JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Out of the many hundreds of portraits printed in the first 25 years of the printed book, none were of actual people who were alive during the printing of the book. There were classic images of great thinkers, mythological beings, saints, martyrs and so on, but no “citizen” humans. Well, that was until Attavanti Paulus’s (d.1499) book on law, Breviarium totius juris canonici, sive Decretorium breviarium, which was printed in Milan in 1479 (in a small folio) and contained a portrait of the author–it was, as A. Hyatt Mayor said in Prints & People, “the first printed portrait of a living private individual”.
