Pietro Ravani

Pietro Ravani, also recorded as Pietro di Ravani, Piero Ravano, and Petrus de Ravanis, was a printer, publisher, and bookseller of Brescian origin, active in Venice from 1516. Recent archival research associates him more particularly with Ghedi, although his date of birth, education, and activities before entering the Venetian book trade remain obscure. His geographical origin is independently established by his publications: seven editions of 1516–1517 describe him as bersano, a vernacular designation for a Brescian, while the colophon of his Horace of 18 April 1527 calls him brixiensis. The older suggestion that the form bersano specifically indicated an origin near the Cremonese frontier was a linguistic hypothesis rather than documentary evidence for his birthplace.

Ravani’s first substantial publishing activity was conducted in partnership with Melchiorre Sessa, whose established business supplied access to an existing catalogue, illustrative materials, and commercial connections. The association is conventionally dated 1516–1525 and comprises approximately seventy-five recorded editions. Its usual starting point, the Italian Pliny of 14 August 1516, requires one calendrical qualification: the partners also signed the Somnia Salomonis David regis filii una cum Danielis prophetae somniorum interpretatione with the date 1 January 1516. If this January date follows the Venetian year beginning on 1 March, it corresponds to 1 January 1517, leaving the August Pliny as their earliest securely ordered publication. Their books frequently retained Sessa’s cat-and-mouse device, which identified the commercial house without establishing who performed every stage of manufacture.

The division of responsibilities within the partnership remains incompletely documented. Ravani probably contributed technical supervision and possibly capital, while Sessa brought the resources of an established publishing and bookselling concern; neither man’s activities can be confined to a single function. Their joint signatures encompass books manufactured in their own establishment and work commissioned from independent printers. Octavo predominated, alongside quartos and a smaller group of folios. Roman was their principal text type, but gothic remained useful for religious, scientific, and vernacular books, and italic entered their production comparatively late. The Latin Sallust of 1523 marks its introduction in the sequence reconstructed by modern bibliographers, followed by other classical editions.

The opening Pliny, Historia naturale di Caio Plinio Secondo, presented Cristoforo Landino’s Italian translation in a substantial illustrated folio of fourteen preliminary leaves, 259 numbered leaves, and a final leaf. Its title, printed in red and black, advertised correction and the provision of illustrations appropriate to the individual books. The illustrative programme reused material from Sessa’s Latin Pliny of 1513, transferring an existing visual apparatus across languages and readerships. This was consequently a new vernacular presentation of an established translation, supported by illustrations already developed for a Latin edition. Its devices are revealing: the crowned cat appears on the title, while Sessa’s orb-and-cross mark occurs in the preliminaries. The publication thus incorporated both the textual and material inheritance of Sessa’s earlier business.

Another ambitious early undertaking was the Latin Vitae Plutarchi Cheronei, completed on 26 November 1516. Its title situated the text within the editorial tradition associated with Josse Bade, advertising renewed correction after his work; the contents combined Plutarch’s biographies with additional ancient and humanist biographical material. The folio’s seventy-eight narrative woodcuts gave this composite collection a particularly extensive visual apparatus. These illustrations also became resources for subsequent publications: the title illustration of Serafino Aquilano’s Opere, dated 15 October 1519, reused a block employed in the Plutarch. Such transfers establish the circulation of particular blocks within the partners’ production, although they do not always settle their legal ownership. Across the illustrated catalogue, signed cuts and bibliographical attributions connect the material with Luc’Antonio degli Uberti, Zoan Andrea da Venezia, and Eustachio Celebrino; these associations require examination book by book, since the presence of a block does not establish a fresh commission from its designer or cutter.

