Bernardo Cennini (; 1414/5 – c. 1498) was an Italian

goldsmith A goldsmith is a Metalworking, metalworker who specializes in working with gold and other precious metals. Modern goldsmiths mainly specialize in jewelry-making but historically, they have also made cutlery, silverware, platter (dishware), plat ...

sculptor Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...

and early printer of

Florence Florence ( ; ) is the capital city of the Italy, Italian region of Tuscany. It is also the most populated city in Tuscany, with 362,353 inhabitants, and 989,460 in Metropolitan City of Florence, its metropolitan province as of 2025. Florence ...

. As a sculptor he was among the assistants to

Lorenzo Ghiberti Lorenzo Ghiberti (, , ; 1378 – 1 December 1455), born Lorenzo di Bartolo, was an Italian Renaissance sculptor from Florence, a key figure in the Early Renaissance, best known as the creator of two sets of bronze doors of the Florence Baptister ...

in the long project producing the second pair of doors—the ''Doors of Paradise''—for the Battistero di San Giovanni. He produced the first book printed at Florence. The painter and author of a famous book on the crafts,

Cennino d'Andrea Cennini Cennino d'Andrea Cennini (; – before 1427) was an Italian painter influenced by Giotto. He was a student of Agnolo Gaddi in Florence. Gaddi trained under his father, called Taddeo Gaddi, who trained with Giotto. He is remembered mainly f ...

, was a member of the same Florentine family.

Works of sculpture and goldsmith

Representing his output as a sculptor-goldsmith is a cache of his sculptures in silver that are preserved in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence. They include a high relief combining two New Testament episodes, ''The Announcement to Zachariah and the Visitation'', which were Cennini's contribution to the silver altar of S. Giovanni, (formerly in the Baptistery), a project that was worked on by several generations of sculptors; the silver crosses for it are also by Cennini, and the ''

corpus Corpus (plural ''corpora'') is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of ...

'' on the crucifix is attributed to him as well.

Printer from moveable type

Hearing of the new process of printing by

moveable type Movable type (US English; moveable type in British English) is the system and technology of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual alphanumeric characters or punctuation ...

, and seeing some printed books, Cennini puzzled out the procedure for himself, cast his own

type font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts "Roman" (or "regular" ...

and, working with his sons Pietro, a humanist poet and manuscript illuminator, and Domenico, produced the first of the

incunabula An incunable or incunabulum (: incunables or incunabula, respectively) is a book, pamphlet, or broadside (printing), broadside that was printed in the earliest stages of printing in Europe, up to the year 1500. The specific date is essentiall ...

printed at Florence, starting in 1471. The book was the commentary of

Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (; 15 October 70 BC21 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Rome, ancient Roman poet of the Augustan literature (ancient Rome), Augustan period. He composed three of the most fa ...

, ''In Tria Virgilii Opera Expositio'' by the late fourth-century grammarian

Maurus Servius Honoratus Servius, distinguished as Servius the Grammarian ( or ), was a late fourth-century and early fifth-century grammarian. He earned a contemporary reputation as the most learned man of his generation in Italy; he authored a set of commentaries o ...

. In the first page of the book, Cennini commemorates his own invention, and at the conclusion is the triumphant Florentine boast: "Florentinis ingeniis nil ardui est," and the date 9 October 1471.The first modern discussion was by G. Ottino in 1871: ''Di Bernardo Cennini e dell'arte della stampa in Firenze nei primi cento anni dall'invenzione di essa: sommario storico con documenti inediti.'' Firenze: The classical content was characteristic of the Florentine incunabula: "Early Florentine printing, in particular, shows a large output of classical texts and grammars and other humanistic works as opposed to the religious works that most other Italian cities of the time were producing." ("Florentine Printing of the Fifteenth Century" 2003).

Visible remains of the Cennini family

The partly thirteenth-century Palazzo Cennini in ''via Faenza'', the family's power center, is now largely rebuilt as a hotel. Via Faenza remained for a long period the locus for Florence's printers' shops. Bernardo Cennini is buried in the south transept of the basilica of San Lorenzo.

Notes

External links

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "Florentine Printing of the Fifteenth Century: Florence: 'Athens on the Arno'"
Exhibition of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, May–June 2003 {{DEFAULTSORT:Cennini, Bernardo Italian sculptors Italian male sculptors Italian goldsmiths Sculptors from Tuscany Printers of incunabula 1410s births 1490s deaths

Works of sculpture and goldsmith

Printer from moveable type

Visible remains of the Cennini family

Notes

Further reading

External links