Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo [1 ed.] 0198158998, 9780198158998

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Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance The Theory and Practice of Literary Im itation in Italy from Dante to Bembo

m a r t in

l

. M cL a

u g h l in

C L A R E N D O N PRESS • O X F O R D 1995

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bombay Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Martin L. McLaughlin iggg All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. Within the UK, exceptions are allowed in respect of any fair dealing for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, ig88, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of the licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agen9 9 0 15 See Grayson, ‘Poetica e poesia in Dante’, 83-4.

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Provencal poets such as Arnaut Daniel, whom he praises both in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (2. 10. 2) and in Purgatorio (26. 11548).16 But in the Convivio (1304-7) he regards his poems as re­ taining the literal facade of love poetry behind which he interprets allegorically a philosophical content, a process which he associates with poetry of Virgil. In the De Vulgari Eloquentia he considers an affinity with Latin as the best way to ennoble vernacular poetry, yet the imitation he recommends remains vague, hinting at the moral import of classical poets, and stylistically at an elevated form of sentence construction which can even be gleaned from prose writers. The Commedia inaugurates a new phase o f poetic practice which breaks with the theory established in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, revealing a more detailed and comprehensive imitatio of classical and vernacular models. Stylistically the poem con­ travenes the dictates of his Latin treatise: it is a serious poem which does not always contain noble material nor employ noble language. Particularly in terms of content, Dante’s poetic prac­ tice continually extends the limits imposed by his previous theo­ rizing. The Vita Nuova demanded that vernacular verse only deal with love; Convivio inserted moral truths behind the erotic facade; De Vulgari Eloquentia (2. 2) admitted only three subjects as suit­ able to the vulgare illustre: ‘salus’, Venus’, and ‘virtus’, or moral poetry, love poetry, and epic, martial poetry. Yet the Commedia’s poetry clearly goes beyond these three topics. Although Dante theorized about imitation in his earlier works, it is only in the Commedia that there is a more specific exempli­ fication of the imitation of classical authors. This imitatio in the vernacular, however, although hinting at an embryonic human­ ism, was not destined to mark the beginning of a trend.17 There were at least two reasons for this. For a start, Dante’s poem was a unique work, a summa, almost inhibiting future writers from following his path. But even more important was the fact that the generation after Dante was to be influenced much more by Petrarch than by the author of the Commedia. After Petrarch reasserts the absolute superiority of Latin over the volgare, Dante’s ,6 For the influence of Provencal and Italian poets, see Barolini, Dante’s Poets. 17 On the distance between Dante and the early humanists, see G. Padoan, ‘Dante di fronte all’umanesimo letterario’ , Lettere italiane, 17 (1965), 237—57, now in his Ilpio Enea, I’empio Ulisse. Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante (Ravenna, 1976), 7- 29-

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vernacular echoes of classical auctores are regarded as a diminution of their status; after 1350 Italian intellectuals could not entertain the possibility of reading volgarizzamenti of classical authors, as Giovanni Villani had done, or actually translating authors such as Livy or Valerius Maximus into the vernacular, as Boccaccio did: instead, under the impact of the humanist ‘return to the sources’ , the classical authors were to be read in the original and not to be linked with the volgare or the vulgus. ' 8 The Petrarchan revolution was to have profound consequences not just for the relationship between the Italian vernacular and Latin, but for the whole question of literary imitation. 18 For the impropriety of translating into the vernacular, see C. Dionisotti, ‘Tradizione classica e volgarizzamenti’, in his Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin, 1967), 115-17; and G. Billanovich, ‘Tra Dante e Petrarca’ , Italia medioevale e umanistica, 8 (1965), 42-3.

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PETRARCH By the time of his death in 1321 Dante had inaugurated a revo­ lution by daring to use the vernacular for a major work which embraced a form of imitatio of classical writers. But by the middle of the fourteenth century Petrarch (1304—74) had effected a counter­ revolution which drove a wedge between the two languages and their literatures, and redefined literary imitation as a process canonically associated with composition in Latin. Dante’s two statements about imitation were in Latin, but they referred to a process whereby the volgare could imitate classical authors. Petrarch deals with the topic on several occasions in his Latin writings, always with reference to composition in the learned language, even though his vernacular lyrics, as we shall see, also reflect in practice his imitative theories. Petrarch is more detailed about imitation theory than Dante partly because he has learned about it from authors unknown to his predecessor. Apart from the condemnation of imitatores in Horace (Ep. 1. 19. 19-20 and Ars Poetica 133-4),1 which Dante probably knew, Petrarch came across key statements in two of his favourite writers, Seneca (Epistulae 84) and Quintilian (lnstitutio Oratoria 10. 2), as well as being aware of the Elder Seneca’s strictures about not imitating just one model, however eminent (‘Non est unus, quamvis praecipuus sit, imitandus . . .’, Controversiae 1. Praef. 6). The two points around which classical theories of imitatio revolved, acccording to D. A. Russell, were reiterated by Petrarch: first, that the writer should imitate a number of different models, not just one; and, second, that he should pen­ etrate beyond superficial verbal imitation to a reworking that recaptures the true spirit and significance of the original.2 Both the quantity and quality of Petrarch’s interventions on 1 Petrarch actually quotes the Ars Poetica passage in one of the key letters on imitation (Fam. 23. 19. 10). 2 D. A. Russell, (De Imitatione\ in D. West and T. Woodman (eds.), Creative Imitation and Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1979), 5.

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this topic are such that he remains one of the key theorists of Renaissance imitation; so it is necessary to consider his ideas and his practice in detailed stages. The first section of this chap­ ter will examine Petrarch’s reading of classical passages on imitatio; in Section 2 we shall consider his own contributions to both the general debate on imitation, and the particular topic of Ciceronianism; and in Section 3 we shall see how his imitative strategy has a coherence in practice which embraces both his Latin and his vernacular works.

1. Petrarch’s Classical Sources on Imitation By 1343 Petrarch was in possession of an important manuscript of Cicero’s rhetorical works. Like other contemporary manu­ scripts it was incomplete, but it did contain some key passages, including the one about defective imitation of a model’s faults (De Oratore 2. 90), asterisked by Petrarch, and the sequence about unwitting imitation (2. 152), also asterisked and whose significance will be considered later.3 He also underlined the passage in De Oratore 3. 150 about avoiding unusual words, and the sequence in Orator 124 about using everyday lexis for clarity in narration (‘Narrationes credibiles nec historico sed prope cotidiano sermone explicatae dilucide’ (‘narration should be credible and should be explained with great clarity, not in the language of historiography but in almost everyday language’)), a stylistic ideal which will be an integral part of the Petrarchan reaction against the ornate Latin of the artes dictaminis. This Ciceronian passage, as well as his discovery of Cicero’s Epistolae ad Atticum in Verona in 1345, account for the revolutionary as­ pect of Petrarch’s plain Latin, especially when compared with the elaborate epistolary language inspired by contemporary rules of dictamen. O f even greater significance, and more heavily annotated, was the manuscript of Quintilian, which Petrarch acquired in 1350.4 The impact of this text was such that shortly afterwards he ' For Petrarch’s manuscript annotations, see P. Blanc, ‘Petrarque lecteur de Oiceron. Les Scolies petrarquiennes du De Oratore et de 1' Orator’, Studi petrarcheschi, 9 (1978). 109-66. 4 See P. De Nolhac, Petrarque et I’humanisme (2 vols.; Paris, 1907), ii. 83-94.

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composed three letters on rhetorical topics (Familiares i. 7-9), including one of the crucial epistles on imitation (1. 8), as well as a eulogistic letter to Quintilian himself (24. 7).5 Although this manuscript was also defective, it did contain— indeed in Petrarch’s copy book 10 actually starts with— Quintilian’s praise of Cicero’s ability to imitate the diverse qualities of Demosthenes, Plato, and Isocrates (10. 1. 108). The humanist’s incipient Ciceronianism is apparent when, on reading Quintilian’s adage ‘ille se profecisse sciat cui Cicero valde placebit’ (‘he who appreciates Cicero should be aware that he has already made considerable progress’, 10. 1. 112), he writes a note in the margin to himself: ‘Silvane, audi; te enim tangit’ (‘Silvanus, note this, for it con­ cerns you’). However, if that first chapter of book 10 was largely missing, the whole of the next chapter, on literary imitation, was present in Petrarch’s text, and the appeal of the subject to Petrarch is apparent in the number of marginal annotations. Quintilian makes two major points about imitatio: that it is an integral element in composition, but that excessive reliance on superficial imitation at the expense of originality is dangerous. Petrarch approves of both points, particularly the latter, noting in the margin ‘Est quando nocet imitatio’ (‘Imitation is harmful on occasions’) at 10. 2. 3; ‘Nichil crescit sola imitatione’ (‘Progress cannot be made by imitation alone’) at 10. 2. 8; and exclaiming ‘Audi, imitator frivole’ (‘Listen, you superficial imitators’) when Quintilian observes ‘Ea quae in oratore maxima sunt imitabilia non sunt, ingenium, inventio, vis, facilitas. . .’ (‘An orator’s greatest assets cannot be imitated: his genius, his powers of invention, his rhetorical vigour and fluency’, 10. 2. 12). Petrarch’s abhorrence of using the same words as his model is a form of ‘anxiety of influence’ which springs both from Horace’s wellknown condemnation of word-for-word translation (Ars Poetica 132-3), and from several passages here. When Quintilian warns ‘imitatio . . . non sit tantum in verbis’ (‘imitation should not just concern lexis’, 2. 27), Petrarch takes it to heart, writing in the margin: ‘lege, Silvane, memoriter’; and the passage about the futility of trying to imitate Cicero by ending sentences with ‘esse videatur’ (10. 2. 18) elicits the comment ‘Ludicre’. But perhaps 5 For a full transcription of Petrarch’s annotations and an interpretation of their significance, see M. Accame Lanzilotta, ‘Le postille del Petrarca a Quintiliano (Cod. Parigino lat. 7720)’, Quademi petrarcheschi, 5 (1988), 1-201.

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the most important idea which Petrarch gleans from the Institutio Oratoria is Quintilian’s advice not to imitate just one model (‘ne hoc quidem suaserim, uni se alicui proprie quern per omnia sequatur addicere’ (‘I certainly would not advise the orator to attach himself to any one model, whom he should follow in everything’), 10. 2. 24): this notion will be reiterated in Familiares 22. 2. 20 and keep even Petrarch’s enthusiasm for Cicero from developing into that exclusive cult of the Roman orator which was to appear in the next century in the form of Ciceronianism.

2. Petrarch’ s Theory of Imitation Petrarch expresses his ideas on literary imitation most exten­ sively in three of the Familiares letters (1. 8; 22. 2; 23. 19). The first letter (1. 8), written, as we have seen, in the early 1350s, was addressed to Tommaso Caloiro (or Caloria) da Messina, hut was probably never sent, since Tommaso had died in 1341. Petrarch merely wanted to include amongst the first epistles of the Familiares an important letter setting out his own poetics of imitation, so he pretended that Tommaso had asked his advice on literary composition.6 The poet’s reply is to repeat Seneca’s counsel as contained in Epistolae 84. It is worth recalling the principal points of Seneca’s letter, a fundamental text in clas­ sical imitation theory. Instructing his pupil on literary imitation, Seneca outlines three aims: that the young writer’s style possess unity, be different from his models, and conceal those models. The five images deployed by Seneca to illustrate his advice were also to enjoy centuries of currency in the debate on imitation. 11c begins with the simile of the bee collecting pollen from vari­ ous flowers which it then transforms into its own distinctive product, honey. Almost as popular in later years was the diges­ tion metaphor which Seneca uses next: the different models are like so many different kinds of food which must be digested to be a source of strength. The three other images used were less well known but would all resurface at different stages in the debate on imitation in the Italian Renaissance: Seneca wants the young writer to resemble his model not as closely as an 11 See G. Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, i.: Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome, 1947), 48.

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artistic image resembles its original, but as a son is similar to his father, and he should develop a style that, like a choir, produces a unified tone from a variety of different voices. In Familiares i. 8 Petrarch reiterates Seneca’s advice, concen­ trating on the apian metaphor, but there are also crucial changes of emphasis. Whereas the classical writer was unsure whether bees merely collected honey from flowers, or produced it by adding some extra element, Petrarch with no hint of doubt in­ sists on the latter idea of mellification, of something new pro­ duced ‘mirifica quadam permixtione’ (‘by a miraculous blending process’ , i. 8. 2). What is significant here is not so much Petrarch’s literal knowledge of apiculture, as the priority ac­ corded on a figural level to the contribution of the individual. It is for ignoring this element that he criticizes Macrobius, who at the beginning of the Saturnalia (1 Praef. 5-10) merely reproduces the flowers of Seneca’s letter without converting them into his own distinctive honey.7 Petrarch admits that he himself is often guilty of such verbatim imitation, but considers it a superior form of imitatio to rework other writers’ ideas in one’s owns words (‘elegantioris esse solertie, ut, apium imitatores, nostris verbis quamvis aliorum hominum sententias proferamus’ (‘it is a more elegant strategy to imitate the bees, and to use our own words even when we are expressing ideas found in other writers’), 1. 8. 4). Indeed this letter in itself is, in an almost metaliterary way, an illustration of Petrarchan imitation, rewriting the substance of the Senecan text but avoiding its lexis.8 Another difference is that, where Seneca had stressed unity of style as the young writer’s chief objective (‘ut unum quiddam fiat ex multis’ (‘that the style should be unified, though deriving from many sources’), Ep. 84. 7), Petrarch underlines individuality as much as unity (‘u t . . . 7 G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quar­ terly, 33 (1980), 1-32, feels that Macrobius does vary Seneca’s text sufficiently to make Petrarch’s strictures seem rather harsh. 8 Martellotti also sees an ‘insignis mutatio’ in that, where Seneca had quoted two verses from the Ameid, Petrarch quotes from two different passages from Virgil’s epic, and one from the Georgies: see G. Martellotti, “ ‘Similitudo non identitas” . Alcune varianti petrarchesche’, Rivista di cultura classica e medievale, 19 (1977), 491503 (491 n. 4), now in his Scrittipetrarcheschi, ed. M. Feo and S. Rizzo (Padua, 1983), 501—16. Other writers would adopt a similar tactic of couching their advice on imitation in such a way as to exemplify the theory: see below, Chs. 8 and 10 on Alberti and Poliziano. Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation’, suggests that Fam. 22. 2. 20 is a similar re-elaboration of Seneca, Ep. 33. 11.

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unum nostrum conflatum ex pluribus habeamus’ (‘that we should possess a style that is unified and personal, though inspired by several models’), Fam. 1. 8. 5). The epistle ends, as it had begun, with Petrarch stressing the apian qualities of transformation into something different and better (‘nulla quidem esset apibus gloria, nisi in aliud et in melius inventa converterent’ (‘bees would enjoy no glory if they did not transform what they found into something both different and better’), 1. 8. 24). The second letter (22. 2), written in October 1359 to Boccaccio, develops in its central section the main points and imagery of the earlier epistle: Petrarch’s practice is to use other writers’ words to improve his life not his literary style, unless he either acknowledges the author or by altering the words gives the phrase his own individual note (‘nisi vel prolato auctore vel mutatione insigni, ut imitatione apium e multis et variis unum fiat’ (‘unless I either name the author, making it a quotation, or change the phrase significantly, so that like the bee I produce something unified from many and various sources’), 22. 2. 16).9 As in the previous letter, the stress is on the writer being content with his own distinctive style, though he borrows the image of the shabby cloak from Horace: ‘multo malim meus michi stilus sit, incultus licet atque horridus, sed in morem toge habilis, ad mensuram mei ingenii factus’ (‘I would much prefer that my style should be my own, no matter how uncouth and inelegant, just like a well-worn toga, made to measure to suit my own intellect’, 22. 2. 16).lo He feels that there is an individual element (‘quiddam suum ac proprium’, 22. 2. 17) which is the distinguishing feature of everyone’s style and which has to be nurtured and polished 9 Petrarch is faithful to this precept in practice: in Fam. i. 8 he recast Seneca’s ideas in his own words, and at one point quoted Quintilian (‘prolato auctore’). U. Bosco, Petrarca (Bari, 1965), 132 ff., illustrates how similar procedures are adopted in the vernacular lyrics. 10 The cloak image comes from Horace, Epistulae, 1. 1. 95 ff. That Petrarch is thinking of Horace here is confirmed by the allusion to the crow in the next sentence: ‘stilus suus cuique formandus servandusque est, ne . . . concursu plumas suas repetentium volucrum spoliati cum cornicula rideamur’ (‘we should form and pre­ serve our own style lest. . . like the crow, we should be laughed at when the other birds come flocking back to repossess the feathers we have stolen’; cf. Horace, Ep. 1. 3. 1&-20: ‘ne si forte suas repetitum venerit olim I grex avium plumas, moveat cornicula risum I furtivis nudata coloribus . . .’ (‘lest the flock of other birds returns to seize back their feathers, and the crow stands mocked once deprived of his stolen plumage . . .’)).

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rather than eradicated. He admits to having to follow the paths blazed by truly original poets such as Horace, Lucretius, or Virgil, but, echoing Quintilian, he refuses to restrict himself to their very footsteps." His insistence on using his own words achieves his ideal of similitudo rather than identitas (22. 2. 20). Even if he is following a model, Petrarch insists on preserving his autonomy: ‘sint cum duce oculi, sit iudicium, sit libertas’ (‘let me follow a leader, but with my own eyes, my own judg­ ment, my own freedom’, 22. 2. 21). The beginning and end of this letter are as important as the central section. The epistle’s main purpose is to inform Boccaccio of changes Petrarch wished to make in his Bucolicum Carmen, and the rationale behind these modifications is the application to that work of his theory of avoiding verbatim imitation. He ex­ plains at the outset that he has read minor authors such as Ennius, Plautus, Martianus Capella, and Apuleius, less often than the major writers, Virgil, Horace, Boethius, and Cicero. Consequently he remembers easily if he is borrowing a phrase from one of the former group, whereas he has read the major writers so often that they have become an integral part of his creative memory. The result is that he has inadvertently in­ serted into his own pastoral poem whole phrases from major authors, which he now wants to alter (22. 2. 11-14). It is impor­ tant to examine this passage carefully. Dante too had named eight authors in that enigmatic list of models in De Vulgari Eloquentia, 2. 6. 7, four poets and four prose-writers, the latter an uneven mixture of major and minor authors. But here the divi­ sion is based not on poetry as against prose, but on the major or minor status of the author. Martellotti dubbed Petrarch’s list of minor authors a ‘curioso raggruppamento’, and claimed that Plautus and Apuleius were included for their moral qualities.1112 But Petrarch’s list is actually carefully ordered, and determined by genre rather than by moral content: all the classical genres are represented and each minor writer contrasts with a major 11 Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation’, 21, feels that Petrarch is here paraphrasing Seneca, Ep. 33. 11, in his own words, thus achieving the desired similitudo, not identitas', but the image of following in another’s footsteps derives from at least two other sources: Horace, Ep. 1. 19. 21; Quintilian, 10. 2. 10. 12 G. Martellotti, ‘Latinita del Petrarca’, Studipetrarcheschi, 7 (1961), 219-30 (221 n. 2), now in Scritti petrarcheschi, 289—301.

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one in the same genre. Thus Ennius and Virgil represent epic poetry, Plautus and Horace comic/satirical verse, Capella and Boethius the prosimetrum, while Apuleius and Cicero, for all their differences, are prose-writers and philosophers. The conclusion of the letter lists the alterations to be made in Petrarch’s tenth Eclogue. The line ending ‘solio sublimis acerno’ (‘seated aloft on his maple throne’, Buc. Car. 10. 288) is too close to Virgil’s ‘solioque invitat acerno’ (‘invites him from his maple throne’, Aeneid 8. 178) and is therefore to be modified to ‘e sede verendus acerno’ (‘venerable on his maple seat’); and the phrase ‘quid enim non carmina possunt?’ (‘What cannot poetry achieve?’, Buc. Car. 1o. 128), which Petrarch had unconsciously stolen from Ovid (Metamorphoses 7. 167), is to become now: ‘quid enim vim carminis equet?’ (‘What can equal the power of poetry?’). Here, then, is Petrarch putting into practice his ideas about verbatim imitation, opting for a significant change which makes the phrase distinctively his: similitudo not identitas is his goal both in theory and in practice.13 The third letter (Fam. 23. 19), also addressed to Boccaccio but written around 1366, develops the familiar points, first about forming a personal style (‘ex multis unum suum [stilum] ac proprium conflabit’ (‘he will develop a unified, personal, and individual style’), 23. 19. 10), then about avoiding too close a similarity to the model. The context for these ideas is Petrarch’s description of the budding talent of his young amanuensis, Giovanni Malpaghini. At present Malpaghini tends to overin­ dulge in imitation, but soon, Petrarch claims (in words that echo two famous classical passages about imitation and originality), he will become more individual, elaborating a novel style from his imitation of old masters (‘sic ut nulli similis appareat sed ex veteribus novum quoddam Latio intulisse videatur’ (‘so that he will resemble nobody, but rather will seem “ to have introduced something original into Italy” from old sources’), 23. 19. 10).14 Again there is the stress on the correct form of imitation: 13 Apart from the discussion of the two terms in Fam. 22. 2. 20, see also his remark: ‘Ita quotiens identitas tedii mater offenderit, aderit optima fastidii disciplina varietas’ (‘Thus whenever one comes across sameness, the source of tedium, variety should come to the rescue, the best remedy for boredom’, Fam. 8. 5. 15). 14 Petrarch here echoes Horace: ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis I intulit agresti Latio’ (‘When Greece was captured [by the Romans], it in turn captivated the victors, and first introduced the arts into rustic Latium’, Horace, Ep. 2. 1. 157-8).

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Malpaghini should strive for similitudo not identitas (‘curandum imitatori ut quod scribit simile non idem sit’ (‘the imitator must ensure that what he writes should be similar not identical [to his model]’), 23. 19. 11). Again Senecan imagery is used: the imitator’s similarity to his model should be like that of a son to his father, not that of an artistic representation to its original model, for the son’s features recall those of the father but are also distinctively different, retaining a ‘shadow’ of the paternal fea­ tures (‘In [filiis] . . . umbra.quedam et quem pictores nostri aerem vocant, q u i. . . similitudinem illam facit, que statim viso filio, patris in memoriam nos reducat’ (‘In our sons . . . there is a shadowy trace of the father— our painters call it an “ air”— which produces that kind of similarity which on seing the son imme­ diately recalls the father to our mind’), 23. 19. 12). Like Seneca, Petrarch stresses the importance of the differences between the new work and the original, but unlike the ancient author he wants the resemblances not to be hidden but to be noticeable at least to the unconscious workings of the mind: Sic et nobis providendum ut cum simile aliquid sit, multa sint dissimilia, et id ipsum simile lateat ne deprehendi possit nisi tacita mentis indagine, ut intelligi simile queat potius quam dici. (23. 19. 13) (So we should ensure that, although some elements are similar, many are not, and that even what is similar should not be obvious, but should only be apprehended by the silent enquiry of the mind: the similarity should be intuited rather than articulated.)'5

Once again Petrarch insists that, although one may use similar ideas and similar rhetorical devices, the difference from the model must be apparent in the words: ‘utendum igitur ingenio alieno utendumque coloribus, abstinendum verbis; ilia enim similitudo latet, hec eminet; ilia poetas facit, hec simias’ (‘we should there­ fore use other writers’ ideas and rhetorical figures, but avoid their words; this kind of imitation is more subtle, whereas verbal imitation is rather obvious; the former creates poets, the latter merely apes’, 23. 19. 13).16 Like the previous letter, this one also 15 Cf. ‘ut etiam si apparuerit, unde sumptum sit, aliud tamen esse quam unde sumptum est, appareat5 (‘so that even if it should be apparent where the passage comes from, it should appear different from the source passage5, Seneca, Ep. 84. 5). 16 For the metaphor of the ape in this context, see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (London, 1979), Excursus X IX , 538-40.

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ends with the theory being put into practice. Malpaghini had noticed yet another line from the Bucolicum Carmen (6. 193) which ended exactly like one o f Virgil’s (‘atque intonat ore’, Aeneid 6. 607), but by this time (1366) it is too late to alter it, as the poem has already been circulated.’7 One of Petrarch’s key concerns, then, in his theory of literary imitation is the avoidance of textual repetition and the search for the author’s own words which will distinguish his work from the model. It might be thought that these identical echoes are easier to perpetrate and to recognize in Latin hexameter verse, because of the metrical exigencies particularly at the end of the line.’8 But the same anxiety is evident in his Latin prose works: in the proem to the De Viris Illustribus, for instance, he stresses that the historian’s duty is to follow the path laid down by ancient his­ torians, but to report the facts (‘res’) in different words (‘verba’): ‘oportet scriptorum clarissimorum vestigiis insistere nec tamen verba transcribere sed res ipsas’ (‘we must follow in the foot­ steps of the famous authors, but we should rewrite their content not their actual words’).’9 Even in his Latin translation of the final novella from Boccaccio’s Decameron, he points out that he has heeded Horace’s warning (Ars Poetica 132-3) about not ex­ ecuting a word-for-word translation, claiming that he has used his own words for Boccaccio’s story, and even added and changed some o f the ideas (‘historiam tuam meis verbis explicui. . . paucis in ipsa narratione mutatis verbis aut additis’ (‘I have retold your story in my words . . . changing or adding a few words in17 9 8 17 There is plenty of other evidence of Petrarch altering wording to avoid subcon­ scious identitas: in a 1364 letter he deletes an et to avoid a Horatian echo in Buc. Carm. 10. 302— see N. Mann, ‘ “ O Deus, qualis epistola!” A New Petrarch Letter’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 17 (1974), 207-43. Similarly in his revision of the Africa, he notes in the margin ‘Attende Virgilium’, when he is worried that his text is too close to Virgil’s— see V. Fera, ‘Annotazioni inedite del Petrarca al testo &t\YAfrica’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 23 (1980), 1-25. 18 All the examples cited in Fam. 22. 2, 23. 19, and in the 1364 letter discovered by Mann deal with phrases occurring at the end of a hexameter. See now G. W. Pigman III, ‘Neo-Latin Imitation of the Latin Classics’, in P. Godman and O. Murray (eds.), Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Oxford, 1990), 199-210 (esp. 200). 19 Petrarca, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E. Carrara, and S. Bianchi (Milan, 1955), 220. V. Fera, La revisionepetrarchesca dell’ ‘Africa’ (Messina, 1984), illus­ trates Petrarch’s concern that his imitatio variata should differ verbally not only from his classical models but also from phrases in his own works.

