1512/1520, Venice: BERNARDINO STAGNINO DA TRINO
While the Aldine-style Dantes saturated the bourgeois and courtly vernacular
literary market, the more austere and demanding academic circles still required
their Dante with commentary. Bernardino Stagnino sought to satisfy this
sector of the reading public with three editions of the poem (1512, 1520
and 1536) incorporatingLandino's commentary. Stagnino was a publisher primarily
of legal, medical, philosophical works, and only very few literary texts
including, besides his four editions of the Comedy, five editions
of Petrarch's Canzoniere and Trionfi. His experience and contacts
in academic publishing evidently led him to provide a Dante with commentary
to the public he knew best.
Stagnino's one significant innovation was to print the "modern"
Aldine text edited by Pietro Bembo together with the 15th-century Landino
commentary. Inevitably, discrepancies between text and commentary became
even more numerous than they had been in the earlier editions. Yet, the
15th-century vulgate of Dante's text clearly had been superseded by Aldus'
edition of 1502. Beyond this innovation, Stagnino rested content to resurrect
in 1512 the Landino text as corrected by Pietro da Figino during the 1490s
(printed now for the sixth time since 1491). He credits da Figino in his
colophon with exactly the same words of the Benali/Codecà edition
of 1492, and seems not to have otherwise burdened himself by having the
text further revised. Little care seems to have gone into Stagnino's editions
of Dante, excepting the finely executed woodcuts.
Stagnino belonged to the distinguished Giolito de' Ferrari da Trino (Piedmont)
family of printers, a family worthy of being considered alongside the Manutius
family, if not for the correctness of their texts, then certainly for their
long history in Renaissance publishing and printing. Yet Bernardino never
used the family name, preferring the nickname "Stagnino" meaning
"tinsmith." Around 1483 he moved from Trino to Venice and established
a press under the sign of SanBernardino, and remained active there until
his death in 1538.
1512 Edition
1520 Edition
