On his way down, he moves into the double row of shops in the broad central passage to browse the offerings of jewelers and goldsmiths. Toward the bottom he finds a glass vendor displaying beads made in imitation of fine pearls — better than perfect, in gorgeous and improbable colors — and as he looks up from them he’s startled to meet his own gaze in a flat mirror hung on the side wall. It’s a rectangular Del Gallo glass of very high quality, only a few inches long, set in a swirling calcedonio frame; Crivano would swear it to be a window were his own face not watching from the midst of it. He recoils, looks again. His lined skin, his jagged teeth, his jackal eyes. Reminded once more of who and what he is.
He locates Ciotti’s shop near the Campo San Salvator: the small wooden sign that announces it as MINERVA appears and disappears behind billowing red silks displayed by the mercer next door. Ciotti himself stands in the entrance, consulting in easy German with a man whom Crivano takes to be his printer. When Crivano approaches, Ciotti claps him on the shoulder and waves him inside with a broad smile.
A fine-boned boy of about thirteen stands in the front room; he greets Crivano warily. Behind him, over a low partition, two bespectacled proofreaders sit at a table by a widow, bent over a stack of unbound pages. One reads aloud almost inaudibly as the other checks the text. Both move their lips; Crivano can’t tell which one speaks.
He peruses the octavos displayed in the front room as he waits. Fifty or so titles stacked on two narrow tables: histories and biographies and volumes of verse. Most are printed in vulgar tongues, mostly local and Tuscan; a sizable minority are in Latin. The books in the tallest stack — an anthology of missionary correspondence from China and Japan — bear the shop’s own imprint. At the edge of the far table, Crivano finds two books by the Nolan. One is the octavo that Tristão showed him over supper at the White Eagle; the other is a philosophical dialogue written in Tuscan, in the style of Lucian. Its front matter states that it was published here in the city, and this amuses Crivano: it was obviously bound by an English printer, perhaps jealous of the Aldine pedigree. He wonders if this deception was made at the Nolan’s request.
As Ciotti steps through the door, Crivano leans down to feign a close examination of the stacked books. I was just admiring the craftsmanship of this table, he says. It supports both these Jesuit letters and the works of the Nolan without tipping discernibly in the direction of either.
Ciotti laughs. I appreciate your attentiveness, he says. It is not always easy to strike such a balance. Especially in this neighborhood, where the very ground beneath our feet fairly often seems to shift.
Crivano rises to exchange bows and clasp hands with the Sienese. Were it not for the thick-lensed spectacles hanging by a chain around his neck, Ciotti might be mistaken for a prosperous artisan: a baker, perhaps, or a carpenter.
I was surprised to see your own device on the frontispiece of the Jesuit anthology, Crivano says. Your friend Lord Mocenigo must be quite pleased with that undertaking.
The bookseller’s smile cools into a perspicacious smirk. Judge not, my friend, he says. I’m sure you’ll agree that as narrators of voyages, the footsoldiers of the Pope are unsurpassed. My favored customers are always eager to learn of the customs of distant lands. Of course, all of our Republic’s citizens are interested to read news of Spanish activity at the far corners of the earth. And, naturally, those among us who hold with the Curia in matters temporal and spiritual are delighted to find printed accounts of the Society of Jesus available at this emporium. Yet you will note, Dottore Crivano — as I myself note with displeasure each time I open or close my shop’s shutters — that this stack remains quite tall, even as those around it diminish. Would you care to join me in my workroom? Dottore de Nis’s friend should be with us shortly.
Ciotti leads Crivano to a small cluttered office near the back of the shop, then closes the heavy door behind them. Crivano takes a seat beside a table awash in loose charts and unbound proofs; Ciotti sits opposite. The brick walls are laddered with oak bookshelves, each stacked to the base of the next.
I just crossed the stone bridge, Crivano says. Quite impressive.
Ciotti seems pleased and proud, as if he built it himself. Yes, he says. It was completed quite recently.
A single span, Crivano says. Surprising. Not very classical.
Ciotti shoots him a pointed glance. Not very Roman, I believe you mean, he says.
Who was the architect?
Antonio da Ponte. Aptly named.
Crivano shakes his head. I don’t know of him, he says.
He’s an engineer. Formerly head of the Magistracy of Salt. Not until now known as a builder. That grandiloquent fool Marcantonio Barbaro did all within his power to bestow the project on Vincenzo Scamozzi, but the grace of God spared us another of that peacock’s theoretical demonstrations. He’s done enough harm in the Piazza as it is. Signore da Ponte was barely able to persuade the Senate to prevent him from adding a third floor to the Library. Can you imagine? The Lords Morosini showed me some of Scamozzi’s sketches for the Rialto project. Disgusting. Relentlessly geometrical. Absurd ornamentation. I ask you, is a bridge a temple? No. It is a bridge.
Crivano smiles. I met Lord Barbaro just yesterday afternoon, he says, at a banquet in the house of Giacomo Contarini. He seemed eager to convey to us that the glassmakers of Murano have compromised the Republic’s future by concentrating their efforts on the manufacture of mirrors, instead of lenses, as the Florentines do.
Yes. That’s a favorite subject of his.
After dinner, his argument was dissolved by a famed Neapolitan scholar who inadvertently demonstrated that lenses can produce spectacles to match or exceed in frivolity any yet conjured by silvery glass.
Well, I can only pray that our mirror-mad friend Tristão de Nis was present to see that demonstration, Ciotti says, and narrows his eyes appraisingly. If I may ask, he says, what did you make of the Nolan’s performance last night?
Crivano shrugs. If his intent was to demonstrate his prodigious memory, he says, then I suppose he succeeded. If he sought to impart some definitive judgment on the subject at hand, then I confess I came away unenlightened.
Ciotti leans back in his chair; his right hand comes to rest atop a shallow wooden tray on the table beside him. It is a rare rhetorical gift, he says, that permits a man to speak knowledgeably about a topic and still deliver his audience into a state of enriched confusion. At times I think this skill chiefly defines the profession of magus. The Nolan has it, I think you’ll agree. That said, I cannot dismiss him as a charlatan.
From what Tristão had told me of the fellow, Crivano says, I expected either a trickster or a madman. As if these categories must be exclusive.
Ciotti nods; the wooden tray clicks beneath his fingers. It’s divided by slats into square compartments, and each compartment is filled with short slender pieces of dull metal. Their sound recalls the rattle of bone dice in a cup. Tracking Crivano’s gaze, Ciotti scoops a few metal bits from the tray and offers them with a pinched, beaklike hand. Here, he says. Have you seen these before?
Crivano takes them. They slide on the ridges of his creased and calloused palm. Each is cuboid, smaller than a newborn’s finger, cast from a lead alloy. Each has a Greek letter—Λ Η Θ Η—in low relief on one of its smallest ends. Movable type, Crivano says. I saw a printing press once in Bologna. But I’ve never seen loose pieces like these.
We call these sorts, Ciotti says. They’re bound together into a forme, from which a page is printed. That work is not done here. I pay a printer to do it, and he generally casts his own type. He’s discreet and reliable, but he lacks facility in Greek. I recently took a commission to print the Enneads of Plotinus, so for that I had to have my own type made. When I first began, all I ever used was the Latin alphabet. But after the Brucioli had such success with their Hebrew books, such trade became difficult to ignore. Some of my guildsmen — I refrain from naming them — have even secured the privilege to print in Arabic, and now turn profits by selling Muhammadan holy books to the Turks.