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narrating the tale’) ).2° Similarly in his vernacular lyrics we shall find Petrarch continually exercised by the problem of repetition of his own or other poets’ words. Petrarch views imitation as an integral component in the creative process; but he is more sen­ sitive to its pitfalls than to its advantages. As far as Giceronianism is concerned, certainly Petrarch was the greatest admirer of Cicero in the Trecento: he keenly searched after and transcribed his works, and always referred to them in superlative terms.21 In one of his two letters addressed to the Roman orator, he acknowledges that any proficiency he or his contemporaries have attained in Latin is due to their study of Cicero (Fam. 24. 4. 4). The notion that any advances in Latinity derive from imitation of Cicero will become fundamental in the humanists of the next century and will even influence their defi­ nition of the Renaissance.22 But, unlike some extreme Ciceronians of the Quattrocento, Petrarch never believed that Cicero was the only model for good Latin. In fact he is prepared to be critical of Cicero in a way that, as Minnis has shown, marks him out as inaugurating a new critical phase.23 Minnis cites Petrarch’s 20 Seniles 17. 3, in Francisci Petrarce. . . Opera Omnia (Basle, 1581), 540. References given in the text in what follows will be to this edition, citing Opera and page number. For the changes and alterations made in the story, see J. Burke Severs, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s cClerk’s Tale3 (New Haven, Conn., 1942), 7-19; G. Martellotti, ‘Momenti narrativi del Petrarca’, Studi Petrarcheschi, 4 (1951), 7-33 (18 ff.); R. Kirkpatrick, ‘The Griselda Story in Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer’, in P. Boitani (ed.), Chaucer and the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, 1983), 231—48; M. L. McLaughlin, ‘Petrarch’s Rewriting of Decameron 10. 10’, in E. A. Millar (ed.), Ren­ aissance and Other Studies: Essays Presented to Peter M. Brown (Glasgow, 1988), 42-59. 21 Accame Lanzilotta, ‘Le postille del Petrarca’, 87, provides an almost exhaustive list of Petrarch’s references to Cicero. See also the chapter on ‘Petrarque et Ciceron’, in De Nolhac, Petrarque et Thumanisme, i. 213-68. 22 Flavio Biondo, for instance, in Italia Illustrata (c.1450) says of Petrarch himself: ‘nec tamen eum attigit Ciceronianae eloquentiae florem, quo multos in hoc seculo videmus ornatos’ (‘but he did not attain that Ciceronian elegance which we see now adorns the writings of many in this century’, Biondo, De Roma Triumphante Libri X . .. (Basle, 1531), 346), thus seeing Ciceronian Latin as the criterion which separates Quattrocento Latinity from that of the Trecento. About twenty years later, in 1473, Alamanno Rinuccini asserts that it was the lack of Cicero’s texts and therefore the ability to imitate him that separated medieval writers from Alamanni’s contempor­ aries: ‘quod illis [mediis scriptoribus] propterea contigisse non miror quia Ciceronis plerique libri in occulto latentes imitandi facultatem illis adimebant’ (T am not surprised that this happened to the writers of that intervening age since the fact that most of Cicero’s works lay hidden in obscurity deprived them of any chance of imitating him’, Lettere ed orazioni, ed. V. R. Giustiniani (Florence, 1953), 108). 23 A. J. Minnis, The Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Late Middle Ages (London, 1984), ‘Epilogue’, 211—17.

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33

famous condemnation of Cicero for becoming involved in the active life of politics (Fam. 24. 2. 3); but, apart from this philo­ sophical criticism, Petrarch also attacks him from a Christian standpoint (2. 9. 13); and even from a literary point of view he is prepared to uphold Seneca’s criticisms of Cicero’s letters as containing trivial details (1. 1. 32). The fullest account of Petrarch’s admiration for Cicero is in his late letter to Luca da Penna (Seniles 16. 1). There he recalls how as a schoolboy, when his classmates were mastering the medieval anthologies ‘Pros­ per’ and ‘Aesop’, he was entranced by the sonority even before he could appreciate the sense of Cicero’s prose, so that whatever else he read sounded harsh and discordant. There are two sig­ nificant points here. One is that sound will remain an important criterion even in Petrarch’s vernacular writings. The other is that this statement contains the germ of a Ciceronianist ap­ proach to writing, in which only what sounds like Cicero is admissible. But Petrarch recognizes that Cicero’s style is totally individual and ultimately inimitable, for on one occasion, he says, he was able to recognize an unidentified work (which he thought mistakenly was the lost Hortensius) as Cicero’s by its style, which nobody else could reproduce: ‘esse autem Ciceronis stylus indicio erat. fuit enim celestis viri illius eloquentia, imitabilis nulli’ (‘the style of the text was proof that it was by Cicero, for it was the heavenly eloquence of that man, which no one can imitate’, Opera, 946). Even at moments of greatest enthusiasm for the Roman orator, Petrarch’s abhorrence o f verbatim imita­ tion prevents him from becoming a Ciceronianist: Ciceronem fateor me mirari inter, imo ante omnes qui scripserunt unquam, qualibet in gente; nec tamen ut mirari, sic et imitari, cum potius in contrarium laborem, nec cuiusquam scilicet imitator sim nimius, fieri metuens quod in aliis non probo. (Prose, 760) (I confess that I admire Cicero amongst, or rather above all other writers who have ever written, of whatever nationality; but although I admire him, I do not imitate him, since if anything I tend in the opposite direction: that is to say, I am not a close imitator of any author, since I am afraid of thereby not practising what I preach to others.)

Thus both Petrarch’s own poetics of imitatio, as well as his read­ ing o f Quintilian, deterred him from becoming a slavish follower

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of Cicero; indeed when it comes to a comparison between the two great rhetorical writers of antiquity, the letter to Quintilian proclaims that Cicero’s actual eloquence may be greater, but that Quintilian’s treatise is more complete and more useful: ‘post tanti viri vestigia novam non imitationis sed doctrine proprie preclarique operis gloriam invenisti’ (‘despite following in the footsteps of such a great writer, you managed to achieve new glory not by imitating him but by writing a famous work which set out your own doctrine’, Fam. 24. 7. 3).24 In short, Petrarch’s attitude to Cicero is determined by two statements in Quintilian: on the one hand, whoever admires Cicero’s style has already made considerable progress in rhetoric (10. 1. 112), but on the other, no one should swear allegiance to any one particular lit­ erary model (10. 2. 24).

2 - Imitation in Practice in Petrarch’s Latin and Vernacular Works Before considering Petrarch’s imitative practice in Latin and the vernacular, it is essential to recall his views on the relationship between the two languages. His sense of the superiority of Latin over the vernacular is less equivocal than Dante’s. Because the volgare is the language of the vulgus, Petrarch officially despises this language as much as the people themselves.25 O f course there is an element of ambiguity in Petrarch’s attitude, as there was in Dante’s: the disparaging title of his vernacular lyrics, Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, is in a sense undermined by the amount of revision and reordering that he devoted to them throughout even his later years. It also appears as if at one stage the collec­ tion was to have been a lyrical synthesis of classical and ver­ nacular elements, in the way that the Divina Commedia was a narrative synthesis. At an early stage Petrarch wanted the col­ lection of poems to open with the ‘Ovidian’ sonnet 34 ‘Apollo, s’ancor vive il bel desio’; and for a long time the concluding sonnet, before the final canzone to the Virgin, was the ‘Virgilian’ 24 cf. Quintilian’s phrase: ‘Bum vero nemo potest aequare cuius vestigiis sibi utique insistendum putat’ (‘No one can overtake the writer in whose footsteps he thinks he should always follow’, io. 2. 10). 25 For just some of the many disparaging references to the vulgus, see Fam. 1. 1. 6; 14. 2. 6-7; Vita Solitaria, Preface (Prose, 286); Sen. 17. 2 (ibid. 1152).

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35

poem 353 ‘Vago augelletto che cantando vai’.26 But some time after 1350 Petrarch decided to abandon this classical frame, and to begin and end his collection with the repentant first sonnet and the final poem to the Virgin. However, there are still a number of poems which individually look like an attempt at fusion between the classical and romance styles: most spectacu­ larly the imitative sonnets which T. M. Greene discusses so thoroughly, ‘Erano i capei d’oro a l’aura sparsi’ (poem 90); ‘Or che ’1 del e la terra e ’1 vento tace’ (poem 264); ‘Quel rosignuol che si soave piagne’ (poem 3 11);27 but also less well-known poems (30; 166; 186; 40-3).28 There was also Petrarch’s more positive, but completely un­ founded, view of the Sicilian origins of vernacular lyric as a kind of Renaissance of ancient ‘Saturnian’ rhymed verse: Quod genus, apud Siculos, ut fama est, non multis ante seculis renatum, brevi per omnem Italiam ac longius manavit, apud Grecorum olim ac Latinorum vetustissimos celebratum; siquidem et Athicos et Romanos vulgares rithmico tantum carmine uti solitos accepimus. (Fam. 1. 1. 6) (This genre, which is said to have been reborn in Sicily not long ago, and then quickly spread throughout the whole of Italy and beyond, was famous in antiquity amongst the most ancient Greeks and Latins, for we know that the only poetry enjoyed by both the native Attic and Roman peoples was rhymed poetry.)29

But even here, poetry in the volgare is seen as a renaissance not of classical poetry itself, but of an earlier and inferior genre. Petrarch’s fullest statements of his views on the two languages are to be found in two letters. The first is the famous letter to 26 On poem 34, see M. Santagata, Iframmenti dell’anima. Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere del Petrarca (Bologna, 1992), 137-41; and for the concluding poems of the various redactions of the Canzoniere, see Santagata’s Tables, ibid. 347-8. 27 T. M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Conn., 1982), 1 11—26. 28 See P. Hainsworth, Petrarch the Poet (London, 1988), 65—9. 29 Petrarch’s use of the word renatum here appears to be the first instance of this precise metaphor in a literary context: see M. L. McLaughlin, ‘Humanist Concepts of Renaissance and Middle Ages in the Tre- and Quattrocento’, Renaissance Studies, 2 (1988), 131-42. He would have derived his knowledge of Saturnian verse from Horace, Ep. 2. 1. 157 ff.: ‘Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis I intulit agresti Latio. Sic horridus ille I defluxit numerus Saturnius . . . ’ (‘When Greece was captured [by the Romans], it in turn captivated the victors, and first introduced the arts into rustic Latium. That was how the crude Saturnian rhythm first began to flow . . .’, a favourite passage, cf. above, n. 14); and also from Servius on Virgil’s Georgies 2. 386.

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Boccaccio, written in 1359, in which he denies his envy of Dan­ te’s popularity (Fam. 21. 15). This epistle is a highly ambiguous document in which praise of Dante and the volgare is hedged about by qualifications and criticism. He starts with the basic antithesis that in the Divina Commedia Dante is ‘popular’ in lan­ guage, but noble in subject (‘popularis quidem quod ad stilum attinet, quod ad rem hauddubie nobilis poete’ (‘he is popular as far as the \Commedia’s] style is concerned, but as for content he is without doubt a noble poet’), 21. 15. 1); and this antithesis is developed when Petrarch easily concedes the palm for vernacu­ lar eloquence to his predecessor (21. 15. 13), but then points out that those who champion a vernacular Dante against the Latin Petrarch are a double liability: they have no critical knowledge of why the Commedia is a great work, and they constantly mis­ pronounce and corrupt Dante’s poetry (21. 15. 14-18). This emphasis on the distortion of the sound of the poetry is at one with Petrarch’s acoustic concerns in both languages. But it is the stress on the unlearned nature of the vernacular audience which allows Petrarch to drive a wedge between the two cultures: how could Petrarch envy Dante, unless perhaps people believe he envies the raucous applause Dante receives from the dyers, inn­ keepers, woolworkers, and the rest, whose appreciation is denied to Petrarch, Homer, and Virgil (‘nisi forte sibi fullonum et cauponum et lanistarum ceterorumve . . . plausum et raucum murmur invideam, quibus cum ipso Virgilio cumque Homero carere me gratulor’ (‘unless perhaps I am to envy him the ap­ plause and raucous approval of the dyers, innkeepers, and woolworkers: I do not have their approval, but nor did Virgil or Homer, and I congratulate myself on that’ , 21. 15. 22)).303 1This association of Dante with an unlearned public is the most im­ portant sentence in the whole letter, as it divorces the two ele­ ments that Dante’s enterprise had tried to unite: the volgare and Virgil, vernacular culture and the classical tradition. It is also the source of the subsequent humanist abuse of Dante as a ‘poeta da calzolai’.3' 30 lanistarum is translated as ‘lottatori’ in Prose, i o i i , but p. 1012, n. 2 suggests that it may mean ‘woolworkers’. This is confirmed by the later mention of ‘lanarii’ by later humanists writing on the same topic. See the next note. 31 Boccaccio, in his later redaction of the Trattatello in laude di Dante (in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, iii (Milan, 1974), 512), transformed the idea

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37

In the centre of the letter Petrarch mentions the topic of imitation explicitly. When he admits that he never acquired a copy o f Dante’s works, he specifies that the motive was not jealousy, as his detractors claim, but rather a determination to avoid unwitting imitation of his predecessor (21. 15. 11). Any similarities between his vernacular verse and Dante’s are purely fortuitous, or are due to that similarity of intellect mentioned by Cicero in De Oratore 2. 152, a passage asterisked by Petrarch in his Cicero manuscript.32 He claims always to have avoided lit­ erary theft or imitation particularly in the vernacular, as though they were two perilous reefs (‘non id furtim aut imitandi proposito, que duo semper in his maxime vulgaribus ut scopulos declinavi’ (‘if I used the same words this was not due to plagiar­ ism or imitation on my part, two faults which I have avoided like perilous reefs, especially in the vernacular’), 21. 15. 12). In fact, there are a considerable number of echoes of Dante in Petrarch, though we shall also see evidence that Petrarch is faithful in practice to his principle of avoiding verbatim imitation. The second letter (Sen. 5. 2), also to Boccaccio, was written later, around 1366. He says that in his youth he had turned to the vernacular because Latin literature had seemed so rich that to Dante’s credit, claiming that the Florentines’ maltreatment of Dante demon­ strated their incapacity to distinguish between ‘un vilissimo calzolaio’ and a ‘solenne poeta’ (see C. Paolazzi, ‘Petrarca, Boccacccio e il Trattatello in laude di Dante*, Studi danteschi, 55 (1983), 165-249). Bruni puts the insult about ‘lanariis, pistoribus’ , and ‘lanarii, sutores atque proxenetae’ into Niccoli’s mouth in his Dialogi ad Petrurn Paulum Histrum, in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. E. Garin (Milan, 1952), 70, 84. Later, in his dispute with Biondo about the two languages, Bruni characterizes vernacular speakers as ‘pistores et lanistae et huiusmodi turbae’ and as ‘nutrices et mulierculas’ (in M. Tavoni, Latino, grammatica, volgare. Storia di una questione umanistica (Padua, 1984), 217-18). Poggio in a similar context talks of ‘cerdones, sutores, cocos’ (Poggio Bracciolini, Opera Omnia, ed. R. Fubini (4 vols; Turin, 1964-9, i. 52). Cino Rinuccini and Filelfo defend Dante against the accusation o f ‘poeta da calzolai’ in the first half of the Quattrocento; while Domenico da Prato attacks humanists who say that Dante’s book should be given to the spice merchants for use as wrapping paper, or the fish-sellers for wrapping salted fish. For the context of these disputes, see A. Lanza, Polemiche e berte letterarie nella Firenze del primo Quattrocento (1375-1449) (2nd edn., Rome, 1989). 32 ‘similitudine illius divini ingenii in eadem incurris vestigia’ (De Or. 2. 152), is clearly echoed in ‘similitudine ingeniorum, ut Tullio videtur, iisdem vestigiis ab ignorante concursum’ (Fam. 21. 15. 12), though neither Blanc, ‘Petrarque lecteur de Ciceron’, nor the note in Rossi’s and Bosco’s apparatus (Petrarca, Le familiari, ed. V. Rossi and U. Bosco (4 vols.; Florence, 1933-42), iv. 96) identifies this passage as the one alluded to in Fam. 21. 15. 12.

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there was nothing left for the young writer to add. Since the new literature was by comparison virgin territory, Petrarch had de­ voted himself to it with enthusiasm, even beginning a major work in it; but when he realized that the enthusiasts of the volgare were not learned and they mispronounced poetry when reciting it, he abandoned the project.33 The ‘magnum opus’ begun was probably the Trionfi, though the phrase may refer to the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. In many of his attitudes Petrarch imitates classical poses: thus his contempt for the vulgus stems from some­ thing in his own personality, but it found endorsement in the elitism that characterized the new humanist movement, and it borrowed from Horace the motto ‘Odi profanum vulgus’.343 5But there appears to be no classical parallels for his anxiety about the ‘mangling and distortion’ (‘discerpi. . . laceratum i r i . . . lament’, Opera, 795), of vernacular verse in recitation, which suggests that it was something deeply rooted in his psyche, and was no doubt connected with his sensitivity to the sonorous qualities of verse. The only possible parallel is the pair of an­ ecdotes in Sacchetti about the mispronunciation of the Divina Commedia?5 I f we examine Petrarch’s Latin in practice, we shall find him largely faithful to the imitative precepts outlined above: he ini­ tiates, but does not fully execute, a general return to classical standards of Latinity, particularly in epistolography, though his Latin remains ‘medieval’ in some respects. In both poetry and prose his style was clearly revolutionary: his contemporaries found the Latin of the Bucolicum Carmen too lofty (‘altior in Bucolicis stilus’, Sen. 2. 1), while in prose canon lawyers wanted him to write something in a plainer style, that suited the ‘planities legistarum’ (‘the plain language of lawyers’, Fam. 14. 2. 3). Indeed this loftiness was what prevented Petrarch from obtaining a post in the Papal Curia in Avignon: ‘unum obstare dicebatur quod stilus michi altior esset quam romane sedis humilitas postularet’ (‘it was said that the one thing that stood in my way was that 33 The letter appears as Sen. 5. 3 in Opera Omnia, 793-6 (795). 34 Horace’s tag is quoted countless times by Petrarch: see Epistule Metrice 2. 11; Fam. 10. 4. 4; 24. 10. 114. 35 F. Sacchetti, Trecentonovelle, ed. V. Pernicone (Florence, 1946), nos. C X IV CX V: ‘e tramestava i versi suoi, smozzicando e appiccando .. (p. 254) may cor­ respond to Petrarch’s ‘discerpere, lacerare, laniare’.

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39

my style was loftier than that required by the humility of the see of Rome’, Fam. 13. 5). This last letter offers a scathing critique o f ‘medieval’ Latin. O f the three styles mentioned by Cicero (Ad Her. 4. 8. 11), Petrarch feels that the level of Latin employed in the past thousand years falls even below the ‘stilus humilis’ of antiquity. It is the lofty quality of classical and Petrarchan Latin that is at the root of his quarrel with the Aristotelians. In the preface to the De sui Ipsius et Multorum lgnorantia, he reminds his opponents that Aristotle taught rhetoric as well as philosophy, but his followers have so forgotten his ideals that they consider eloquence as inimical to philosophy (Opera, 1037); for this reason the Latin Aristotle lacks the ‘verborum faces’ (‘stylistic splen­ dours’) which are so visible in Cicero, Seneca, or Horace (Prose, 744-6).36 Here Petrarch anticipates one of the major querelles of the next century, that concerning the correct style for philo­ sophical works. On this topic, as on the question of the correct style for historiography, Petrarch is convinced of the compatibil­ ity, indeed the necessity, of stylistic elegance even in technical areas such as philosophy and history.37 In general, then, Petrarch aims at a consciously elaborate level of Latin in both prose and verse. His Latin works are written for an intellectual elite, though he deliberately cultivates a less lofty style in two genres. One was the series of dialogues, De Remediis Utriusque Fortune, in which he was pursuing a more common style of dialogue, since it was aimed more at the com­ mon man than at philosophers (‘vulgatum et publicatum loquendi morem secutus, quod michi ad vulgares sepius quam ad philosophos sermo esset’ (‘I followed a more common and every­ day style, since my discourse was directed more often at the common man than at philosophers’), Opera, 837). The other genre that he felt should be written in a plainer mode was the epistle. In the introductory letter to the Familiares he warns that 36 He makes a similar point in the Rerum Memorandarum Libri (2. 31. 8), claiming that contemporary Aristotelians consider good style and philosophy as mutually exclusive: ‘quasi in altis rebus nulla verborum claritas possit habitare, cum contra sublimem potius scientiam altus deceat stilus’ (‘as if clarity of style were not possible in lofty matters, whereas on the contrary sublime subject-matter requires the high style’) in Rerum Memorandarum Libri, ed. G. Billanovich (Florence, 1943), 65. 37 He admires Livy’s work not least for its proximity to rhetoric: ‘ab arte eloquentie non multum abesse [videtur]’ (‘ [Livy’s History] seems not too remote from the art of eloquence’ , ibid. 1. 18 (18)).

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he does not use the grand style in these epistles, but that he is imitating Cicero who rejected ‘magna vis dicendi’ in his letters and philosophical works (Fam. i. i. 14). Instead Petrarch char­ acterizes his epistolary style here as ‘hoc mediocre domesticum et familiare dicendi genus’ (‘this everyday, middle style which is used for writing to friends’, 1. 1. 16), which suits the everyday content of the letters.38 He has, however, removed much of the trivia from the original copy of the letters, thereby imitating Seneca, who had criticized Cicero for including philosophical, ephemeral, and political material in his collections (Ep. 118. 1-2). Nevertheless, Petrarch has kept enough of the variety of topics in his letters to feel that his epistles are closer to Cicero’s than to Seneca’s.39 I f we examine his epistolary practice, we can see that Petrarch is conscious of using a Latin very different from that of his contemporaries. On many occasions he proclaims his use of the tu instead of vos form of address as an emblem of his return to the Ciceronian usage he had discovered in the Epistolae ad Atticum (Fam. 23. 14; Sen. 16. 1). On one occasion, when wanting to say ‘In Babylon I have a great friend, one worthy of particular veneration’, he writes ‘Magnum amicum cultuque precipuo colendum Babilone habeo’, whereas his contemporaries would have said ‘habeo singularem verendumque dominum’ (Fam. 13. 6. 30). Petrarch sees his phrase as a return to a classical style (‘prisco et ingenuo loquendi more’), and cites Cicero’s similar description of Pompey, and Pliny’s mention of Vespasian. The unclassical ‘verendum dominum’ he castigates as belonging to the modern, servile style; and he presumably also objects to 38 Similarly Leon Battista Alberti in Della famiglia contrasts his plain, dialogic style, ‘ragionare domestico e familiare’ (in Opere Volgari, ed. C. Grayson (3 vols.; Bari, 1960-73), i. 62), with the more subtle style of philosophical writers (ibid. i.

84 )-

39 Despite these claims, it was recognized by the end of the fifteenth century that, if not in content, at least in style, Petrarch’s epistles were much closer to Seneca’s than to Cicero’s. See, for instance, G. Squarzafico’s comments: ‘Stylus eius copiosus est et magnus, in consolando dulcis et in admonendo liber. Interdum iocatur salibus, sed ubique restrictus, ut ille qui magis Senecae densitatem quam Ciceronis amplitudinem imitatur, unde persaepe ex hoc recentiorem Senecam ipsum appellaverim’ (‘His style is excellent and copious, gentle when consoling the reader, uninhibited when admonishing him. At times he writes with wit, but throughout he is rather restrained in style, being someone who imitates more Seneca’s density than Cicero’s abundance, so that because of this I would have often called him a second Seneca’ , Petrarca, Opera Omnia, fo. 6r of the introduction).

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using the verb habeo at the beginning rather than at the end of the sentence. Yet elsewhere he knowingly uses the verb illuminare in its medieval sense o f ‘to illuminate manuscripts’ (Fam. 18. 5. 5), and intercedere in its medieval meaning of ‘to intercede’, not in its ancient sense: ‘loquor autem nostro more, non veterum, apud quos intercedere impedire est’ (‘here I use it in the modern sense, not the one used by the ancients for whom intercedere means to prevent’, 16. 10. 1). Petrarch is keen, then, to distinguish his style from that of scholastic writers or the writers of dictamen; but he is not prepared to confine himself to classical lexis or usage, far less to restrict himself to the words of one single author, as the Ciceronianists would do. Instead he is willing to use words in their contemporary, non-classical sense; he employs many words not found in classical authors; and especially in the epis­ tles uses many diminutives. One letter to Tommaso da Messina opens with the diminutives ‘seniculum’ (found only in Apuleius), ‘corpusculum’, and ‘palliolum’ (an archaism cited by Cicero); and this is followed by a quotation of twenty lines from Plautus’ Aulularia, and an allusion to the opening of Apuleius’ Metamor­ phoses (Fam. 1. 10). The use of diminutives, as well as archaic and late Latin lexis, would be seen at the end of the Quattrocento as the badge of the anti-Ciceronianists. The few analyses that have been carried out on Petrarch’s Latin style tend to confirm these general conclusions. Martellotti showed that Petrarch’s distinctions in Latin were synchronic rather than diachronic: he was exercised more by the differences between vulgar, scholastic, and learned Latin than by any no­ tion of confining correct Latinity within any one period.40 Hence he approved equally of the style of Cicero, Apuleius, and the Church Fathers. He was not inclined to separate prosaic from poetic lexis, hence we find whole periods of Livy versified in the Africa, and conversely many poetic words used in his prose. In terms of syntax, he is more classical than Dante in using the accusative and the infinitive rather than the medieval quod after verbs of saying; yet he is still tied to the medieval idea that fore has a present not a future connotation, and he famously misuses sui in the full title of the De . . . Ignorantia. Rizzo’s work has con­ firmed that Petrarch’s revisions to his Familiares moved in the 40 ‘Latinita del Petrarca’.

