Giovanni Farri

Giovanni Farri, head of the Venetian printing partnership conventionally identified in bibliographical repertories as Giovanni Farri & fratelli, was active in Venice from 1540 to at least 1548. Neither his date of birth nor his death has been securely established, and the surviving documentation concerns the workshop much more fully than the individual printer. The family originated at Rivoltella, near Desenzano del Garda, and was descended from a Cristoforo Farri. Current EDIT16 authority data identify Giovanni’s brothers as Domenico Farri and Giovanni Pietro Farri, the latter dead before 1550; older scholarship had been less certain about Domenico’s exact relationship to Giovanni, although it already regarded him as probably one of the brothers involved in the original family enterprise. Their workshop was associated with San Zulian and remained there at least into the years around 1550. Giovanni’s secure activity, however, belongs essentially to the 1540s, and it must be kept distinct from the much longer independent career of Domenico, who appears under his own name from 1555 and continued printing until the end of the century.

The Farri enterprise is particularly revealing of the structure of the Venetian book trade because its imprints occur in markedly different forms: apud Ioannem de Farris et fratres de Rivoltella, per Giovanni de Farri & fratelli, ex officina Farrea, nella stamparia de’ Farri, and formulas connecting their press with the signs of the Salamander, the Griffin, and, in at least one Greek schoolbook, the Tree. These variations should not be interpreted as simple changes of personal brand. They reflect the flexible relationships among physical printing shop, bookseller, financier, publisher and place of sale that characterised Venetian production. Some books were ventures identifiable directly with the Farri name and device; others were physically printed by them for men who supplied capital, controlled the edition or placed their own commercial identity on the title page. The distinction becomes essential in reconstructing their catalogue, because the Farri press served both as an autonomous publishing operation and as a technically capable workshop available to other Venetian booksellers.

The first securely documented phase, beginning in 1540, already displays a pronounced interest in the learned educational market. Among the books printed that year were Georgius Trapezuntius’s De re dialectica, enlarged with material by Giorgio Valla and Petrus Mosellanus; Johannes Caesarius’s Dialectica; and Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’s Latin version and exposition of the first book of Aristotle’s De partibus animalium. The Trapezuntius edition explicitly associates the book with the sign of the Salamander, while the colophon names Giovanni Farri and his brothers of Rivoltella. The combination is characteristic of the early workshop: compact scholarly books for students and humanists, printed in Roman and italic type, linked to Aristotelian logic, dialectic and the philological culture of the universities of northern Italy.

Leonico Tomeo’s Aristotelian work is particularly instructive. The title advertises the exposition as newly brought to light from the author’s archetype, placing the Farri within a publishing culture in which proximity to an authoritative manuscript could itself be part of the edition’s scholarly claim. The house was therefore not confined to reprinting established school texts. From its first year it participated in the conversion of learned manuscript scholarship into print, while simultaneously producing more conventional textbooks that could generate a steadier educational market. That combination—new philological material beside established instructional works—would remain characteristic of the workshop’s best years.

The production of 1541 broadened this programme into theology and ecclesiastical controversy. A particularly complex example is the Concilium provinciale Coloniense, containing the acts of the Cologne provincial council of 1536 together with the Enchiridion christianae institutionis. Surviving copies reveal more than one issue of the same edition. One has a title page giving Coloniae as the place of publication while the colophon explicitly reads “Venetiis: per Ioannem de Farris, & fratres de Rivoltella”; another has a recomposed title page with Venetiis instead, and a further issue lacks the colophon. The setting otherwise belongs to the same bibliographical production. This is precisely the kind of evidence that prevents title-page information from being treated mechanically as a complete account of an edition: the Farri sheets could circulate under different title-page configurations while their physical Venetian origin remained unchanged.

The same year saw the printing of John of Damascus’s Adversus eos, qui negant sacrificia et eleemosynas prodesse defunctis, translated into Latin by the Benedictine Isidoro Clario. The edition demonstrates the press’s access to contemporary Catholic humanist scholarship at a moment when patristic texts were becoming increasingly important to confessional argument. The Farri list was therefore never simply “classical.” Greek antiquity, Christian Greek authors and contemporary theological controversy occupied adjacent sectors of the same learned market.

