NERSES IV.

Extremely rare editio princeps of Yisus Ordi or 'Jesus the Son', a spiritual poem containing an abbreviated biblical narrative and with verse prayers to Christ by the twelfth-century Armenian saint Nerses Shnorkhali or 'the Graceful', attractively printed and beautifully ornamented with initials formed of birds, vines and architectural ornaments, in a lovely contemporary Armenian binding.

In the colophon, the editor Yohannes Ankyurats’i, also known as Giovanni Molino (c.1592-1643), describes earlier failed attempts at printing the work, and how the Armenian Catholicos had finally requested his expertise. Molino, born in Ankara, was from the Armenian community of the Ottoman Empire. Sent to Rome as a child, as was common for talented Armenian and other non-Muslim Ottoman boys at the time, he was educated at the Academy of Neophytes, a school for Jewish and Muslim converts. He evidently returned to his native Ankara, since he arrived in Venice from there in 1626, where he began work as an interpreter. Molino was heavily involved in the project to print an Armenian Bible in Rome on behalf of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, and travelled there in order to study printing and advance this ultimately fruitless work: ‘I put myself … to learn the art of printing … I went with hope and desire to the city of Rome, where for four years, with hard work, pain and torment … that it is not possible to explain in writing and [only] my Creator knows I procured punches and matrices, ornaments and floral initials, with sizeable hardship' (in Elżbieta Święcicka, ed., Dictionary of Italian-Turkish (1641) by Giovanni Molino (Leiden: 2020), p. 52).

Molino returned to Venice in October 1641, having completed work on the Armenian Missal published for the Sacra Congregatio in the following year, taking with him a set of Armenian type. In 1642 he was able to produce an Armenian Psalter and the Yisus Ordi, which is acknowledged to be of a high standard (Soviet Armenian Encyclopedia).

Despondent after further rejections of his proposed printing projects, in 1643 he endeavoured to return to Constantinople and his family, but died in Milan. The colophon to this work is essentially his farewell to Italy and his printing labours, thanking his friends and benefactors in Venice, Giuseppe Aromatari and Angelos Beliselo, who had paid for the project. He left behind his Armenian types, which were used in the 1660 edition of Yisus Ordi by Battista Bovis in 1660, in which Bovis acknowledged that Molino had enabled the printing of many important Armenian books in Venice (ibid., p. 53).