Vernacular poetry supplied a different kind of publishing opportunity. Marcello Filosseno’s Sylve, issued on 10 November 1516, was an octavo of 144 leaves advertising 342 youthful strambotti and 420 sonnets. Its bibliography preserves a material variation: an alternative form has a recomposed first gathering, a title printed in black instead of the original red-and-black presentation, and altered contents claims, including 362 strambotti, ten previously unprinted capitoli, and an epistle praising virtue. These differences concern the opening gathering and advertised contents; they should not automatically be converted into two wholly reset editions. The same year’s illustrated quarto of Cecco d’Ascoli’s Acerba, published as Lo illustro poeta Cecho dascoli, contained one hundred leaves in gothic and roman type and promoted its commentary, correction, and illustrations. Together these books show the partners adjusting the presentation of established vernacular texts through format, typography, illustration, and the explicit advertisement of additional material.

The illustrated Hyginus of 24 March 1517, entitled De mundi et sphaerae ac utriusque partium declaratione, offers an especially clear example of edition genealogy. Comparison of line lengths identifies a new setting of Sessa’s 1513 edition, while the constellation illustrations were printed from the earlier blocks. The cat-and-mouse device was updated and reversed. The publication therefore combined newly composed type with an inherited illustrative series. Its iconography belonged to the tradition established by Erhard Ratdolt’s illustrated Hyginus of 1482 and subsequently modified through Venetian editions, rather than to an independent reconstruction of the ancient author’s astronomical descriptions. The distinction matters because the printed constellation figures could perpetuate iconographic conventions even where they did not correspond closely to the accompanying text. Ravani’s participation belongs to the continued manufacture and circulation of this established astronomical book.

Practical mathematics provided another durable component of the catalogue. Pietro Borghi’s Libro de abacho, dated 25 June 1517, identifies Giacomo Penzio da Lecco as printer and Sessa and Ravani as the parties at whose instance it was produced. This quarto, containing one hundred leaves despite its defective printed numbering, supplies unusually explicit evidence of their commissioning role. Penzio also manufactured the Psalterium of 16 May 1518 and the illustrated Compilatio de astrorum scientia attributed to Leopold of Austria, dated 15 July 1520. The latter, a gothic quarto of ninety-four leaves, reproduced the tradition of Ratdolt’s Augsburg edition of 9 January 1489. Its retained dedication to Ulrich Frundsberg, prince-bishop of Trent, belongs to that earlier publication history and cannot be treated as evidence of a new patronage relationship in 1520. These editions demonstrate why the formula per Melchiorem Sessam et Petrum de Ravanis socios must be interpreted alongside typographical evidence and more explicit manufacturing statements.

Schoolbooks formed a substantial and technically varied part of the business. The partners published Latin grammars, elementary rhetorical manuals, and classical texts suitable for instruction, including works by Niccolò Perotti and Agostino Dati. Perotti’s Regulae grammaticales of 30 July 1521, documented through the copy at the Biblioteca Regionale Universitaria di Catania, illustrates the uneven survival of this heavily used category. A more substantial undertaking was Aldus Manutius’s Institutionum grammaticarum libri quatuor, dated 17 October 1521. This quarto assembled the Latin grammar with supplementary material and the De octo partium orationis constructione libellus, advertised under Erasmus’s name but properly distinguished as a work by William Lily revised by Erasmus. The surviving Eton copy preserves separate colophons within the volume and belongs to one of several bibliographically recorded variants. The edition’s structure consequently deserves attention as a composite instructional publication, rather than simply as a reprint of an undifferentiated “Aldine grammar.”

Greek printing became a further specialism. The Constantine Lascaris compendium dated 1521 brought together grammar, syntax, linguistic and dialectal material, elementary reading texts, and a brief Hebrew introduction, with Latin interpretation. Its contents continued the expanded Aldine tradition of assembling several aids to language learning within one volume. The partners addressed their introductory statement to students, making the instructional purpose explicit. Its dating requires care: descriptions record colophons dated 18 February as well as 17 October 1521. These dates alone establish neither the priority of the surviving forms nor the extent of recomposition, particularly where the possible use of the Venetian calendar affects the interpretation of February. The book nevertheless securely establishes the partnership’s use of a cursive Greek fount in publications dated 1521. Typographical scholarship identifies this fount with the DS 1 type of the Nicolini da Sabbio and infers its acquisition from that workshop; it subsequently remained with Ravani’s business and heirs, in whose production its use is traced into the 1550s.

