The Douglas Archives
Ottaviano Scotti
Ottaviano Scotti. Portrait of a man in profile medal 1500 - 1599 Obverse of the medal OBJECT medal MATERIAL AND TECHNIQUE bronze/ fusion CULTURAL SCOPE Milan area PLACE OF STORAGE Giorgio Franchetti Gallery at Ca' d'Oro LOCATION House of Gold ADDRESS Cannaregio, 3932/ Calle Ca' d'Oro, Venice (VE) CARD TYPE Artworks/objects LEGAL STATUS State property NATIONAL CATALOGUE CODE 0500442668 INVENTORY NUMBER ME. 722r COMPETENT BODY FOR THE PROTECTION Special Superintendence for the Historical Artistic Ethno-anthropological Heritage and for the Museum Centre of the city of Venice and the municipalities of the lagoon ring road RECORDING BODY Special Superintendence for the Venetian Museum Centre DATE OF COMPILATION 2003 UPDATE DATE 2006 REGISTRATIONS OCTAVIANVS. SCOTTVS - capital letters - embossed - Latin
J Ruaidri Douglas
COTUS, Octavian
SCOTO (Scotto, Scotti), Octavian . – Born in Monza around 1440, he was the founder of a family of printers and publishers operating in Venice from the last quarter of the 15th century until the beginning of the 17th. His father Beltramo was a merchant, owner of properties located in the Mediovico district. The name of his mother is not known; however, it is known that he had four brothers: Brandino, Antonio, Bernardino and Agamemnon.
The family boasted an ancient mercantile tradition in the wool trade and had long been involved in the city's administrative life. Especially well-known is Balino, Beltramo's brother, an already wealthy man who became even richer thanks to the assignments he received from Filippo Maria Visconti.
Nothing is known about Scotus's life spent in his home town: in particular, some of the information provided by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians according to whom he was a man of letters (Frisi, 1794, I, p. 251) and in Monza he had two children, Angioletta and Gerolamo, before remarrying in Venice with Gioseffa Manfredini (Mezzotti, 1839, pp. 41-43) are not documented. Most likely, during his years in Monza he worked in the family business, from which he learned the trade of merchant and inherited the entrepreneurial mentality that characterized his later years.
Around 1475, at the age of about 35, he moved to Venice and began working as a printer. Little is known about his apprenticeship: it seems that he initially took part in the firm Compagnia di Venezia of Nicolas Jenson and Johannes de Colonia; it is certain that in his house in the confinement of S. Samuele in 1479 a printing workshop was active, since in that year the first edition that bears his name was published ( General index of incunabula , IGI , n. 2118). From 1479 to 1488, twenty-nine editions were released from Scoto's printing shop. Various craftsmen worked in his shop; in 1481 the director of the printing shop was Battista de' Dentis of Bellano sul Lario, a Lombard of some fame in the field of printing.
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J Ruaidri Douglas
From 1482 until 1488, his activity as a printer was accompanied by that of a publisher, for which Scoto made use of the presses of other printers, especially those of Boneto Locatello from Bergamo and also of Bartolomeo Zani and Johann Hamman. The first editions commissioned by him were the Legenda aurea by Jacopo da Varazze ( IGI , no. 5015) and the Mammotrectus super Bibliam by the friar Marchesino da Reggio (no. 6150), published in 1482 by Andrea Paltasichi. Both activities slowed down in 1484, with only two editions printed (nos. 361, 2441), until the silence of 1485, when both the presses and the editorial commissions stopped. In 1486, the editorial activity resumed with an edition of s. Augustine, De civitate Dei (no. 974) printed by Locatello; from this moment a close partnership began between the two, since Locatello printed most of the works financed by Scotus. In the two-year period 1487-88 the editorial production intensified compared to the typographical one: Scotus printed one edition in 1487 (no. 10360) and one in 1488 (no. 6823); as a publisher he financed five in 1487 (nos. 472, 1065, 2413, 5940, 5943) and five the following year (nos. 2261, 3074, 5058, 5272, 9132).
