Melchiorre Sessa

Melchiorre Sessa the Elder, also called Marchionne or Marchiò Sessa, was a Venetian printer, publisher, bookseller and merchant whose career extended from the inheritance of his father’s business in 1506 to the formation of a publishing enterprise continued by his wife and sons. He was probably born at Venice towards the end of the fifteenth century; neither his birth date nor the precise day of his death is securely established. The documentary chronology places his death probably in the second half of 1565 or at the beginning of 1566. His family may have originated at Sessa in the territory of Lugano, although his father, Giovanni Battista Sessa, sometimes described himself as Mediolanensis. The elder and younger Melchiorre must be distinguished carefully, since editions bearing the name Marchiò during the 1550s and 1560s can belong to the publishing activities of the sons.

Giovanni Battista had established himself at Venice by the closing decades of the fifteenth century and was demonstrably active in printing and bookselling from at least 1491 until 1505. Melchiorre consequently inherited an existing catalogue, equipment, commercial relationships and a recognisable shop identity. Classical and humanist works, vernacular poetry, grammars, devotional literature, arithmetic, astronomy and illustrated narratives already coexisted within the business. His earliest known signed publication was Cherubino da Spoleto’s Conforto spirituale de’ caminanti a porto di salute, dated 7 February 1506, or 1505 according to the Venetian calendar, whose year began on 1 March. The printing establishment and adjoining bookshop occupied premises in the parish of San Zulian, near Campo San Lio.

His first devices included a circle surmounted by a double or triple cross, with the initials “MO. S.”; he subsequently adopted the paternal cat holding a mouse in its mouth, which generated the documentary appellations Marchiò “da la gatta” and “a la gatta”. These devices underwent successive changes in execution, framing and accompanying initials. Their chronology is therefore more informative than the animal motif alone: the same family identity could be expressed through different blocks, and the cat-and-mouse image also appeared outside the Sessa concern. Moreover, the circle-and-cross and feline devices could coexist within a publication, as they do in his illustrated Pliny of 1513.

The first decade was constrained by a serious fire, occurring before 1510, which reportedly caused losses of approximately 2,000 ducats, consuming much of the capital invested in the enterprise. About fifty editions are associated with Sessa before his partnership with Pietro Ravani. Continuity with the inherited catalogue was pronounced: Pulci’s Morgante, issued in 1507, Leonardo Giustinian’s Canzonette et strambotti, Antonio Cammelli’s Tragedia, the collected poetry of Serafino Aquilano and Antonio Tebaldeo, grammatical manuals and numerous cantari supplied established categories of demand. Such production required decisions about which texts remained saleable, how frequently they should be reset and what combination of format, typography and illustration could sustain their circulation.

A substantial early undertaking was the Latin Historiae naturalis libri XXXVII of Pliny, completed on 20 August 1513 and presenting the text in the recension associated with Alessandro Benedetti. This was a folio with a title page printed in red and black, ornamental and pictorial initials, and thirty-seven principal woodcuts, one introducing each book. Its colophon names Sessa, but bibliographical attribution identifies Agostino de Zanni as the probable actual printer. The distinction establishes that commissioned manufacture formed part of Sessa’s practice well before his later concentration on publishing. Benedetti’s textual intervention, Sessa’s commercial responsibility and the anonymous or separately attributable work of the illustrators belong to different layers of the edition.

On 8 July 1516, Sessa still signed the chivalric Aiolpho del Barbicone independently. The following 14 August, the Italian Historia naturale of Pliny inaugurated his association with the Brescian Pietro Ravani. The translation was Cristoforo Landino’s, first printed at Venice by Nicolas Jenson in 1476, so the Sessa–Ravani volume belongs to the renewed presentation of an established vernacular text. Its folio format, red-and-black title page and illustrated apparatus preserved the substantial character of the work, while its woodcuts drew on Sessa’s Latin edition of 1513. The sequence demonstrates a coordinated exploitation of textual and graphic resources across two linguistic markets: Latin readers received Benedetti’s recension, whereas Italian readers encountered Landino’s translation through a related visual programme.

The Sessa–Ravani partnership, 1516–1525, is represented by approximately seventy-five editions in the EDIT16 census cited by modern biographical scholarship. Ravani may have supplied capital needed to restore the business after the fire. Documents commonly describe him as a printer, while Sessa increasingly appears in the position of publisher and merchant, but the surviving evidence does not establish an invariant division of labour. The partners also commissioned outside workshops: Giacomo Penzio, for example, manufactured publications carrying their commercial responsibility. A jointly signed imprint could thus identify the owners of an editorial venture without recording the complete organisation of its manufacture.

