3. The Text With Commentary

fol. A4v-A5r

Editions of the Bible that print the text in several languages for comparison are useful tools for readers—but they present design challenges for printers. Aldus Manutius attempted polyglot printing, without success. This Genoa Psalter was long considered the first successful example of multilingual printing, but Erasmus’s edition of Jerome, published by Amerbach just three months before the Genoa Psalter, should be given pride of place as the first polyglot. The Genoa Psalter shown here, however, deserves special recognition for the scope and artfulness of its effort to produce the text in a greater variety of biblical languages and with diverse alphabets. The Psalms are printed in eight columns: Hebrew; Vulgate translation of the Hebrew; Vulgate translation of Greek; the Greek Septuagint; Arabic (it is the second example of Arabic printing); Aramaic; Latin translation of the Aramaic; and Latin notes in the eighth column and in the margin.

The book has great physical beauty with its parallel columns and exotic scripts, its red and black printing, and its intricate woodcut borders. Equally interesting is the commentary, which not only presents traditional information, such as typological references to the life of Christ, but also allows the modern reader glimpses of the confidence and enthusiasm of the age of discovery. In a note on Psalm 19:14, for example, the voyage of Christopher Columbus (also from Genoa) is recounted, prompted by the phrase "and their words shall go to the ends of the earth" (C7^r–D1^r). Columbus, after all, had been there. Another example is the correction of "unicorn" in the Vulgate with a scientific description of a rhinoceros (E3^r).

The editor, Agostino Giustiniani (1470–1536), bishop of Nebbio, remarks in the preface that Porro planned to publish the entire Bible in this form. Alas, it never appeared.