The workshop’s most coherent scholarly specialisation emerged in 1542–43, when it produced an impressive sequence of Greek texts. Among them were the eleven comedies of Aristophanes, Homeric material, Aesop, Isocrates, collections incorporating Hesiod, Theognis, the Sibylline material, Musaeus, Orphic texts and Phocylides, and Theocritus. The activity presupposed more than ownership of Greek type. Correct composition of continuous Greek text required specialised compositors, competent correction and familiarity with a market in which schoolmasters, university readers and humanists cared about the quality and usability of the text. The concentration of such editions in a comparatively short period gives the Farri workshop a more distinct profile than that of an ordinary contract press.

The 1542 Aristophanes, Comoediae undecim, was a substantial Greek undertaking, while the Homeric editions placed the workshop within one of the most competitive sectors of humanist classical publishing. These books did not attempt to rival the monumental editorial identity established earlier by Aldus Manutius; the Farri strategy was more compact and commercial. Their classical books were often produced in portable formats appropriate to students and active readers. In this respect the press participated in a second phase of Venetian Greek publishing: the fundamental Greek corpus had already entered print, and the opportunity now lay in making texts available again in practical scholarly editions for a market formed by decades of humanist education.

The Theocritus of 1543, edited by Alban Thorer, shows the typographical sophistication such production could require. The volume gives the Greek Idylls and epigrams and preserves the famous technopaegnia—the poems shaped as an axe and wings—within specially designed woodcut outlines. The book consequently required the compositor to reproduce not merely linguistic content but the visual form of ancient patterned verse. Its surviving bibliographical description records both the Salamander on the title page and, in the same production, a device with a crowned three-faced figure accompanied by the bilingual motto Concordia parvae res crescunt / its Greek equivalent. The Farri workshop’s visual identity was therefore not fixed to a single mark, and the coexistence of devices reinforces the need to reconstruct each edition materially rather than to attribute books from a simplified trademark history.

At precisely the same moment the Farri were printing books for other entrepreneurial figures in the trade. Bernardino Scardeone’s De castitate libri septem of 1542, for example, belongs commercially to Andrea Arrivabene while being physically executed by Giovanni Farri and his brothers. Even more revealing is Pedanius Dioscorides’s Dioscoride fatto di greco italiano, the first edition of the Italian translation by Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano, issued in 1542 for the bookseller Curzio Troiano Navò but printed by the Farri. The distinction between printer and publisher is fundamental. Navò and his family developed an active editorial programme and regularly commissioned other presses; the Farri supplied the manufacturing expertise. Their role in the Dioscorides therefore does not make the work an autonomous Farri publishing project in the same sense as books bearing their own commercial identity, but it places their workshop inside one of the most important vernacularising movements of the Venetian book trade: the transfer of Greek scientific and medical knowledge into Italian for a readership larger than the Latin university world.

This dual role—independent producers on the one hand, printers for outside publishers on the other—helps explain the striking heterogeneity of their output. A single workshop could set Greek pastoral poetry, a Latin theological treatise and an Italian scientific translation because the commercial initiative behind those books did not always originate with the same person. Giovanni Farri should consequently not be assigned a coherent personal “editorial ideology” on the basis of everything that came from his presses. What can legitimately be attributed to the workshop is technical versatility and an ability to serve several highly literate publishing networks in Venice.

The year 1543 illustrates that versatility particularly well. Alongside the Greek programme appeared Pietro Aretino’s Dialogo nel quale si parla del giuoco con moralità piacevole, the work later known as Le carte parlanti. This was its first edition; a second Venetian edition followed in 1545 from another press, while much later versions transmitted a censored and altered text. The Farri edition thus has genuine textual priority, not merely chronological interest. Its presence beside Theocritus and the Greek anthological material shows the workshop moving directly between university humanism and the most immediate contemporary vernacular literary market.

The transition from 1543 to 1544 brought the most technically specialised episode in the history of the enterprise: Giovanni’s brief involvement in Hebrew printing. Venetian Hebrew typography already possessed an exceptional tradition through Daniel Bomberg, whose press had developed type, skilled personnel and production techniques of the highest level. In 1544 Giovanni Farri directed a specialised Hebrew operation using Bomberg’s types and the expertise of the celebrated master printer Cornelio Adelkind, who had previously worked on major Bomberg editions including the Babylonian Talmud. Mario Infelise counts ten Hebrew works produced by the Farri in that single year. The venture then ceased, and in 1545 its equipment and personnel were absorbed into the new Hebrew establishment founded near the Rialto by the patrician Marcantonio Giustinian.