Their programme strengthened the representation of classical literature and educational books. Cicero, Horace, Plautus, Terence, Sallust and Juvenal appeared alongside Greek authors, humanist compilations and vernacular poetry. Roman type predominated initially; the partnership introduced italic in its Latin Sallust of 1523, subsequently using it for further classical texts. Greek was employed in the Lascaris grammar of 1521, in Erasmus’s Adagia of 1522, and in the Greek dictionary and Greek Psalterium of 1525. The octavo was the principal format, accompanied by quartos and a smaller group of substantial folios. These changes widened the shop’s technical resources without imposing one uniform material form on its catalogue.

Practical mathematics and astral learning remained an established part of the concern. Pietro Borghi’s Libro de abacho appeared under the partners’ responsibility in 1517, and Sacrobosco’s Algorismus in 1523. Their 1520 Compilatio de astrorum scientia, attributed to Leopold of Austria, was a quarto manufactured by Penzio. It revived a work previously printed by Erhard Ratdolt at Augsburg in 1489. Here the editorial operation consisted in returning a medieval astronomical and astrological compilation to circulation through a new Venetian production arrangement. The juxtaposition of commercial arithmetic, elementary computation and astral science reflects the different professional and educational uses served by the same publishing house.

Illustrated religious books supplied another substantial market. Alberto da Castello’s Rosario della gloriosa Vergine Maria, completed on 15 December 1524, was an octavo extending to 252 numbered and four unnumbered leaves, furnished with woodcut vignettes, frames and initials. The colophon calls the partners Marchiò Sessa and “Piero da la Serena”, referring to Ravani’s mermaid emblem. The volume joined an extensive devotional text to a portable format and a sustained graphic apparatus. Its religious readership should be considered alongside the readers of classical and practical books when assessing the partnership’s production, rather than treating devotional publishing as a peripheral activity.

The last jointly signed publication was the Dictionarium Graecum, completed on 24 December 1525. Its principal vocabulary drew partly on Giovanni Crastone, but the folio assembled a broader linguistic apparatus: the collection attributed to Cyril, Latin words explained in Greek, Ammonius on related and differing expressions, and materials concerning dialects and specialised terminology. The recorded extent of 182 numbered and fifty-six unnumbered leaves indicates the scale of this investment. It consolidated an existing Greek lexicographical tradition into a composite reference book, requiring resources quite different from those used for a small vernacular poem or devotional manual.

The dictionary also exposes the difficulty of assigning graphic and typographical responsibility. Its title-page border, related to designs associated with Hans Holbein the Younger and Froben’s Basel publications, contains the monogram of Giovanni Andrea Valvassore; this does not settle whether his contribution extended beyond the border. Signed cuts elsewhere in the partnership’s production connect it with Luc’Antonio degli Uberti, Zoan Andrea and Eustachio Celebrino. Such evidence identifies particular contributions, rather than supporting an undifferentiated attribution of “Sessa illustrations” to the publisher himself.

After the partnership ended, Sessa continued independently while progressively increasing commissioned production. Giovanni Antonio and Pietro Nicolini da Sabbio, Bartolomeo Zanetti, Giovanni Padovano, Comin da Trino, Bartolomeo detto l’Imperatore, Niccolò Bascarini, the Giglio workshops, Bernardino Bindoni and Francesco Rampazetto participated at different times in his publishing activity. Their names occur in combinations that distinguish manufacture from financing or publication through such formulas as per, ad instantia and sumptu. The figure of approximately 376 entries associated with Sessa through 1565, reported from EDIT16, consequently measures a publisher’s bibliographical output; it cannot be equated with the uninterrupted production of one personally operated press.

His 1526 Petrarch, Li sonetti, canzoni et triomphi historiati, provides a particularly clear example of his handling of an established literary text. The octavo printed the poems in italic, one verse to a line, and introduced the six Triumphi with full-page woodcuts. It retained Aldus Manutius’s address to readers and included the alternative opening of the Triumphus Fame, additional Petrarchan poems, poems addressed to Petrarch by contemporaries, and compositions by Cavalcanti, Dante and Cino da Pistoia. Alphabetical indexes supplied access to the collection. Its editorial ancestry was thus visible in the paratext, while the illustrations and supplementary material gave Sessa’s edition its own material and literary configuration.

Ariosto’s Orlando furioso brought Sessa into a market governed by rapid textual revision and contested commercial protection. His quarto of 12 September 1530 preceded the definitive forty-six-canto redaction of 1532 and belongs to the circulation of the earlier poem. The quarto completed on 10 September 1533 followed Ariosto’s death that July and participated in the immediate Venetian exploitation of the enlarged text. These publications must be distinguished from the three Ferrarese editions produced under Ariosto’s supervision in 1516, 1521 and 1532. As Erika Squassina’s documentary study establishes, the Venetian privilege system treated previously published texts differently from new redactions, and Ariosto’s death created a further opening for competitors. Sessa’s editions therefore belong to a specific succession of textual versions and legal circumstances; neither authorial supervision nor counterfeiting follows automatically from their date or commercial independence.

