# Alphabetum tibetanum missionum apostolicarum commodo editum **Autore:** Giorgi Agostino Antonio **Dati editoriali:** Rome, Typis Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1759 **Codice archivio:** 188 **Prezzo:** 9000.00 USD **Stato commerciale:** Disponibile **Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/giorgi-alphabetum-tibetanum-1759 --- ## Descrizione accademica e analisi 4to (278x205 mm). 208 pp. Woodcut device of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide on the title-page; large woodcut illustration on p. 10 depicting writing implements and traditional Asian book formats; examples of Tibetan characters throughout, together with specimens of Sanskrit (p. 42) and Hebrew; woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces; errata on the final page. Late nineteenth-century half vellum with vellum corners, two lettering-pieces on the spine, red top edge. A very good, wide-margined copy. Extremely rare first edition, published anonymously, of Agostino Antonio Giorgi’s pioneering account of the Tibetan writing system, language and literary culture. Issued by the celebrated polyglot press of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the work occupies an important position at the intersection of eighteenth-century Oriental scholarship, Catholic missionary activity, comparative linguistics and the history of typography. Giorgi, an Augustinian friar and distinguished Orientalist, undertook his investigation in Rome using the extensive documentation assembled by the Congregation’s missionaries in Asia. Particularly important were the linguistic materials and reports transmitted by the Capuchins Francesco Orazio della Penna di Billi and Cassiano da Macerata, whose direct experience of Tibetan language and religious culture provided information otherwise largely inaccessible to European scholars. Rather than presenting an account of personal travel, Giorgi sought to transform missionary knowledge into a systematic printed description of an unfamiliar language. “The same Roman press [the Propaganda Fide Press] was the first to print the Tibetan script with movable type, in its publication Alphabetum tibetanum missionum apostolicarum commodo editum of 1759. This quarto volume was written by Agostino [Augusto] Antonio Giorgi, an Augustine Eremite from Ravenna and a friend of Costantino Ruggieri, the then director of the Propaganda Fide Press. It described not only the Tibetan language, but also the customs and religion of the people. Funded by the Spanish Cardinal Belluga, a Tibetan fount was made especially for this work. Its punches had been cut 20 years earlier, in 1738, by Antonio Fantauzzi, who based his design of the Tibetan characters upon the drawings of Francesco Oliverio Orazio (1680–1745), a Capucin monk from Penna di Billi of the Pesaro province in Italy. This Christian missionary had travelled to Tibet in 1716 and settled in Lhasa, where he collaborated with Buddhist and Lamaist scholars in India and China for more than 15 years. Then, in 1738, Orazio travelled back to Tibet - the same year Fantauzzi modelled the punches of the Tibetan type for the Propaganda Fide Press upon Orazio’s hand: Formas Tibetanas eodem Pinnabillensi Horatio duce, Romae ab Antonio Fantautio an mdccxxxviii sculpsi (pp. 7-8)” (J. De Baerdemaeker, “The Evolution of Tibetan Typography.” Typotheque, 21 May 2026). The Alphabetum Tibetanum introduces the Tibetan alphabet and examines its constituent letters, orthography, pronunciation, grammatical structures and methods of combining written signs. Tibetan presented particular difficulties for European typographers and philologists because its writing system could not be adequately represented through a simple correspondence with the Latin alphabet. The thirty basic consonantal characters, inherent vowels, additional vowel signs and combinations of superscribed, subscribed, prefixed and suffixed letters required a more elaborate approach to both linguistic description and typographical reproduction. Of particular historical importance is the use of Tibetan metal type. The characters employed by the Propaganda Fide press originated in punches engraved at Rome in 1738 by Antonio Fantauzzi, working from calligraphic models associated with Orazio della Penna. The undertaking was supported by Cardinal Luis Antonio Belluga y Moncada, whose patronage helped make the specialised types available for missionary printing. The 1759 Alphabetum is identified in modern typographical scholarship as the earliest publication issued by the Roman press using movable metal type to reproduce the Tibetan script. Some of the original punches are preserved today in the collections of the French Imprimerie nationale. The volume is therefore not merely an early linguistic handbook, but also an exceptional witness to the material challenges involved in transferring a non-European writing system into the technology of Western letterpress printing. The manufacture of the type required the forms of Tibetan handwriting to be translated into reproducible metal sorts, capable of representing combinations of consonants and vowel signs while retaining their recognisable graphic structure. Another particularly attractive feature is the large woodcut on p. 10, illustrating writing implements, containers, an oblong book or