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general direction of a return to classical standards (the elimina­ tion of medievalisms such as deiformius, lator presentium, scio quod, quatenus for ut, etc.), but concluded that one must talk of ‘il particolarissimo latino petrarchesco . . . la sua non rigorosa classicita’.4' Like Martellotti, she also noted Petrarch’s tendency to substitute poetic terms such as equor for mare, ensis for gladius, and in syntax his preference for hypotaxis over parataxis, for the subjunctive over the indicative, and for simple verbs over com­ pounds. But the most striking point in Rizzo’s study is the con­ trast between the Latin of the Familiares and contemporary epistolography influenced by dictamen. The exchange between the Imperial secretary Jan ze Streda and Petrarch is exemplary: the secretary’s first letter, sent in 1353, not only uses the vos form, but is studded with ornate but unclassical lexis prized by the artes dictandi. The first sentence alone is indicative of the tenor of the whole letter: Magister et domine, Utinam Parnasei fluminis delicato liquore et Pegasei roris aspergine lingua scribentis imbuta germine fecundo Eliconi collis fructus uberes et Apollinis Delphici grata thumiamata degustare valeret, tanto et tam famoso magistro rethorici carminis oblectamine locutura!42 (Master and lord, I would that the tongue of this writer were bathed in the delicate waters of the river of Parnassus and were sprinkled with the drops of the Pegasean stream, and that it were capable o f savouring the fertile fruits which grow from the fecund seeds on Mount Helicon and the pleasant incense of Delphic Apollo, since it has to address such a great and famous master in the delights of rhetoric and poetry!)

By comparison, Petrarch’s reply (Fam. 10. 6) is a model of classical sobriety and clarity, eschewing the medieval forms of address, such as magister, domine, vos, as well as the unclassical abstracts which obviously appealed to Streda (aspergine, thumiamata, oblectamine). It is worth adding that the correspondence between the two men continued for a number of years,43 and that even­ tually the difference in style is made explicit. In March 1358 Petrarch points out that Jan should not be amazed at Petrarch’s Latin, unless he would be amazed by Cicero’s own style (21. 5. 5). 41 S. Rizzo, ‘II latino del Petrarca nelle Familiari\ in A. C. Dionisotti, A. Grafton, and J. Kraye (eds.), The Uses of Greek and Latin (London, 1988), 41—56 (55). 42 Petrarcas Briefwechsel mit Deutschen Zeitgenossen, ed. P. Piur (Berlin, 1933), 21. 43 The chronology of the letters has been established in U. Dotti, Petrarca e la scoperta della coscienza modema (Milan, 1978), 165-74.

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By autumn of 1362 Petrarch is prepared to open a letter to the Chancellor expressing great amazement at the strange Chancery style (‘novus . . . insolitus stilus erat’ (23. 14. 1)), in this case Jan’s medieval use of the vos form of address. Instead Petrarch is proud of being the only, or at least the first writer in Italy to have reversed this effeminate trend and returned to the purity of ancient Latin (23. 14. 2). It is worth noting that when it is possible to examine Petrarch’s stylistic alterations in other Latin works, the results confirm Martellotti’s and Rizzo’s conclusions of Petrarch moving gener­ ally in the direction of classical clarity. For instance, between the earliest and final redaction of the Vita Scipionis44 he tends to reject unclassical compound verbs for their simple equivalent: ‘subridens’ becomes ‘ridens’ (p. 163), ‘intendebant’ is altered to ‘tendebant’ (p. 182), ‘inardescens’ to ‘ardescens’ (p. 225), and ‘retraheretur’ becomes ‘traheretur’ (p. 227). However, Petrarch did not eliminate all ‘medievalisms’ from his epistles. In Seniles 4. 2, written in 1364 to Pietro da Moglio, he deliberately uses the term ‘galeas’ for galleys and coins ‘discursus’ for a horse race, a kind of Venetian Palio, and ‘concursus’ for a joust. The term commonly used by the French for joust (‘hastiludium’) is inaccurate, he notes, since the joust is more of a contest than a game.45 In the practice of writing Latin, then, as in theory, Petrarch is an eclectic; he borrows words from a wide range of authors, and employs a syntax that has both classical and medieval ele­ ments in it. Yet he feels that his Latin is strikingly different from that of his contemporaries. For him the major divergence is that 44 The examples which follow are from Petrarca, La vita di Scipione I’Africano, ed. G. Martellotti (Milan, 1954). 45 ‘longarum navium quas galeas vocant. . . Quibus [ludis] ego nunc propria nomina latina non habeo, dicam tamen ut intelliges. Alter nempe discursus, alter concursus, ut arbitror, dici potest. . . non sat proprie “ hastiludium” Galli vocant, quod nomen primo magis convenit, illo enim vere luditur, hoc certatur’ (‘warships which they now call “ galleys” . . . For these [tournaments] I have no correct Latin terms now, but I shall write so that you understand my meaning. One is a kind of parade, the other a genuine contest. . . the French are not correct in calling it “ hastiludium” [“joust” ], because that is more suited to the first kind where they are really just playing, in the other type there is a real struggle’, Opera, 782-3). Other medievalisms appear to have been used less consciously: the editors of the first edition of the Fam. (1492) had to substitute ‘barbaric’ locutions such as ‘ambasciatoribus Iliensium’ and ‘guerrae’ with ‘legatis Iliensium’ and ‘bellis’ respectively— see De Nolhac, Petrarque et Vhumanisme, i. 226 n. 1.

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the Latin of his epistles lacks the flowery ornateness of the writ­ ers of dictamen, while in his other works his style is certainly more lofty than the barbarism of scholastic terminology. Humanists of the next century would develop in particular his cult of classical clarity. Petrarch’s poetic practice in the vernacular is remarkably faithful to both his imitative theory and practice in Latin. Fubini illustrated how Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta 216 was rewritten by Petrarch in a way that excised the echoes of Dante (‘da le fatiche loro’ at the beginning of a line, as in Inf. 2. 3; ‘Quanti dolci anni, lasso perdut’aggio! I Quanto desio . . .’ too similar to ‘Oh lasso! I Quanti dolci pensier, quanto desio . . .’ of Inf. 5. 112-13).46 He also noted the echo of Virgil in ‘quando piglian riposo i miseri m ortali. . .’ (cf. ‘Tempus erat quo prima quies mortalibus aegris I incipit. . .’ (‘It was the time when the first rest begins to descend on weary mortals . . .’), Aeneid 2. 268-9), as well as showing that ‘di questa morte che si chiama vita’ in the definitive version is a reworking of a Ciceronian phrase (cf. ‘Vestra . . . quae dicitur vita mors est’ (‘what you call life is really death’), De Re Publica 6. 14). But he did not infer the general point that classical imi­ tations are retained and even enhanced in the second version, in contrast to the vernacular echoes, which are eliminated. The imitative rationale behind the rewriting of this sonnet is ex­ plained in Familiares 21. 15. 12, where Petrarch stresses that he is particularly keen to avoid verbatim imitation especially in the vernacular (‘in his maxime vulgaribus’); whereas even an almost direct translation of a line from Virgil or Cicero does not offend him, presumably because by the very act of using the volgare he is faithful to his precept of using different words from the model.47 Similar processes emerge in other poems for which we have variants in his autograph manuscript (Vat. Lat. 3196).48 The 46 M. Fubini, ‘II Petrarca artefice’, in his Studi sulla letteratura del Rinascimento (Florence, 1947), 1—12. 47 Cf. Hainsworth’s conclusion on the echo of Ovid in 264. 91-2 (‘Quel ch’io fo veggio, e non m’inganna il vero I mal conosciuto, anzi mi sforza Amore’, echoing Ovid, Met. 7. 92-3: ‘Quid faciam video, nec me ignorantia veri I decipiet, sed amor’): ‘Citation ceased to be citation by the mere fact of translation . . in Petrarch the Poet,

85-

48 The examples of variants in what follows are taken from A. Romano, II codice degli abbozzi (Vat. Lat. gig6) di Francesco Petrarca (Rome, 1955).

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original opening line of the important first canzone after Laura’s death (RVF 268) was ‘Amore in pianto ogni mio riso e volto’. Against this opening line and the seven others that followed Petrarch noted in his rough manuscript (Vat. Lat. 3196): ‘non videtur satis triste principium’ (‘this does not seem a sad enough beginning’). Before reaching the definitive ‘Che debb’io far? Che mi consigli, Amore?’, he tried ‘Che faccio omai? Che mi consigli, Amore’, which was presumably altered because just too imita­ tive of a Latin poem cited by Aulus Gellius (Nodes Atticae 19. 9. 14): ‘Quid ago? Da, Venus, consilium’ (‘What shall I do? Give me some advice, Venus’). In several places in this manuscript Petrarch’s sensitivity to verbal repetition (a form of self-imitatio) and sound is evident. In the first two lines of Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta 321 he is worried about the repetition of the words, not of the thought: ‘attende in hoc repetitionem verborum non sententiarum’. Contini showed that ‘E questo ’1 nido in che la mia fenice I mise l’aurate et le purpuree penne’ (321) was too close verbally to the phrase in the next but one poem (‘Una strana fenice, ambedue l’ale I di porpora vestita’ , 323. 49-50), as well as to the other phoenix sonnet (‘Questa fenice de l’aurata piuma . . .’, 185).49 At several points in 268 he is concerned with eliminating repetitions: in the original line 20 he fears that ‘Ahi mondo ingrato et rio’ reuses the adjective which had already appeared in line 6 (‘quest’anni acerbi et rei’); in the original version of lines of 41-4 the fourfold repetition o f ‘piu’ is noted: ‘attende piu’;5° in 76-7 he is anxious about overusing the rhymes ‘rischiari— chiari’: ‘sed alias hos rithmos in cantilenis nostris crebro nimis.’5’ Against the line ‘fonti, fiumi, montagne, boschi e sassi’ (Trionfo d’Amore 3. 114) he notes ‘Attende similem pedem in cantilenam oculorum et in ilia A la dolce ombra’: i.e. it is too close to ‘O poggi, o valli, o4 1 0 5 9 49 G. Contini, ‘Saggio d’un commento alle correzioni del Petrarca volgare’, in Varianti e altra linguistica. Una raccolta di saggi (ig^8-68) (Turin, 1970), 5-31. 50 In the sonnet analysed by Fubini, the critic pointed out how in rewriting it Petrarch eliminated the repeated ‘lasso’ of lines 1 and 12, and the ‘quanti’ and ‘quanto’ of lines 12 and 13. But Petrarch must also have been dissatisfied with the quadruple repetition o f‘piu’ in the space of three lines (‘con piu pensieri raddoppiarsi i mali, I e duolmi piu che sian meco immortali, I sempre piu iieta vita piu sperando5,

11. 6 - 8) . 51 See M. Vitale, ‘Le correzioni linguistiche del Petrarca nel CanzoniereStudi linguistici italiani, 14 (1988), 3-37.

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fiumi, o selve, o campi’ (71. 37) and ‘Selve, sassi, campagne, fiumi et poggi’ (142. 25).52 As for sound quality, again 268 offers interesting evidence: line 67 proceeds from ‘Frena l’impeto ardente che ti sprona’, to ‘Pon fren al fiero duol che ti trasporta’, to the definitive ‘Pon fren al gran dolor che ti trasporta’, which last version receives the acoustic approval: ‘Hie placet quia sonantior.’ The adjective must refer both to the improved rhythm over the first attempt, and to the marginally better variety of stressed vowel sounds compared with the second (e-a-o-i-o as opposed to e-e-o-i-o). This sensitivity to sound is at its most evident when he notes on Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta 155 that he changed the order of the quatrains because otherwise the better sounding phrases would have been in the middle, the harsher sounds at the beginning and the end, which goes against rhetorical exigencies (‘quia sonantiora erant in medio, rauciora in principio et fine quod est contra rethoricam’).53 Petrarch’s pursuit of clarity and that middle elegance typical of his Latin style can also be inferred from his vernacular revi­ sions. His rejection of the technical terminology typical of the dolce stil novo poets is a vernacular parallel to his critique of the ‘barbaric’ Latin of the scholastic philosophers. Contini high­ lighted both Petrarch’s move away from prosaic syntax at one end of the register, and his elimination of philosophical terms at the other: ‘spiriti’ is used much less frequently than in Dante and Cavalcanti, ‘angelicamente’ becomes ‘soavemente’ (159), and other stilnovistic terms such as ‘celeste’, ‘angelico’, ‘soave’, ‘parere’ are used more sparingly.54 The poems relegated to the Rime disperse are indicative of the two extremes which Petrarch rejected: at one end there is the colloquial tone of ‘Se Febo al 52 Gorni suggests that such lines are possibly imitations of Latin poets, and that Petrarch himself uses them in his own Latin poems, such as Ep. Metr. i. 2. 15: ‘seditione, dolis, scelere atque libidine et ira’— see G. Gorni, ‘Metamorfosi e redenzione in Petrarca. II senso della forma Correggio del Canzoniere’, Lettere italiane, 30 (1978), 3-13 (esp. 5-6 n. 3). 53 On this poem, see Hainsworth, Petrarch the Poet, 181-2. The minor alterations made in his vernacular verse, and the concern for what sounds ‘sonantior’, is par­ alleled by his elimination of the conjunction et in Bucolicum Carmen to produce a phrase that is similar rather than identical to one of Horace’s, yet at the same time it too becomes ‘sonantior’— see Mann, “ ‘O Deus, qualis epistola!” ’, 239 n. 2. 54 See G. Contini, ‘Preliminari sulla lingua del Petrarca’, in Varianti e altra linguistica, 167-92.

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primo amor non e bugiardo’ which prevents it from being in­ cluded,55 at the other there is the canzone to Azzo da Correggio, which discusses the Aristotelian concept of ‘intellettiva conoscenza’. Contini’s insistence on Petrarch’s ‘unilinguismo’ and ‘unita di tono e di lessico’, as opposed to Dante’s ‘plurilinguismo’ and ‘pluralita di toni’, is borne out by these vernacular rewritings, but the term ‘unilinguismo’ could also be applied to his stylistic ideal in Latin, as could his definition of Petrarch’s poetic lan­ guage: ‘il grafico del linguaggio petrarchesco rimane tracciato chiaro, verso la sincera semplicita certo . . . ma un gradino piu in su.’56 Greene pointed out that one of the major differences between Dante and Petrarch was that in Inferno 4 Dante was welcomed into the company of the classical poets, whereas Petrarch tends more to stress his distance and sense of exclusion from the clas­ sical writers.57 This sense of exclusion is due to his superior knowledge of and sensitivity to Latin literature. His views on imitation, when compared with Dante’s, also reveal the cultural distance between the two writers. In Dante there is general approval of the principle of imitatio, though it is applied solely to the vernacular and without any details of how it might work in practice. Petrarch agrees with his classical sources on the role of imitation in the creative process. Theoretically he is concerned more with how it works in Latin than in the volgare, and he goes into detail about what kind of imitative similarity should be sought. But overall Petrarch is apprehensive of the negative ef­ fects of imitation, insisting that the writer’s individual contribu­ tion should be apparent, and that verbatim imitation should be avoided. Dante in the Vita Nuova, Convivio, and De Vulgari Eloquentia had approved of imitation of classical authors in their use of rhetorical figures, moral message, and lofty style; but a synthesis of Petrarch’s views on the subject suggests that he is in favour of only the first two areas of imitation: ‘utendum igitur alieno ingenio utendumque coloribus, abstinendum verbis’ (‘we should use other writers’ thoughts and rhetorical figures but avoid their words’, Fam. 23. 19. 13). In Dante Cicero is not mentioned at all as a stylistic model, yet in Petrarch we find the first embryonic 55 See Hainsworth, Petrarch the Poet, 21. 56 Baggio d’un commento’, 9. 57 Greene, The Light in Troy, 28-32.

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elements of Ciceronianism. Clearly Petrarch did not have that sensitivity to different periods of Latinity that would be evident in later humanists, but he was aware of a canon of major and minor auctores, and possessed a sharp sensitivity to what distin­ guished his own Latin from contemporary alternative models of scholastic language or the artes dictandi. Petrarch was to become the most influential cultural paradigm for the next century or so after his death, and his implicitly eclectic imitation of classical authors would remain the stylistic norm for future humanists until the second half of the Quattrocento.

3

BOCCACCIO Although Giovanni Boccaccio (1314-75) was Petrarch’s disci­ ple, in some respects he advanced further along the road of humanism than his master. He was more familiar with Greek, for a start, and eventually gained knowledge of a wider range of classical authors than his predecessor. Like Petrarch, he had read Quintilian and Apuleius;' indeed he felt so strongly at­ tracted to Apuleius’ style that he transcribed his complete works in his own hand (now Laurentian MS Plut. 54. 32), and allowed the African author significantly to influence both his Latin and his vernacular writings. Boccaccio also came into possession of Tacitus’ historical works, though in this case there appears to be no evidence of stylistic influence.2Boccaccio, then, was acquainted with Greek, with Quintilian, Apuleius, and Tacitus— in other words with the four elements which would become the main sources of anti-Ciceronian Latin in the next century. His stylis­ tic trajectory in both languages moves from the baroque influ­ ences of Greek and Apuleius to the more sober eclecticism of Petrarch. After meeting Petrarch in person in 1351 and reading his Latin epistles, Boccaccio moves away from the vernacular to embrace Latin as the sole linguistic medium, and away from poetry to the exclusive use of prose.3 Boccaccio often exploits his wide knowledge of Latin authors, but, except for his early Latin works, any imitation is in terms of subject-matter; and since he offers no theoretical statements on imitation, Boccaccio’s use of previous writers is more often to be analysed in terms of his literary sources than his stylistic models.4 The one area which offers a substantial amount of 1 C. C. Coulter, ‘Boccaccio’s Knowledge of Quintilian’, Speculum, 33 (1958), 490-6. 2 See V. Zaccaria, ‘Boccaccio e Tacito’, in G. Tournoy (ed.), Boccaccio in Europe: Proceedings of the Boccaccio Conference, Louvain, December igy5 (Louvain, 1977), 221—37. 3 G. Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, i.: Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome, 1947), 135 n. 1. 4 G. Velli, ‘Cultura e imitatio nel primo Boccaccio’, in his Petrarca e Boccaccio. Tradizione, memoria, scrittura (Padua, 1979), 61-96.

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stylistic imitatio is the early Latin epistles, which imitate the Latin of Apuleius and Dante, exhibiting a taste for exotic style that disappears under the influence of Petrarch. I f Apuleius is only a transitory influence on Boccaccio, the two fundamental models, both in his general intellectual aspirations and in his linguistic choices, remain Dante and Petrarch. The first section of this chapter will consider the Latin works, which illustrate this movement from the poetic and ornate to the restrained prose style of the mature Boccaccio; the second section will examine how the vernacular works also fit into this pattern.

i. Boccaccio’s Latin Works In the early Latin works of his Neapolitan period, Boccaccio imitates the paragons of contemporary taste. He follows in gen­ eral the rules of dictamen, in particular some letters of Dante, and embellishes these early epistles with lexical rarities drawn chiefly from Apuleius. The significance of Dante’s letters as models is apparent not only in these youthful exercises but also in his autograph zibaldone (Laurentian MS Plut. 29. 8) in which he transcribed three of Dante’s epistles (Dante, Ep. 3; 11; 12).5 It is Dante’s letter to Cino da Pistoia {Ep. 3) and his letter to Moroello Malaspina (Ep. 4), which Boccaccio probably tran­ scribed elsewhere, that exercise the strongest influence on his youthful compositions, the four epistles written in 1339.6 The first letter is addressed to Carlo, Duca di Durazzo, but was probably merely a rhetorical exercise, addressed to a ficti­ tious prince. It is obviously modelled on Dante’s letter to Cino (Ep. 3), in that it deals with a hypothetical question, offers the evidence of the same three auctores and in the same order as those cited by Dante in resolving a different question (Ovid, Seneca, the Old Testament), and implies that a vernacular poem is enclosed. Boccaccio offers a slight variatio in that, whereas Dante had cited from O vid’s Metamorphoses and Seneca’s De Remediis, he quotes from the Tristia and the De Clementia. The similarity of content is matched by verbal echoes: Dante had 5 G. Billanovich, Restauri boccacceschi (Rome, 1945), 49 n. 1. 6 G. Boccaccio, Epistole 1-4, in Open latine minori, ed. A. F. Massera (Bari, 1928), 109-24.

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called the slings of fortune ‘Rhamnusie spicula’, but Boccaccio embellishes this to make it ‘Sed sevientis Raynusie causa, ac atrocitatis Gupidinis importune’ (‘But because of the onslaught of Rhamnusian Nemesis, and the relentless ferocity of Cupid’ , p. 109); Dante had enclosed the poem with the words ‘Redditur, ecce, sermo Calliopeus inferius’ (‘The poetic composition is sub­ mitted for your perusal below’), but Boccaccio adds an Apuleian echo to make it ‘prout parvus et exoticus sermo, caliopeo moderamine constitutus, vestre magnificentie declarabit inferius’ (‘as the brief, unusual composition, drawn up under the rules of Calliope, will declare below to your magnificence’).7 This first epistle also contains other Apuleian words and phrases (‘lacrimas centuculo desiccabo’ (‘I will dry off my tears with a little cloth’), ‘rude desultoriumque eloquium’ (‘unpolished, impromptu eloquence’) ), the diminutive ‘questiunculam’, as well as other unclassical locu­ tions ‘Crepor celsitudinis’, ‘cristibie’, ‘balluce’ (Massera, 109-10). Billanovich demonstrated the imitative scholasticism of the first two epistles, and showed how Boccaccio has inverted the status of the recipients compared to the Dantean models: whereas the first letter, based mostly on Dante’s epistle to the poet Cino, is addressed to a duke, the second, which incorporates large sections of Dante’s epistle to the Malaspina overlord, is directed to the poet Petrarch.8 This second epistle is not so much an imitation as a transciption of whole sentences from Dante, inter­ spersed with phrases from Apuleius. If the style is medieval, so also is the content: praising Petrarch, Boccaccio claims he is another Ockham in logic, in rhetoric he is ‘Tullius et Ulixes’ , in arithmetic he is ‘iordanizans’, in music he is ‘boetizans’, while in history he follows ‘optimum Commestorem’ (p. 113)! By the time he writes the De Vita et Moribus Francisci Petrarchi in the 134.0s, Boccaccio would have read some of Petrarch’s Latin works and begun to absorb the new humanistic ideals in both content and style. Thus in this later encomium Petrarch is praised not inaccurately as the scholar of Ockham, Boethius, and Comestor, 7 cf. ‘praefamur veniam, si quid exotici ac forensis sermonis rudis locutor offendero’ (‘I first ask the reader’s pardon if any foreign or market-place terms uttered by this uneducated speaker offend him’, Apuleius, Met. 1. 1). 8 G. Billanovich, ‘ “ Cum meum dictare non s it . . in Restauri boccacceschi, 49—78. The closeness to Dante’s letter is also emphasized by F. Bruni, Boccaccio. L’ insenzione della letteratura mezzana (Bologna, 1990), 70-1.

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but correctly as the imitator of the classical poets, as well as Cicero and Seneca: ‘Hinc vero morales est phylosophos diligenti studio ymitatus, et maxime M. Tullium Ciceronem et egregium Senecam cordubensem’ (‘After this with diligent study he imitated the moral philosophers, in particular Cicero and famous Seneca of Cordoba’, p. 239). Petrarch’s ‘ciceronianam facundiam’ (p. 224) is lauded, and Boccaccio’s own Latin is much more classical, though some medievalisms survive (‘examinatus’ , ‘laureatione’, ‘clericalem’, ‘presulatus’), as well as a few Apuleianisms (‘fuscositate permixtus’, ‘gerulonum’, ‘exotidice’), and the velox rhythm is prevalent (‘studio ymitatus’, ‘Senecam cordubensem’). The language of the third letter is even more extraordinary: no imitation of Dante, but many Apuleian echoes (‘obgannirier’ , ‘sepicule’ , ‘exanclando’ on the first page alone), and a welter of unclassical terms derived from Greek (‘cathacreto’, ‘cathagorando’, ‘acromata’, etc.). The epistle ends with an explicit ac­ knowledgement of this bizzarre style: ‘Cathagrafavi enim obscure, ne forte prius huius rescripti accipias intellectum, quam patrati scelleris meritum sentias accessisse’ (‘For I have written this obscurely, lest you understand the contents of this letter before hearing that punishment had caught up with the crime that had been committed’, Ep. 3, p. 117). The dominant rhythm, as this passage shows, is the cursus velox, the most artificial of cursus rhythms: ‘accipias intellectum’, ‘sentias accessisse’. The con­ tent, language, and rhythm of this epistle all point to another exercise in dictamen. Although the last of the four letters written in 1339 is less devoted to such devices (it is replete with echoes of the Divina Commedia), it is clear that Boccaccio begins his Latin works as a faithful imitator of Dante’s epistolary style.9 In the 1340s he wrote another epistle, purporting to be by a fra Ilaro who re­ counted the visit of Dante to his monastery, but this too was a juvenile exercise in Latin dictamen, borrowing and reworking phrases from all of Dante’s Latin works.10 Where Boccaccio differs 9 Witt calls Dante ‘the greatest exponent of the oratorical style [of the public letter] in the generation after Latini’— see R. G. Witt, ‘Medieval ars dictaminis and the Beginnings of Humanism: A New Construction of the Problem’, Renaissance Quar­ terly, 35 (1982), 19. 10 G. Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio’, Studi danteschi, 28 (1949), 45-144.