From 1489 until 1498, the year of his death, he was only an editor, thus completing the evolution of the previous decade and accentuating the entrepreneurial dimension of his work. In total he commissioned 142 editions, with peaks in the years 1493 (eighteen), 1497 (eighteen) and 1498 (nineteen). Only one of these was printed outside Venice: in 1494 in Pavia the printer Antonio Carcano printed at Scoto's expense a medical manual by Cristoforo Barzizza, followed by the Liber nonus Almansoris by the Persian physician Al-Razi (b. 1406).
Scotus was attentive to the textual quality of his editions, as demonstrated by his collaboration with the Augustinian monk Giovanni Battista Aloisi, who in 1497 edited for him a commentary on Aristotle by Alberto di Sassonia (no. 253) and one by Paolo Veneto in 1498 (no. 826-A). In the years in which he was mainly an editor, he also devoted himself to trade, establishing relationships with some booksellers. Between 1484 and 1488 he did business with the Venetian Francesco de' Madi; from 1494, to facilitate the distribution of scholastic works at the University of Pavia, he allowed the Brescian Maurizio Moretti to manage his own shop in the city. The sales radius of his books reached as far as Valencia, Spain, where he supplied numerous booksellers, with whom, however, he had problems with payment, to the point that on 14 August 1492 the Venetian government sent a letter to the governor of Valencia asking him to favor an agent of Ottaviano sent to Spain to collect the debts owed.
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J Ruaidri Douglas
In November of the same year he was summoned to court by Raffaele Regio for having printed without authorization his commentary on Quintilian (no. 8317), a work for which Regio had requested the privilege of printing on 25 September 1492, later confirmed on 28 November . However, Scotus' edition remained the only one available in the city for a long time.
Among the merits of his editions are the decorated and figured capital letters and the illustrations, for which Scotus occupies a position of precursor: among the first illustrated books in Italy are some of his missals; the illustrated Bible printed for him by Locatello in 1489 is instead the first in Italy of this type (no. 1688). He experimented with smaller formats than those typical of the time ( folio and quarto), to make the product cheaper and easier to handle, anticipating a phenomenon that would become generalized over time: six editions are in octavo, one in doubloon and one in sixteenth . He was also one of the first to dedicate himself to the printing of music: the Missale Romanum of 1481 (no. 6601) is the first work in Italy and the second in Europe to use the double print run system, with which the staff was printed first, then the notes. The typographic mark consists of a rectangle in which a tripartite circle is impressed which houses the initials «O[ctavianus] S[cotus] M[odoetiensis]» and is surmounted by a cross with two arms of different lengths.
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J Ruaidri Douglas
Scotus died in Venice on December 24, 1498 and was buried in the church of S. Francesco della Vigna. The tombstone bears the Scotus family coat of arms, the printer's brand, and the words "mercator librorum impressorum", the only one of the activities by which Scotus wanted to be remembered.
The heirs were his brother Bernardino with two of his sons, Paolo and Ottaviano (two others answered to the names of Ludovico and Girolamo) and two nephews: Amedeo di Brandino and Giovanni Battista di Antonio. Five editions dated 22 December 1498 ( Incunabula short-title catalogue , ISTC , nn. ia00953000, ib00451000, it00165000, it00244000; IGI , n. 827 B) and one dated 31 December ( ISTC , n. it00257000) came out with the name of Octavian the Elder, under which the heirs continued to publish also for the following year; The subscription «Heredes Octaviani Scoti» first appeared in Guy de Chauliac's Chirurgia parva on 27 January 1500 (n. ig00564000).
In 1494 Bernardino had made a journey to the holy places together with Pietro Casola and Francesco Trivulzio (the report drawn up by Casola is preserved in the autograph Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana, 141; published Viaggio a Gerusalemme , edited by G. Porro Lambertenghi, Milan 1855). He had already worked as a publisher in Pavia, using the printing house of Giovanni Andrea Bosco to print the Tabula consiliorum secundum ordinam ac viam d. Avicenae ordered by the doctor Giovanni Matteo Ferrari (4 May 1501). He died at the age of ninety in Milan in 1537.
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J Ruaidri Douglas
Giovanni Battista was a book dealer. He died in 1529 in his cousin Amedeo's house in the S. Felice district after having made a will on March 5, naming his other cousin Ottaviano di Bernardino as executor and universal heir. Paolo appears with the qualification of bookseller in a deed dated October 23, 1534, from which it can be deduced that he was already dead by that date. Ottaviano earned a doctorate in philosophy and medicine. He probably also dedicated himself to the typographic-publishing activity within the family business, but it is difficult to circumscribe his activity due to the confusion with Amedeo's son of the same name.
