi was the most important encounter of Bodoni’s life.

Born in Turin in 1710, Paciaudi was a fashionable preacher, whose stirring sermons were intended to induce the aristocratic congregations of churches such as Sant’ Andrea della Valle into a life of virtue. He was also a highly respected scholar, archaeologist, and librarian. A Theatine monk, he practiced the principles of that order in his efforts to reform Catholic morality, and he waged an ecclesiastical hot war on the teachings of Martin Luther. Paciaudi had a particular interest in the work of the Polyglot Press at the Propaganda Fide because the Theatines were the first order to found papal missions overseas. He kept his eye on Bodoni’s progress and was amazed, like everyone else, by the young man’s skill. He would remember this skill long after leaving Rome for Parma in 1761.

Another distinguished scholar/archaeologist with whom Bodoni would have come into contact through Father Paciaudi and Cardinal Spinelli was J.J. Winckelmann. Often referred to as the father of art history, Winckelmann worked as Cardinal Albani’s librarian and as scriptor and prefect of antiquities at the Vatican. He was known for his particularly beautiful Greek script and his insistence on the use of the clearest possible Greek type for the printing of books. He felt that standards of printing in that language had slipped since the days of Robert Estienne (1503-1559), whose publications in Greek were renowned for their elegance and clarity. Bodoni paid attention to this insistence on clarity and beauty, and took it especially to heart when cutting and printing his own Greek type, said to be his favorite type of all.

The man with whom Bodoni spent most time was, of course, Abbé Costantino Ruggieri. They worked closely together, and Ruggieri witnessed Bodoni’s competence quickly outstripping that of his colleagues in the studio. Ruggieri’s admiration for Bodoni blossomed into love. Passerini recounts what happened: “So this learned man fell in love with him, and started to feel so much regard for him that he desired his company on his daily walk, all the more so because it seemed to him that the gloom with which he was often assailed was in large part eased by Bodoni’s lively and witty company.”⁶¹ Early each morning, Bodoni set out from the Palazzo Valentini for Ruggieri’s apartment in nearby Piazza SS. XII Apostoli, and together they walked the streets of Rome until Ruggieri was ready to go to work.

Abbé Ruggieri’s world was shattered when Cardinal Spinelli died suddenly on 12 April 1763.⁶² Bodoni, too, was grief-stricken by the death of that warm and generous man who had done so much for art and archaeology, for the modernization and expansion of the Propaganda Fide press, and for Bodoni himself. Indeed, the cardinal’s death saddened the whole city. His body was transported in a cavalcade from the Palazzi Valentini to the church of SS. XII Apostoli. There he lay in state, and after his funeral he was buried below the middle of the nave, resting beneath an elaborately decorated and effusively wordy tombstone, alas now almost illegible.

LIFE IN ROME went swirling on. Visitors kept coming and going, eating and drinking. On the subject of eating and drinking, Smollett notes: “. . . the vitella mongana, which is the most delicate veal I have ever tasted, is very dear . . . Here are the rich wines of Montepulciano, Montefiascone, and Monte di Dragone; but what we commonly drink at meals is that of Orvieto, a small white wine, of an agreeable flavour.”⁶³ Casanova gave a dinner party for the family of Momolo (an ex-gondolier who became a sweeper for the pope) whose daughter he was aiming to seduce, and comments, “The polenta was excellent, the pork superb, the ham perfect. In less than an hour there was no longer any sign that the table had once been covered with things to eat; but the Orvieto wine continued to keep the company cheerful.”⁶⁴ Charles de Brosses admitted to being bowled over by the exquisite flavor of Tiber sturgeon. Hot chocolate and ices were all the rage. Tomatoes were a recent phenomenon and were still regarded with suspicion. A few years later, in the poem “Er pranzo e el minente,” (translated by Gillian Riley), Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli exulted in the variety and excellence of Roman food.

Just listen to what we had. Rice and peas,

A stew of beef and turkey cock,

Beef topside pot roast with cloves, a right old dish of tripe,

And spit roast sausages and pork liver.

Then a fry-up of artichokes and sheeps’ balls,

Some sinful gnocchi to die for,

A puffed-up take-away pizza,

Sweet sour wild boar and game birds.