manuscript with Tibetan characters, and a substantial stack of leaves protected between rigid boards. The illustration offers an early European visual account of Asian writing equipment and book construction, contrasting the familiar European codex with the long-established tradition of loose oblong leaves, commonly known as the pothī format. Its inclusion extends the work beyond the study of letters to the material history of writing, manuscript production and the preservation of books. The publication belongs to the important series of Oriental alphabets produced by the Propaganda Fide press for the practical requirements of Catholic missions. Such works were intended to facilitate linguistic acquisition, translation and religious instruction, but they also contributed to the formation of European Oriental studies by making unfamiliar scripts and textual traditions available to readers who had never travelled beyond Europe. In Giorgi's case, the missionary objective generated a work whose scholarly significance considerably exceeded its immediate ecclesiastical purpose. In 1762 Giorgi published a substantially enlarged and explicitly attributed edition, retaining the original linguistic project while adding extensive historical, geographical, ethnographic and religious discussions. The enlarged work also developed controversial comparisons between Tibetan religious doctrines and Manichaeism, together with an apologetic response to Isaac de Beausobre's writings on the history of that religion. The present 1759 first edition is particularly significant as the original, independently published formulation of Giorgi’s linguistic enterprise, preceding its transformation into a much larger work of comparative religious scholarship. It represents an early attempt to make the Tibetan language intelligible to European readers through the combined instruments of missionary observation, philological analysis, visual illustration and specialised typography. The historical importance of the Alphabetum must be distinguished from the accuracy of all its interpretations. Some of Giorgi’s linguistic and religious conclusions were subsequently revised or rejected by later scholarship. Nevertheless, the work remains an important document of the beginnings of European Tibetology and of the intellectual and technological circumstances under which knowledge of Tibetan language and Buddhism entered European scholarly circulation. The work is outstanding also for containing the earliest known use of movable metal Devanagari (Sanskrit) type in a european printed book. On p. 42 Giorgi reproduces a comparative table of Brahmanic (Devanagari) and Tibetan vowel signs, accompanied by Latin transliterations. While earlier European works, notably Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata (1667), had reproduced Devanagari through engraving, the types employed in Giorgi’s Alphabetum Tibetanum have been identified by Pijush K. Ghosh as the first known use of the movable Devanagari characters developed at the Roman press of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide during the 1740s. The Devanagari characters of Sanskrit are characterized by a continuous horizontal line that connects the letters at the top of the word. Perfectly aligning dozens of individual metal blocks so that this line appeared to be drawn with a single fluid stroke - without any visible steps or breaks - required millimeter-level precision in casting and type setting, which placed a heavy strain on the machinery of the time. The pioneering result seen in the 1759 Alphabetum tibetanum was an engineering triumph that paved the way for the subsequent standardization of Eastern typography in Europe. --- ## Bibliografia di riferimento Italian Union Catalogue, IT\ICCU\TO0E\151560; J. Lust, Western Books on China Published up to 1850: In the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. A Descriptive Catalogue, London, 1987, no. 198; G.G. Fagioli Vercellone, “Giorgi, Agostino Antonio.” In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. LV, Rome, 2001, pp. 300-304; T. Pomplun, “Agostino Antonio Giorgi, OESA (1711-1797): Between Augustinianism and the History of Religions.” History of Religions, vol. 59, no. 3 (2020), pp. 193-221; J. De Baerdemaeker, Tibetan Typeforms, Amsterdam, 2020; J. Schubert. “Typographia Tibetana.” Gutenberg-Jahrbuch (1950), pp. 280–295; D.B. Updike, Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use, vol. I, Cambridge, 1963, p. 183; C. Bellini, Svelare il Paese delle Nevi. L’Alphabetum Tibetanum di Agostino Antonio Giorgi. Uno studio preliminare, Rimini, 2011, especially pp. 49 and 51; P. Saviotti, Exoticis typis. Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) e le collaborazioni editoriali per le pubblicazioni in lingue orientali, Dissertation thesis, University of Milan and Salamanca, 2023/2024, especially pp. 61-64; Ghosh, Pijush K. An Approach to Type Design and Text Composition in Indian Scripts. Stanford, 1983, p. 19; Scharf, Peter M. and Malcolm D. Hyman. Linguistic Issues in Encoding Sanskrit. Providence, 2011, pp. 21-23; Priolkar, Anant Kakba. The Printing Press in India: Its Beginnings and Early Development. Bombay, 1958, pp. 62-63. --- *Documento generato automaticamente dall'Archivio Govi Rare Books per finalità di ricerca e catalogazione.*