The management of the company Eredi di Ottaviano Scoto was taken over by Amedeo . On 20 November 1500 he obtained a printing privilege for the publication of some works, including the Contines Rhasis (ie the work of the doctor, philosopher and alchemist Al-Razi) and the Problems of Aristotle. As a result of the privilege, the Lords of the Night ordered Bernardino Benali not to print the work of Al-Razi, which was published by the Scoto family in the Locatello press on 1 May 1506. The Problemata of Aristotle in Latin were published on 30 July 1501. Under the management of Amedeo until 1510 the activity was editorial, from 1513 also typographical and from that year other partners were involved in the company.
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J Ruaidri Douglas
Under the title Heirs of Octavian Scotus, approximately 120 editions were published up to 1539 and between 1513 and 1534 over 180 in partnership with other printers or publishers, whose names, however, do not usually appear in the subscriptions, where the formula «Impensa heredum Octaviani Scoti ac sociorum» is present, while the printers are indicated, which indicates that the initiative and editorial management was by the Scotus and the partners were involved at a financial level. During the years of his direction, Amedeo continued the founder's direction, printing works of theology, philosophy, medicine, intended for a safe and qualified market. With a deed dated 25 June 1507 he entered into a printing company with the brothers Battista and Silvestro Torti, Lucantonio Giunti, Giorgio Arrivabene and Antonio Moretto. The company was to print mainly legal works in folio with the mark «Per Baptistam de Tortis»; lasted five years and used four presses, apparently supplied two by the Tortis and two by Arrivabene. Probably because they had provided the equipment, the company shares were 1/4 for each of the Tortis and Arrivabene and 1/4 for Giunta, Scoto and Moretto together. In 1514 Amedeo and the bookseller Niccolò di Raffaele entered into a partnership with Ottaviano Petrucci of Fossombrone to help him in the printing of musical works, for which Petrucci had obtained a twenty-year privilege, extended on 26 June 1514 for another five years. The enterprise required large capital and adequate technical means, which Petrucci did not possess, and were provided by Amedeo and Niccolò di Raffaele, whose names, however, did not appear in the subscriptions. In 1519 Amedeo claimed credits of 48 gold ducats from Vincenzo di Feliciano from Foligno and Vincenzo di Teodoro Da Meno from Monza for various goods that the debtors had purchased from him. On 14 June 1522 he bought land and houses in Cappelletta near Noale.
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J Ruaidri Douglas
Amedeo died in Venice in 1535.
Ottaviano di Bernardino continued his activity with his brother Girolamo, Francesco di Paolo and the two sons that Amedeo had had with Elisabetta Storla, Brandino and Ottaviano. Until 1538 Ottaviano di Bernardino initially printed on his own, mainly musical works and works on Aristotelian philosophy. Then his brother Girolamo joined in. As a publisher he used the printing house of Nicolini da Sabbio. He expanded his activity to Rome, where in 1536 he owned a shop to which he sent typographic characters. He continued to reside in Venice, but also owned real estate in Milan and Monza. Amedeo's sons, Brandino and Ottaviano, signed 22 known editions between 1539 and 1544, sometimes also as printers, but more frequently as publishers. Ottaviano had a production on his own between 1533 and 1555, with 95 titles; in the colophons aimed at qualifying themselves by indicating their paternity with formulas such as «apud Octavianum Scotum d. Amadei f.» or «per Octavianum Scotum quondam d. Amedei." With the title Heirs of Ottaviano Scoto, the Scotos participated in the Company of the Crown, founded on 18 April 1539 and renewed on 10 November 1550, for the printing of legal texts, together with the heirs of Lucantonio Giunti, the heirs of Gabriele Giolito and Federico Torresano. The members' brands surround the emblem of the Crown on the title pages. They published using other printers in 1543-57 and in 1563. Paolo's son, Francesco, had his own workshop, in the confines of S. Salvatore, under the emblem of the Griffin. He continued to produce philosophical works according to the family tradition, but since there are no prints with his name, it must be concluded that he worked in partnership with others and for contractual reasons he renounced having him appear in the subscriptions.
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