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from his contemporaries is in his impressive assimilation and imitation of Apuleius. However, after his meeting with Petrarch in 1351 and his reading of the Familiares, Boccaccio modified his epistolary style to imitate the more sober, classical Latin of his new master: the new canon of authors contained in the last book of Petrarch’s Familiares converted Boccaccio from being a fol­ lower of Ovid and Apuleius to being an enthusiast of Virgil and Cicero.11 Both in Latin and in the vernacular Boccaccio’s devel­ opment is polarized by his admiration for and imitation of Dante and Petrarch. The fact that he erased his name from these early letters proves how far-reaching were the effects of the Petrarchan revolution in Latin epistolary style. This symbolic disowning of Latin juvenilia is paralleled by Boccaccio’s removal of his name from his vernacular transla­ tions of Livy and Valerius Maximus, by the later repudiation of his amorous works in the volgare (Ep. 21), and, most important of all, by the rewriting of his biography of Dante, the Trattatello in laude di Dante. Before his first meetings with Petrarch in 1350 and 1351, Boccaccio had been an enthusiastic translator from Latin into the vernacular, providing volgarizzamenti of both Valerius Maximus and Petrarch’s favourite historian, Livy.1213But after Petrarch hierarchically separated the two languages and cultures, Boccaccio removed his name from these translations, concurring with his new master’s ideal that such authors should be read only in the original: from now on the only translations tolerated in the new humanist environment would be from Greek into Latin.'3 The changes made in the second redaction of his 11 ‘Questo libretto delle epistole ai classici. . . perfeziono particolarmente la conversione .. . del lettore congeniale di Ovidio e di Apuleio nell’ ammiratore di Cicerone e di Virgilio’ (Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, 107). 12 See M. T. Casella, Tra Boccaccio e Petrarca. I volgarizz.amen.ti di Tito Livio e Valerio Massimo (Padua, 1982). Even if Boccaccio’s authorship for the Third Decade is disputed, most critics now concur that he was the author of the Fourth Decade— see G. Tanturli, ‘Volgarizzamenti e ricostruzione dell’antico. I casi della Terza e Quarta Deca di Tito Livio e di Valerio Massimo, la parte di Boccaccio (a proposito di attribuzione)’, Studi medievali, ser. I ll, 27 (1986), 811-88. 13 On the impropriety of translations into the vernacular, see G. Billanovich, ‘Tra Dante e Petrarca’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 8 (1965), 1-44 (esp. 42-3); and C. Dionisotti, ‘Tradizione classica e volgarizzamenti’, in his Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin, 1967), 103—44 (esp. 115-17). A similar development is visible in the fact that in the 1340s Giovanni Villani can boast about his reading of Latin histo­ rians (Sallust, Livy, Valerius Maximus, and Orosius) in the vernacular (Cronica 8. 36), whereas his nephew Filippo Villani writing in the 1380s will complain about his

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Trattatello are parallel to and, to a certain extent, account for these recantations made by the biographer of Dante under the impact of his meeting with Petrarch.14 The first version was probably written between 1351 and 1355; the second one some time between 1361 and 1363. Ricci outlined the main structural differences between the first (I) and second (II) versions, as well as the major conceptual difference, which was Boccaccio’s attenuated claim in II that poetry was merely similar to theology, whereas in the first redaction he had pro­ claimed that poetry and theology were identical. Most interest­ ing of all, from the point of view of Boccaccio’s literary models, but inexplicable, according to Ricci, was the suppression, in the second redaction, of all mention of Dante’s Epistole, of the title of the Monarchia, and of the number of Latin Eclogues Dante wrote.'5 Carlo Paolazzi, in a seminal article, provided the answer to the question of Boccaccio’s motivation in his downgrading of Dante’s Latin works. In a detailed reconstruction of the rela­ tionship between the two redactions and Petrarch’s 1359 letter to Boccaccio about Dante (Fam. 21. 15), Paolazzi convincingly established that the Petrarch letter is the most influential factor in the rewriting of the Trattatello and that the letter accounts for the implied criticism of Dante’s Latin works in the second redaction.'6 In the light of Petrarch’s segregation of the Latin and volgare public in the letter, Boccaccio did feel free in the second redaction to expand his praise of Dante as a poet in the vernacular (11. 30), since Petrarch had willingly conceded Dante’s excellence in the volgare; but he was forced to moderate other claims which had aligned Dante too closely with humanist, Latin uncles’ vernacular chronicles (‘rem non fecere bellissimam’)— see Giovanni Villani, Cronica. Con le continuazioni di Matteo e Filippo, ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia (Turin, 1979) 5 78; and F. Villani De Origine Civitatis Florentie et de eiusdem Famosis Civibus, ed. G. C. Galletti (Florence, 1847), 40. 14 This oscillation between Dante and Petrarch as models is defined as ‘il movimento fondamentale nella biografia intellettuale e artistica del Boccaccio’, by Billanovich, ‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio’, 54 n. 2. 15 See P. G. Ricci’s ‘Introduzione’ to his critical edition of the Trattatello, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, iii (Milan, 1974), 425-35 (esp. 431— 5)* 16 C. Paolazzi, ‘Petrarca, Boccaccio e il Trattatello in laude di Dante', Studi danteschi, 55 (r 983), 165-249, now in C. Paolazzi, Dante e la ‘Comedia’ nel Trecento. Dali’Epistola a Cangrande all’eta di Petrarca (Milan, 1989), 131-221.

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culture. For instance, in the first edition he had claimed that Dante had restored the Muses to Italy and had revived dead poetry (i. 19), and that he had done for the Italian vernacular what Homer and Virgil had done for Greek and Latin (1. 84). In the second redaction such claims are omitted, largely because of Petrarch’s categorical separation of the two cultures in the 1359 letter to Boccaccio, when he aligned Dante’s work with the vernacular audience of woolworkers and innkeepers, but put himself alongside Homer and Virgil (Fam. 21. 15. 22). In the second redaction Dante no longer appears as the reviver of poetry, presumably because Petrarch wished to claim this glory for him­ self, and because in the new humanist view of things this literary renaissance could now only be associated with work in Latin not in the volgare. But there are other modifications introduced by Boccaccio into his second redaction of the Trattatello which are not men­ tioned by Ricci or Paolazzi, but which shed important light on Boccaccio’s literary development. Perhaps even more indicative of the new anti-vernacular atmosphere is the modification of this passage: ‘familiarissimo divenne di Virgilio, d’Orazio, d’Ovidio, di Stazio e di ciascuno altro poeta famoso; non solamente avendo caro il conoscergli, ma ancora, altamente cantando, s’ingegno d’imitarli’ (1. 22). In the second redaction this is reduced to ‘familiarissimo divenne di tutti [i poeti], e massimamente de’ piu famosi’ (11. 18). All mention of Dante’s imitation of classical authors is omitted because, for a humanist like Petrarch, proper imitatio could take place only when writing in Latin. Similarly Boccaccio omits his initial claim that Dante’s poem revealed the capacity of the vernacular for dealing with any elevated subject: ‘Colui mostro con effetto con essa ogni alta materia potersi trattare, e glorioso sopra ogni altro fece il volgar nostro’ (1. 85). This motivation also accounts for Boccaccio’s downgrading of Dante’s lyric poems and the Vita Nuova in the second redaction. In II. 115 he merely states that in this work Dante ‘e in prosa e in sonetti e in canzoni gli accidenti dimostra dell’amore, il quale porto a Beatrice’. The first redaction, on the other hand, had provided details of the chronology of the Vita Nuova, of the way in which the prose sections document the inspiration for and divisions of each lyric; and most important of all, it had pronounced the poems contained in it as ‘maravigliosamente

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belle’, and pointed out that, although Dante was later ashamed of this youthful work, ‘nondimeno, considerata la sua eta, e egli assai hello e piacevole, e massimamente a’ volgari’ (1. 175). After Petrarch’s pronouncement in Familiares 21. 15 that he had in­ dulged in vernacular poems only in his youth, Boccaccio felt he could no longer lavish praise on a tradition which, in Petrarch’s eyes, was puerile and could never rival the maturity of the clas­ sical poets.17 Indeed there is a general reticence in the later version of the Trattatello about all aspects of the romance lyric: gone are the allusions to the ‘donna angelicata’ in the descrip­ tion of Beatrice (‘quasi una angioletta era reputata da molti’, 1. 32), and to Dante as a ‘fedele d’amore’ (‘Dante nella sua pargoletta eta fatto d’amore ferventissimo servidore’, 1. 34), pre­ sumably since there are few traces of these motifs in Petrarch’s rime. As regards the Commedia, Paolazzi commented on the omis­ sion of a passage which stressed the double audience which read the poem, contravening Petrarch’s separation of the two cultures (‘pasce non solamente gli uomini, ma i fanciulli e le femine; e . .. ricrea e pasce gli solenni intelletti’, 1. 218). But Boccaccio also eliminates several statements about the originality of Dan­ te’s enterprise (‘cosi alta, cosi grande, cosi escogitata impresa’, 1. 178; ‘non miga come gentile, ma come cristianissimo poetando, cosa sotto questo titolo mai avanti non fatta’, 1. 179; cf. 11. 116), presumably in order not to stress too much Dante’s combining of the classical and Christian traditions. Hence he also omits the third mention of his originality, in the passage dealing with his reasons for writing in the vernacular (‘e diletto e intendimento di se diede agli idioti, abandonati per addietro da ciascheduno’, I. 190), since this too underlines Dante’s fusing of the two audi­ ences, Latin and vernacular, which Petrarch officially wanted to keep separate. There is also a curious reticence about the content and struc­ ture of the Commedia in the second redaction. In the first version Boccaccio had outlined the subject-matter of the poem in a lengthy passage which recalls the Epistle to Cangrande (1. 176— 77). Clearly one motive for omitting what amounted to a triple 17 On Boccaccio’s contradictory attitude to the Vita Nuova, see Bruni, Boccaccio. Vinvenzione della letteratura mezzana, 27-33.

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summary of the poem was its tautologous nature; but in the second redaction there is not even one synopsis of the poem’s content. Instead of the elaborate description of the poem’s con­ tent, its divisions, and its stylistic qualities, Boccaccio limits himself to saying: ‘gli venne nell’animo quello laudevol pensiero che a comporre lo ’ndusse la Comedia. E, lungamente avendo premeditato quello che in essa volesse descrivere, in fiorentino idioma e in rima, la comincio’ (n. 116). The critique o f Dante’s Latin works had begun in Petrarch’s 1359 letter, in which he had observed that Dante wrote more clearly and nobly in the vernacular than in Latin prose and verse (‘in vulgari eloquio quam carminibus aut prosa clarior atque altior assurgit’, Fam. 21. 15. 24). Boccaccio seems now to reject his youthful enthusiasm for Dante’s Latin works and to agree with Petrarch, who had inaugurated a completely new style of writing Latin prose, after his discovery of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in 1345. Thus, although he had briefly mentioned Dante’s Epistole in the first redaction (‘Fece questo valoroso poeta molte pistole prosaice in latino, delle quali appariscono assai’, 1. 201), in the second redaction of the Trattatello he now makes no mention of them at all. Similarly he omits his summary of the De Vulgari Eloquentia (‘dove intendea di dare dottrina, a chi imprendere la volesse, del dire in rima’, 1. 200), presumably because o f its scholastic Latin and because Petrarch could not have had anything to learn about vernacular poetry from such a manual. Furthermore, he now reduces the amount of space devoted to the Monarchia, omits to mention its title, and no longer calls it a ‘libro . . . molto famoso’ (1. 195-7; IL 4 )- Probably this is done not only because of its rebarbative Latin, but be­ cause Boccaccio’s own lengthy summary had clearly and accu­ rately associated it with the questiones of the scholastic tradition rejected by Petrarch: ‘il cui titolo e Monarcia, il quale, secondo tre quistioni le quali in esso ditermina, in tre libri divise. Nel primo, loicalm ente disputando, pruova che . . .’ (1. 195). Petrarch’s letters and works by 1363 are full of condemnations of scholastic logicians and their ‘barbaric’ Latin, so in this al­ teration Boccaccio attempted to disassociate Dante’s treatise from its true cultural context. Related to this humanist contempt for contemporary philoso­ phy is the omission of the anecdote about Dante’s feat of memory

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in Paris, ‘sostenendo in una disputazione de quodlibet che nelle scuole della teologia si facea, quattordici quistioni’ (i. 123). While Ricci saw the suppression of this anecdote as serving the greater narrative economy of the second redaction, there is no doubt that Boccaccio was also motivated by Petrarch’s contempt for the language and structure o f scholastic debate, with its ‘quistioni’, and its discussions de quodlibet, which would fast become a term of intellectual abuse in humanist circles.'8 The encounter with Petrarch and his Latin works, then, served to put into crisis Boccaccio’s earlier admiration for Dante. I f his works in both Latin and the vernacular before 1351 had largely celebrated Dante as a cultural paradigm, those that came after 1351 were influenced by the new models proclaimed by Petrarch. Boccaccio, like Petrarch, turns away from poetry to prose and from the volgare to Latin, devoting himself to erudite works in Latin prose: De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, De Mulieribus Claris, De Montibus, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium. It is in this last work that Boccaccio comes closest to making a theoretical statement about imitation. Defending poets against the charge of being merely ‘apes of philosophers’, he claims that poets are actually philosophers themselves, and draws this dis­ tinction between the ape or simple imitator, and the complex imitation of philosophers to be found in poetry: Preterea imitator simplex in nullo exorbitat a vestigiis imitati. Quod quidem in poetis minime cernitur, nam, esto a phylosophicis non devient conclusionibus, non tamen in eas eodem tramite tendunt. (Gen. Deor.

i4. 7r ,8 Leonardo Bruni, in his Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, would put into the mouth of Niccolo Niccoli the accusation that Dante’s Latin was barbaric because of his reading of the ‘quodlibeta fratrum atque eiusmodi molestias’ (‘the quodlibet writings of the friars and other such barbaric works’)— in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. E. Garin, (Milan 1952), 70. Similarly, in his Vita di Dante he condemns the inad­ equacies of Dante and his contemporaries in writing either Latin prose or verse, labelling them ‘rozzi e grossi e senza perizia di lettere, dotti niente di meno in queste discipline al modofratesco scolastico' (emphasis added); and the Monorchia is dismissed as a work ‘scritto a modo disadorno, senza niuna gentilezza di dire’ (in Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Humanistisch-Philosophische Schriften mit einer Chronologie seiner Werke und Briefe, ed. H. Baron (Leipzig, 1928), 61-2). Filelfo also would talk disparagingly of the medieval ‘brodaglia fratesca’ compared with Petrarch’s elegance of style— cited in C. Dionisotti, ‘La fortuna del Petrarca nel Quattrocento’, Italia medioevale e umanistica,

17 (r974)> 79-

19 Genealogie Deorum Gentilium,

ed. V. Romano (2 vols.; Bari, 1951), ii. 731.

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(Besides, the simple imitator never strays in any way from the steps of the author imitated. But this is hardly the case with poets, for although they do not deviate from the conclusions of philosophers, they do not reach those conclusions by the same route.)

The metaphors of ‘vestigiis’ and ‘tramite’ echo the image of the road found in classical authors and cited by Petrarch, and are parallel to Boccaccio’s own adaptation of the image in the 1372 letter to Iacopo Pizzinga (Ep. 18). There, surveying the current revival of poetry, he sees tentative beginnings in medieval works such as ‘Cato’ , ‘Prosper’, and Arrigo da Settimello, but con­ cludes that these do not have an authentic classical flavour (‘nec ullam antiquitatis dulcedinem sapientia’, p. 194). He proclaims Dante as the first to recall the Muses to Italy, but, in the light of Petrarch’s views, Boccaccio adds that Dante took an indirect route back to antiquity (‘nec ea tamen qua veteres via, sed per diverticula quedam omnino insueta maioribus’ (‘however, he did not use the ancients’ route, but instead travelled along by­ ways completely unknown to his predecessors’, p. 195)) presum­ ably referring to his use of the vernacular for a major poem. The glory of opening up the high road to antiquity is reserved for Petrarch: ‘vetus iter arripere orsus e s t . . . sibi et post eum ascendere volentibus viam aperuit’ (‘he began to use the old road . . . and opened the way up both for himself and for those who wanted to climb after him’, p. 195), and Boccaccio claims to be following this latter path, inspired by hopes of fame and by his confidence in his great mentor: ‘in stratum iam iter intravi, trahente me perpetuandi nominis desiderio et fiducia preceptoris mei’ (‘I have entered on the road already made [by Petrarch], carried along by the desire and trust that this will perpetuate the name of my teacher’, p. 197).

2. Boccaccio’s Vernacular Works The influence of both Dante and Petrarch is apparent in Boccaccio’s vernacular verse, as are traces of stilnovisti such as Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia. In the 126 poems se­ curely attributed to Boccaccio it is the Petrarchan model which

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is the most pervasive influence;20 and although none of the lyrics are datable with any certainty, it is likely that, on the analogy of the Latin works, the early poems are ones which follow most closely Dante and Cavalcanti, while the Petrarchan stamp is more obvious after 1350. Boccaccio may not have collected his lyrics into a Canzoniere, but the inspiration for many of the indi­ vidual items came from the Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta. As Petrarch had played on the associations of Laura and the laurel, so Boccaccio explores the resonances of Fiammetta in his poems; like Laura and Beatrice, Fiammetta is also portrayed as dying and then beckoning to the poet from the other world (poems 97-9); Boccaccio too feels that Love has made him ‘del vulgo noioso I favola divenire’ (poem 63, cf. RVF 1); the sequence of sonnets against the avaricious enemies of humanism may echo Petrarch’s more engaged poems; and certainly the last religious poems— ‘O glorioso Re’ (poem 116) and ‘O Regina degli angioli’ (poem 119)— deliberately parallel the closing poems of Petrarch’s collection. Some sonnets exemplify Boccaccio’s eclectic practice in imita­ tion. In the following poem the maritime landscape is a favourite one of the poet in his Neapolitan days, but the evocation of the noonday heat is classical in tone. The first line derives from Ovid, the second is an echo of a famous Petrarchan sonnet, while the fifth vaguely recalls Dante: II Cancro ardea, passata la sesta ora, spirava zefiro e il tempo era bello, quieto il mar, e in sul lito di quello, in parte dove il sol non era ancora, vid’io colei, che ’1 ciel di se innamora, e piu donne far feste . . .2I (

3-

1-6 )

But as in his Latin writings, so in these lyrics, Boccaccio reaches a stage where he is writing almost entirely in the Petrarchan idiom, even though in one poem he draws on many Petrarchan originals: 20 For the text and numbering of the vernacular poems I have used Boccaccio, Rime, ed. V. Branca (Bari, 1939). ” cf. ‘Aestus erat, mediamque dies exegerat horam’ (‘There was a burning heat, and it was past midday’, Ovid, Amores i. 5. 1); ‘Zefiro torna e ’1 bel tempo rimena’ (Petrarch, RVF 311. 1); ‘la gloria di Colui che la innamora’ (Dante, Par. 31. 5).

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Quante fiate indrieto mi rimiro e veggio Tore e i giorni e i mesi e gli anni ch’io ho perduto seguendo gl’inganni della folle speranza e del desiro . . .22

(46. 1-4) Apart from the Rime, Boccaccio’s other verse works in the vernacular offer similar parallels with the Latin compositions. In his earliest narrative poem, La caccia di Diana, the two clas­ sical models most prominent are Ovid (for the scenes of nymphs hunting) and Apuleius (for the transformation of the narrator into a stag and then back to human form again). The Teseida, written after Boccaccio’s move from Naples back to Florence, reflects his increased interest in Dante. The poem was intended to be in part the vernacular epic on a military subject which Dante in De Vulgari Eloquentia (2. 2. 8) had complained had not yet been written in the Italian volgare. Like the Aeneid, it is com­ posed of twelve books, deals with a martial topic, contains fu­ neral games, a catalogue of heroes, epic similes, and other elements of the grand style. Yet the romantic vein is equally prominent, the imitations of Ovid in the poem tending to con­ sign it to the middle rather than the high style. In the Amorosa Visione the visionary subject-matter, the structure of fifty canti, the use of terza rima, all demonstrate the influence of Dante’s Commedia. Yet the Ninfale fiesolano, probably the last of the ver­ nacular verse works written by Boccaccio, reveals far fewer lit­ erary influences. The parabola of Boccaccio’s poetic composition in the volgare, from the heavy dependence on previous models in the Caccia di Diana to the almost total absence of ‘esibizionismo culturale’ in the Ninfale, runs parallel to the development of his Latin style, from the crude and unassimilated imitations of Dante and Apuleius to the fluency of the later Petrarchan prose style; and, as we shall see, the vernacular prose works suggest a simi­ lar trajectory. Schiaffini first outlined the significant change that takes place in Boccaccio’s vernacular prose style from the florid, almost baroque descriptions of the Filocolo, Fiammetta, and Comedia delle 22 R. Ferreri, Innovazione e tradizione net Boccaccio (Rome, 1980), 39, talks of a per­ sonal note in this poem, but it seems characteristic of Boccaccio only in as much as it echoes so many Petrarchan poems as to constitute a cento.

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ninfefiorentine to the more restrained prose of the Decameron,232 4The first works belong to the earliest period in Boccaccio’s writing, between 1339 and 1343, and thus are contemporary with and parallel to the youthful Latin exercises in dictamen. The Comedia delle ninfefiorentine in one sense can also be paralleled in the verse works which illustrate a close reading of Dante, the Teseida and the Amorosa visione; for it seems to be inspired by a reading of Dante’s and Giovanni del Virgilio’s exchange of eclogues, which Boccaccio discovered in the mid-1340s. But the atmosphere of the work is more that of the classical pastoral of Virgil than of Dante. Apart from echoes of Virgil’s Eclogues, the work also contains imitations of minor Virgilian works, while the praise of female hair (Comedia 12) derives from one of Boccaccio’s favour­ ite authors, Apuleius {Met. 2. 8). This work marks the extreme in Latinate prose in Boccaccio’s compositions in the volgare.H It is worth examining the passage from the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine in detail, since of the many critics who allude to it none has discussed the sequence in detail. It occurs in one of the many descriptions of the nymphs that Ameto sees. Her hair is described in a long period that includes Boccaccio’s favourite Latinate method of listing: ‘parte ravolti alia testa nella sommita di quella, con nodo piacevole d’essi stessi, vede raccolti; e altri piu co rti. . . e altri dati all’aure . . . quali sopra le candide tempie e quali sopra il dilicato collo ricadendo.’ Apart from the OvidianPetrarchan echo of the nymph’s hair blown by the breeze, the first clause reflects the description of Photis’ hair in Apuleius: ‘conglobatos in summum verticem nodus astrinxerat’ (‘her hair was bound up in a knot at the top of her head’ , Met. 2. 9). This echo leads Boccaccio into reworking the whole passage in the Latin model: A quelli con intero animo Ameto pensando, conosce i lunghi, biondi e copiosi capelli essere della donna speziale bellezza; de’ quali se essa Citerea, amata nel cielo, nata nell’onde e nutricata in quelle, benche d’ogni altra grazia piena, si vegga di quelli nudata, appena potra al suo Marte piacere. (p. 932) 23 A. Schiaffini, Tradizione e fioesia nella prosa d’arte italiana dalla Latinita medievale a Giovanni Boccaccio (Genoa, 1934). 24 ‘Quasi tutta la prosa de\VAmeto e cosi manierata, esteriore e decorativa, e il periodo tocca il limite estremo . . . nell’anelito di latinizzarsi’ (Schiaffini, Tradizione, 261). For the texts of the prose works I have used Boccaccio, Decameron, Filocolo, Ameto, Fiammetta, ed. E. Bianchi, C. Salinari, and N. Sapegno (Milan, 1952), giving page numbers in parentheses.