The dissolution of the Ravani partnership did not terminate all subsequent collaboration with that family. In 1532, Sessa joined Guglielmo da Fontaneto and the heirs of Pietro Ravani in the Biblia in lingua materna. This continued the Italian biblical tradition associated with Nicolò Malermi, translated from the Vulgate and first printed in 1471. The edition advertised theological and moral postils, chapter summaries, repertories and appropriately placed figures; its illustration reused material from Guglielmo Anima Mia’s 1493 Bible. The enterprise combined an inherited translation, an enlarged apparatus and older graphic resources within a new commercial association. Fontaneto’s later appointment of Sessa as an executor in his testament of 1542 further documents the durability of their relationship.

A different arrangement lies behind Lodovico Martelli’s Le rime volgari of 1533. The posthumous collection was prepared through Giovanni Gaddi, with the assistance of Annibal Caro, and printed at Rome by Antonio Blado. Bibliographical comparison has identified the contemporary volume carrying Sessa’s Venetian subscription as a new issue of that Roman printing, sharing its setting and differing in the colophon. Sessa’s involvement therefore concerned the commercial presentation and circulation of an existing printing, rather than a wholly new Venetian composition. A papal privilege of 26 June 1533 protected his undertaking. Jane Ginsburg’s examination of the documentary record notes that its printed wording was apparently adapted from Blado’s earlier privilege for Machiavelli’s works, providing an unusually tangible example of the administrative procedures accompanying publication.

The arts of memory formed a distinct strand of Sessa’s educational production. In 1533 he issued Johann Host von Romberch’s Congestorium artificiose memorie, previously printed by Giorgio Rusconi in 1520, and Pietro da Ravenna’s Foenix, whose printed history reached back to 1491. Pietro Nicolini da Sabbio participated in the manufacture of the latter. These manuals offered techniques for arranging places, images and verbal material for recollection. Their relevance extended across the occupations named in Romberch’s title, including preaching, law, medicine, teaching and commerce. Sessa was consequently maintaining a market for learned procedures that could be acquired and practised through the organisation of text and image on the printed page.

His edition of Nicolò Liburnio’s Le tre fontane, dated February 1534, likewise concerned the practical organisation of knowledge, here directed towards vernacular composition. First published by Gregorio de Gregorii in quarto in 1526, the work appeared under Sessa’s name in octavo. It extracted the vocabulary and modes of expression of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, arranging words first by grammatical category and then alphabetically, with explanations and references to the source passages. A concluding dialogue addressed Trissino’s proposed innovations in the alphabet. The edition made the three Tuscan authors available as a structured linguistic resource for writers, rather than solely as texts for continuous literary reading.

Sessa also participated in the negotiations surrounding more extensive literary scholarship. The manuscript of Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo’s Petrarch commentary was initially entrusted to him before passing, through the intervention of Tommaso Giunti, to the Nicolini da Sabbio establishment, which published it in July 1533. Its protracted preparation involved the intellectual circle of Antonio Minturno, competing commentaries and the approval of Venetian literary authorities. Sessa’s place in this history is that of an intermediary in the projected publication; it should be distinguished from responsibility for every stage of the edition ultimately produced. The episode documents his access to ambitious scholarly undertakings as well as to established popular genres.

The 1539 Il Petrarca nuovamente conferito con essemplari antichi, printed by Giovanni Antonio Nicolini da Sabbio at Sessa’s expense, adopted a more concise explanatory apparatus. Its octavo combined the poems and six full-page illustrations with indexes, additional poetry, explanations of difficult passages and attention to accents. The annotations derived from the apparatus introduced in the Aldine Petrarch of 1533, conventionally associated with Paolo Manuzio, although their authorship remains disputed. The relationship between the editions is therefore located in the transmission of a specific apparatus as well as in the poetic text. Sessa offered readers access to selected grammatical and linguistic explanations while retaining the portable, illustrated presentation of the collection.

Classical historiography reached his readers through equally specific routes of transmission. The 1539 Herodoto Alicarnaseo historico delle guerre de Greci & de Persi was manufactured by Bernardino Bindoni for Sessa, using Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Italian version, first printed in 1533. Despite the title’s claim to a translation from Greek, Boiardo had worked from Lorenzo Valla’s Latin translation, in its Venetian printing of 1474. The actual genealogy was therefore Greek → Valla’s Latin → Boiardo’s Italian. Sessa’s reprint sustained a vernacular historical text shaped by the earlier Ferrarese court, with its subdivisions and summaries facilitating access to the narrative.

