Editing Aldus Manutius (section)

===Illuminated manuscripts and prefaces===
Before the printing press and during the Italian Renaissance, illuminated manuscripts were individually created by a credited artist. When print publishing became popular, woodcuts were used to mass-illuminate works. The woodcuts were often reused in several editions, thereby decreasing their value. These woodcuts soon came to Venice and were viewed as part of the "new humanist manuscript."{{sfn|Beltramini|Gasparotto|2016|pp=91–92}} The woodcut images "included aspects of both continuity and discontinuity that involved the activity of Manutius, who was called upon to wholly explicate the new potential of the printed book and deal with the crisis of the illumination."{{sfn|Beltramini|Gasparotto|2016|p=92}} Many of the Aldine Press's publications contained illumination, but Manutius let patrons decide the illumination details while he worked to translate and publish.{{sfn|Beltramini|Gasparotto|2016|p=102}}

Prefatory letters, popular in first editions of Latin works years before, were also common for Aldine editions.{{sfn|Grant|2017|p=xvii}} Manutius used the Aldine editions to ask scholarly questions and provide information for his readers. In the preface of [[Ovid]]'s ''[[Metamorphoses]]'' (1502), he argues that Heroides 17, 19, and 21 (the letters of Helen, Hero, and Cudippe, respectively) were the work of the poet [[Sabinus (Ovid)|Sabinus]], whom Ovid refers to as Amores. In another preface Manutius explains how a sundial works.{{sfn|Grant|2017|p=xxiv}}