chapter 8 The Rise of the Stampatore Camerale: Printers and Power in Early Sixteenth-Century Rome Paolo Sachet More than any other early modern power, the sixteenth-century Catholic Church is generally identified with a strict, if not reactionary policy towards printing. As part of its struggle against the Reformation, the papacy developed a vast and centralised system of ecclesiastical censorship. While it failed to be as universal as originally envisaged, it had serious ramifications on the culture of Catholic countries, beginning with Italy. An ever-growing number of studies is devoted to this subject, benefiting from the opening of the archive of the Roman Inquisition in 1998 and from the ground-breaking critical edition of the Indexes of Forbidden Books.1 By contrast, almost all of the Church’s attempts to harness printing as a means of communication in support of its own cause have been largely overlooked. This observation is especially true for the very heart of Catholicism, the city of Rome. In the capital of the Papal States, how- ever, cardinals and popes did employ local publishers to print an array of scholarly books to challenge Protestantism mostly in the patristic and histo- riographical fields. As I have illustrated elsewhere, these innovative attempts took place long before the establishment of the Typographia Vaticana in 1587.2 1 To cite only the most relevant contributions, see Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo: la cen­ sura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura (1471–1605) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997), as well as her Proibito capire: la Chiesa e il volgare nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005); Vittorio Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice: la censura ecclesiastica dal Rinascimento alla Controriforma (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2006); Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2000); Ugo Rozzo, La lette­ ratura italiana negli Indici del Cinquecento (Udine: Forum, 2005). For the broader picture, see María José Vega, Julian Weiss and Cesc Esteve (eds.), Reading and Censorship in Early Modern Europe (Conference Proceeding, Barcelona, 11–13 December 2007) (Bellaterra: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2010); Sandro Landi, Stampa, censura e opinione pubblica in età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011); and Hubert Wolf, Index: der Vatikan und die verbotenen Bücher (Munich: Beck, 2006). I wish to express my gratitude to Claudia Daniotti, Stephen Parkin and the editors of this volumes for their insightful suggestions and to David Speranzi for his help in tracing two rare bulls in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. 2 See Paolo Sachet, ‘A Humanist Printer Moves from Venice to Rome: The Curial Patronage of Paolo Manuzio’, in Cristina Dondi etc. (eds.), La stampa romana nella Città dei Papi e in Europa (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2016), pp. 217–233; Paolo Sachet, ‘La © Paolo Sachet, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004448896_010 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.Paolo Sachet - 9789004448896 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:38:17PM via free access 182 Sachet This paper aims to shed light on another little-investigated aspect of the use of movable type by the Roman Curia in the late Renaissance, by focus- sing on the publication of ephemera rather than erudite books. Revisiting a well-established historiographical topos, it will examine the early days of the Apostolic Chamber’s printer (stampatore camerale), a new figure entrusted with disseminating official documentation. According to conventional wis- dom, a stream of Apostolic printers starting with the Silbers in the 1510s and continuing with Francesco Calvo and the Blado family have been identified. This assumption, based on no evidence and dated literature, has been uncrit- ically reverberated by distinguished scholars of Roman Renaissance printing, including Francesco Barberi and Emerenziana Vaccaro.3 A closer look at sources provides a very different picture. On the one hand, I will question the accepted reconstruction of the events by showing the risks in building a firm chronology upon uncertain dates, such as those related to official broadsheets. On the other, I will analyse some key published and unpublished archival acts and draw attention, for the first time, on printers’ networks and the internal politics of the papal Curia. Such wide-ranging docu- mentation will show how the innovative office of stampatore camerale resulted from a considerably slower process than previously thought, shedding light on the intermediary role of high offices in the relation between printers and rul- ers. Dynamics were marked by sheer competition and political patronage, in which the heads of the Apostolic Chancery and Chamber played a crucial part. In fact, the formalisation of the stampatore