As a patron of literature Lorenzo was no less active. He founded and developed a wonderful library in which the treasures of antiquity were collected, in the original or in copies, without regard to expense, from all parts of Europe. The art of book-making was carried to its highest development in this period. The manuscripts of the time are marvels of beauty. The ornamentation is beautiful, and the letters themselves are printed with a degree of regularity closely rivalling the uniformity of a printed page. And then not long after the middle of the century, just when this art of the scribe was at its height, the printing-press was introduced from Germany, and an easy mechanical means was at hand by which the most perfect technique could be attained. True, the connoisseur did not at first recognise the printed book as a possible rival of the old hand-made work. For a long time the collector continued to employ the hand workman, and the dilettante looked upon the printed book with much the same scornful glance which the modern collector of paintings bestows upon a chromo or lithograph. The first printing-press was set up, according to Von Reumont, at Subiaco in a Benedictine monastery in 1465. Some fifteen years later Vespasiano da Bisticci, writing about the library of the duke of Urbino, could proudly state that “All the volumes are of the most faultless beauty, written by hand, with elegant miniatures, and all on parchment. There are no printed books among them; the duke would have been ashamed to have them.”[2] Notwithstanding the scornful attitude of the connoisseur, however, the art of printing books made its way rapidly. Hitherto the cost of production had rendered even the most ordinary book a luxury not to be possessed by any but the relatively wealthy. Naturally enough, an eager band of book lovers hailed the advent of the new method, despite its supposed artistic shortcomings; and before the end of the century there were printing-presses in all the important centres of Italy, and numberless classics, beginning with Virgil, had been given a vastly wider currency than had ever previously been possible. It is needless here to dwell upon the remoter influences of this rapid diffusion of classical treasures; but nowhere was the influence more important than in Italy.