What was happening in the world about the year 1500 when Aldus Manutius[23] had his great printing shop in Venice working at its peak? Columbus had made several voyages, and the Portuguese had been around the tip of Africa although Magellan had not yet sailed around the world. Leonardo da Vinci had left Milan for political reasons, and was working in Venice, as was Giovanni Bellini and his pupils Titian and Giorgione. Northern Italy was the scene of much brawling between rival princes, with Emperor Maximilian I stepping in now and then to make things worse. The battles were nuisances to Aldus, for they interfered with the production and distribution of his books. I do not know how much he knew about the geographical discoveries of his time, but we can be sure that a man of his cultivation knew about the great painting and sculpture being done. Ralph Roeder says of this time that its "triumphs are preserved in art, its reverses in its spiritual story, and both are the result of the same cause--its supreme vitality."
It is one more indication of that vitality that Aldus at the age of forty embarked on a project which was to bring about a tremendous enlargement of the conception of the purpose of books. Many printers in history have drifted into printing or its allied trades by chance, but there seems to be no doubt that Aldus knew exactly what he was doing all the time. He was a man who knew what he wanted. He had been a scholar and tutor to Alberto and Lionello Pio, princes of Carpi, when he first saw printed books and realized what could be done to make classical manuscripts generally available. With the aid of the Pio family he went to Venice, which, since the fall of Constantinople, had been the richest repository of manuscripts and a residence of Greek scholars. In order to have reference books available for his proof-readers and editors, he first printed a Greek dictionary and a Greek grammar and himself prepared a Greek-Latin dictionary. He gave Venice a university when he started the New Academy of Venice. For his press he hired the finest scholars of the day--Bembo and Reuchlin, Musurus and Erasmus. We, in the twentieth century, have a tendency to think of scholars as removed from the affairs of life. Aldus was a scholar who was also in the midst of life, because scholarship was an important affair in the world of Renaissance man. He must have been a true cosmopolitan as well, commanding, as he did, the friendship of men as different as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Jean Grolier of France, from whom he had a commission to print special copies of his books on vellum.