Figure 99
Page of Ovid: Gorgonzola, Milan
From Ovidii metamorphoses
1509
Ovid’s Metamorphoses with commentary by R. Regi, published at Milan in 1509 by Nicolas Gorgonzola, is a book which at first sight might have been printed in the fifteenth rather than the sixteenth century. The text, in large roman type, runs at the right of left-hand pages and left of right-hand pages, and the outside of the page is filled (as in manuscripts) by wide columns of notes, set in smaller roman characters. These columns of notes, much infested by a family of very black paragraph marks, are allowed to come just as they will—sometimes extending to the bottom of the page, sometimes not, and here and there surrounding three sides of the text. At the beginning of each Book, an unattractive initial is usually inserted, to take the place of those before painted in by hand; for spaces were still sometimes left for an illuminator’s work. This detail indicates a beginning of the decline in Italian book-making; but this book maintains something of the grand manner.