The Greek Psalterion of 1525 extended this capacity to a religious text printed in red and black. An octavo of 144 leaves, it carried a framed title with David kneeling in prayer, his harp and crown below and God the Father above. A more demanding undertaking closed the principal sequence of joint publications: the folio Dictionarium Graecum, subscribed on 24 December 1525. Partly based on Giovanni Crastone’s lexicon, it assembled Greek–Latin and Latin–Greek reference material with supplementary linguistic treatises; its internal arrangement followed the enlarged lexicographical tradition represented by Andrea Torresano’s 1524 edition. The publishers’ address presented Greek books as indispensable instruments for acquiring the bonae litterae. Its elaborate title border adapted Hans Holbein’s Tabula Cebetis imagery, representing the ascent towards true happiness, and bears Giovanni Andrea Valvassore’s monogram. That signature connects him with the border’s production; it does not establish that he printed the volume. The edition combined a substantial investment in Greek composition with an emblematic title design borrowed and reworked from the Basel book trade.

The final year of the association also included publications that complicate any description of its catalogue as exclusively elementary. The Latin Naturalis historia of 24 March 1525 advertised Ermolao Barbaro’s corrections and consultation of a German printed exemplar, accompanied by Johannes Camers’s separately signed Plyniani indicis, dated in April. This was a Latin scholarly and reference edition, distinct from the Landino translation with which the partnership had opened. In September 1525 the partners issued Ambrogio Leone’s De nobilitate rerum dialogus, together with his Latin translation of De virtutibus et vitiis, then attributed to Aristotle. The octavo was edited by Camillo Leone, whose role appears in the prefatory material, and was printed in italic with a woodcut title border. Its inclusion of contemporary philosophical writing and a humanist translation gives the catalogue a dimension obscured by a simple opposition between learned publishing and commercially established texts.

Ravani’s separate commercial identity emerged before the partnership ended. In publications of 1524, including Baldassarre Olimpo Alessandri’s Gloria d’amore and Alberto da Castello’s Rosario de la gloriosa Vergine Maria, dated 15 December, he subscribed as “Piero da la Serena.” The name referred to the Siren shop and should be distinguished from the subsequent appearance of the siren as his independent printed device. A document of 4 March 1524, concerning a debt of four ducats, already calls him librer; another, dated 15 September 1527, places him as a bookseller in the Merceria. His bookselling activity therefore overlapped with both the joint publishing enterprise and his later independent editions. The Rosario, an extensively illustrated octavo of 252 numbered and four unnumbered leaves, also demonstrates the scale of devotional production issued under the partners’ names immediately before their separation.

After 1525, Ravani’s recorded publishing output contracted sharply, while his bookselling business continued. His independent Aldine Latin grammar, completed on 10 November 1526, returned to an instructional work already represented in the partners’ catalogue in 1521. The title displayed the crowned, double-tailed siren, holding the raised ends of her tails, which became the enduring emblem of the business. This edition retained the association of Aldus’s grammar with supplementary teaching texts, including the Lily–Erasmus construction manual. Its publication should be understood as Ravani’s independent continuation of an established schoolbook investment, rather than as the introduction of a new grammatical work. The red-and-black title and opening presentation also maintained the visual distinction afforded to the earlier instructional editions.

His most substantial independent commission was the illustrated folio Horace of 18 April 1527, Horatius cum quinque commentis. Its colophon distinguishes responsibilities explicitly: Guglielmo da Fontaneto printed the book at Ravani’s expense, identifying the latter as brixiensis. The five principal commentaries were those circulating under the names of Antonio Mancinelli, Acron, Pomponius Porphyrio, Giovanni Britannico, and Josse Bade. Additional material included the metrical text attributed to Servius, annotations and an account of Horatian metres by Aldus Manutius, Perotti’s Libellus de metris odarum, and Matteo Bonfini’s annotations, inserted at relevant points and also supplied together at the end. A substantial index completed the apparatus. The volume comprised six preliminary leaves and 296 numbered leaves, with a red-and-black title within a woodcut border, the siren device, narrative vignettes, and figured initials. Ravani’s investment thus supported a large cumulative commentary edition whose manufacture required an independent printing establishment and whose presentation served sustained consultation of text, exegesis, and metre.