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Again this is a Latinate sentence in length, complexity as well in the construction ‘conosce i capelli essere’. Comparing the sen­ tence with the Apuleian original, we shall see that it is a close imitation of the original. The rhymed tricolon (‘amata . . . nata . . . nutricata’) exists in the African author, but Boccaccio has slightly varied the participles (‘caelo deiecta, mari edita, fluctibus educata’ (‘sent down from heaven, born in the sea, brought forth from the waves’), Met. 2. 8— though Boccaccio’s text probably read ‘caelo dilecta’). The phrase ‘d’ogni altra grazia piena’ is more abstract than the pagan description of Venus ‘omni Gratiarum choro stipata et toto Cupidinum populo’ (‘surrounded by the whole chorus of the Graces, and by an entire crowd of little Cupids’). Even the final phrase represents a minor variatio, since ‘appena potra al suo Marte piacere’ was originally ‘placere non poterit nec Vulcano suo’. The last sentence in the whole paragraph follows the same technique: Adunque tanta estima la degnita de’ capelli alle femine, quanta, se, qualunque si sia, di preziose veste, di ricche pietre, di rilucenti gemme e di caro oro circundata proceda, senza quelli in dovuto ordine posti, non possa ornata parere. (p. 932)

He alters Apuleius’ order (‘auro, veste, gemmis’) and to the bare list of three nouns adds an extra substantive and endows each of them with a decorative adjective: ‘preziose veste, ricche pietre, rilucenti gemme, caro oro’. The ornate quality of the prose of the Comedia delle ninfefiorentine has often been commented on, but here we can document Boccaccio’s conscious attempts to achieve this ornatus with amplification and the addition of adjectives. One of the tests adopted by critics to confirm this movement in Boccaccio’s prose from the ornate to the more restrained is to compare two similar passages from different works. An ob­ vious example is the story in the Filocolo which then reappears as Decameron 10. 4. Schiaffini compared the sequence in both works where the knight takes the dead woman in his arms and embraces her; but his conclusions were more concerned with tone than with style: ‘il sensualismo e superato in serenita.’ 25 Yet the same passages can be considered from a purely stylistic 25 Tradizione, 208. The Filocolo passage is also discussed but not directly compared with Decameron 10. 4 in J. Usher, ‘Boccaccio’s Experimentation with Verbal Portraits from the Filocolo to the DecameronModem Language Review, 77 (1982), 595-6,

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viewpoint. Here is the sentence in the Filocolo where the knight’s passion overcomes him: E dopo alquanto, non potendosi di baciare costei saziare, la comincio a toccare e mettere le mani nel gelato seno fra le fredde menne, e poi le secrete parti del corpo con quelle, divenuto ardito oltre al dovere, comincio a cercare sotto i ricchi vestimenti, le quali andando tutte con timida mano tentando sopra lo stomaco le distese, e quivi con debile movimento send li deboli polsi muoversi alquanto. (p. 894)

This is a highly complex period with gerunds, participles, rela­ tive pronouns, inversion, latinate syntax, and a plethora of nouns (seven out of the ten nouns have epithets). In the Decameron the sentence is briefer, more restrained in both content and style: Vinto adunque da questo appetito, le mise la mano in seno, e per alquanto spazio tenutalavi, gli parve sentire alcuna cosa battere il cuore a costei. (p. 687)

Here there is just one participle, the few adjectives are colour­ less, and the most obvious contrast is between the bald state­ ment ‘le mise la mano in seno’ and the duplicated verbs, nouns, and adjectives of the previous sentence (‘toccare e mettere le mani nel gelato seno fra le fredde menne’). O f course the Decameron contains much more variety than this brief analysis would sug­ gest; but it is this very stylistic varietas that distinguishes the masterpiece from the uniformly rhetorical and imitative works that preceded it.26 From Boccaccio’s earliest works to the end of his life we find him following many different literary models from classical and late antique authors to writers from the romance and vernacular traditions. Certain writers such as Dante, Petrarch, and Apuleius remain favourite models throughout his literary career; yet, despite these constants, there remains a perceptible shift in Boccaccio’s writing in Latin and the volgare, from the derivative and ornate to the more sober and prosaic mode of the late works. O f all his models, Boccaccio imitated Petrarch most closely, not only in his altered style of Latin, but also in many of his literary attitudes, particularly in his public rejection of the vernacular 26 cf. Branca’s verdict: ‘quel suo entusiasmo culturale troppo indiscriminato e farraginoso trovano un equilibrio limpidissimo e una misura superiore nel Decameron' (V. Branca, Boccaccio medievale (Florence, 1975), 49).

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and its audience. The most curious aspect of Boccaccio’s adula­ tion for his literary mentor is that he does not echo Petrarch’s many pronouncements on imitation, even though three of the most relevant letters on the topic were addressed to Boccaccio himself (Fam. 21. 15; 22. 2; 23. 19). Perhaps one reason for this is that Petrarch’s notion of verbal identitas was an imitative strat­ egy that Boccaccio himself was guilty of, particularly in his early writings.27 Another area of divergence is in their estimate of Cicero. Although the younger humanist shared some of Petrarch’s enthusiasm for the Roman orator, he never immersed himself totally in his language and thought, and never really deserved the epithet ‘Ciceronian’ inaccurately applied to his prose in the later Renaissance.28The rather poetic prose of Livy and Apuleius appealed to Boccaccio more. Thus, although Cicero appears in the Amorosa visione (4. 77—8) in the company of Seneca, this may be regarded as traditional given the precedent in Dante {Inf. 4. 141); but the appearance of Apuleius (5. 37-9) reflects Boccaccio’s personal taste, and his collocation beside poets rather than philo­ sophers suggests that Boccaccio was aware of the poetic, ornate quality of his prose. Even in the Decameron, Apuleius remains an important model, providing the source for two stories (5. 10; 7. 2). In many respects Boccaccio, like Petrarch, reflects the transi­ tional nature of late Trecento culture. He looks back to Dante and Petrarch in many ways; but in his knowledge of Greek and of authors such as Apuleius and Tacitus he prefigures many of the later developments of Quattrocento humanism. His vernacu­ lar verse, with its idyllic landscapes and fondness for aesthetic diminutives, anticipates the atmosphere of Poliziano’s poetry; while the ornate prose of the minor works, particularly the Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, will become both popular and influential around 1500, as is testified by the printing of these minor works in that period and the printing of a work that owes much to the poetic prose of both Boccaccio and Apuleius, the Hypnerotomachia 27 Velli notes that in Boccaccio’s early Latin poem, Elegia Constantie, ‘la spiccata predilezione sua per la ricreazione “ a mosaico” sembra collocarlo su un versante se non opposto, diverso rispetto a quello su cui il Petrarca . . . sceglie di porsi’ (G. Velli, ‘L '‘ Elegia di Costanza e VArs combinatoria del Boccaccio’ , in his Petrarca e Boccaccio. Tradizione, memoria, scrittura, 120). 28 For the sixteenth-century view of Boccaccio as a Ciceronian, see C. Dionisotti, ‘Girolamo Claricio’, Studi sul Boccaccio, 2 (1964), 311.

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Poliphili of 1499. Where Boccaccio differs from Petrarch and later humanists is in his emphasis on the practice of literary imitation and his lack of theory. The humanism and courtly culture of the years around 1500 appreciated Boccaccio as the eclectic stylist he was; it was the Ciceronianist approach of Bembo and his circle that mistakenly tried to see Boccaccio as another Cicero.

4

COLUCCIO SALUTATI Like Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati (1331—1406) has little contri­ bution to make to the theoretical side of the imitation debate. With the exception of one general statement on the imitation of ancient writers,1 his thoughts on imitatio are to be derived from his practice in writing. Also like Boccaccio, it is in his letters that Salutati reveals his early rejection of medieval models of dictamen, of the kind he had been taught by his tutor, Pietro da Moglio (d. 1383). His treatises, on the other hand, remain dis­ tinctly scholastic in subject-matter, structure, and style.2 Only the De Laboribus Herculis (c. 1390) is humanistic in spirit, particu­ larly in its defence of poetry, in which Salutati imitates the defences of poetry written by Petrarch (the Invective, Familiares 10. 4, etc.) and Boccaccio (Genealogie Deorum 14-15); but even the first book’s definition of poetry is in purely scholastic terms: ‘Convenienter possumus cum Aristotile diffmire poesim esse potentiam considerantem laudationes et vituperationes prout metris et figurativis locutionibus concinnuntur’ (‘One may aptly define poetry, as Aristotle does, as the potential for praise and blame in written documents which are embellished with metre and figurative speech’).3 To obtain a full idea of Salutati’s ideas on imitation we must concentrate on the letters rather than the treatises. First I want to consider the Latin of his epistles, to document Salutati’s evolving stylistic criteria; then, in a second section, his theoretical statement on imitation will be examined in the context of his general attitude to antiquity and modernity. 1 Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. F. Novati (4 vols.; Rome, 1891-1905), iv. 148. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text. 2 F. Ercole, II trattato De Tyranno e lettere scelte (Bologna, 1942); C. Salutati, De Nobilitate Legum et Medicine, De Verecundia, ed. E. Garin (Florence, 1947); id., De Seculo et Religione, ed. B. L. Ullman (Florence, 1957); id., De Fato et Fortuna, ed. C. Bianca (Florence, 1985). 3 De Laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullman (Zurich, 1951), 14.

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i. The Evolution of Salutati’ s Latin Style Naturally Salutati’s epistolary style is not uniform: not only did it develop away from earlier models of dictamen towards a Petrarchan Latinity, but it also varied depending on the ad­ dressee. The Florentine Chancellor was aware of this need for diversity and alludes to it on several occasions (Ep. ii. 77; iii. 5864). In what follows we shall deal largely with his private cor­ respondence. Little work has been done on the public letters, but the studies that have been carried out suggest that even there he instituted some kind of reform, moving from the stilus humilis to the stilus altus and introducing many classical exempla,4 On the whole, however, in his official missives Salutati was bound by the traditions of chancery epistolography: he had to use the plural (vos) form of address and other features of the tradition. In his private letters he reacted against these official con­ straints, complaining about their general inelegance (i. 133; ii. 411-27), and in particular railing against the use of vos (i. 35, 250, 259; ii. 162, etc.). While this latter campaign clearly stems from the teaching of Petrarch, Salutati’s lifelong interest in or­ thography probably derives from his own acquisition, in 1355, of a copy of Priscian.5 He discusses Latin orthography with many of his correspondents, from minor rhetoricians (ii. 110-12, 279-83; iii. 158) to writers of importance such as Filippo Villani (ii. 47), Pierpaolo Vergerio (iv. 85), and Giovanni Dominici (iv. 217).6 But it was the influence of Petrarch that was para­ mount, and it was this that led Salutati to criticize the two salient features of medieval dictamen, the use of an excessively florid vocabulary, and the insistence on the cursus. Already in the late 1360s he defines his stylistic ideals in these terms: ‘plane, aperte et luce clarius dico quod sentio et scribens et loquens’ 4 See R. G. Witt, Coluccio Salutati and his Public Letters (Geneva, 1976); id., Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, NC, 1983); D. De Rosa, Coluccio Salutati: II cancelliere e il pensatore politico (Florence, 1980); A. Petrucci, II protocollo notarile di Coluccio Salutati (Milan, 1963); E. Garin, ‘I cancellieri della Repubblica fiorentina da C. Salutati a Bartolommeo Scala’, in his La cultura filosojica del Rinascimento (Florence, 1961), 3-37. 5 See B. L. Ullman, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati (Padua, 1963), 44-6. 6 For the significance of the orthographical corrections suggested by Salutati to Villani and Vergerio, see G. Billanovich, Restauri boccacceschi (Rome, 1945), 30-1; M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 (Oxford, 1971), 68.

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(‘whether writing or speaking, I say what I feel plainly, openly, and in a manner that is as clear as day’, i. 69), and contrasts the ‘solido illo prisco more dicendi’ (‘that solid ancient style’) with the ‘modernorum lubricatione . . . religiosorum rythmica sonoritate’ (‘the oily manner of the moderns . . . the rhythmic cadences of religious writers’ , i. 77). This is clearly parallel to the contrast between Petrarch’s more sober Latin and the excessive ornatus of his contemporaries. Lubricatio is the antithesis of soliditas, solidus and clarus are the key positive epithets for Salutati, and the cult of clarity in Latin will be one of the distinguishing features of the humanist revolution.7 Yet it is emblematic of Salutati’s distance from authentically classical Latin that the noun he uses along with soliditas is the unclassical claritudo (iii. 606), and he is still capable of using the medieval dictatoribus as the word for describ­ ing even classical authors (iii. 83). The most important document in this context is Salutati’s letter criticizing the first part of Benvenuto’s commentary on Dante (ii. 76-8). He finds fault with Benvenuto’s style, which is too pedestrian (‘nimis pedestri sermone’), and therefore unsuited to a commentary on a sublime poem. Even though Benvenuto is writing for the lord of Ferrara, Salutati denounces ‘ilia stili tenuitas’ (‘that thinness of style’) and'says he expects something ‘edecumatum atque expolitum’ (‘choice and polished’). That unusual epithet ‘edecumatum’ comes from Macrobius (Saturnalia 1.5. 17), so it is no surprise that Salutati should urge Benvenuto to imitate the great commentaries of Macrobius and Boethius, which almost rival in eloquence the texts they expound. Salutati’s criticisms are not vague but focus on a particular passage: ‘ubi auctoris vitam et laudem amplecteris, noli fratrum religiosorum morem sequi. an tibi deficit adminiculum Ciceronis?’ (‘Where you deal with the author’s life and praise him, do not follow the style of the religious friars. Do you not have the support of Cicero to rely on?’ , ii. 78). Novati suggested that what Salutati is attacking here is the fact that, in the passage concerned, Benvenuto had begun with a statement from Averroes’ comment­ ary on Aristotle’s Poetics as his text, and had then proceeded to expound it like a preacher with a religious text. But if we read 7 Guarino will lay similar stress on Cicero’s clarity as opposed to the obscurity of Pietro da Moglio’s Latin— see Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, ed. R. Sabbadini (3 vols.; Venice, 1915-19), i. 85-6.

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what follows (‘quid recurris ad illos, qui ad mensuram et, quod apud Tullium puerile est, ex pari ferme numero sillabarum orationis membra distringunt?’ (‘why do you follow those who force each clause of their speech into equal measure and ap­ proximately the same number of syllables, a practice condemned by Cicero as puerile?’), ii. 78), it is clear that he is denouncing Benvenuto’s use of scholastic techniques such as isocolon which were condemned as ‘puerile’ in Ad Herennium 4. 20. 27, and which appear when Benvenuto praises the Commedia’s ‘profunditas admirabilis . . . utilitas desiderabilis . . . fertilitas ineffabilis . . . utilitas inventionis, utilitas instructionis, utilitas correctionis’ (‘admirable profundity . . . desirable utility . . . ineffable fertility . . . utility of invention, of instruction, of correction’).8 In his last epistle, the reply written in 1406 to Giovanni Dominici’s Lucula Noctis, Salutati rejects the notion that rhetoric consists merely of the two most obvious features of contempor­ ary dictamen: a florid vocabulary (‘splendidorum vocabulorum congeriem’) and the cursus (‘clausulis lubricantibus trisyllaboque cursu vel quadrisyllabo terminatis’ (‘oily clause-endings finishing in a three- or four-syllable cursus’ ), iv. 234). Ironically, this last sentence itself ends with a fine velox, the cursus rhythm most favoured by Salutati and Petrarch. But what Salutati objects to is the excessive pursuit of these effects, pointing out that such frivolity (festivitas) developed only after the great writers such as Cicero, Sallust, and Livy.9 By the end of his life Salutati has progressed from a medieval frame of mind which permitted a master of ars dictaminis to style himself ‘Tullianus imitator’ merely because he taught rhetoric, to a historical perspective from which he can see that the characteristic features of contemporary Latin are contrary to classical theory and practice. In practical terms we can observe the evolution of Salutati’s Latin by examining an early and late letter. One of his first letters to a Papal secretary, Francesco Bruni, sent in 1367, begins thus: Domine mi quam plurim um reverende. adm irabitur forte vestra prudentia quod, tandiu tacitus, nunc demum ruperim obstinata silentia, et unde hie tam subito scribendi pruritus incesserit. (i. 42) 8 Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola, Comentum super Dantis Aldigherii Comoediam, ed. J. Lacaita (5 vols.; Florence, 1887), i. 7. 9 Festivitas is the classical term used for describing rhyming clauses and similar de­ vices: ‘est in his lepos et festivitas, non dignitas et pulchritudo’ (Ad Herennium 4. 2. 3).

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(My most reverend lord, your wise self will wonder that I who have not spoken to you for so long should at last have broken this obstinate silence, and where this sudden urge to write comes from.)

This and the rest of the epistle abound with ecclesiastical Latin terms, such as that opening ‘Domine reverende’ (criticized by Petrarch in Fam. 13. 6. 30), and the plural periphrasis ‘vestra prudentia’. Non-classical syntax, such as the use of ‘quod . . . ruperim’ instead of ‘me . . . rupisse’, is to be found in all of his letters, as are non-classical words like ‘subito’ and ‘pruritus’ (later in this same letter we find the late Latin ‘ruditas’ and ‘sospitas’, as well as ecclesiastical terms ‘caritas’ and ‘dieta’).10 Even an early letter to a fellow humanist like Petrarch (i. 72-6) displays similar traits, including the diminutives ‘sepiuscule’ (found first in Priscian), ‘cupidulus’ (i. 72), other rare or unattested forms like ‘ delenificis’ (only in F ulgen tius), ‘frustratorium’ , ‘incivilitas’ (i. 75), and terms converted from the vernacular: ‘capricare . . . bachalarii. . . licentiati’ (i. 74—5). By the time of his last letters Salutati adopts a more classical form of address: ‘Linus Colucius Salutatus Leonardo Ceccho Aretino summi pontificis a secretis salutem dicit’ (iv. 113). This letter o f November 1405 to Leonardo Bruni (1370—1444), fellow humanist and Papal secretary, is very different from the earlier letters to the other secretary Francesco Bruni, and the other humanist Petrarch. The revolution in Salutati’s epistolary Latin was effected not just by Petrarch’s letters, but by the Chancel­ lor’s own discovery of Cicero’s Ad Familiares in 1392.11 After the Ciceronian salutation, the letter to Bruni adapts another Ciceronian formula: ‘postquam tibi per Dei gratiam bene est et michi bene est’ (‘since, thanks be to God, both you and I are well’, iv. 113). The rest of the epistle contains very few nonclassical items (‘labascunt’ and ‘urbicus’ occur in Gellius; while ‘dosim’, ‘pathica’, ‘sophim’, and ‘antipophoram’ are coinages from Greek), illustrating to what extent Salutati’s style has been influenced by his reading of Cicero and by his association with humanists such as Petrarch, Poggio, and Bruni. The major cul­ tural influences on Salutati in his later years are his reading of lo Ullman, The Humanism of Salutati, 106-8, gives a fairly comprehensive list of unclassical elements in Salutati’s Latin. " For this discovery, see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (3rd ed., Oxford, 1991), 135.

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Cicero and his interest in Greek, and both of these influences are detectable in his Latin style.

2. Salutati’ s Theories on Imitation, Antiquity, and Modernity This late letter to Bruni (iv. 113-20) is an important document since it introduces us to the context of a wider dispute between Salutati and the younger generation of humanists about the correct way to imitate antiquity and the status of contemporary literary culture. Since the letter had criticized Bruni’s unstoic attitude to the tribulations he was facing in 1405, the younger humanist took offence, replying with a letter which found fault with the Chancellor’s Latin.12 Bruni objected to two elements in Salutati’s classical salutation: first, his use of two forenames, ‘Linus Colucius’, is unnecessary since the ancients used only one proper name; and, secondly, ‘Leonardo Ceccho Aretino’ is am­ biguous since it could refer to Bruni’s father, so, if he had to mention his father at all, Salutati should have written ‘Leonardo Cecchi filio’. Bruni also attacks a third unclassical trait in his letter, the older man’s use of the medieval formula ‘Vannes de Montecuculo’ (iv. 119), whereas Bruni styles himself in the classical manner ‘Leonardus Aretinus’ , not ‘de Aretio’. Bruni acknowledges that Salutati is trying to imitate classical epistles, but objects that this is ‘nulla antiquitatis imitatio sed corruptio’ and insists that imitation should be carried out rationally (‘modo id ratione fiat’, iv. 376). Salutati replied with another letter to Bruni (iv. 147-58). The first sentence illustrates the older man’s acceptance of some but not all of Bruni’s criticism: ‘Linus Colucius Salutatus Leonardo Aretino summi pontificis a secretis salutem dicit’ (‘Lino Coluccio Salutati to Leonardo [Bruni] of Arezzo: greetings’). He still uses his own two forenames, but drops the ambiguous allusion to Bruni’s father ‘Ceccho’. He also repeats his Christian adapta­ tion of the classical formula (‘postquam ergo tibi per Dei gratiam bene est et michi bene est’), which he mistakenly thought Bruni 12 Bruni’s Ep. io. 5 in Leonardo Bruni Aretino, Epistularum Libri VIII, ed. L. Mehus (2 vols.; Florence, 1741), ii. 171—4, is printed also by Novati in Salutati, Epistolario, iv. 375-8.

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had also attacked.13 He justifies the inclusion of the Christian phrase ‘per Dei gratiam’ in these terms: sed antiquitatem sic semper censui imitandam, quod pura non prodeat, sed aliquid semper afferat novitatis. scis me non ignorare morem nostri celeberrimi Ciceronis, meque libenter verbis uti suis. sed aliud est referre, aliud imitari. habet aliquid imitantis proprium imitatio, nec totum est eius quern imitamur; relatio vero totum solet exprimere quern referimus. (iv. 148) (But I have always believed that one should imitate antiquity in such a way that the imitation should not emerge as an exact reproduction, but rather should always include some element o f modernity. You know that I am not unaware of the style of our own most famous Cicero, and that I willingly use his words. However, it is one thing to copy, and quite another to imitate. Imitation always contains something that is proper to the imitator, and does not entirely belong to the author imitated; whereas copying tends to reproduce in entirety the imitated author.)

This is Salutati’s fullest statement on imitatio and it shows that he is in favour not of a slavish imitation of antiquity, but of an imitation that retains some aspect of modernity (‘novitatis’). The passage makes clear his admiration for Cicero but also his dis­ tance from Ciceronianism. There is also a hint of Petrarch’s influence in the differentiation between ‘imitari’ and ‘referre’, and in the insistence on the individual’s contribution, the ‘aliquid imitantis proprium’.'4 Salutati’s attitude to literary imitation is consistent with his general assessment of contemporary culture, an estimate that admires antiquity but insists on the superiority of the Christian present. In the rest of the letter he justifies his retention of his two forenames in the salutation not on classical but on Christian grounds, since they were baptismal names; he yields to Bruni on the ambiguity of ‘Ceccho’; but reiterates the propriety of mod­ ern forms such as ‘Dinus de Mucello, Bartholus de Saxoferrato, Vannes de Montecuculo’, partly through contemporary usage, partly appealing to biblical precedent (he cites Jerome’s opening to Judg. 17: ‘vir quidam de monte Ephraim’), and partly because 13 In fact Bruni had criticized the opening of another letter, to Iacopo Angeli da Scarperia (see Salutati, Ep. iv. 148 n. 1). I+ Petrarch had stressed that the ‘quiddam suum ac proprium’ should be retained even when imitating (Fam. 22. 2. 17).

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the classicizing adjectives ‘saxoferratensis’ and ‘montecuculensis’ are inelegant. All of this is consistent with his defence, at the beginning of the epistle, o f ‘novitatis’ , as well as with his general view of the superiority of res over verba (‘offendit. . . te sonus non sensus’), and of the dignity of contemporary culture.'5 The diachronic development of Salutati’s views on Dante and Petrarch is also relevant to the question of imitative models. In his 1374 letter on the death of Petrarch (i. 176-87) he claimed that Petrarch was the greatest writer of all time: he rivals Virgil in poetry, his invectives and philosophical works surpass Cicero’s in ‘ornatu verborum et gravitate sententiarum’ (i. 181), he is a better philosopher than Seneca, and he outdoes Dante in ver­ nacular sonnets. But over the course of the next three decades these sweeping claims, even in the eulogistic context of praising the dead, had to be modified. In 1379 (i. 334-42) Salutati at­ tenuates some of the particulars: he concedes that Virgil is a superior poet but argues that prose is more important than verse; and as for prose, in his moral works Petrarch is the equal of Seneca in thought, but superior in elegance of expression; he is the equal of Cicero in copia and gravitas, but outdoes him in inventio. In 1392 he now feels that Dante, not Petrarch, is supe­ rior to all writers at least in ‘scientia vel ingenio’ (iii. 84), and by 1401 he claims that Dante would have been a greater poet than Homer and Virgil if he had written the Commedia in Latin (iii. 491)— a view faithfully ascribed to Salutati in Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum (1401—6).15 16 In his last years the quarrel over the ancients and moderns explodes. The younger humanist ‘avant-garde’ generation, such as Bruni, Poggio, and Niccoli, 15 Bruni, on the other hand, stands by his principles and addresses letters, for instance, to ‘Atto militi Saxoferratensi’ (Bruni, Ep., ed. Mehus, ii 51). 16 ‘sentio tamen alium recte, nisi fallor, tam latiali quam greco preferendum Homero, si latine potuisset, sicut materni sermonis elegantia, cecinisse’ (‘I believe that another writer [Dante] would have been superior to both the Greek and Latin Homer if he had been able to write Latin with the elegance he displayed in the vernacular’ , iii. 491). Salutati derived the idea from Petrarch’s famous letter about Dante in which he acknowledges ‘potuisse ilium si voluisset alio stilo u ti. . . omnia quibus intendisset’ (‘I believe he could have achieved all his ambitions, if he had decided to write in a different language’, Fam. 21. 15. 22). Bruni makes Salutati say ‘Dantem vero, si alio genere scribendi usus esset. . . et [Latinis] et Graecis etiam anteponerem5 (‘I would place Dante above both Latin and Greek writers, if he had written in another language’), in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. E. Garin (Milan, 1952), 68.

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contest the privileged position of the Tre Corone, and find fault with both their Latin and their vernacular works.17 In December 1405 Salutati has to intervene in the debate, since Poggio had criticized even his attenuated praise of Petrarch in the 1379 letter. The older humanist replies (iv. 126—45), complaining that Poggio and an unnamed friend (probably Bruni or Niccoli) are too deferential to antiquity (‘nimis . . . defertis et ceditis vetustati’ (‘you defer and yield too much to antiquity’), iv. 131), and too critical of modern works ‘nisi vincant vel saltern redoleant vetustatem’ (‘unless they outdo or at least smack of antiquity’, iv. 142).18 Salutati is in favour of a moderate not extreme classi­ cism, especially as Cicero himself had demanded that one of the prerequisites of good style is that it be accessible (De Oratore 1. 3. 12). But the particular focus of the letter is his defence of Petrarch. Like all Christian writers, Petrarch is automatically superior to the ancients in ‘sapientia’ . As for style, he concedes that his De Viris Illustribus is not comparable to the histories of Livy or Sallust, but these were peaks which antiquity itself never again matched. He also concedes that Petrarch is inferior to Cicero and Virgil in style (‘facundie dignitate’), but claims that he is superior in erudition and Christian wisdom. His final ver­ dict is that the supreme writer in Latin prose is Cicero, in poetry Virgil, in a lengthy vernacular poem Dante, in sonnets Petrarch (iv. 140). In his last letter to Poggio, in March 1406, the debate is still rumbling on. Salutati claims that in one letter Poggio had praised Petrarch for opening up the road back to antiquity, for writing good historical and poetic works, as well as for his invectives; yet elsewhere he had criticized them. The younger humanist is portrayed as being perverse for this, and for preferring mii and niil to the then accepted forms, michi and nichil. At the end Salutati climbs down from his 1374-9 position, and admits that Petrarch is inferior to Cicero in both invectives and moral works, but he does claim that no other writer has come as close to Ciceronian Latin as Petrarch (iv. 166). But both the style and the content of Bruni’s Dialogi would disprove even this attenuated claim. 17 For the significance of the humanist ‘avant-garde’, see G. Holmes, The Florentine Enlightenment 1400—1450 (London, 1969), ch. 1. '8 The phrase again comes from Macrobius: ‘sermo tuus . . . ipsam redolet vetustatem’ (Sat. 1. 5. 4).

