SPIRA, GIOVANNI and VINDELINO da (JOHANN und WINDELIN von SPEYER). - The names of two German printer brothers, who emigrated to Venice and worked there from 1469 to 1477.
GIOVANNI was Venice’s first printer, with the two editions of Cicero’s Epistolae familiares and Pliny’s Naturalis historiae, printed in 1469, for which he obtained a privilege lasting five years. He also began printing St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei, which he left unfinished owing to his death, occurring toward the end of that same year.
He was succeeded by his brother VINDELINO who, in 1470, completed the aforesaid edition, beginning a typographical activity that lasted until 1477. He printed numerous works, including the first editions of certain Latin classics: Tacitus, Sallust, Priscian (1470), Plautus, Tibullus (1472); those of Petrarca’s Rime (1470), Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum (1472), the very well-known vernacular Bible of Niccolò Mallermi in 2 vols. (1471), and a valuable edition of Dante’s Commedia with the commentary formerly attributed to Benvenuto da Imola, but actually by Jacopo della Lana. Documents prove that, after 1473, V. COLONNA.