Arnold Pannartz and Konrad Sweynheim

Arnold Pannartz and Conrad Sweynheym[1] were two printers of the 15th century, associated with Johannes Gutenberg and the use of his invention, the mechanical movable-type printing press.

The Benedictine Abbey of Saint Scholastica in Subiaco (in present-day Lazio) was the cradle of Italian printing.

The first book printed in Italy that is extant is a Cicero, De oratore, which Pannartz and Sweynheim completed before 30 September 1465.

These four impressions from Subiaco are of particular importance, because they abandon the blackletter of the early German books: Italian readers demanded Roman characters.

In 1467, the two printers left Subiaco and settled at Rome, where the brothers Pietro and Francesco Massimo placed a house at their disposal.

Up to 1472, they had published twenty-eight theological and classical volumes, namely, the Bible, Lactantius, Cyprian, Augustine, Jerome, Leo the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Cicero, Apuleius, Gellius, Virgil, Livy, Strabo, Pliny, Quintilian, Suetonius, Ovid, etc., in editions varying from 275 to 300 copies each – in all, 12,475 volumes.

Sweynheym took up engraving on metal and executed the fine maps for the Cosmography of Ptolemy, the first work of this kind, but died before he had finished his task.