Ravani’s last known signed publication was Battista Della Valle’s Vallo, completed on 9 December 1528. This illustrated octavo contained eighty leaves, conventionally collated as eight preliminary leaves, seventy-one numbered leaves, and a final leaf. It belonged to an existing publication sequence, following the Naples edition of 1521 and the Venetian edition printed by Gregorio de Gregori in 1524. Its long title advertised practical instruction in fortifying and defending cities, siege operations, bridges, ladders, artillery, mining, military formations, signalling, gunpowder, and incendiary devices. Woodcuts and diagrams composed from typographical elements translated parts of this instruction into reproducible visual schemes. The advertised additions concerning fire devices belong to the textual claims of the edition and do not, without comparison with its predecessors, establish that Ravani first introduced them. The Vallo became one of the most persistent identifiable titles in the subsequent family catalogue.

Ravani died between December 1528 and May 1531. The latter limit is established by Manuel Chrysoloras’s Erotemata, issued in May 1531 by Vittore, son of the late Pietro Ravani, and associates. This octavo joined Chrysoloras’s grammar with material on irregular verbs, extracts from Demetrius Chalcondyles, the fourth book of Theodore Gaza’s grammar on syntax, a treatise on enclitics, monostichic sayings, and Cato. The publication therefore resumed the language-teaching programme through a collection of complementary texts. The wording identifying Vittore as the son of the deceased Pietro is also essential when interpreting later imprints: in the Vallo of 1535, the formula Vettor q. Piero Ravano denotes Vittore’s descent from his late father, rather than a partnership between two living publishers named Vittore and Pietro.

The continuity of the concern depended substantially on Luchina, Ravani’s widow and testamentary commissioner. On 23 January 1532, corresponding to 1531 in Venetian reckoning, she was documented as the widow of the bookseller at the Siren and as tenant of a house belonging to the monastery of San Girolamo in the parish of San Giuliano. The business continued to work with both Sessa and Fontaneto: their joint Biblia in lingua materna of 1532 names Fontaneto, Sessa, and the heirs of Pietro Ravani. This illustrated folio continued the Malermi translation, supplying postils, chapter summaries, and repertories. Its illustrations largely reused the series from Guglielmo Anima Mia’s 1493 Bible. The undertaking consequently renewed both an established vernacular biblical text and an older stock of images through an association that reunited Pietro’s former partner, his independent printer, and his estate.

Vittore’s name occurs in approximately eighty editions between 1531 and 1541, generally accompanied by associates; from 1543, the collective designation “heirs of Pietro Ravani” became regular and appears in a further substantial sequence extending through the 1550s. Individual titles establish continuity more precisely than the family name alone. The Vallo returned under the Ravani concern in 1531, 1535, and 1539, and under the heirs in 1543 and 1550. Aldus’s Institutionum grammaticarum libri quatuor, again accompanied by the construction manual advertised under Erasmus’s name, appeared from the heirs and associates in July 1547. These dated editions trace the continued exploitation of particular instructional works first undertaken during Pietro’s career, while their successive settings and associated imprints belong to the production history of his successors.

The company behind these imprints extended beyond a straightforward succession from father to son. Archival research has identified Luchina’s nephew Andrea Obici among her associates, together with Giovanni Varisco of Ghedi. Varisco’s marriage to Marta Paganini, daughter of Alessandro Paganini and Daria Rusconi, connected the concern with another Brescian printing family and, through Daria, with the descendants of Giorgio Rusconi. A renewed association dated 19 January 1541, or 1540 more veneto, documents Luchina’s continuing participation as Pietro’s testamentary representative. Its provisions contemplated her operating the printing establishment on her own account or dividing it. Her authority therefore encompassed productive assets as well as the administration of inherited books and obligations: the continued Siren business was sustained through her management and a documented network of family and commercial partnerships