Bernardo Cennini

Bernardo Cennini (1415 — c. 1498) was an Italian goldsmith, sculptor and early printer of Florence. As a sculptor he was among the assistants to Lorenzo Ghiberti in the long project producing the second pair of doors— the "Doors of Paradise"— for the Battistero di San Giovanni. He produced the first book printed at Florence.

Representing his output as a sculptor-goldsmith is a cache of his sculptures in silver that are preserved in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence. They include a high relief combining two New Testament episodes, "The Announcement to Zachariah and the Visitation", which were Cennini's contribution to the silver altar of S. Giovanni, (formerly in the Baptistery), a project that was worked on by several generations of sculptors; the silver crosses for it are also by Cennini, and the "corpus" on the crucifix is attributed to him as well. [ [http://www.thais.it/citta_italiane/firenze/index/mod/pag_01.htm Illustrations.] ]

Hearing of the new process of printing by moveable type, and seeing some printed books, Cennini puzzled out the procedure for himself, cast his own type font and, working with his sons Pietro, a humanist poet and manuscript illuminator, [He was a correspondent of Bartholomaeus Fontius, a Florentine humanist who became one of the librarians for Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary; through this connection at least six of Pietro Cennini's manuscripts produced for Matthias Corvinus, one with the dated colophon "Escripsit Florentie petrus cenninius Anno Dominj 1467 VII. idus aprilis", from the "Biblioteca Corvinianus" are conserved in the National Széchényi Library and elsewhere. (Ilona Berkovits, "Illuminated Manuscripts from the library of Matthias Corvinus" (1964): ( [http://www.tertullian.org/articles/berkovits_corvina.htm On-line extract. pp. 9-53] )] and Domenico, produced the first of the incunabula printed at Florence, starting in 1471. [ [http://www.ib.hu-berlin.de/~wumsta/infopub/textbook/umfeld/rehm3.html Margarete Rehm, "Information und Kommunikation in Geschichte und Gegenwart"] ; a chronology of printing "firsts".] The book was the commentary of Virgil, "In tria Virgilii Opera Expositio" by the late fourth-century grammarian Maurus Servius Honoratus. [L. Hain catalogue: 14704.] In the first page of the book, Cennini commemorates his own invention, and at the conclusion is the triumphant Florentine boast: "Florentinis ingeniis nil ardui est," ["To Florentine ingenuity nothing is difficult"] and the date 9 October 1471. [The first modern discussion was G. Ottino, 1871. "Di Bernardo Cennini e dell'arte della stampa in Firenze nei primi cento anni dall'invenzione di essa: sommario storico con documenti inediti." (Florence). ] The classical content was characteristic of the Florentine incunabula: "Early Florentine printing, in particular, shows a large output of classical texts and grammars and other humanistic works as opposed to the religious works that most other Italian cities of the time were producing." (""Florentine Printing of the Fifteenth Century" 2003). The partly thirteenth-century Palazzo Cennini in via Faenza, the family's power center, is now largely rebuilt as a hotel. Via Faenza remained for a long period the locus for Florence's printers' shops. Bernardo Cennini is buried in the south transept of the basilica of San Lorenzo.

The painter and author of a famous book on the crafts, Cennino D'Andrea Cennini, was a member of the same Florentine family.

Notes

External links

* [http://www.library.uiuc.edu/rbx/exhibitions/Florentine%20Printing/I.htm (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), "Florentine Printing of the Fifteenth Century: Florence: 'Athens on the Arno'"] Exhibition of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, May-June 2003

Further reading

*Rhodes, Dennis E. 1988. "Gli annali tipografici fiorentini del XV secolo." (Biblioteca di bibliografia italiana, 113 (Florence: Leo S. Olschki).
*Ridolfi, Roberto. 1958. "La stampa in Firenze nel secolo XV." (Florence: Leo S. Olschki).