|
Stefano Rocchi, Stefano Andronio, Mariangelo Accursio tra
l'Italia e l'Europa: poeta, filologo, epigrafista e diplomatico.
The seeds of Triptolemus, 4. Rome: Deinotera Editrice, 2023. Pp.
320. ISBN 9788889951439.
Review by William Stenhouse, Yeshiva University. stenhous@yu.edu
[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
For a poet, philologist, and epigrapher, Mariangelo Accursio
(1489-1546) led an exciting life. By 1511, barely twenty years
old, he had found his way to Rome and become a favorite of Pope
Julius II. He was sufficiently close to the aging pontiff to be
entrusted as envoy, bearing 500 ducats, to the temperamental
Michelangelo. Unfortunately, when Julius died in 1513, Accursio
had had time to make enemies. But he stayed in Rome, relying on
his wits in the competitive court around Leo X, before getting a
post as tutor and guide to two of the seventeen children of the
Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. With them, Accursio travelled
in central Europe, France, and across the Iberian peninsula,
where he and his charges became part of the entourage of Emperor
Charles V. In the early 1530s, he was in Augsburg, in the
household of Anton Fugger the younger, heir to the most
successful banker in the world. Tired, perhaps, of the whims of
great men, he returned to his native Aquila in 1533. But soon he
was on the road again, making seven missions to Charles’ court
to secure concessions for his town. The essays in this edited
volume have a little to say about these adventures. The main
focus, though, is on Accursio’s scholarly production. At Rome,
Accursio matured as a sharp critic and poet, immersed in the
pioneering humanist circles of the time; on his travels around
Europe, he recorded the Roman inscriptions that he saw with a
keen understanding of how they might be interpreted; and with
the support of Fugger, he published two pioneering editions of
late antique authors. The essays make a clear argument for the
importance of Accursio’s scholarship and also give a good idea
of how classical scholars today can deal with the challenges
posed by sixteenth-century humanists’ work.
Accursio’s facility with Latin was clear. He demonstrated his
precocity, and maybe his bravery, by composing a Lucianic
dialogue, the Osci et Volsci dialogus ludis Romanis actus,
in 1513, shortly after Julius’ death. It defended Roman
eloquence against the archaisms and scholarly pretensions of
Giovanni Battista Pio, who had been summoned by Julius from
Bologna in 1512 to teach at Rome. It displayed Accursio’s
linguistic skills, particularly his suspicion of the vocabulary
of Plautus and Ennius, his understanding of political debates
around style, and his readiness to use his intelligence to win
the support of the new regime. Certainly, it seems to have won
over scholars at Rome: we have evidence of his connections with
other prominent humanists in the sodalities that formed in Rome
in this period, as Paola de Capua shows. Like them, he wrote
verse. Stefano Rocchi considers the annotated proofs of a
collection of Sylvae, never properly printed for reasons
that are unclear. Following Statius, Accursio was ready to write
for the rulers of the time, including Emperor Charles (an
epithalamium celebrating his union with Isabella of Portugal),
Charles’ chancellor Gattinara (three poems of praise after the
disasters of 1527, with appropriate Vergilian allusions), and
Fugger (on his marriage to Anna Rehlinger).
On a blank page of his proofs Accursio copied a poem by Claudian
(Carm. Min. 20, ‘De sene Veronensi qui Suburbium numquam
egressus est’), an indication of his growing interests in later
imperial Latin, travel, and the traces of the Roman empire. At
Rome, he collected records of inscriptions, worked on their
abbreviations, and started to make notes on the texts of
Ausonius and Solinus. As Giusto Traina demonstrates, Accursio
had an understandable interest in emending proper names and in
connecting Solinus’ text with Pliny’s. Then in Augsburg,
Accursio published substantial editions of Cassiodorus’ Variae and
Ammianus Marcellinus. For the former, he was able to use the
evidence of a manuscript he saw in Valencia. Characteristically
for the period, his presentation of his sources was opaque, but
even so, according to Angelo Luceri, his became the standard
text for 300 years. His Ammianus was less successful, largely
because it came out shortly before an edition by Sigismundus
Gelenius, published by Hieronymus Froben, who had access to an
important ninth-century manuscript from Hersfeld, as well as the
unacknowledged benefits of Accursio’s work, and as a result
produced a better text. Accursio, though, was the first to print
books 27-31, and made many important corrections to the received
text of books 14-26. He used manuscripts that he had seen in
Rome, along with the previous edition of Petrus Castellus
(1517). Again, while he was eager to denigrate his predecessor,
telling the reader that he had made 5,000 corrections to
Castellus, Accursio was not transparent about the sources of his
changes. Gavin Kelly shows that he used Castellus as his base
text, despite its problems. Immacolata Eramo looks at six
passages as case studies for Accursio’s methods and interests.
As in his notes on Solinus, he was concerned about getting
proper names of people and places right, and his knowledge of
Roman imperial systems informed a couple of innovative
corrections to military terms.
Accursio developed his knowledge of Roman names and institutions
in part through his epigraphic studies. After learning how to
copy and interpret inscriptions at Rome, he transcribed hundreds
on his travels. Two of his notebooks survive, in which he gave
his transcriptions alongside details of the people and places he
saw.[1] They
make clear the sophistication of his understanding, what the
late Marco Buonocore, reviewing his achievements, describes as
his “personalità scientifica” (132): unusually for the period,
he sometimes recorded letter sizes and letter forms, the apices between
words, and details of the settings in which inscriptions
appeared. Stefano Andronio’s essay makes it clear that he was
not a great draughtsman, but good enough to catch the details he
needed. The nineteenth-century editors of CIL recognized
and appreciated Accursio’s abilities, but Buonocore’s essay
demonstrates that they may even have understated his abilities.
