Aldus Manutius (family name Mannucci or Manuzio), educated in Rome and Ferrara, founds the Aldine Press, a pioneering family printing firm.

It becomes the first press to produce printed editions of many of the Greek and Latin classics and the first to use italic type, a font created to accommodate the requirements for pocket-size books, another of the Aldine Press’s significant innovations.

The invading French troops at the start of the Second Italian War in 1499 had used Leonardo’s life-size clay model for the Gran Cavallo for target practice.

With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, flee Milan for Venice, where he is employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.

The Aldine Press publishes, in 1499, Francesco Colonna's illustrated book, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (“The Strife of Love in a Dream”), a masterpiece of the twenty-five-year old art form.

In an elegant page layout, with refined woodcut illustrations in an Early Renaissance style, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili presents a mysterious arcane allegory in which Poliphilo pursues his love Polia through a dreamlike landscape, and is, seemingly, at last reconciled with her by the Fountain of Venus.

Colonna lived in Venice, and preached at St. Mark's Cathedral.

Besides Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, he definitely wrote an Italian epic poem called Delfili Somnium, the "Dream of Delfilo”, which goes unpublished in his lifetime and will not be published until 1959.

Colonna spends part of his life in the monastery of San Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, but the monastery is apparently not of the strictest observance and Colonna is granted leave to live outside its walls.

Giovanni Bellini, famous for his portraiture, helps make this art form especially popular in Venice, perhaps inaugurating what is to be a tradition of painting formal portraits of its rulers dressed in state robes.

His 1501 portrait of Leonardo Loredan, Doge of Venice from 1501 to 1521, is painted in the style of the sculpted portrait busts popular at the time and often inspired by Roman sculpture.

Bellini portrays the doge in his ceremonial garments.

Shown here wearing his robes of state for this formal portrait, the hat and ornate buttons are part of the official wardrobe.

The sitter can be identified as Doge Loredan by comparing his features with portrait medals of him.

The shape of the hat comes from the hood of a doublet; called a 'corno', it is worn over a linen cap.

Alsus Manutius has designed a celebrated roman typeface and is, in 1501, the first to introduce an italic typeface, which he bases on Italian cursive hand.

Venetian publisher Ottaviano Petrucci, born in Fossombrone (Pesaro), and probably educated at Urbino, had gone to Venice around 1490 to learn the art of printing, and in 1498 he had petitioned the Doge for the exclusive right to print music for the next twenty years.

The right was very probably granted, since no examples of printed music from other Venetian printers are known before 1520.

In 1501, Petrucci publishes his first collection, ninety-six chansons in his “Odhecaton,” the first book of polyphonic music to be printed.

The contents show the chanson changing from a treble-dominated piece to one with equality of voices in imitative counterpoint, increasing from three voices to four.

Petrucci also prints more than fifty volumes of secular and sacred vocal music as well as a few volumes of music for the lute.

Venice, by the time Aldus Manutius settled here in 1490, was not only a major printing center but it also had a large library of Greek manuscripts from Constantinople and a population of Greeks who could assist with their translation.

He soon afterward printed editions of Hero and Leander by Musaeus Grammaticus, the Galeomyomachia, and the Greek Psalter.

He calls these "Precursors of the Greek Library."

He began gathering Greek scholars and compositors around him, employing as many as thirty Greeks in his print shop and speaking Greek at home.

Instructions to typesetters and binders are given in Greek.

The prefaces to his editions are written in Greek.

Greeks from Crete collate manuscripts, read proofs, and give samples of calligraphy for casts of Greek type.

Manutius had issued the first volume of his edition of Aristotle in 1495; four more volumes completed the work in 1497–1498.

Nine comedies of Aristophanes appeared in 1498.

Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus follow in 1502.

In addition to editing Greek classics from manuscripts, Manutius reprints editions of classics that had originally been published in Florence, Rome, and Milan, at times correcting and improving the texts.

His Aldine Press becomes noted for its anchor and dolphin signature, or colophon, which first appears in 1502.

In order to promote Greek studies, Manutius founds an academy of Hellenists in 1502 called the "New Academy."

Its rules are written in Greek, its members are obliged to speak Greek, their names are Hellenized, and their official titles are Greek.

Members of the "New Academy" include Desiderius Erasmus and the Englishman Thomas Linacre.

It is possible that during this period, in his printing works, Hieromonk Makarije was educated, who will later found the Obod printing works of Cetinje and print the first books in Serbian and Romanian.

Forty-two-year-old physician and philosopher Judah Abravanel, with his father Isaac a resident of Naples and now Venice during the decade since the expulsion of Jews from Spain, writes Dialoghi d'Amore (“Dialogues of Love”) by 1502.

Taking, as his central theme, love as the major creative force in the universe, he professes that love of God is the ultimate goal of the human soul.

A circle of love therefore leads from God's creation in love to man's return to God through love.

Abravanel is also a minor poet.