This episode is crucial to any assessment of Giovanni Farri because it distinguishes him technically from many contemporaries operating presses of comparable commercial scale. Hebrew printing demanded specialist type, compositors capable of setting from right to left, correctors with linguistic expertise and, for many texts, the handling of complicated relationships between main text and commentary. Among the works associated with the 1544 venture were editions of Bahyā ben Asher’s commentary on the Pentateuch and other important rabbinical, philosophical and grammatical texts. The Farri did not create this technical tradition independently—the presence of Adelkind and the reuse of Bomberg materials make that clear—but for one intensive year their workshop became an important transitional site between the Bomberg era and the Hebrew presses of Giustinian and his competitors. The significance lies therefore in transmission of typographical infrastructure as much as in the individual editions.

The closure of the Hebrew operation did not interrupt the ordinary press. The same year saw the appearance of Giulio Camillo’s Due trattati dell’eccellentissimo M. Iulio Camillo, printed “nella stamparia de’ Farri” for Paolo Gherardo. The volume, containing Delle materie che possono venir sotto lo stile dell’eloquente and Della imitatione, was the first printed book devoted to Camillo’s own writings and appeared after his death. Its typographical construction included a diagram of Camillo’s “secondo artificio” in red and black, making it more demanding than a purely verbal treatise. Here again the economic roles require separation: Gherardo was the publisher responsible for the venture, while the Farri were the printers who gave the posthumous texts their first material form. The edition’s importance in Camillo’s textual history nevertheless makes it one of the most consequential books to emerge from their presses.

A quite different 1544 publication, Manuel Chrysoloras’s Erotemata, illustrates their continuing commitment to Greek pedagogy. The imprint ex officina Farrea ad signum Arboris venundantur distinguishes manufacture in the Farri workshop from the place or sign under which copies were offered for sale. The volume gathered Chrysoloras’s elementary Greek grammar with material on anomalous verbs, tense formation, syntax and other grammatical aids. It therefore belonged to the infrastructure that sustained demand for the more advanced Greek editions produced by the same workshop: grammars trained the readers who would buy Homer, Aristophanes and Theocritus.

The peak of the workshop’s Italian vernacular production came in 1545–46. One of its most significant ventures was Bernardino Tomitano’s Ragionamenti della lingua toscana, first issued by the Farri in 1545. Tomitano, closely associated with the Paduan Accademia degli Infiammati and with Sperone Speroni, used the dialogue to argue for the capacity of the vernacular to sustain philosophy, rhetoric, poetry and elevated prose. The edition bears the Farri’s Griffin device: a griffin raising a weight chained to a winged globe, accompanied by the motto “Virtute duce, comite fortuna.”

The Farri returned to the work in 1546, and the relationship between the two impressions deserves emphasis because it is an unusually clear case of edition development within their catalogue. The new edition explicitly announced the addition of the Precetti della rhetorica secondo l’artificio d’Aristotele & Cicerone at the end of the second book. It was therefore not a routine resetting of the 1545 text: the work had been enlarged in a way that sharpened its attempt to connect vernacular linguistic theory with classical rhetorical method. Tomitano himself later revised the project much more radically for the Quattro libri della lingua thoscana, but the Farri 1545–46 sequence already records the first transformation of the work from its original form into a substantially augmented edition.

Another important 1545 publication was Bernardino Daniello’s La Georgica di Virgilio, nuovamente di latina in thoscana favella tradotta e commentata. Printed by Giovanni Farri and his brothers in quarto, it combined vernacular translation with commentary and belonged to a wider mid-century effort to make classical poetry available in Italian without surrendering its learned exegetical apparatus. The Griffin and its motto again appear in connection with the edition. The book shows that the Farri’s interest in classics was not confined to preserving Greek and Latin texts in their original languages: the workshop also participated in the contemporary transformation of ancient literature into authoritative vernacular reading.

The same year produced two works by Giovanni Maria Memmo, L’oratore and Tre libri della sostanza et forma del mondo, which further illustrate the intersection of rhetorical and philosophical publishing cultivated by the press. The first addressed the formation and qualities of the orator; the second moved into cosmological and philosophical territory. The coexistence of Tomitano, Daniello and Memmo gives the 1545 list a recognisable Venetian-Paduan humanist texture: classical authority is repeatedly translated into questions about modern eloquence, vernacular language, philosophy and the organisation of knowledge.

