Panfilo Castaldi

Who was Panfilo Castaldi?

Panfilo Castaldi was an Italian physician and "master of the art of printing," to whom local tradition attributes the invention of moveable type. He was born in Feltre but spent most of his life working in Milan.

The story as it has circulated through the centuries in Feltre is that Castaldi was given examples of early Chinese block printing by Marco Polo, with which he experimented, eventually producing modern type. The story was largely unknown outside of Lombardy until it was reported in the 19th century by Robert Curzon, Baron Zouche, a diplomat. As Curzon tells it, Castaldi began with glass stamps made at Murano and eventually developed wooden printing blocks which he used in a printing press in Venice in 1426. This would have been several years before Johann Gutenberg's first experiments with metal type in the early 1430s. Curzon stresses the connection to Marco Polo, arguing that Castaldi's early work closely resembles Chinese printing, and also stresses Gutenberg's acquaintance with Venetian printing, thus suggesting that European printing did not emerge distinctly from the Chinese analogues but in imitation.