The commencement of the sixteenth century found the French army in Italy, under the command of Louis XII. Marching from glory to glory, the French successively saw Pisa, Capua, and Naples, and that which has since been called the Renaissance displayed itself little by little to the conquerors. At Venice was living Aldus Pius Manutius, then the greatest printer of the entire world. Aldus was proprietor of the celebrated printing office of Nicholas Jenson, through his father-in-law, Andrea Torresani, of Asola, who acquired it on the death of the French printer; and he had in a few years reached a position in which he was without a rival. We have seen that he composed, at the end of the fifteenth century, the admirable volume _Hypnerotomachia_, the renown of which became universal. Aldus was fifty-two years of age, having been born in 1447; and his learning was increased by daily intercourse with learned Italians, among them the celebrated Pico de la Mirandola. His establishment at Venice in 1488 had for its object the creation of a chair in Greek, in which language he was well instructed from his youth. Occupied with the idea of issuing editions of the principal Greek writers, which up to then remained in manuscript, he engaged himself in the formation of a printing office. He first published the _Herone et Leandro_ of Musæus in 1494, quarto, in a Greek character apparently designed by him, and perhaps engraved by Francisco da Bologna; then the Greek grammar of Constantine Lascaris, with the date of 1494; and the works of Aristotle in five folio volumes. At the time of the Italian wars Aldus was making a revolution in typography, by producing more practical sizes and finer characters, which would permit a volume of the smallest height to contain the matter of a folio printed with large type. Legend says that the new letters were copied exactly from the handwriting of Petrarch, inclining like all cursive writing; the name of _Italic_ was given to this character, which was also called _Aldine_, from its inventor. It was engraved by Francisco da Bologna. Aldus published in octavo size, with this kind of letter, an edition of Virgil in 1501, then a Horace, a Juvenal, a Martial, and a Petrarch in the same year. The following year, 1502, he gave an edition of the _Terze Rime_ of Dante, and for the first time took as his typographical mark an anchor encircled by a dolphin.[A] [Footnote A: Tory in his _Champfleury_ explains thus the mark of Aldus and his device, which was in Greek the "Make haste slowly" of Boileau: "The anchor signifies tardiness, and the dolphin haste, which is to say that in his business he was moderate."] [Illustration: Fig. 42.--The anchor and dolphin, mark of Aldus Manutius, after the original in the _Terze Rime_ of 1502, where it appears for the first time.]