Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/25

 THE SPREAD OF THE ART OF PRINTING 13 energies to the perfecting of this new art. Already, in 1471, Conrad Schweinheim began printing atlases from metal plates. In the year 1482 Erhard Eatdolt made the first attempt to multiply mathematical and architectural drawings by means of the printing-press. Erhard Oeglin inaugurated the printing of musical notes with movable types. 1 While Germany was thus alive with new and happy creative industry, German printers were spreading the new art as far as Subiaco and Eome, Sienna, Venice, Foligno, Perugia, Modena, Urbino, Ascoli, Naples, Messina, and Palermo. Up to the end of the fifteenth century, Eome alone counted no fewer than one hundred and ninety presses and twenty-three German printers ; while throughout Italy generally there were over a hundred German printing establishments. It is to a German printer of Foligno, Johann Neumeister, from Mentz, that Italy owes the first edition of Dante's ' Divine Comedy,' published in the year 1472 ; and also to a German the first edition with a commentary which appeared in the year 1481. 2 Thanks to German printers, the spread of typography was almost as rapid in France and Spain as in Italy. In Spain up to the year 1500 there were over thirty German master-printers, who in Valencia, Saragossa, Seville, Barcelona, Tolosa, Salamanca, Burgos, and other cities, were, according to Lopez de Vega, 'the armourers of civilisation.' Christopher Columbus belonged for a time to the printing trade. In Granada, only two years 1 Independent discovery of that of Ottaviano dei Petricci. See Ambros, pp. 190-199 of Oeglin. See Herberger, pp. 41 42. a See V. Reumont, ii. 48 ; Faulmann, p. 179. German writers and illustrators of books also were settled in Italy in great numbers from the middle of the fifteenth century.