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Two points emerge from these debates: first that, whereas Salutati was aware of Petrarch’s greatness from the start, his interest in Dante is something that develops only in the last decade of the century.'9 Secondly, by the early years of the fif­ teenth century even Petrarch’s Latin, which had seemed to Boccaccio so superior to Dante’s, is now coming under fire from the younger generation of humanists— in particular his De Viris Illustribus, which was described as a ‘zibaldone da quaresima’,19 20 and which had the air of a medieval compilation to those hu­ manist historians like Poggio and Bruni who would soon pro­ duce their sophisticated imitations of Livy, Sallust, and Plutarch. One final statement of Salutati’s is important to consider in detail, his original sketch of the development of Latin literature, in a letter of 1395 (iii. 76 -9 1).21 It is a reply to Cardinal Bartolommeo Oliari, who had praised Salutati’s epistles as being superior to those of Cassiodorus. The mention of the latter writer encourages the Chancellor to discourse on the evolution of Latin literature. He states, uncontroversially, that the age of Cicero was the peak of Latinity (‘culmen . . . eloquentie summitas’, iii. 80), but goes on in original vein to distinguish two further ages before his own. The first was the extended period from Seneca, Valerius Maximus, and Livy, who were closest to the great Ciceronian age, to secular writers such as Tacitus, Pliny, Apuleius, Macrobius, Capella, and Church Fathers like Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, and others down to Cassiodorus. Although spanning centuries from the first to the sixth, Salutati claims that all these writers revived eloquence or rather kept it alive as in one enormous tract of time (‘redivivam quodammodo facundiam reduxerunt; sive, quo verius loquar, continuatam in paucis unius ferme tractu seculi tenuerunt’, iii. 82). From their writings it is apparent both how eloquence continued to flourish in this period, and how the majesty of classical Latin, which had reached its peak with Cicero, had diminished (‘quorum scriptis percipitur 19 See A. Vallone, ‘C. Salutati e l’umanesimo fiorentino dinanzi a Dante’, Zeitschrift fur Romanische Philologie, 94 (1978), 69-82 (77). 20 Cino Rinuccini’s Invettiva (1405-6) details the criticisms of the Tre Corone made by the humanist avant-garde: ‘dicono . . . che . . . Giovanni Boccacci non seppe grammatica. .. . E de’ libri del coronato poeta messer Francesco Petrarca si befFano, dicendo che quel De viris illustribus e un zibaldone da quaresima. . . . dicono che lo egregio e onore de’ poeti Dante Alighieri essere suto poeta da calzolai.’ See A. Lanza, Polemiche e berte letterarie nella Firenze del frrimo Quattrocento (Rome, iQ7i), 26a.

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quantum tractu temporis ornatus ille locutionis effloruit quantumque maiestas ille prisci sermonis, que cum Cicerone summum apicem tenuit, imminuta est’, iii. 82).22 After this there came that iactura or mutatio which led to a second epoch, in which the medieval writers flourished: Ivo of Chartres, St Bernard, Hildebert of Lavardin, Abelard, John of Salisbury. But these writers are dismissed as being unworthy to compare with either the writers of the great age or the intervening period (‘non decet tamen ipsos priscis vel mediis ipsis dictatoribus comparare’, iii. 83).2 23 Salutati, then, has little contribution to make to imitation theory, but his practice in the writing of Latin is of considerable relevance.24 It is a Latin that comes as close if not closer to classical Latin than Petrarch’s; yet we know from his statement on imitatio that he would never have been a strict Ciceronian.25 He reveres Priscian and accepts as valid models ‘Alcidus’ (i. 187), Symmachus (ii. 141-2; iii. 85), and Macrobius and Cassiodorus (iii. 82), whereas Bruni in the Dialogi will attack the barbarian Latin o f ‘Alcidus’ and Cassiodorus, and Valla will diminish the authority of Priscian and Macrobius. In the heady atmosphere of the turn of the century, when the younger humanists saw a rupture between antiquity and modernity, Salutati represented a force for compromise and continuity, for endorsement of the achievements of the Tre Corone in Latin and the vernacular, for acceptance of a Christian humanism, for approval of medieval forms such as michi and nichil, against the extreme classicism of the younger generation.26 22 Salutati probably uses ‘effloruit’ in the sense o f ‘flourished’, as in classical usage, including Seneca’s famous statement: ‘quidquid Romana facundia habet. . . circa Ciceronem effloruit’ (‘All Roman eloquence flourished around Cicero’, Controversiae 1. Pref. 6); but he might just have used it mistakenly to mean ‘withered’, as a synonym for imminuta. 23 Here ‘mediis’ is not used in our sense of ‘medieval’, but Salutati is groping towards just such a tripartite periodization— see M. L. McLaughlin, ‘Humanist Concepts of Renaissance and Middle Ages in the Tre- and Quattrocento’, Renaissance Studies, 2 (1988), 131-42 (134). 24 He does use the stock images of the imitation debate: footsteps (ii. 41911., De Lab. Here. i. 45-6); cloaks (i. 133; ii. 145, 356); the ape (iii. 288); paintings and statues (i. 133; iii. 373); flowers (iii. 86); bread (iv. 86, 316, 370). 25 Ullman, The Humanism of Salutati, 106-8, and De Rosa, Coluccio Salutati, 17-18 n. 21, detail many of the unclassical elements in his Latin. 26 Witt highlights ‘the ambivalence of Salutati’s humanism, the limitations on his ability to abandon certain assumptions of the medieval tradition he inherited’ (Hercules at the Crossroads, 271). For the wider significance of orthography and diphthongs, see E. H. Gombrich, ‘From the Revival of Letters to the Reform of the Arts: Niccolo Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi’, in his The Heritage of Apelles (Oxford, 1976), 93-110.

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It was in the Quattrocento that Italian humanists were to transform the imitation of Cicero from theory into practice, so it is predictable that later in the century Salutati’s reputation as a Latinist suffered a complete reversal. In the early 1400s the epistles of the Florentine Chancellor were considered models of Latin style. Even in France his letters were in demand, while in Italy his ideological enemy, Antonio Loschi, called him ‘princeps latine eloquentie’ (iv. 476-7).27 Filippo Villani’s description of Salutati as ‘symia Ciceronis’ (iv. 491-2) is more a standard rhe­ torical compliment than an integral part of the imitation debate, since the Statute re-electing Salutati Chancellor in 1388 describes him in similar terms: ‘eloquentie fontis et splendidissimi Ciceronis alumni, et naturalium et moralium unius speculi’ (‘that fount of eloquence and disciple of the brilliant Cicero, mirror of both natural and moral philosophers’, iv. 465). By 1450 Flavio Biondo, who in his Italia Illustrata saw the revival of letters as stemming from the recovery of Ciceronian texts at Lodi in 1421, could place Salutati in a more accurate position in that renaissance: Colutius vero Salutatus etsi prius didicerit, quam Ciceronianae imitatio eloquentiae sui saeculi adolescentibus nota esse coepisset, et eloquens est habitus et multa scripsit prudentiam magis et doctrinam quam eloquentiam redolentia.28 (Although Coluccio Salutati learnt Latin before the imitation of Ciceronian eloquence had begun to be a familiar concept to the young men of his century, he was regarded as eloquent, and wrote many works but they were more redolent of wisdom and learning than of classical elegance.)

By the end of the century an exacting Ciceronian like Paolo Cortesi in his De Hominibus Doctis (c. 1490) would class Salutati alongside Boccaccio and Giovanni da Ravenna as a writer whose Latin was never free from ‘orationis asperitate maestitiaque’ (‘harshness and severity of style’), while adding that Giovanni’s dialogues and Salutati’s epistles are now no longer read.29 27 For his reputation in France, see G. Billanovich and G. Ouy, ‘La Premiere Correspondence echangee entre Jean de Montreuil et Coluccio Salutati’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 7 (1964), 337-74 (esp. 343). The famous compliment paid by Giangaleazzo Visconti that Salutati’s writings did him more harm than a thousand cavalrymen is reported by Pius II in his Historia de Europa, ch. 54, in his Opera Omnia (Basle, 1571), 454. 28 F. Biondo, De Roma Triumphante Libri X, Romae Instauratae Libri III, Italia Illustrata, Historiarum ab Inclinatione Romani Imperii Decades III (Basle, 1531), 304. 29 P. Cortesi, De Hominibus Doctis, ed. G. Ferrau (Palermo, 1979), 116.

PART TWO

The Early Quattrocento

5

LEONARDO BRUNI From his epistolary exchange with Salutati in 1405, which was examined in the last chapter, it could be presumed that, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444) belonged to that extreme humanist avant-garde which was the object of Cino Rinuccini’s Invettiva ( ed. H. Baron (Leipzig, 1928), 142 (henceforth cited as Schriften with page numbers in parentheses). 8 cf. G. Billanovich, Petrarca letterato, i.: Lo scrittoio del Petrarca (Rome, 1947), 135 n. 1. Holmes, The Florentine Enlightenment, 101, cites an important letter of 1430 about how the poetic renaissance of the Trecento has given way to the re-establishment of Ciceronian prose under men like Bruni, Poggio, Guarino, and Barbaro.

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as if Bruni felt it incumbent upon himself to produce a new style of Latin to suit the new age. Certainly, when he looks back on this period in his Rerum suo Tempore Gestarum Commerttarius, he seems distinctly sensitive to both fin-de-siecle phenomena (the 1399 Bianchi procession) and the signs of the new century (the revival of Italian chivalry, and the revival of literature through the know­ ledge of Greek).9 On closer analysis, it is clear that the first book is not just a fictitious dialogue. Several phrases echo almost verbatim Salutati’s ideas. The notion of the ‘perturbatio’ and ‘iactura’ (Prosatori, 52) o f the present recalls Salutati’s own words (‘mutatio . . . iactura’) in the letter about the development of Latin literature (Salutati, Ep. iii. 83), as does the idea of Cicero representing the peak of Latinity (p. 58). More critically, the attack on ‘Cassiodorum . . . et Alcidum et alia huiusmodi somnia’ (p. 54) contradicts the older humanist’s appreciation of these two medieval authors.10 The ideas that if Dante had written his poem in Latin it would have surpassed both Homer and Virgil (p. 68), that one letter of Cicero and one poem of Virgil’s is preferable to all of Petrarch’s Latin works (p. 74 ) , and the op­ posite notion that one speech of Petrarch’s is preferable to all V irgil’s epistles, and that Petrarch’s poems are superior to Cicero’s (p. 94), all recall the comparative claims which Salutati had to attenuate in his last years. There are also a number of general concepts to which Bruni himself will remain faithful in later works, such as Cicero’s importance not so much as an orator but as the philosophical writer who endowed Latin with a vocabulary elegantly capable of conveying philosophical ideas (Cicero Novus, c. 1415); the attack on scholastic terminology in philosophical works (the prefaces to Bruni’s translations of Ar­ istotle); the polemic against the vulgus (Bruni’s argument against Biondo in 1435 that there was an equivalent of the volgare even in antiquity). There are also other indications about Bruni’s genuine sym­ pathies in the debate. Most important of all, the detailed criticisms 9 L. Bruni, Rerum suo Tempore Gestarum Commentarius, ed. C. di Pierro, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, xix. 3 (Bologna, 1926), 423-58 (430-2). 10 Cassiodorus is mentioned in positive terms in the 1395 letter already cited (Ep. iii. 76-92), while ‘Alcidus’ was a medieval author of a dialogue much quoted by Salutati (see Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. E. Garin (Milan, 1952), 54-5 n. 1).

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of the Tre Corone in book 1 are never convincingly refuted in the second book. The major charge against Dante— his lack of good Latin, especially in his Episfule— reflects the genuine dis­ may that had been expressed from the time of Petrarch’s 1359 letter to Boccaccio (Fam. 21. 15).” For humanists o f Bruni’s generation, Dante’s Latin imitated not so much classical works as ‘quodlibeta fratrum atque eiusmodi molestias’ (p. 70). When Niccoli refutes this charge in book 2, he vaguely says how ab­ surd it is to accuse Dante of ignorance of Latin when he had debated so often, written ‘carmina heroica’, and had proved himself in so many other areas of study (p. go).111213As for Petrarch, Niccoli initially denounces the failure of the Africa, but also claims that the Invective lack rhetorical skill, and the Bucolicum Carmen bears no relation to classical pastoral (p. 72). These were all works which Salutati had to defend against the more extreme humanists around the turn of the century. But in his palinode Niccoli merely excuses the faults of the Africa by claiming that it was unfinished at the author’s death, while the Bucolicum Carmen is said to be replete with pastoral elements. Significantly there is no attempt at all to deny the unclassical nature of Petrarch’s invectives (p. 94). Although Baron has argued that Bruni really agrees with Niccoli’s recantation in book 2, especially in that he later goes on to write Le vite del Dante e del Petrarca (1436), there are indi­ cations in those biographies themselves that his position is more nuanced, as will be seen later. Furthermore, if the content of the dialogue ends on a note of compromise with Salutati’s view, the quality of Bruni’s Latin is such as to constitute an implicit at­ tack on his mentor’s medievalisms in lexis and syntax. Stylisti­ cally, then, as well as ideologically, the Dialogi inaugurate a new era. The language is the first instance of a total return to clas­ sical Latin, and of a complete mastery of the dialogue form, compared with the previous efforts in the genre by Petrarch (Secretum, De Remediis) and Giovanni Conversing13 Sabbadini 11 Cf. G. Tanturli, ‘II disprezzo per Dante dal Petrarca al Bruni’, Rinascimento, 25 (1985). I99-2I912 It is difficult to say precisely what Dante’s ‘carmina heroica’ are: presumably either his Latin eclogues in ‘heroic’ hexameters, or the epic of the Commedia. 13 L. B. Mortensen, ‘Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogus: A Ciceronian Debate on the Literary Culture of Florence’, Classica et Medievalia, 37 (1986), 259-302, produces a tabular comparison to prove that in this work Bruni imitates all the formal features of the Ciceronian dialogues known to Bruni.

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thought there was only one unclassical word in the work (‘ amicitior’, p. 74),14 but even the other unattested nouns (‘subirationem’, p. 62; ‘parificatio’, p. 90), and the few items taken from late antique authors (‘scritas’ from Gellius, ‘illaborate’ formed from Quintilian’s adjective) do not vitiate the accuracy of the epithet ‘classical’ applied to the Dialogi. The almost total absence of the medieval cursus also helps to create the antique aura of the language. We shall see that these two elements, lexis and rhythm, were two of the instruments which Bruni deliber­ ately cultivated in eliminating medieval elements from his Latin. How, then, did Bruni create this impeccable Latin ex novo? Or how did he develop that sensitivity to lexis and prose rhythm that allowed him to arrive at an almost perfect imitation of Ciceronian periods? Much of the answer must lie in his expertise in Greek. He learnt Greek under Manuel Chrysoloras from 1397 to 1399; by 1400, even before writing the Dialogi, he was already translating part of Plato’s Phaedo into Latin, and in the first programmatic letter of his Epistolario (September 1400) he insists on the need to render not only the substance but also the el­ egance of Plato’s dialogue, which he defines as ‘facilitas’, or in Greek ‘charis’.15 Bruni’s sensitivity to style informs all his com­ ments on translation. In the De Interpretatione Recta (c. 1420, Schriften, 81-96) he insists that the good translator should be aware of idioms and figures of speech in both languages, and that he should reproduce ‘et doctrina rerum . . . et scribendi ornatus’ (‘both the erudite content and the elegant style’, p. 86). He should be sensitive to the variety of styles available in Latin, Cicero’s ‘amplitudo et copia’, Sallust’s ‘exilitas et brevitas’, and Livy’s ‘granditas’. Adducing a series of examples from Plato and Aristotle, he proves that both authors possessed a certain 14 R. Sabbadini, review of L. Bruni, I dialoghi al Vergerio, ed. E. De Franco (Catania, 1929), in Giomale storico della letteratura italiana, 96 (1930), 129-33. He also noted that in this ‘primo ampio saggio di prosa umanistica . . . si respira un’aria nuova’. 15 Leonardi Bruni Aretini Epistularum Libri VIII, ed. L. Mehus (2 vols.; Florence, 1741), i. 15-17 (henceforth cited as Ep. with volume and page nos. in parentheses). For the importance of the introductory letter in each book, see L. Gualdo Rosa, ‘La struttura dell’epistolario bruniano e il suo significato politico’, in Viti (ed.), Leonardo Bruni cancelliere, 371—89. Elsewhere he is sufficiently sensitive to criticize Procopius’ attempts to imitate Thucydides (‘admodum ineptus et eloquentie hostis ut apparet maxime in contionibus suis, quamquam Thucydidem imitari vult’ (‘he is quite unskilled and rather inelegant, as we see particularly in his speeches, even though he would like to imitate Thucydides))— see C. Griggio, ‘Due lettere inedite del Bruni al Salutati e a Francesco Barbaro’, Rinascimento, 26 (1986), 27-50 (50).

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‘numerositas et ornatus’ which had to be conveyed in Latin. Time and again he insists on reproducing both the elegance of diction and the rhythm of the original. His interest in rhythm undoubt­ edly derived from his reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as well as Cicero’s Orator, both of which he quotes in the De Studiis et Litteris (1422-9).1617There he points out that not only in verse but also in prose there are ‘numeri quidam et veluti concentus’ (‘rhythm and harmony, as it were’), which must be observed by the diligent student, particularly as regards which syllables in adjacent words are or are not compatible. He is even aware that this sensitivity to prose rhythm may seem unusual, but reaffirms his conviction of its importance. When he praises one of Valla’s dialogues in 1433, he singles out not only its copia and varietas, but also its style, sentence structure, and rhythm.'7 As for Bruni’s interest in lexis, that too will have stemmed from his experience as a translator. In 1412 we find him realiz­ ing that ‘maledictio’ and ‘infausti’ are inadequate translations for the Greek ara and enarges respectively. The former is rejected not just on grounds of content, since it means ‘abuse’ rather than ‘curse’, but even more on stylistic grounds: ‘non michi placet, quia nec elegantiam, neque dignitatem, neque sonum habet’ (‘I do not like the word, as it possesses neither elegance, dignity, nor sonority’, Ep. i. 96-7). In order to polish his version of Aristotle’s Ethics (1417), he sends for a copy of Cicero’s De Finibus (Ep. i. 124-5). This study of Cicero’s philosophical ter­ minology allows Bruni to make his criticisms of the medieval version, in the introduction to his translation of the Ethics. He points out that the medieval translator has left many words in Greek, unaware, for instance, that eutrapelia could have been rendered by one of at least four classical synonyms (‘urbanitas’, ‘festivitas’, ‘comitas’, ‘iucunditas’). The medieval version also uses the scholastic ‘delectatio’, ‘tristitia’, and ‘malitia’ for the 16 See the edition in Sckriften, 5-19 (8—11). See also the letter of around the same time (1424-6) in which he states that ‘ [Aristoteles] pedes et syllabas etiam in oratione soluta servandas ostendit’ (‘ [Aristotle] proves that even in prose one ought to be sensitive to metre and syllabic rhythm’, Ep. i. 138). 17 ‘intersunt tropi quidam ac figurae veterum dignitatem et amoenitatem prae se ferentes, complexioque ipsa et ambitus plerisque in locis numerose cadit’ (‘It con­ tains certain tropes and figures which display the dignity and elegance of the ancient writers, while its sentence structure and periods mostly run rhythmically’, Schriften, 142).

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Ciceronian ‘voluptas’, ‘dolor’ and ‘vitium’ respectively, whereas Bruni can quote De Finibus 2. 4. 13 to prove that ‘voluptas’ is the correct equivalent of ‘hedone’ (Schriften, 76-81). Elsewhere he describes his own method of securing lexical purity in these terms: ‘Ego millies singula verba olfacere soleo, priusquam litteris mandem. Nullum denique nisi probatum et ab optimis auctoribus michi commendatum recipio’ (‘I tend to savour the bouquet of each word a thousand times before using it in my writings. In the end I do not accept any word unless it has the approval and recommendation of the best authors’, Ep. ii. 88). In short, it is the continued process of translation from Greek into Latin, which involved his scrutinizing of nuances between near synonyms, that permits Bruni to achieve that sensitivity to correct lexis and rhythm which distinguishes the new prose of the Quattrocento from that of his predecessors.'8 As he says in another letter, ‘verborum delectum eloquentiae principium [est] ’ (‘the choice of lexis is the first foundation of eloquence’, Ep. ii. 126). Another of his major polemical points was that Aristotle was an elegant writer in Greek, who has been portrayed as a crude stylist because of poor Latin translations. He argues that Aris­ totle is stylistically effective not only in the civic matter of works like the Politics, but also in less promising areas such as the Physics and Metaphysics (Ep. i. 137-40; ii. 95). In a famous letter, written between 1431 and 1434, in which he defines the ‘studia humanitatis’, Bruni identifies his two literary models as Aristo­ tle (for res) and Cicero (for verba): ‘fundamenta disciplinamque harum rerum ab Aristotele perdisces, ornatum vero orationis et copiam et omnes verborum divitias, sermonisque ut ita loquar dexteritatem in his ipsis rebus a Cicerone mutuaberis’ (‘you will thoroughly learn the foundations and the entire discipline of these [philosophical] matters from Aristotle, but elegance of style, breadth of discourse and all other lexical resources, as well as stylistic dexterity, if I can call it that, in dealing with these same topics you will borrow from Cicero’, Ep. ii. 49). In the Cicero Novus (1415) he maintains, perhaps attacking Salutati’s claim that Petrarch came closest to imitating Cicero, that ‘ex tanta multitudine studiosorum hominum, qui vel in eius aetate fuerunt, On the broader literary importance of humanist translations, see L. Gualdo Rosa, ‘Le traduzioni dal greco nella prima meta del Quattrocento’, in M. Renard and P. Laurens (eds.), Hommages a Henry Bardon (Brussels, 1985), 177-93.

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vel postea secuti sunt, neque dicendo adhuc quispiam Ciceronem adaequavit neque scribendo proximus accessit’ (‘of all the many learned men who either lived in his own age, or followed after him, none so far has ever equalled Cicero nor even come close to him either in speaking or writing’, Schriften, 118).19 Yet Bruni is no Ciceronian. His concept of literary models is always a pluralistic one. In his 1421 introduction to a translation of Demosthenes’ speeches he warns ‘Utilissima quidem imitatio est sed non nisi perfectorum’ (‘Imitation is extremely useful, but only the imitation of the best authors’, p. 131). Similarly in his treatises on education and translation, he urges the study of the best authors (pp. 7, 86). In his own translation practice he main­ tains that for Latin his models are not just Cicero, but also Seneca, Jerome, Augustine, Lactantius, and Boethius (Schriften, 80; Ep. ii. 1-8, 81-90, 195-217). Unlike Salutati, who had ap­ proved of neologisms in translation (Salutati, Ep. ii. 356), Bruni is mostly against them except where absolutely necessary (Schriften, 86, 93). For Bruni Latin is not an impoverished lan­ guage compared to Greek, but rather thanks to Cicero it pos­ sesses all the linguistic resources necessary to deal with philosophical concepts in translation (pp. 78, 114-15). In conformity with this limited eclecticism, Bruni is interested in genres other than Ciceronian dialogues, orations, and epis­ tles. In his historical works he clearly follows Livy, Sallust, and Caesar, while in his biographies, including the ‘parallel’ lives of and comparison between Dante and Petrarch, he is imitating Plutarch. Also in terms of the language of these other works, Bruni is clearly no Ciceronian. The Historiae Florentini Populi opens with a proem which obviously echoes that of Livy, from the opening expression of diffidence (‘Diuturna michi cogitatio fu it. . . faciundumne foret’ (‘For a long time I pondered on whether it would be worth while’) ), through the standard praise of history as a most difficult genre, and as containing outstand­ ing examples of virtue to emulate, to the final sentence in which he deals with the foundation myths of the city and alludes to his illustrious model: ‘placuit exemplo quorundam rerum scriptorum 19 Certainly there is a verbal similarity with Salutati’s formulation: ‘nullum ferme Ciceroni propinquius accessisse Petrarca nostro in soluto sermone’ (‘probably no­ body came closer to Cicero in writing prose than our own Petrarch’, Salutati, Ep. iv. 166).