Jacopo Gabriele adds an especially instructive case. In 1545 Giovanni Farri printed his Regole grammaticali, a report of a discussion held ten years earlier between Gabriele and his uncle Trifone Gabriele, one of the respected figures of the Bembian linguistic milieu. When Gabriele authorised a later edition in 1548, however, he stated explicitly that the Farri impression had appeared without his knowledge. The 1545 book must therefore not be described simply as an authorially supervised first edition. It is a first printing of the text, but one whose publication the author later disavowed as unauthorised. That distinction is especially valuable for understanding how manuscript material could enter the Venetian market: possession of a text and authority to print it were not always the same thing.

Gabriele’s Dialogo nel quale de la sphera et degli orti et occasi de le stelle minutamente si ragiona, also printed by the Farri in 1545, stands on firmer authorial ground. Dedicated to Pietro Bembo and framed as a conversation among Gabriele, Trifone, Andrea Gabriele, Marino Gradenigo and Bernardino Daniello, it treated astronomy and the celestial sphere while incorporating a life of Trifone Gabriele. Its appearance in the same workshop as the Regole shows how closely the Farri were connected with a specific Venetian intellectual network interested simultaneously in language, classical culture and cosmology.

These books also reveal why the term “publisher” must be used selectively. In some records EDIT16 and library catalogues identify Giovanni Farri & brothers as the publishing entity; elsewhere the physical colophon shows them merely executing a book financed or marketed by another operator. The family worked repeatedly with publishers and booksellers such as Andrea Arrivabene, Curzio Troiano Navò, Paolo Gherardo, Giovanni Dalla Chiesa and Giovanni Griffio. Dalla Chiesa in particular is documented as using Farri presses extensively and as entering into partnership with them. The Farri workshop should therefore be understood as part of a networked manufacturing economy in which type, presses, capital, manuscript supply, privileges and retail distribution could belong to different participants in the same edition.

Their printer’s devices make this network visible rather than simplifying it. The Salamander crowned among flames, accompanied by the vernacular motto Sopra ogn’uso mortal m’è dato albergo, appears in association with several early editions. The Greek Theocritus also carries the crowned three-faced head and the bilingual motto concerning concord. By 1545–46 the Griffin with the chained winged globe and Virtute duce, comite fortuna had become especially conspicuous. The Chrysoloras of 1544, meanwhile, advertises sale at the sign of the Tree. These are not merely decorative emblems useful for modern identification: they register shifting commercial relationships and places of sale, and a bibliographer must therefore distinguish a mark printed in a book from proof that the entire edition was financed and marketed solely by Giovanni Farri.

The workshop remained active after its peak of 1545–46. Among its later important scholarly productions was the 1548 edition of Theodoret of Cyrus, Eranistes seu Polymorphus, in the Latin translation and editorial context associated with Gentian Hervet. The volume belongs to the intensified mid-century recovery of Greek patristic theology and its use in Catholic controversy. Its appearance toward the end of Giovanni’s securely documented period is significant: the workshop that had begun in 1540 with dialectic and Aristotle was still, eight years later, capable of producing substantial scholarly theology rooted in Greek sources.

No evidence presently warrants assigning a precise death date to Giovanni Farri or assuming that the disappearance of his name after 1548 coincided with his death. Bibliographical authority records identify him as active through that year. Giovanni Pietro was dead before 1550, while the family shop at San Zulian is documented around the same period. Domenico Farri subsequently emerged as an independent printer from 1555 and maintained a substantial business for decades. His later output—Dante and Ariosto, religious books, commissions for other publishers, conflicts over privileged editions and a very large programme of reprints—belongs to a new stage of the family history and should not be retroactively counted as Giovanni’s production.

The distinction is particularly important because the later visibility of Domenico can distort the profile of the earlier partnership. Giovanni Farri & brothers were not principally a house of routine reprints. During less than a decade they handled an unusually concentrated body of Greek scholarly printing, technically difficult Hebrew books, important Italian first editions, vernacular translations of classical and scientific works, grammatical and rhetorical treatises, patristic theology and contemporary literature. Some of those ventures were theirs commercially; others were commissioned. What unites them is the technical range of the press rather than a single ideological programme.

