Torrentino, Lorenzo

Abstract

Lorenzo Torrentino was a printer active in mid-sixteenth-century Florence in the service of Duke Cosimo I De’ Medici. Born in Gemert (Netherlands) sometime between 1498 and 1501, he moved from Northern to Southern Europe to pursue his career in the book trade. In the early 1530s, he opened a bookshop in Bologna together with his compatriot Arnoldus Arlenius. In 1547 Torrentino moved to Florence, where he was appointed ducal printer by Cosimo. In return for his service to the Duke of Florence, Torrentino was granted a series of privileges, listed in a detailed contract. He set up a printing house in Via del Garbo in Florence and worked alongside his colleague Arlenius and the polygraph Lodovico Domenichi.

During the period 1547–1563, Torrentino printed some 290 works in the fields of literature, philosophy, religion, law, and art. His most famous publications include Bernardo Segni’s translations of Aristotle’s works, Francesco Robortello’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (1548), academic lectures on Dante and Petrarch by members of the Florentine Academy, Justinian’s Pandects (1553), Francesco Guicciardini’s Historia d’Italia (1561, 1562), and Giorgio Vasari’s Vite (1550). In 1561, Torrentino was requested by Duke of Savoy Emmanuel Philibert to open a printing press in Mondovì to serve the recently founded local university. He died in Florence on 2 February 1563.