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de primordio atque origine urbis, vulgaribus fabulosisque opinionibus reiectis, quam verissimam puto notitiam tradere’ (‘I decided to follow the example of certain historians in handing down what I thought was the truest account of the earliest origins of our city, and dismissing popular and fictitious legends’).20Bruni, however, departs from his model in rejecting the legends ac­ cepted by previous choniclers such as Giovanni Villani, whereas Livy remains neutral about Rome’s foundation myths: ‘ea nec adfirmare nec refellere in animo est’ (‘I do not intend to confirm or reject them’, Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 1. 6). Bruni’s proem is closer to the sceptical preface of Thucydides.21 But Livy is again the model when he claims that Pisa is ‘altera Carthago’ , and that the deeds of the Pisan war are in no way inferior to the Punic war (Historiae, 3). The structure of the work also recalls Livy’s: although not written in decades, like Biondo’s history, Bruni makes his first book end with the demise of the last em­ peror in Italy, Frederick II, as Livy book 1 ended with the downfall of the last Roman king; while the war against Milan receives a separate proem at the start of book 10, just as Livy writes another proem to the Punic war in book 21.22 Livy, then, is the chief model, but other historians are imitated. Both Sallust and Tacitus are sources for two of the mainstays of Bruni’s ideology, the republican founding of Florence and the decline of Rome which sets in with the Empire. But he also echoes these writers in the ‘terse Latin style’ which he cultivated for his 30 Bruni, Historiarum Florentini Populi Libri XII, ed. E. Santini, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, xix. 3 (Citta di Castello, 1914), 4. Cf. Livy’s ‘Facturusne operae pretium sim si a primordio urbis res populi Romani perscripserim nec satis scio’ (‘I do not know whether it will be worth my while if I write down the history of the Roman people from the very beginnings of the city’, i. i). See R. Fubini, ‘Osservazioni sopra gli Historiarum Florentini Populi Libri XII di Leonardo Bruni’, in Studi di storia medievale e modema per Ernesto Sestan (2 vols.; Flor­ ence, 1980), i. 403-48 (425 n. 69); id., ‘La rivendicazione di Firenze della sovranita statale e il contributo delle Historiae', in Viti (ed.), Leonardo Bruni cancelliere, 29-62. For Bruni’s departure from Livy’s estimate of the Etruscans, see A. M. Cabrini, ‘Le Historiae del Bruni: Risultati e ipotesi di una ricerca sulle fonti’, in ibid. 247-319. M ‘Bellum mediolanense . . . maximum sit existimandum; nam et civitas per id tempus viris opibusque maxime florebat, et nitebatur adversus potentissimum hostem’ (‘The war against M ilan . . . must be considered the most important war, since the city in that period was at its peak in terms of wealth and numbers of men, and it was pitted against a most powerful enemy’, Historiae, 247). Cf. Livy: ‘Bellum maxime omnium memorabile . . . nam neque validiores opibus ullae inter se civitates gentesque contulerunt arma’ (‘This war was the most memorable of a ll. . . for never before had two such powerful states or nations gone to war with each other’, 21. 1).

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history.23 Brief epigrammatic sentences are typical of Sallust and Tacitus rather than Livy: ‘victi procul dubio, Romani vicerunt’ (‘though undoubtedly defeated, the Romans triumphed in the end’, p. n ) is redolent of their paradoxical sententiae; in the fol­ lowing sentence both the thought and the expression are Tacitean: ‘Cessit enim libertas imperatorio nomini, et post libertatem virtus abivit’ (‘Freedom yielded to the institution of the Empire, and after freedom all virtuous achievements vanished’, p. 14);24while the sequence of abrupt sentences describing the violent ends of many emperors (pp. 14-15) is also a deliberate attempt to emu­ late Tacitus. It is not surprising that in the De Studiis et Litteris Bruni recommends the imitation not just of Livy, but also of Sallust, Tacitus, Quintus Curtius, and Caesar (Schriften, 13). O f course there are also many complex periods as well, and the overall tone is heavily classical: the Guelphs are termed ‘adversa imperio factio’ (‘the faction opposed to the Empire’, pp. 26, 28, etc.), the Anziani are ‘Antianos’ (p. 27), the Palazzo Pubblico is ‘aedes publicas, ubi nunc praetorium est’ (‘the pub­ lic building where the seat of government now resides’, p. 30) and the podesta is dressed up as ‘magistratus qui peregrinus eligi consueverat’ (‘the magistrate who customarily was elected from non-Florentines’, p. 31). But Bruni’s Latin also comes from other sources: ‘consignatio’ (p. 5) is a legal term, ‘discursio’ (p. 10) is found only in Ammianus, ‘fomitem’ (p. 25) comes from Gellius, while ‘vindicabundus’ (p. 11) is a poetic form un­ attested in ancient authors, though such adjectival formations were characteristic of Sallust.25 The incidence of such unclassical terminology is higher in the Historiae than in the Dialogi, but this is understandable in view of the subject-matter, as Bruni himself points out in the proem, when he mentions its ‘asperitas vix cuiuscumque elegantiae patiens’ (‘technical nature which barely allows any room for elegance’, p. 3). The Latin of the Historiae 23 See E. B. Fryde, ‘The Beginnings of Italian Humanist Historiography: The New Cicero of Leonardo Bruni’, English Historical Review, 95 (1980), 533—52 (534). 24 cf. ‘postquam. .. omnem potentiam ad unum conferri pacis interfuit, magna ilia ingenia cessere’ (‘after all power was transferred to one man in the interests of peace, those great talents disappeared’ , Tacitus, Histories 1. 1). 25 cf. A. La Penna, ‘II significato di Sallustio nella storiografia e nel pensiero politico di Leonardo Bruni’, in his Sallustio e la romana (Milan, 1968), 409-31 (esp. 425-6).

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evinces that limited eclecticism characteristic of Bruni and other Quattrocento historians.26 Bruni’s other historical work, the Rerum suo Tempore Gestarum Commentarius, or De Temporibus suis Libellus (1440-1), belongs to a different genre.27 Unlike the twelve books of the Historiae, here there are no reported orations, for the accent is on brevitas: ‘in hoc libello brevi discursu colligere. . .’ (‘in this short work I have decided to put together a brief discussion . . . ’), he warns in the preface.28 In a letter of around 1424, he explicitly notes the difference between the two genres: ‘Commentaria tamen ab historia multum differunt. Ilia enim amplior ac diligentior est: haec contractiora et minus explicata’ (‘ Commentaria are very dif­ ferent from a History: the latter is a broader, more thorough work, the former briefer and with fewer explanations’, Ep. i. 135). Along with this briefer structure goes a more lax attitude to lexis. That late Latin ‘discursus’, the poetic ‘decursa tempora’ , and the unusual form ‘scisciderant’ all occur on the first page.29 Another indication of the more informal tone is the use of the medieval form ‘gebellinarum partium’ (p. 425) for Ghibellines rather than the classical circumlocution ‘imperii fautrix factio’, used in the Historiae. In his historical works, then, as in his philosophical treatises and translations, Bruni demands stylistic elegance. But, while his historiography received universal acclamation, his Ciceronian attitude to philosophy came under attack. In 1436 the Bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, attacked Bruni’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics. Although unable to read the original Greek text, he defends the propriety of the old medieval translation on philosophical rather than rhetorical grounds. He admits that Cicero was a great orator, but claims that he lacked Aristotle’s 16 Santini in the introduction to his edition cites the ‘ben inteso eclettismo’ of fifteenth-century historians (p. iv). 17 For the title and the distinctive characteristics of the work, as opposed to the Historiae, see G. Ianziti, ‘Storiografia e contemporaneity. A proposito del Rerum suo tempore gestarum commentarius di Leonardo Bruni’, Rinascimento, 30 (1990), 3-28. a8 Bruni, Rerum suo Tempore Gestarum Commentarius, ed. C. di Pierro, 423. For the ideal of brevitas in Bruni, see N. S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, NJ, 1970), 81 n. 107. 19 This archaic form of the verb is discussed in Aulus Gellius, Nodes Atticae 6. 9.

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philosophical acumen. He rejects Bruni’s view and claims that it is the writer’s content not his elegance that is crucial. He defends the use of Greek words such as eutrapelia, and bomolochia, since Latin is a language that expands to accept many foreign coinages. But it is clear from Alonso’s own Latin that he lacks Bruni’s stylistic sensitivity: he claims that Bruni’s suggestion of ‘urbani’ for eutrapeloi is inaccurate, since it means ‘courteous’, which Alonso can only gloss as ‘ “ corthesios” . . . “ curialitatem” quandam’. Bruni’s ‘urbani’ , ‘festivi’, or ‘iucundi’ are classical, but not suitable translations; instead ‘faceti’ or Aquinas’ trans­ lation ‘gratiosi’ seem more suitable. For Alonso the strict con­ clusions of philosophy should not be subject to the rules of eloquence, so he defends the medieval translation o f ‘bonum per se’ against the Ciceronian ‘summum bonum’ adopted by Bruni, and reasserts the primacy of res over verba: ‘Non ergo ex eo translatio mordenda est, quod oratorum etiam summorum usitatis verbis discordet, sed in hoc examinanda est, an simplicitatem rerum ac restrictam proprietatem verborum observet’ (‘Conse­ quently the translation should be not be attacked because it departs from the normal words used by the best orators, rather it should be scrutinized to see whether it retains the essentials of the subject-matter and strict verbal propriety’).30 The church­ man Alonso thus adopts the stance that will be taken by Benedetto Accolti and Pico della Mirandola when the question of the correct style for philosophical works resurfaces in the second half of the century. Bruni also offers a substantial contribution to ideas about imitation .in the vernacular. In the 1435 dispute with Flavio Biondo (1392-1463) about the origins of the vernacular, Bruni took the unhistorical view that ancient Rome was characterized by the bilingualism of his own day. This idea of a volgare existing in antiquity, not deriving from the barbarian invasions, as Biondo thought, allowed Bruni to conclude that it had a linguistic parity with Latin, particularly in Dante and the best writers: ‘Nam et habet vulgaris sermo commendationem suam ut apud Dantem 30 For Alonso’s text, see A. Birkenmajer, ‘Der Streit des Alonso von Cartagena mit Leonardo Bruni Aretino’, in his Vermischte Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Mittelalterlichen Philosophic (Munster, 1922), 129-210 (esp. 169-75). For the whole episode, see J. E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 121-33.

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poetam, et alios quosdam emendate loquentes apparet’ (‘For the vernacular also has its own excellence, as is apparent in the poet Dante, and certain others who write elegantly’, Ep. ii. 62-8).31 This new dignity was enhanced in the following year when Bruni wrote in the vernacular Le vite di Dante e del Petrarca (Schriften, 50-69). Bruni is inspired to write the biographies, not only to dignify vernacular authors with a Plutarchan biography, but also because he finds Boccaccio’s Trattatello ‘tutto d’amore e di sospiri e di cocenti lagrim e. . . pieno’ (p. 51). For Bruni, Boccaccio’s biography is as fictitious as his other vernacular works, and, as he rejected the civic myths in his Historiae, and as he had criticized Dante’s inaccurate legend about the found­ ing of M antua (Ep. ii. 217-29, 1418),32 so here he rejects Boccaccio’s fictions about Dante. Although he acknowledges the inadequacy of the vernacular in dealing with learned topics such as the Greek etymology of the word poeta (‘queste sono cose, che mal si possono dire in vulgare idioma’, p. 60), nevertheless he reaffirms his belief in the nobility of the volgare, claiming that the poet is to be differentiated from other writers on the grounds of what he writes, not because of his language: lo scrivere in istile litterato o volgare non ha a fare al fatto, ne altra differenza e se non come scrivere in greco od in latino. Ciascuna lingua ha la sua perfezione e suo suono, e suo parlare limato e scientifico. (p. 61)

Although the biographies illustrate Bruni’s enthusiasm for the vernacular writers, an important number of critical nuances remain. Unlike Salutati’s hypothesis about a Latin Commedia which would have surpassed Homer and Virgil, Bruni openly admits that Dante chose to write his poem in the vernacular because he knew his Latin was inferior to his work in the volgare, notably his Eclogues and the Monarchia. The latter is written ‘a modo disadorno, senza niuna gentilezza di dire’ (p. 61), and, as in the Dialogi, Dante’s Latin is associated with the hated scho­ lastic style (‘al modo fratesco scolastico’, p. 60). 3‘ For accurate editions of the texts and on the whole question, see M. Tavoni, Latino, grammatica, volgare. Storia di una questione umanistica (Padua, 1984). 3a Echoes of this criticism are to be found in Domenico da Prato’s Prefazione: ‘Ed un altro di loro dice, anzi l’ha scritto, ch’e peggio, Dante non avere nella origine mantuana Virgilio inteso’ (cited by Lanza, Polemiche e berte letterarie nella Firenze del primo Quattrocento, 242).

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Similarly Bruni’s famous praise of Petrarch as the pioneer of the humanist Renaissance also contains hints of criticism: Francesco Petrarca fu il primo il quale ebbe tanta grazia d’ingegno, che riconobbe e rivoco in luce l’antica leggiadria dello stile perduto e spento, e posto che in lui perfetto non fusse, pur da se vide ed aperse la via a questa perfezione, ritrovando le opere di Tullio e quelle gustando ed intendendo, adattandosi quanto pote e seppe a quella elegantissima e perfettissima facondia. (pp. 65-6)

For Boccaccio Petrarch had been the reviver o f poetry, and for Salutati he had been the supreme Latinist, but Bruni’s tribute to Petrarch is in terms not of his Latin works, which fall short of the present age of perfection (‘posto che in lui perfetto non fusse’), but in the general terms of opening up the road of hu­ manist studies, by discovering ancient works. Instead, Petrarch’s Latin represented a limited Ciceronianism (‘quanto pote e seppe’) well below the perfect copy achieved by Bruni and his genera­ tion. For Bruni, as for Biondo, a genuine return to Ciceronian Latin was possible only after the 1421 discovery at Lodi of the complete Orator, De Oratore, and Brutus.33 As for Boccaccio, despite the generic praise of him in Dialogi book 2, there is nothing but criticism of his Latin in the Vite: ‘Apparo grammatica da grande, e per questa cagione non ebbe mai la lingua latina molto in sua balia’ (p. 67). Thus, although Bruni is more positive about the vernacular in the Vite, the main charge against the Tre Corone made in Dialogi book 1, their lack of ‘Latinitas’, is reaffirmed in the biographies. There is also explicit criticism of Petrarch’s, Boccaccio’s, and Salutati’s in­ accurate definitions o fpoeta (p. 60).34 Similarly a passage in the 33 On the Lodi discovery, see R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV (2 vols.; Florence, 1905), i. 100. Biondo in his Italia Illustrata shared Bruni’s estimate of Petrarch: ‘nec tamen eum attigit Ciceronianae eloquentiae florem, quo multos in hoc seculo videmus ornatos. .. . Ipse enim et si epistulas Ciceronis Lentulo inscriptas Vercellis reperisse gloriatus est, tres Ciceronis De Oratore et Institutionum Oratoriarum Quintiliani libros non nisi laceros mutilatosque vidit’ (‘but he did not attain that Ciceronian elegance which we now see adorns the works of many writers in our century. . .. For although Petrarch himself gloried in having discovered Cicero’s Letters to Lentulus at Vercelli, the only copies he saw of Cicero’s three books of De Oratore and Quintilian’s Institutiones Oratoriae were fragmentary and corrupt’ , De Roma Triumphante Libri X, Romae Instauratae Libri III, Italia Illustrata, Historiarum ab Inclinatione Romani Imperii Decades III (Basle, 1531), 346). Biondo here confuses Petrarch’s dis­ covery of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in Verona with Antonio Loschi’s discovery in Vercelli of Cicero’s Letters to his Friends. 34 For this criticism, see Trovato, ‘Dai Dialogi ad Petrum Histrum’ , 281-2.

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Historiae written about the same time criticizes Salutati’s prolix and rhetorical Latin in his reply to the Milanese declaration of war.35 Thus by the mid-1430s Bruni is aware of the stylistic distance between his own Latin and that o f his predecessors, and does not need to resort to the artifice of the dialogue to camouflage the sharpness of his critique. Bruni’s contribution to the history of literary imitation, like his importance in other areas of humanism, is of major signifi­ cance. His dispute with Salutati over epistolary form in 1405 may seem trivial in substance, but it is indicative of the gulf that separates Quattrocento Latin from its predecessors. Petrarch’s similitudo and Salutati’s imitatio are clearly different from Bruni’s quest for identity with antiquity. The Latin of men like Salutati and Petrarch could never be mistaken for classical prose; the Latin of humanists like Bruni and his generation is an almost perfect copy. Partly because he possesses this facility, Bruni displays little originality as he seeks to produce a genuine antique. Hence his many works which require no inventio: the translations, the compilations based on Xenophon, Procopius, and Polybius, the historical works, the commentaries, and the biographies. Bruni does not theorize much about imitation partly because he is so proficient at it in practice. We have seen how through the practice of translation he developed a sensitivity to style, lexis, and rhythm. It was for this expertise that he was often consulted by his fellow humanists on correct usage. As early as 1406 he is explaining the correct use of the verb fastidire, and still in 1440 he is pointing out that the adjective from Como is ‘Comensis’, ‘Cumanus’ meaning from Cumae (Ep. i. 23-5; ii. 122-5).36 The most interesting letter of this consultative type is the one written in 1438—9 in which Bruni defends the medieval forms michi and nichil. Bruni appeals to the usage established by the Tre Corone as well as Salutati against those who use mihi merely because they want to be considered ‘antiquarii’ {Ep. ii. 107-8). This unique defence of Trecento usage seems at odds 35 ‘prolixius duriusque responsum est’, in Historiae ix. fin. (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, xix. 3, 246). For the date of composition (the first nine books were written by 1439), see D. J. Wilcox, The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), ch. 1. 36 However, a recently discovered letter shows that in 1406 he commended to Salutati ‘Gregorium de Cumis’ (Gregory of Como), despite having criticized Salutati’s medieval Latin forms such as ‘de Aretio’— see Griggio, ‘Due lettere inedite del Bruni’,

47 •

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with Bruni’s earlier critique, but is perhaps due to his attempts to distance himself from the extreme antiquarianism of Niccoli, with whom he had had an acrimonious quarrel. In imitational practice, Bruni is important in continuing the tradition of the oration and the letter, and is original in inaugu­ rating the most distinctive genres of the century: the dialogue, the history, the commentary, the biography, and the translation from Greek. Particularly as regards the latter, Bruni sees himself as imitating Cicero: not only did he translate the philosophical authors Cicero had translated (Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon), but he even asks for a copy of Cicero’s own preface to his (lost) translations from Aeschines and Demosthenes (De Optimo Genere Dicendi) ‘u t . . . me summo viro propinquum afferam’ (‘in order that I may place myself alongside that great writer’, Ep. i. g8). He is also Ciceronian in his concern for elegant form even in untractable historical or philosophical material. Yet, although he too sees Cicero as the peak of Latin eloquence, he draws his own Latin from a plurality of authors extending to Boethius and the fourth-century fathers. His ‘optimi auctores’ are not yet confined to the one century, far less the one author. Bruni’s fortunes as a Latin stylist naturally oscillate in the course of the century, but to a lesser extent than those of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati. His contemporaries like Antonio da Rho and even his opponent Alonso da Cartagena call him a second Cicero.37 In Bruni’s own lifetime it was perhaps inevitable that personal or ideological opponents, like Ambrogio Traversari and Pier Candido Decembrio, should find fault with some of his translations.38 But there was also criticism from within the hu­ manist camp itself from the scholar who would be the leading Latinist of the next generation, Lorenzo Valla. As early as 1435 Valla attacked the Latin of the Laudatio as ‘laxus . . . et fluens et enervatus et gravitate et ingenio carens multisque in locis minime 37 ‘alter Cicero’, Antonio da Rho, ‘Oratio ad Scolares’, in K. Mullner, Reden und Briefe italienischer Humanisten. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Pddagogik des Humanismus (Vienna, 1899), 166; ‘novellum dixerim Ciceronem’, Alonso da Cartagena, in Birkenmajer, ‘Der Streit des Alonso von Cartagena mit Leonardo Bruni Aretino’, 164. 38 Traversari quotes a critic of Bruni’s Phaedrus translation who had called it ‘incultum, asperum ac rudem’— seej. Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (2 vols.; Leiden, 1990), i. 68 n. 84. Decembrio sides with Alonso in attacking Bruni’s render­ ing of ‘aristocratia’ as ‘optimorum civium potestatem’ (Hankins, ii. 581-2).

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latine, ne dicam corrupte, loquens’ (‘slack . .. and loose and weak, lacking in seriousness and intelligence, and in many places writ­ ten not just in poor but in corrupt Latin’).39 Two years after Bruni’s death, in 1446, Valla claims to have spotted over 400 errors in the version of Aristotle’s Politics.4° By the end of the century the Ciceronian Cortesi accurately observes that Bruni’s historical work owes more to Livy than to Cicero, criticizing his ‘minus plerunque lectis verbis’ (‘words that are on the whole not often found’), but accurately underlining his major contribution to Latin prose: ‘hie primus inconditam scribendi consuetudinem ad numerosum quendam sonum inflexit’ (‘he was the first to turn the rather uncouth style of writing [Latin] into something more rhythmical and sonorous’).41 The final irony is that, in criticizing Bruni, Cortesi attributes any faults in his Latin to the uncouth age he lived in, the same criticism that Bruni had made of Dante in the Dialogi and Vite. Cortesi rightly accords Bruni a prominent place in Quattrocento culture; but Bruni was not only a sensitive Latinist, he was also interested in the achieve­ ments of the vernacular to an extent not found in any of his contemporaries. The humanists we shall examine in the follow­ ing two chapters are interested solely in perfecting their Latin; only when we come to Alberti will we find an interest in the volgare to match and indeed outstrip Bruni’s. 39 L. Valla, Epistole, ed. O. Besomi and M. Regoliosi (Padua, 1984), 163. 40 Ibid. 288-9. 4' P. Cortesi, De Hominibus Doctis, ed. G. Ferraii (Palermo, 1979), 121.

6

HUMANIST EDUCATORS When we turn from men of letters such as Petrarch, Salutati, and Bruni to humanists whose main occupation was teaching, we find a predictable change of emphasis in discussions of liter­ ary imitation. Gasparino Barzizza (1360-1430) and Antonio da Rho (1395-1451) may acknowledge, like Petrarch, the supremacy of Cicero’s Latin, but they deal with imitation in basic and pedagogical rather than literary terms. Imitatio was only explic­ itly mentioned by Bruni and Salutati in a few places; in the humanist educators and writers of educational treatises the topic receives quantitavely greater attention, but always in the con­ text of basic rules of rhetorical training rather than as specific stylistic advice.

/. Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder (1370-1444) is most famous for being the first humanist to write a full treatise on education. But before examining his De Ingenuis Moribus et Liberalibus Adolescentie Studiis (1402-3), it is worth considering some of his relevant letters— in one of them he achieves another important ‘first’.' In 1389 he contrasted his own study of dialectic with his corre­ spondent’s reading of Cicero and Seneca (Ep. 13), but his cor­ respondent, Santo de’ Pellegrini, had responded with praise of Vergerio’s ability to remain a follower of Ciceronian Latin even while studying logic. Vergerio in accepting the compliment, asserts his recognition of Cicero as the supreme model, but senses the distance between his own Latin and Cicero’s: sequor quo cominus possum totius eloquentie fontem. nescio enim quern potiorem ducem in hoc sectari valeam. sed adeo iners tardusque sum1 1 Quotations in the section that follows are from Epistolario di Pier Paolo Vergerio, ed. L. Smith (Rome, 1934).

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ut velociter preeuntem obliteratis ferme Vestigiis nedum attingere sed videre minime possim. (Ep. 29) (I follow as closely as I can that source of all eloquence; for I do not know who else would be preferable as a guide in this matter. But I am so artless and slow that I can scarcely see let alone catch up with someone who has preceded me so swiftly that his footsteps are all but obliterated.) That this is more than the standard praise of the Roman orator is confirmed by Vergerio’s elegant elaboration of the image of the footsteps on the road, and by his fullest statement on im­ itation, in a letter of 1396 to Ludovico Buzzacarino {Ep. 176-9). In the context of some general precepts on rhetoric, he argues against Seneca the Elder’s advocacy of choosing a series of models: et quamquam Anneus neminem velit unum sequendum, sed ex diversis novum quoddam dicendi genus conficiendum, michi tamen non ita videtur, sed unum aliquem eundemque optimum habendum esse, quern precipuum imitemur. {Ep. 177) (And although Annaeus Seneca wants us to follow no single author, but to manufacture an original style from a number of different sources, nevertheless I do not agree: I think we should choose one single model, one that is the best, whom we should imitate in particular.)2 Like many writers on imitation, Vergerio draws an analogy from painting, urging Buzzacarino to act like contemporary artists who may look at many other painters’ works but follow only Giotto’s ‘exemplaria’ .3 He reasserts his view that Cicero is the finest of all authors, then adds his own variation of the apian image: ‘illud omnino curandum est, ut sententiis magis polleat oratio quam verbis, ne similes illis videamur qui flores sectantur, fructus negligunt’ (‘we must ensure that our discourse should be stronger in ideas than in words, lest we end up looking like those 2 Cf. Seneca, Controversiae i Proem, 6: ‘Non est unus, quamvis praecipuus sit, imitandus, quia numquam par fit imitator auctori’ (‘We should not imitate one single writer, no matter how great, since the imitator will always remain inferior to the model’). Perhaps there is also an echo of Petrarch’s similar advice: ‘unum nos­ trum [stilum] conflatum ex pluribus’ (Fam. i. 8. 2), which in turn derives from the Younger Seneca: ‘unum quiddam fiat ex multis’ {Ep. 84. 7). 3 See M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford, 1971), 43-4.

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people who go in search of flowers, but ignore the fruit’, Ep. 178).4 This stress on res rather than verba is typical of late Trecento writers such as Salutati, particularly the condemnation o f ‘lubricis aut magno boatu resonantibus verbis’ (‘flashy or loud-sounding words’) and the warning to avoid obscure or archaic diction: ‘habenda sunt autem vocabula non obscura aut insueta nec vero passim vulgata et puerilia, sed que apud claros auctores cognita celebrataque sunt’ (‘we should use words that are neither ob­ scure or unusual, nor on the other hand over-used or puerile, but words which have become familiar and even famous through their use by the best authors’, ibid.)- This early call for exclusive imitation of Cicero was stimulated by Salutati himself, whose letter about the evolution of Latin literature, and Cicero’s su­ preme position within it (Salutati, Ep. iii. 79 ff.), was written the year before Vergerio’s epistle.5 Yet the end of Vergerio’s letter is already talking about a plurality of authors (‘auctores claros’), so it is unlikely that he believed that the young writer should use only words exclusively drawn from Cicero. This pluralism is confirmed in the De Ingenuis Moribus .. . ; Vergerio insists that the young student learn from the best teach­ ers and authors (‘non quibuslibet [auctoribus] passim immorari sed optimis’ (‘we should concentrate not on every author but only on the best’)), but the insistence on a restricted range of texts seems to be prompted more by quantitative concerns than by stylistic preoccupations: Ut enim superfluus cibus non nutrit, sed stomachum quidem fastidio afficit, reliquum vero corpus aggravat atque infirmat: ita multa rerum copia simul ingesta memoriae, et facile in praesenti elabitur et in futurum imbecilliorem vim eius reddidit. (Just as excessive food provides no nourishment, but rather oppresses the stomach, and weighs down and debilitates the rest of the body, so too does an excessive quantity of material committed to memory at the 4 The image derives from Seneca (Ep. 84), is expanded in Petrarch, as we have seen, and is favoured also by Poliziano. Vergerio’s formulation of it finds a signifi­ cant echo in another influential educational work written a century later: ‘Pero io estimo che come la musica, le feste, i giochi e l’altre condicioni piacevoli son quasi il fiore, cost lo indurre o aiutare il suo principe al bene e spaventarlo dal male, sia il vero frutto della cortegiania’ (B. Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano con una scelta delle opere minori, ed. B. Maier (Turin, 1964), 451). 5 See R. G. Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads: Hie Life, Works and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, NC, 1983), 267.