The edition genealogy of several of their books further demonstrates that the workshop occupied more than a passive manufacturing role within Venetian print culture. The Concilium Coloniense survives in title-page issues that alter the apparent place of publication while retaining the same Venetian production; Tomitano’s Ragionamenti moved from the 1545 first edition to the substantially augmented 1546 edition; Gabriele’s Regole grammaticali preserve the unusual case of a first printing later declared unauthorised by the author; the Farri Aretino of 1543 stands at the beginning of the textual history of the Carte parlanti; Camillo’s Due trattati of 1544 constitute the first printed stage in the posthumous construction of Camillo’s oeuvre; and the Hebrew books of the same year belong to a direct material succession leading from Bomberg’s types and Adelkind’s expertise to the Giustinian press. These are not interchangeable examples of productivity: each represents a different way in which a printing house could affect the subsequent history of a text.

The Farri’s Greek books are equally important when considered as a group. The editions of Aristophanes, Homer, Theocritus, Isocrates and associated minor Greek authors show a workshop capable of sustaining a specialised classical list over successive years. The presence of Chrysoloras’s grammar beside those literary texts indicates an intelligent relationship between elementary and advanced markets. A student learning Greek through the Erotemata belonged potentially to the same reading culture that consumed editions of Homer or Theocritus. The workshop thus participated in maintaining the practical infrastructure of Greek humanism in Venice after the pioneering age of Aldus.

The Hebrew venture represents the opposite commercial model. Instead of a gradually developed list, it was a brief, concentrated technical episode dependent upon imported expertise and equipment. Its short duration should not diminish its historical importance. Printing history often follows not only firms but also movable material assets: punches, matrices, types, presses and skilled workmen could migrate between enterprises. The movement from Bomberg-related resources through Giovanni Farri’s 1544 shop into Marcantonio Giustinian’s operation in 1545 gives the Farri workshop a precise place within the genealogy of Venetian Hebrew typography.

Their vernacular books show a comparable ability to inhabit transitional markets. The Dioscorides printed for Navò converted Greek pharmacological authority into Italian; Daniello converted Virgil into an annotated Tuscan text; Tomitano argued for the vernacular as a language capable of philosophical and rhetorical excellence; Gabriele codified grammar and presented astronomy in dialogue form; Aretino addressed an entirely different urban readership through witty contemporary prose. Such books illustrate the widening functions of Italian print around the middle of the century. Latin and Greek scholarship were not disappearing; rather, they increasingly coexisted with a vernacular capable of appropriating their subjects and methods.

For this reason, Giovanni Farri & fratelli should not be remembered simply as minor Venetian printers positioned between the great Aldine and Giolitine dynasties. Their historical importance is more specific. The workshop was an unusually adaptable manufacturing and publishing node in the exceptionally differentiated Venetian book economy of the 1540s. It could print Greek accurately enough to sustain a significant classical programme; mobilise Bomberg types and Adelkind’s expertise for Hebrew production; execute illustrated or diagrammatic material; supply presses to independent publishers; and move rapidly between scholarly Latin, technical translation and contemporary Italian literature.

At the same time, the Farri case demonstrates why the history of printing cannot be reconstructed from the printer’s name alone. Giovanni Farri was sometimes printer, sometimes publisher, sometimes both; his brothers formed a family enterprise whose internal responsibilities are only imperfectly documented; and several of the most important books manufactured in their shop belonged commercially to other men. Their marks changed, their partners changed, and individual texts passed through the press under different contractual arrangements. The correct unit of analysis is therefore often the edition rather than the firm in the abstract.

Seen edition by edition, however, the coherence of their achievement becomes striking. Between 1540 and 1548 the Farri presses participated in several of the most active currents of Venetian intellectual publishing: renewed editions of Greek classics, Aristotelian and dialectical teaching, recovery of Greek Christian literature, the vernacularisation of medicine and natural philosophy, the debate over the Italian language, contemporary literary experiment, posthumous construction of humanist authors, and Hebrew learned printing.

Their career was brief under Giovanni’s leadership, but its very compression makes it revealing. Few Venetian workshops of comparable duration moved so readily among three learned alphabets—Latin, Greek and Hebrew—or between the university book, the vernacular dialogue and the commissioned commercial edition. Giovanni Farri’s importance consequently lies less in the creation of a long-lived personal publishing dynasty than in the extraordinary technical and editorial flexibility with which his family workshop served the rapidly changing book culture of Venice at the middle of the sixteenth century.