There were peppers in vinegar,

Salami, mortadella, and a fresh sheep’s cheese,

House plonk,⁶⁵ and wine from Orvieto.

Next some divine rosolio,⁶⁶

Coffee and sweet bread rings,

And radishes to gladden the heart.⁶⁷

Visitors from abroad streamed into the city. On 15 October 1764, Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote: “I was sitting and reflecting among the ruins of the Campidoglio, with the barefoot brothers singing vespers in the temple of Jove, when for the first time the idea of writing about the decline and fall of Rome came to mind.” Meanwhile, James Boswell was spending almost all his time with women, but not just prostitutes. On 16 February 1765, he noted that he danced and dined with the young Swiss/Austrian artist, Angelica Kauffmann, and then chatted with her, calling her “paintress singer; modest, amiable,” adding “Quite in love.”⁶⁸

Bodoni persisted at the press, but he was exhorted by the circle of virtuosi in which he moved to think of a life beyond Rome and particularly of a life in England. “In the eighth year of his training, all spent in assiduous study,”⁶⁹ states De Lama, “in much production, and in extremely costly experimentation, he was seduced by large promises of fortune that certain virtuosi, extolling the generosity of Britain, constantly repeated in his ear.” Ambition and curiosity were tempting him north to sharpen his skills in a wider arena than Rome.

At the time, Britain was on its way to becoming a rich and inventive nation. Already a center of world finance, the country was on the brink of the Industrial Revolution. More important to Bodoni, it was a center of printing ingenuity and home to such luminaries as the Caslons (father and son) and John Baskerville (1706-1775). Their fame had spread to Rome in books carried there by tourists and collectors, and these books were quickly snapped up by bibliophiles like Winckelmann and Cardinal Spinelli. Bodoni, by now 26 years old, was languishing at the Propaganda Fide, no longer challenged at the press, and by 1766 had become infatuated with the idea of going to England and seeing with his own eyes the innovations within the British printing industry. All that held him back was his loyalty to Abbé Ruggieri. Many years later, when he was an old man, Bodoni’s brother Giuseppe recalled the tragic incident that happened next (although he was seriously wrong about the year in which it occurred):

Bodoni usually took himself each morning to the home of his Maecenas [Ruggieri]. One day like many others (and if I am not mistaken it was 11 November 1762⁷⁰) finding out that Ruggeri was still in bed, he was detained by the manservant in the antechamber. While he was waiting, he heard a shot from a firearm. He jumped at the explosion, and then found the poor man lifeless from the desperate shot of a pistol. This tragic spectacle affected him like a thunderbolt . . . Thus ended the days of that famous man of letters who, by a thousand titles, deserved a better end.⁷¹

John Thomas Baskerville (1706-1775).

Passerini continues: “It is impossible to express the fright, the sorrow of the highly sensitive Bodoni. Here lay this man, who had fallen on his side as though struck by lightning or by a huge, deadly rock.”⁷²

Depression kills, but even so Ruggieri’s suicide provokes speculation.⁷³ First, it seems surprising that he had a pistol in his possession. Second, his timing, at a moment when he knew Bodoni would be arriving for their daily walk, seems thoughtless at best, even willfully cruel. Was he angry with the young man? Had they fallen out? Was his suicide an act of vengeance? We will never know the truth, but poor Ruggieri must have been suffering such exquisite anguish that nothing could prevent him from pulling the trigger that ended his life.

But now Bodoni was free to leave Rome, and no one could change his mind; not Cardinal Castelli, the new prefect of the press; not Marco Ubaldo Bicci, who succeeded Ruggieri as superintendent; not the members of the artistic and literary circles in which he swirled; not his colleagues and friends at the Propaganda Fide. Undeterred by his inability to speak English and in the mistaken belief that (due in part to the popularity of Italian opera and song) all educated Britons would naturally speak Italian, he was confident he would have no difficulty in making himself understood.

Bodoni was primed for his grand adventure, but before leaving Italy for England, he decided to return to Saluzzo to set eyes on—and to embrace—his family and friends for the first time in eight years.

A synopsis of the roman types of William Caslon (top), John Baskerville (center), and Giambattista Bodoni (bottom); all in modern digital renderings.