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Published on November 4, by Anne Doridou-Heim

A Venetian incunabulum

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T his copy of a masterpiece of Venetian Renaissance typography is about to find a new home in a library.
*De Evangelica praeparatione* is a seminal literary work written in Greek by Eusebius of Caesarea, one of the Church Fathers, and as such it has exerted a profound influence on the Christian faith. In this treatise, the theologian aims to prove the superiority of Christianity over pagan religions. Since the use of Ancient Greek had fallen into disuse even in monasteries, and in order to make the work accessible to as many people as possible, in the mid-15th-century, Pope Nicholas V asked the Byzantine humanist George of Trebizond (1396–1472), who had taken refuge in Rome, to translate the work into Latin. It was this text that was printed on the presses of the Venetian Nicolas Jenson (c. 1420–c. 1480), once again with the aim of making it accessible to the general public. This was his first

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