camerale took place as late as the spring of 1550, when Julius III eventually acknowledged Blado’s services and assigned the publication of official material by means of a privilege, granted only to him. In doing so, the pope paved the way to the integration of the stam­ patore camerale into the papal administration, turning printing into an affair of state. Chiesa davanti ai Padri: Erasmo, gli umanisti riformati e la patristica cattolica romana tra Rinascimento e Controriforma’, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 54:2 (2018), pp. 389– 419; and my book Publishing for the Popes: The Roman Curia and the Use of Printing (1527–1555) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020), where I discuss in details the earlier, scattered bibliographi- cal studies on the topic and anticipate part of this contribution. 3 Emerenziana Vaccaro, ‘Documenti e precisazioni su Antonio Blado ed eredi’, Bollettino dell’Istituto di patologia del libro, 9 (1950), pp. 48–85, at pp. 51, 57. Francesco Barberi, ‘Blado, Antonio’, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (DBI), X, 1968, pp. 753–757, at p. 753; his ‘Calvo, Francesco Giulio’, DBI, XVII, 1974, pp. 38–41, at p. 39; and his essays collected and repub- lished in Tipografi romani del Cinquecento: Guillery, Ginnasio Mediceo, Calvo, Dorico, Cartolari (Florence: Olschki, 1983), pp. 19–20 and, less assertively, at p. 84. Paolo Sachet - 9789004448896 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:38:17PM via free access RISE OF THE STAMPATORE CAMERALE: PRINTERS & POWER IN ROME 183 Early Printers, ‘Red Tape’ and the Papacy With the arrival of Sweynheym and Pannartz and other German typogra- phers, Rome and its surroundings were the cradle of Italian printing in the 1460s and 70s.4 However, support for and interaction with this new mode of communication came mainly from a few high-ranking curial prelates, such as the bishops Giovanni Andrea Bussi and Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo and the Cardinals Bessarion, Cusa, Torquemada and Todeschini Piccolomini, rather than from the papacy as an institution.5 Nor should the occasional granting of privileges to protect some works from piracy be seen as a well-thought politi- cal, cultural or religious policy on the part of the Curia; as was the case within other privilege-granting bodies across early modern Europe, the whole pro- cess usually started with a plea from the individual printer or the author of a specific work, not from the upper ranks.6 At the end of the fifteenth century and beginning of the sixteenth, papal interest in printing generally leaned towards regulation rather than exploitation, as the threatening implications of an almost unlimited and unmediated access to knowledge started to become 4 For a general overview of the development of priting in Rome, see Francesco Barberi, ‘Librai e stampatori nella Roma dei Papi’, in Francesco Barberi, Per una storia del libro: profili, note, ricerche (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), pp. 197–235, at pp. 197–211 and Gian Ludovico Masetti Zannini, Stampatori e librai a Roma nella seconda metà del Cinquecento. Documenti inediti (Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1980). For the years before 1527, see in particular Concetta Bianca etc. (eds.), Scrittura, biblioteche e stampa a Roma nel Quattrocento: aspetti e problemi: atti del seminario, 1–2 giugno 1979 (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di paleografia, diplomatica e archivistica, 1980); Massimo Miglio (ed.), Scrittura, biblioteche e stampa a Roma nel Quattrocento: atti del II semi­ nario, 6–8 maggio 1982 (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di paleografia, diplomatica e archivis- tica, 1983) and Massimo Miglio, Saggi di stampa: tipografi e cultura a Roma nel Quattrocento, ed. by Anna Modigliani (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2002); Paola Farenga (ed.), Editori e edizioni a Roma nel Rinascimento (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2005); Cristina Dondi etc. (eds.), La stampa romana. 5 See the recent overview provided by Concetta Bianca, ‘Le strade della “sancta ars”: la stampa e la curia a Roma nel XV secolo’, in Dondi et al. (eds.), La stampa romana, pp. 1–8. 6 See Maria Grazia Blasio, “Cum gratia et privilegio”: programmi editoriali e politica pontificia Roma (1487–1527) (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1988); and for a broader perspective, based on different sources, see Jane C. Ginsburg, ‘Proto-Property in Literary and Artistic Works: Sixteenth-Century Papal Printing Privileges’, The Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, 36 (2013), pp. 345–458. On privileges elsewhere in Europe, see Edwige Keller-Rahbé, Henriette Pommier and Daniel Régnier-Roux (eds.), Privilèges de librairie en France et en Europe – XVIe– XVIIe siècles (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017), including the Venetian case analysed by Angela Nuovo, ‘Naissance