Natural history continued beyond his Pliny editions. Conrad Gessner’s Historia plantarum et vires appeared under Sessa’s name in 1541, as a small volume recorded in sixteenth format. It arranged plant information alphabetically, drawing on Dioscorides, Paul of Aegina, Theophrastus, Pliny and more recent Greek authorities, and supplied an extensive index. Robert Winter’s Basel edition also dates from 1541, placing the Venetian publication within the work’s first year of circulation without establishing its priority within that year. The two editions differed materially: the Basel volume was an octavo, whereas Sessa’s smaller book accommodated the compilation in a particularly compact form.

The reach of this catalogue depended upon an extensive commercial network. Documents associate Sessa with booksellers, agents, factors or procurators in Padua, Verona, Vicenza, Cremona, Desenzano, Milan, Genoa, Florence, Lucca, Pesaro, Ancona, Rome, Lanciano, Campobasso, Rossano Calabro, Messina and Palermo, and outside Italy at Toledo. These relationships should not all be understood as branches owned by the Venetian firm: they represent different forms of sale, agency and representation. Particularly close were his connections with the Bergamasque Roman bookseller Giovanni Micheli, who became known as Giovanni della Gatta. The shared shop identity made the Sessa emblem recognisable beyond the city in which the books were commissioned.

Sessa’s capital also circulated through property and other merchandise. Until 1530, his family retained its fiscal residence at Padua, where he owned a house and a small holding; thereafter he entered the Venetian tax registers. Between 1530 and 1537 he acquired thirty campi at Lancenigo, in the Trevigiano, and more than doubled this estate before his death. His 1563 testament records participation with other merchants in the textile trade. These holdings establish a mercantile profile extending beyond books, while the testament supplies an important documentary anchor for the closing phase of his life.

His marriage to Veronica Baron produced six children: Giovanni Battista, Giovanni Bernardo, Melchiorre, Bernardino, Isabetta and Faustina. The sons’ participation generated increasingly varied publishing subscriptions during their father’s lifetime. Consequently, the history of the house after the mid-sixteenth century must be reconstructed through the actual names in each imprint. Giovanni Fabrini’s Il Terentio latino comentato in lingua toscana of 1556, for example, appeared with the names Giovambattista and Marchiò Sessa. Its combination of Latin text and Italian explanation continued the concern’s educational interest in classical literature through a publication associated with the next generation.

An especially revealing continuation was Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo nel quale si ragiona del modo di accrescere e conservar la memoria, first published in 1562 by Giovanni Battista and Melchiorre Sessa the Younger. Dolce recast the Romberch tradition in Italian dialogue form. The book’s visual genealogy was also material: several illustrations were printed from blocks originally designed for the 1520 Congestorium. Its title-page device was Pegasus, showing that this alternative emblem was already employed within the family’s publishing activity before the elder Melchiorre’s death. The work brought an established Latin mnemonic tradition into a vernacular edition while preserving part of its earlier graphic apparatus.

The large illustrated Dante of 1564 likewise belongs specifically to the sons’ enterprise. Its title names Giovambattista, Marchiò Sessa and brothers, while the colophon identifies Domenico Nicolini da Sabbio as the printer working for them. Francesco Sansovino prepared the edition, combining Cristoforo Landino’s commentary, first printed in 1481, with Alessandro Vellutello’s, first published by Francesco Marcolini in 1544, and adding tables, arguments and allegorical apparatus. The conspicuous profile portrait of Dante gave rise to the familiar description of these volumes as the “large-nose” or nasone editions. The project represents a major folio undertaking within a family catalogue often associated with smaller formats. Its novelty lay in the assembled editorial apparatus and presentation, rather than in the first publication of Dante’s poem.

Sansovino’s Dante continued through the editions of 1578 and 1596, with further changes in the distribution of responsibilities. The 1578 volume was manufactured by the heirs of Francesco Rampazetto for Giovanni Battista, Marchiò Sessa and brothers; the 1596 edition names Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Bernardo Sessa, with Domenico Nicolini as printer. The enduring text and apparatus thus passed through changing combinations of family publishers and commissioned workshops.

After Melchiorre’s death, Veronica Baron administered the concern with her children and remained documented in its management until at least 1582. Publications under the designation “Eredi di Marchiò Sessa” maintained the cat-and-mouse identity, while individual sons and different groups of brothers also operated under their own subscriptions. More than four hundred editions are attributed to the heirs before the end of the sixteenth century, followed by approximately another 160 through 1629. Their participation in the Compagnia dell’Aquila, renewed for legal publishing between 1573 and 1605 with Melchiorre Scoto, Giovanni Varisco and Damiano Zenaro, extended the family’s activity into collective investment in juridical texts. The business Sessa left behind was consequently capable of surviving changes in both readership and production: ownership of publishing interests and commercial relationships could continue across generations even as particular printers, editorial collaborators and combinations of partners changed.