Schiratti Nicola

Nicolò Schiratti, also recorded bibliographically as Nicola and, in Latin imprints, as Nicolaus Schirattus, was born at Udine in August 1590, the son of Giovanni Schiratti, a native of Susans, and Valentina Sottomonte. He received the baptismal names Nicolò Giovanni Battista. The founder of a printing dynasty active at Udine from 1629 until 1704, Schiratti belongs to the comparatively small group of seventeenth-century provincial printers whose technical formation, editorial ambitions, and commercial connections allowed their workshops to operate beyond a narrowly local market.

Schiratti learned the printer’s craft in Venice and rose to the position of proto—the senior technician responsible for the organisation and supervision of a printing house—in the establishment of Antonio Pinelli, ducal printer from 1610. This Venetian apprenticeship was decisive: it gave him experience in a large and institutionally privileged workshop, familiarity with the acquisition of type and presses, and access to the commercial networks through which printing materials, paper, and books circulated within the Republic. Following the death of the Udine printer Pietro Lorio in July 1629, the municipal council unanimously appointed Schiratti printer to the city. His initial annual stipend of sixty ducats was soon increased to one hundred, restoring the level formerly enjoyed by Giovan Battista Natolini and Lorio. As public printer, Schiratti supplied the municipality with proclamations, ordinances, mandates, and other administrative matter; as a camerale printer, he also served the Venetian lieutenant and the fiscal and governmental offices operating in the Patria del Friuli.

The equipment inherited from the preceding Udine workshops was inadequate. Schiratti initially arranged to use Lorio’s types, which had previously belonged to Natolini and were already heavily worn. In 1630 the Udine nobleman Bartoluccio Bartolucci purchased new printing equipment and leased it to him for fifty ducats annually. Schiratti meanwhile commissioned fresh type from the Venetian founder Giovanni Claser and bought a press from the printer Andrea Baba for twenty-eight ducats. His subsequent purchases reveal continuous investment in the material resources of the shop: between 1655 and 1666 he obtained additional fonts from the Venetian type-foundry of Marco Filippi. The paper employed in his books, identifiable through numerous distinct watermarks, came from several mills, principally within the commercial orbit of the Toscolano paper industry. Its generally high quality was especially important for editions containing intaglio illustrations. By 1656 Schiratti had become financially independent of his original backer; when Vincenzo Bartolucci, the latter’s son, incurred a debt of 132 ducats, ownership of the printing establishment passed to Schiratti.

His typographical devices preserve evidence both of continuity and of deliberate self-fashioning. He retained the device of Experience inherited from Natolini and Lorio, depicting a seated woman testing coins upon a touchstone. In other books he used an emblematic rebus on his surname: a squirrel—schirat in Friulian—standing upon and rowing a floating trunk, guided by three stars and accompanied by the motto Sic ad portum. Other title-page ornaments functioning as devices include Aurora holding crowns and a pair of anchors with the motto His suffulta. The image of Mercury pursuing Pan or a satyr, accompanied by Fortasse licebit, was formerly attributed to Schiratti but has been correctly identified as the personal and academic emblem of Fortunio Liceti; its appearance in Udine books reflects Liceti’s authorship rather than the printer’s ownership of the device.

Bibliographical censuses differ slightly in their totals, assigning between 176 and 186 known books and pamphlets to Schiratti between 1631 and 1668. These figures necessarily exclude much ephemeral and institutional printing—broadsides, official notices, occasional verses, administrative forms, and similar matter—of which only a small proportion has survived. Although his position as Udine’s sole established printer obliged him to undertake work of many kinds, literary and occasional publications form the largest component of his recorded output. Devotional and ecclesiastical books, civic and regional history, legal and administrative texts, academic disputation, antiquarian scholarship, medicine, and natural philosophy are also substantially represented.

Schiratti’s principal editorial achievement was the establishment of productive relations with authors attached to the University of Padua and to the wider learned culture of the Venetian mainland. Between 1635 and 1655 he printed twenty-three titles by the physician, natural philosopher, and antiquary Fortunio Liceti. This association brought technically demanding works to Udine and materially raised the profile of the press. Liceti’s De mundi et hominis analogia of 1635 contained the earliest intaglio illustrations employed by Schiratti. The De anulis antiquis liber singularis of 1645 included a folding plate representing thirty-nine ancient rings, together with Liceti’s portrait and emblem. The most ambitious illustrated production of the shop was the folio De lucernis antiquorum reconditis libri sex of 1652, furnished with 117 copperplate images executed by the Venetian engraver Giovanni Giorgi. Through such publications Schiratti introduced sustained calcographic book illustration into Udine printing and demonstrated an ability to coordinate authorship, engraving, typography, and the acquisition of suitable paper.

Other learned authors entrusted substantial portions of their work to his press. Between 1643 and 1647 Schiratti issued six texts by the French philosopher Claude Bérigard, who taught at Pisa and Padua. Between 1639 and 1654 he printed eight works by Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, historian, antiquary, and later bishop of Cittanova, including scholarly catalogues concerned with manuscript collections at Padua and Venice and a history of the congregation of San Giorgio in Alga. These relationships placed the Udine workshop within the intellectual and bibliographical networks of Padua and Venice rather than confining it to the production of books for Friulian institutions alone.

Schiratti nevertheless remained an important printer of Friulian historical memory. Among the imposing folios produced in his later years were Enrico Palladio degli Olivi’s Rerum Foroiuliensium ab orbe condito usque ad annum Redemptoris Domini nostri 452 libri undecim (1659), Gian Francesco Palladio’s two-volume Historie della Provincia del Friuli (1660), and Giovanni Giuseppe Capodagli’s Udine illustrata da molti suoi cittadini così nelle lettere come nelle armi famosi (1665). These publications united local historiography and civic commemoration with the format and visual apparatus of learned folio production. Their scale, together with the illustrated works of Liceti, distinguishes Schiratti’s enterprise from a workshop sustained solely by municipal patronage and routine official printing.

The prosperity of the establishment was reflected in Schiratti’s acquisition of houses and land and in the existence of an associated bookselling business. His Venetian connections facilitated the procurement not only of type, presses, and paper but also of books for retail distribution. He died at Udine in 1668. By his wife, Caterina Gingilli, he had several daughters and two sons, Giovanni and Carlo. Giovanni entered the priesthood, while Carlo inherited the printing house; Carlo’s death in 1670 compelled Giovanni to administer the business on behalf of his young nephews. The successors did not consistently maintain the technical and illustrative standards achieved under the founder, but they expanded the family’s commercial assets, acquiring additional printing equipment and establishing or purchasing bookselling interests at Gorizia and Capodistria. From the early 1680s the firm was directed by Carlo’s son Francesco, whose death in 1704 brought the Schiratti family enterprise to an end. The workshop then passed to Domenico Murero, formerly an employee of the family. Schiratti’s historical importance rests upon his transformation of Udine’s municipally supported press into a financially stable printing and bookselling concern capable of serving civic government, regional historiography, devotional culture, and the learned authors of the Paduan academic world.