Together, Kelly’s and Eramo’s essays illustrate the difficulties
and pleasures of working with sixteenth-century textual critics.
On the one hand, those critics gave vague details of
manuscripts, provided the sources of their emendations
inconsistently, and cited the work of their contemporaries only
when they wanted to show how stupid and incompetent those
scholars were. On the other, they sometimes had access to
witnesses that have since disappeared (only a few folios survive
of Gelenius’ Hersfeld manuscript), and sometimes, as Eramo
shows, they offered provocative or plausible conjectures. Silvia
Orlandi’s and Claudia Marchegiani’s contributions provide an
excellent illustration of how sixteenth-century manuscripts can
include valuable information for contemporary epigraphers, and
of the practical difficulties in making that information
available. As well as the texts of inscriptions, the editors of CIL regularly
took from manuscripts and early modern printed books details of
find-spots and the collections in which the inscriptions were to
be found, but less consistently the information early modern
sources provided about letter shapes or the monuments on which
the texts appeared. And often the editors abbreviated what they
did find. Clearly there were good practical reasons for this as
long as they were constrained by the requirements of print; now
that epigraphers work primarily with databases online, and
images of manuscripts are increasingly digitized by the
libraries that house them, in theory that could change. As
Orlandi points out, though, the designers of inscription
databases often inherited the philological concerns of their
predecessors, and in their efforts to provide as reliable a text
as possible, overlooked (for example) the history of the
monument on which it appeared. Changing course would not be
simple, not least because linking to digitized manuscripts is
not necessarily straightforward. Accursio’s two notebooks in the
Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, are digitized, in high resolution;
but the images of the pages cannot be annotated with links to
reproductions of pages in CIL or epigraphic databases.[2] Orlandi
gives some examples of the benefits of being able to access
early witnesses: seeing that two texts edited separately in CIL came
from the same monument, for instance, or being able to give a
more precise date based on letter-forms. As an example of the
potential benefits the additional data can offer, Marchegiani
and her team have added snapshots of the 575 inscriptions from
Rome that Accursio included in one of his Milan notebooks to EDR
(Epigraphic database Roma).[3] Her
contribution here includes a more old-fashioned table,
presenting transcriptions of the notes that Accursio made by
each.
This volume makes it clear that Accursio should be added to the
long list of humanists worthy of further investigation. He
played a key role in transmitting the scholarly achievements of
high renaissance Rome elsewhere in Europe, and in laying the
groundwork for studies of the practical extent and functions of
the Roman Empire; his travelling with the court of the
sixteenth-century Roman Emperor seems to have encouraged this
perspective. Rocchi and Andronio’s contributors approach him
from a variety of perspectives and show very clearly why he
should be better known to classicists, epigraphers, and
historians of sixteenth-century erudition.[4]
Authors and Titles
-
Premessa, Stefano Rocchi and Stefano Andronio
Parte 1: Poeta
-
Gli esordi di Accursio a Roma, Paola de Capua
-
I Sylvarum libri duo priores di Mariangelo Accursio:
prime considerazioni (Accursiana VI), Stefano Rocchi
Parte 2: Filologo
-
Toponimi orientali di Solino nelle Diatribae di
Accursio, Giusto Traina
-
Accursius’ Ammianus Marcellinus (1533): The editio
princeps of books 27–31, Gavin Kelly
-
“Un Ammiano Marcellino quasi nuovo e rinato”. Note testuali
alle Res gestae di Mariangelo Accursio, Immacolata
Eramo
-
Mariangelo Accursio e la genesi dell’editio princeps delle Variae di
Cassiodoro (1533), Angelo Luceri
Parte 3: Epigrafista e diplomatico
-
«Sunt … Accursiana haec apographa plane egregia». Accursio e
l’epigrafia classica: una prima messa a punto, Marco
Buonocore †
-
I codici ambrosiani di Mariangelo Accursio e le risorse
disponibili in rete: osservazioni in margine al fascicolo
“urbano” del codice D 420 inf., Silvia Orlandi and
Claudia Marchegiani
-
Disegni di iscrizioni e monumenti antichi nelle carte di
Mariangelo Accursio, Stefano Andronio
-
Mariangelo Accursio, ambasciatore e mediatore tra Monarchia
spagnola e terre di confine, Silvia Mantini
Notes
[1] The essays on Accursio as epigrapher here focus on his
collections from Italy; for a good example of his work
elsewhere, see Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa, “Le voyage épigraphique de
Mariangelo Accursio au Portugal, printemps 1527,” in Portuguese
Humanism and the Republic of Letters, ed. Maria Berbara and
Karl Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 17-111. For a more detailed
case study, overlapping with his contribution here, see Marco
Buonocore, “Mariangelo Accursio e le inscrizioni di
Beneventum,” Epigraphica 65 (2023): 554-95.
[2] Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS O 125 sup (https://digitallibrary.unicatt.it/veneranda/0b02da82800bcd5d)
and MS D 420 inf. (https://digitallibrary.unicatt.it/veneranda/0b02da82801d63ae)
(consulted 20 July 2024). Orlandi urges the adoption of the IIIF
(International Image Interactive Format).
[3] See, e.g., EDR092854 with www.edr-edr.it/edr_programmi/view_img.php?id_nr=092854-1&lang=it (consulted
20 July 2024). Very helpfully, EDR also includes here a link to
the entry for the monument from the Census of Antique Works of
Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance (e.g., https://database.census.de/detail/10083142,
consulted 20 July 2024), which gives illustrations of other
witnesses.
[4] The volume is nicely produced and supplemented with
plenty of well-chosen illustrations from Accursio’s Nachlass.
It could do with an index, and some illustrations are a little
small and indistinct, perhaps a consequence of the reasonable
price.
|