First Patent System

The solid core established in Renaissance Venice

Today in 1474, the Republic of Venice established the first statutory patent system in Europe.

Bruce Bugbee in Genesis Of American Patent and Copyright: "The international patent experience of nearly 500 years has merely brought amendments or improvements upon the solid core established in Renaissance Venice."

Nicolò Marcello, the 69th Doge of Venice, from 13 August 1473 to 1 December 1474. Painted by Titian, based on a previous painting.

Titian (1488-1576) moved in 1531 to a house known as Biri Grande, where he “entertained leading scholars and artists and many of the beautiful women in Venice,” writes Christopher Hibbert in Venice: A Biography of a City.

Hibbert continues:

The food was exquisite and the dishes often included delicacies which were sent as presents to the host from his admirers on the mainland, and which Aretino [1492-1556] acknowledged on his behalf in letters of thanks in such mannered prose as that addressed to “most kind, most dear and most gracious Messer Nicolo… Because it seemed most ungrateful to Titian who gives life to colour, and to Sansovino, who imbues his marble with breath, merely to thank you for the gift of pickled fennel and spice cakes, they, together with myself and the other witnesses of their appetites… declare how much they are beholden to you.”