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one time: it easily slips the memory in the short term, and weakens rhetorical vigour in the long term.)6 Vergerio submitted a copy of his treatise to Salutati but paid little attention to the older humanist’s strictures on sources and orthography. In replying to Salutati’s criticisms, Vergerio admits that he is not diligent in orthography, since the glory of writers derives not from how they spell but from what they write. Indeed he seems to display a deliberate lack of orthographical concern when he misrepresents the older man’s advice, which had been summed up in the biblical phrase ‘munda fermentum hoc’ (‘clean out this yeast’).7 Vergerio mockingly replies: nec me iube frumentum hoc, ut tu appellas, tarn exquisite mundare. neque enim usque adeo candidum ex similagine panem conficere studeo, ut nichil in eo furfuris relictum velim. (Ep. 262) (Do not order me to cleanse this wheat, as you call it, so thoroughly. For I am not trying to make such white bread from flour as to leave no trace of bran in it.) He seems to have consciously exchanged ‘frumentum’ for fermentum in order to illustrate elegantly his lack of concern for

orthography and to allow him to allude to another favourite area of imagery, that of bread.8 Vergerio’s position in the history of imitation is significant in that his is the first articulation of the principle of single model imitation, even though in practice and in other statements he is clearly a pluralist, like other early Quattrocento humanists. His closest links are with Leonardo Bruni: the latter’s Dialogi are 6 These quotations are taken from De Ingenuis Moribus et Liberalibus Adolescentie Studiis, in V. Roscius, De Docendi Studendique Modo ac de Claris Puerorum Moribus (Basle, 1541), 442-500 (479-80). The food metaphor clearly derives from Seneca: ‘Fastidientis stomachi est multa degustare’ (‘It is typical of those with a delicate appetite to try out a variety of dishes’, Ep. 2. 4); ‘alimenta quae . . . solida innatant stomacho, onera sunt. . . Concoquamus ilia; alioqui in memoriam ibunt non in ingenium’ (‘foods which sit solidly in the stomach are a burden . .. Let us digest them: otherwise they will merely lodge in the memory not in the brain’, Ep. 84. 6-7). 1 Salutati’s words (cited in Vergerio, Ep. 257) echoed St Paul’s ‘expurgate fermentum vetus’ (1 Cor. 5: 7). 8 The metaphor of bread goes back to Seneca: ‘utrum hie panis sit plebeius an siligineus ad naturam nihil pertinet’ (‘whether this bread is ordinary bread or from the finest wheat is of no relevance’, Ep. 119. 3), though perhaps Vergerio derived it from his fellow Capodistrian St Jerome (Ep. 52. 6). Dante alludes to the image in Corn. 1. 10. 1, 1. 13. 12, but it is unlikely that Vergerio knew of this.

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dedicated to Vergerio and they begin, like Vergerio’s own De Ingenuis Moribus, with a quotation from Plutarch’s Vita Demosthenis about the advantage of being born in an illustrious city; and both works highlight the importance of disputatio? Both men were almost exact contemporaries, enjoyed similar careers, and their first major works established two major Quattrocento gen­ res, the dialogue and the educational treatise. Vergerio too dis­ tances himself from Trecento predecessors like Petrarch and Salutati: in response to Petrarch’s criticism of Cicero’s involve­ ment in political matters (Fam. 24. 3) he pens a defence of Cicero in the orator’s own name (Ep. 436-45);'° he spurns, as we have seen, Salutati’s interests in orthography; and he rejects in theory the stylistic eclecticism hitherto proposed by other humanists in the question of imitation. Yet Vergerio has stronger links with Trecento culture than Bruni has. This is certainly true as regards the substance of his educational ideas," and it applies equally to the quality of his Latin. He has, like Salutati, a lingering fondness for the cursus and he employs far more unclassical terms than Bruni: apart from the early letters, the language of which is influenced by his interests in dialectic, even the De Ingenuis Moribus abounds with forms such as ‘miserativi’, ‘specialius’, ‘repagulis’, etc.9 12*Vergerio 10 may sound in his statement on imitation like a late Quattrocento Ciceronian, his letter in Cicero’s name may be woven out of authentic phrases from Cicero, but in practice his Latin is closer to the Trecento than to the Cinquecento.'3 9 See N. W. Gilbert, ‘The Early Italian Humanists and Disputation5, in A. Molho and J. A. Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence, 1971), 205-6. 10 See D. J. B. Robey, ‘Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder: Republicanism and Hu­ manist Values in the Work of an Early Humanist’ , Past and Present, 58 (1973), 3-32. 11 Cf. D. J. B. Robey, ‘Humanism and Education in the Early Quattrocento: The De Ingenuis Moribus of Pier Paolo Vergerio5, Bibliotheque d’ Humanisme et Renaissance, 42 (1980), 54.

12 De Ingenuis Moribus, 453, 462. ‘3 J. M. McManamon, SJ, ‘Innovation in Early Humanist Rhetoric: The Oratory of Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder’ , Rinascimento, 22 (1982), 3-32, illustrates Vergerio’s application of classical ideals to his speeches. But his Latin could not accurately be described as Ciceronian: apart from the instances cited above, see the lively facetia in the form of a letter (Ep. 384-7), in which his Latin achieves the anecdotal fluency of Poggio; his comedy Paulus is replete with unclassical elements discussed by A. Perosa, Teatro umanistico (Milan, 1965), 19, 60.

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2. Gasparino Barzizza The reputation of Gasparino Barzizza as a scholar and teacher extends from his own time to the present day. In 1422, when Guarino heard of Barzizza’s role in deciphering the manuscript of Cicero discovered at Lodi in 1421, he claimed that it was only right that this renaissance of Cicero should take place under Barzizza’s auspices.'4 In mid-century Biondo argues that it was this discovery that differentiated the Ciceronian style of the Quattrocento from Petrarch’s Latin: ‘factum videmus ut maior meliorque ea quam Petrarca habuit dicendi copia in nostram pervenerit aetatem’ (‘this is why wider and better resources of [Latin] style than Petrarch enjoyed have come down to our gen­ eration’).'5 Even at the end of the century Barzizza’s reputation seems still intact, as Sabellico credits the return of classical eloquence in his time to Barzizza’s labours on Cicero’s De Oratore: primus omnium, ut audio, ad veteris eloquentiae umbram . . . oculos retorsit. . . ea fiducia fretus quod in tres divinos illos M. Tullii ad Quintum fratrem libros, quum diutissime non exdtissent, primus inciderat.'6 (he was the first, it is said, to turn his eyes towards the outline of ancient eloquence . . . confident in his aspirations since he had been the first to come upon Cicero’s three divine books [of De Oratore] dedicated to his brother Quintus, which had not been extant for a very long time.)

There is no doubting Barzizza’s scholarly expertise. It was largely due to Barzizza and his pupil Cosma Raimondi that the complete texts of the De Oratore, Orator, and the Brutus were deciphered from the Lodi manuscript, transcribed, and then14 5 14 ‘renascens ad superos Cicero [te] primum in terris delegit hospitem. . . . Quem enim potius quam te Cicero deligeret, cuius ductu atque auspiciis amatur legitur et per Italorum gymnasia summa cum gloria volitat?’ (‘Cicero reborn in our time selected you as his first host on earth. . . . For who else should Cicero have chosen other than you, since it is thanks to your pioneering work that he is now loved, read, and reigns in supreme glory throughout all the academies of Italy?’, Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, ed. R. Sabbadini (3 vols.; Venice, 1915-19), i. 345. 15 F. Biondo, De Roma Triumphante Libri X, Romae Instauratae Libri III, Italia Illustrata, Historiarum ab Inclinatione Romani Imperii Decades III (Basle, 1531), 346. '6 M. Sabellico, De Latinae Linguae Reparatione, in Opera Omnia (Basle, 1560), 324.

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disseminated amongst Italian humanists.'7 Throughout his life he worked on a project to establish correct texts of all of Cicero’s works. ‘8But Barzizza’s reputation as ‘apostolo del ciceronianismo’ was also due to his success as a teacher, and to the influence of his didactic treatises, De Orthographia, De Compositione, and his series o f model Latin letters, the Epistolae ad Exercitationem Accommodatae.'9 Yet if Barzizza is the apostle of Ciceronianism, it is not reflected in his own Latin, which is much more eclectic than that of contemporaries, such as Bruni. The reputation stems from his theoretical enthusiasm for Cicero as a literary model. Leaving aside the rather basic treatises, De Orthographia and De Compositione, the most relevant work to our enquiry is the short tract De Imitatione. This too is a rather pedestrian piece, presenting ‘the nuts and bolts of the technique of imitation, simple advice how to adapt models’, and is probably not a fin­ ished work.20 Nevertheless it deserves attention, since it bears directly on our topic. It is addressed to those who have just graduated from the study of grammar to the art of rhetoric, hence its rather basic approach. The student is warned that imitation can take place in inventio and dispositio, as well as in the more obvious area of elocutio; and he is advised not to borrow passages from the begin­ nings of letters or speeches, since they are more easily recog­ nized. This is followed by some very elementary examples of imitation by adding or removing words: thus the phrase ‘Scite hoc inquit Brutus’ (‘Brutus wisely says this’) can be added to and become ‘Scite enim ac eleganter hoc inquit Me vir noster Brutus’ (‘For our goodfriend Brutus wisely and elegantly says this’); while other phrases can be altered by changing singular to plural, or by mere transposition: ‘fecisti satis’ can become ‘satisfecisti’ ! Despite this elementary tone, the treatise is based on major classical authorities. The opening division of imitation into four '7 R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV (2 vols.; Flor­ ence, 1905), i. 100-1; id., ‘I codici delle opere rettoriche di Cicerone’, Rivista di filologia e d’ istruzione classica, 16 (1887), 97-120. ,s R. G. G. Mercer, The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza with Special Reference to his Place in Paduan Humanism (London, 1979), 72. 19 The tag, ‘apostolo del ciceronianismo’, comes from R. Sabbadini, Storia del ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterarie nell’eta della Rinascenza (Turin, 1885), 32. 20 G. W. Pigman III, ‘Barzizza’s Treatise on Imitation’, Bibliotheque d’ Humanisme et Renaissance, 44 (1982), 341. Pigman’s edition of De Imitatione is on pp. 349—52.

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categories (‘videlicet addendo subtrahendo transferendo et immutando’ (‘namely, additions, deletions, transpositions, and alterations’)) derives from Quintilian (1. 5. 38), while the cen­ tral section is elaborated from Seneca, Epistulae 84. The apian and alimentary metaphors, as well as the son’s similarity to the father, the echo of a voice, and the sound of a choir, are all reworked from the Senecan letter.21 But the pedestrian thrust of the work is again apparent in that Barzizza does not stress that the imitator should improve on the original, merely that he should avoid plagiarism: ‘et nos non accipiamus dicta oratorum et poetarum quos imitari volumus recte secundum literam sed imitemur ita ut non videamur ipsa furari’ (‘We should not just take over verbatim and literally the phrases of orators and poets whom we want to imitate, but we should imitate in such a way as not to appear to have stolen the phrases’).22 Although the overall message is a cautious eclecticism, there is constant reference to Cicero. Like the bee selecting the finest flowers, we should imitate choice phrases ‘quando libros poetarum et oratorum et inprimis Ciceronis nostri legimus’ (‘when we read the works of the poets and orators, and especially those of our own Cicero’). In the two places where he offers more general stylistic advice, Cicero is the chief model: ‘Qui vult imitari, Ciceronem non relinquat’ (‘Whoever wants to imitate should never abandon Cicero’) is the conclusion to the first half of the work; while towards the end, Quintilian’s advice (2. 5. 19) is re­ cycled: ‘Iubeo potius te Ciceronem quam Livium imitari et potius Livium quam Sallustium’ (‘I suggest that you imitate Cicero rather than Livy, and Livy rather than Sallust’). Cicero is thus accorded the standard theoretical priority but is never elevated to being the sole source of Latinity. Although the Latin of this minor, unfinished work lacks polish, this is not as significant for our purpose as the fact that even the language of Barzizza’s model letters employ words and rhythms that Cicero would never have used. Although Barzizza may have been the first to argue for the use of the forms mihi and nihil, and 21 There is no mention of an echo in Seneca, but Barzizza’s text obviously read ‘echo’ instead of ‘ex quo’ at Ep. 84. 8. 22 De Imitatione, 350. Pigman sums up the difference between Barzizza and Seneca’s use of the bee image: ‘Disguising thefts, not making something better, is Barzizza’s special province’ (‘Barzizza’s Treatise on Imitation’, 343).

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although his epistles represented the most rigid reproduction of the techniques and assumptions o f Cicero to be found in Barzizza’s writings,23 nevertheless they still fall short of the clas­ sical standards achieved by humanists such as Bruni. Confirma­ tion of this limitation is the criticism made of Barzizza’s style by a Ciceronian writing at the end of the fifteenth century: ‘ipso orationis genere exilis et tristis, nimia enim cura attenuat orationem’ (‘his Latin style is narrow and dreary, since he pares down his discourse with too much attention’).24 This criticism by Cortesi is significant because it reflects not only the rigid criteria of a Ciceronian, but also, unlike the assessments of Guarino and Sabellico cited at the beginning of this section, the impartial estimate of a writer not from the Veneto. The praise lavished on Barzizza earlier in the century is not to be totally discounted; but the definition of him as Ciceronian can refer only to his textual labours and his theoretical estimate of the Roman orator, not to Barzizza’s own Latin writings. Much more indicative of Barzizza’s way of thinking was his coupling of Cicero with Terence and Priscian as indispensable models of Latinity: ‘Quid mihi prodesset Cicero sine Prisciano, et Terentio, et caeteris poetis? Quid Priscianus sine Cicerone et Terentio? Quid denique Terentius sine Cicerone et Prisciano? Sane nihil’ (‘What use would Cicero be to me without Priscian, Terence, and the other poets? What use would Priscian be without Cicero and Terence? and Terence without Cicero and Priscian? Clearly none at all’).25 Although the prose-writer (Cicero), poet (Terence), and gram­ marian (Priscian) are seen as mutually indispensable by Barzizza, not long after Barzizza’s death V alla will inaugurate a new age of sophistication in Latin by discriminating against the use of poetic words in prose and severely limiting Priscian’s authority.

j . Antonio da Rho Antonio da Rho was a pupil of Barzizza, and eventually suc­ ceeded him as professor of rhetoric in Milan after Barzizza’s 23 Mercer, The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza, 97. 24 P. Cortesi, De Hominibus Doctis, ed. G. Ferrau (Palermo, 1979), 141. 25 Gasparini Barzizii Bergomatis et Guiniforti Filii Opera, ed. J. A. Furietti (2 vols.; Rome, 1723), i. 182.

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death in 1430. As a scholar, Antonio was inferior to his teacher, but he continued his work in many ways, including writing a substantial treatise on imitation. De Imitationibus Eloquentie (1430-3) is, like Barzizza’s treatise, rather basic in its aims, but is wider in scope, more detailed in exemplification, and is infi­ nitely longer, consisting of several prefaces, and a lexicon of about one thousand entries.26 The instigator of the work appears to have been the Cosma Raimondi who had helped Barzizza transcribe the Lodi manu­ script. In a letter he urges Antonio to compose something on imitation, since, along with ars and exercitatio, imitatio is one of the three methods of acquiring eloquence, and because the an­ cients never dealt with this subject in detail, merely praising imitation and stating which writers to imitate in which genre.27 Raimondi’s belief that ‘unum enim verbum proprie significanterque positum totam interdum illustrat orationem’ (‘one word, properly and significantly placed, at times lights up a whole speech’ , M. 2ogr) reflects the contemporary pursuit of correct lexical usage, characteristic of other works of this period by Maffeo Vegio, Pier Candido Decembrio, and, of course, Valla himself in the Elegantiae.28 Raimondi specifies the form the work should take: Antonio should collect ‘significantia verba et splendida’ from the best authors, and provide synonyms and examples of different usage either in the same or different authors. This will allow the student who does not possess many books to have at his disposal a wealth of synonyms which will help him avoid verbatim imitation of the classical author; but he ends by advis­ ing selectivity in the use of these words: ‘verbisque utetur non 26 For details of the manuscripts of the work, see Antonio da Rho, Apologia. Orazioni, ed. G. Lombardi (Rome, 1982), 30 n. 79. I have consulted the complete treatise in two manuscripts: Avignon, Musee Calvet, MS 1054 (henceforth cited as A.); Padua, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS C. 72 (hereafter cited as P.). 27 Raimondi’s letter appears in the incomplete manuscript in Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS H. 49. inf., fos. 2ogr-2 io v (hereafter M.); but in A. and P. it reappears almost verbatim as Rho’s dedicatory letter to Gherardo Landriani. Rho’s reply to Raimondi (M. 2iov-2 i2 v) becomes in A. and P. ‘aliud prohemium’; and both A. and P. contain another dedicatory letter to the Archbishop of Milan, Bartolomeo Capra, which is not present in M. For the dedications to Raimondi and Capra belonging to a first redaction of the work, and that to Landriani belonging to a second, see M. Regoliosi, ‘Due nuove lettere del Valla’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 25 (1982), 151-88 (167). 28 cf. Antonio da Rho, Apologia, 27-9.

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omnibus sed electis atque prestantibus’ (‘he should not use all these words but only those which are carefully selected or out­ standing in some way’ , fo. 2ior). Rho’s reply to Raimondi reaffirms the importance of imita­ tion, which can be more useful than ars or doctrina: ‘Ars quidem precepit, imitatio vero sermonis cultum splendoremque verborum coram porrigit’ (‘The art of rhetoric teaches the student, but imitation puts within his grasp elegance of style and the riches of lexis’, fo. 2iov). He claims that there have been some men who with little learning have become great orators through imitation, and others who despite knowing all the precepts re­ mained poor speakers because of a lack of a suitable model. Yet Antonio warns against concentrating on verba at the expense of res, and condemns the archaizers of his time: Sunt et alii qui dum verba ab usu remotissima et prisca quedam velut ilia Enee creduntur et Evandri fuisse colloquia, litteris et epistolis mandant, se solos attigisse, se solos profited eloquentiam arbitrarentur. (fo. 21 Ir) (There are others who believe that just because they use in their speeches and letters words which are remote from contemporary usage and certain primitive phrases like those used by Aeneas and Evander, they there­ fore are the only ones who have attained true eloquence and can teach it.)

I f Rho had to select just one model, of course, it would be Cicero: Si qui fuerint querentes ex me quern illis principem putem ex omnibus viris hoc ipso commentario collocatis lectum et imitatum iri, unum ipsum illis plane Ciceronem impingam. Ibi nihil insolens, nihil asperum, nihil ferme priscum, ibi nihil vulgare, nihil quotidianum offendent. Sed elegantiam ut ita dixerim auream, splendoremque verborum in quibus nulla prorsus obscuritas, nulle latebre invenientur. (fo. 2 n r) (If anyone wanted to know who I think they should regard as the chief author to read and imitate amongst all those cited in this work of mine, I should clearly put forward the one name of Cicero. In him they will find nothing unusual, nothing harsh, nothing slightly archaic, nothing vulgar, nothing trite. Instead they will find only a golden elegance and splendour of discourse, in which no obscurities or dark phrases subsist.)

The praise of Cicero underlines his clarity and avoidance of obscur­ ity, and is in harmony with the approach of other contemporaries,

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such as Guarino, who contrast Cicero’s plainness with the tortuous Latin of medieval writers.29 But, although he is the supreme model, Cicero is not the only author to be imitated, as Antonio implies in developing an image dear to those who favoured an eclectic approach: calamum verto quo his commentariis tamquam in ortulo quodam pulcherrimo ex multis diversisque floribus nobiliores ac venustiores quosque suaviusque spirantes possint excerpere, quibus eloquentie nova serta intexant atque confidant, (fo. 21 i r) (I am writing so that [students of rhetoric] can come to this compila­ tion as to a beautiful little orchard and pluck from the many varied flowers there the nobler ones, the prettier ones and the ones that smell the sweetest. With these they can weave and produce new garlands of eloquence.)

The stress here is on producing something new out of the pre­ existing flowers of this classical anthology; but it is not emula­ tion, the attempt to produce something better than the original, as is made clear later in the treatise: ‘Imitatio simplex est et livorem atque invidiam non admittit. Emulatio autem habet imitandi studium sed cum militie operatione’ (‘Imitation is straightforward and does not admit of envy or jealousy; emula­ tion, on the other hand, embraces the desire to imitate along with an element of rivalry’, A. ioyr). Like Barzizza, Rho’s em­ phasis is on avoiding verbatim imitation, and on appreciating Cicero as the chief model, but not as the sole arbiter of usage. The De Imitationibus is not a treatise on style. It is more a thesaurus, an alphabetical list of synonyms and usage. Barzizza’s De Imitatione offered a theoretical approach, albeit rather pedes­ trian. Rho’s work is more practical: he rarely discusses imitatio in the singular, i.e. in the abstract. Instead, in the title and on the many occasions he uses it in the text, it is in the plural and means ‘usage’. His procedure is to give the head-word, offer some synonyms, then provide imitationes or examples of their use: Abscondo-dis, celo-as, occulto-as, abdo-dis, occulo-is, lateo-es, in idem quasi redeunt; sed nota imitationes. Virgilius enim aiebat: ‘et vanis sese occulit umbris’, i.e. abscondit; et alibi: ‘tu post carecta latebas.’ (M. 214’; A. 6r) 29 Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, i. 85—6.

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{I hide,you hide: I conceal, you conceal; I bury, you bury; I seclude, you seclude; I obscure, you obscure; I lurk, you lurk; all these have the same meaning. But note the examples to imitate. Virgil says, ‘and he obscured himself in the empty shadows’, i.e. he hid himself; and else­ where he says, ‘you were lurking behind the reeds’.)

Although the structure of the work, an alphabetical wordlist illustrating usage, stems from the medieval grammatical tradi­ tion, the particular format for each entry seems to owe some­ thing to Quintilian. One of the longest entries, ‘Rhetorica’ (A. 207v-215V), cites from the list of synonyms for ‘scio’ in Quintilian: ‘ “ scio, non ignoro, non me fugit, non me latet, non sum nescius” et subdit statim “ et intellego, et sentio et video sepe idem valent quod scio” ’ (‘I know, I am not ignorant, it has not escaped me, I am not blind to the fact, I am not unaware’, and [Quintilian] immediately adds, ‘ and I understand, I feel, I see, often mean the same as I know’, A. 2i5v).3° Quintilian’s approach here is the format used by Antonio for each entry, yet he is aware of the difference between his own work and rhetorical treatises (artes) written by Quintilian and Cicero.3' The latter provide rhetorical precepts, while Rho is concerned with ‘imitationes et elegantias’ (A. 68r, i66v, etc.). On many occasions when he mentions Cicero, it is in a tech­ nical rather than a stylistic sense, explaining in what kind or parts of a speech certain rhetorical figures are permitted.3 *32 The 0 30 Quintilian’s text is slightly different: ‘Plurima vero imitatione figuramus: Scio Non ignoro et Non me fugit et Non me praeterit et Quis nescit? et Nemini dubium est. Sed etiam ex proximo mutuari libet. Nam et intellego et sentio et video saepe idem valent quod scio. Quorum nobis ubertatem ac divitias dabit lectio’ (‘We can develop many synonyms by analogy: I know gives us I am not unaware, it has not escaped me, I am not blind to thefact, who does not know, no one is in any doubt. But it is also possible to borrow from a cognate word: for I understand, I feel, I see, often mean the same as Iknow\ 10. 1.12 -13). 3‘ Time and again he ends an entry: ‘De his iam satis. Non enim artem traditurus sum’ (‘Enough on this topic. After all, I am not writing a whole manual on rhetoric’, A. 43’)32 Here, for instance, is a typical entry for a rhetorical term: ‘Annominatio: est color rhetoricus Ciceronis quern nos Insubres vulgari lingua nominamus “ beschiso” , ut est illud: magis rerum expertem quam expertum; et, Siculis orator non sed arator erit. Quod si volueris imitari Ciceronem, aptissime exordio conseditur, per insinuationem cum risu volumus animos auditorum movere. Narrationi rarissime aut divisioni et ceteris partibus. Item generi demonstrative et ceteris convenit, si cause leves erunt; si graves, raro vel nunquam. . . . Attribuitur etiam aptius figure attenuate quam aliis’ (‘Annominatio is a rhetorical figure found in Cicero, which we Northern Italians in vernacular call “ bischizzo” , as in “ magis rerum expertem quam expertum” , or

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imitation of Cicero referred to in all such entries means merely adhering to the rules governing the different parts of rhetoric, as analysed particularly in the Ad Herennium. Antonio is also capable of perceiving various Ciceronian traits: his liking for compound verbs (A, 371), his preference for the indicative with ‘etsi’ and ‘quamquam’ (fo. i28v), his avoidance of per with a superlative like ‘perillustrissimum’ (fo. 175v). Under ‘Homo’ he lists a number of diminutives (‘homoncio, homonculus, homululus’) and notes that for ‘mankind’ Cicero always uses ‘genus hominum’ not ‘genus humanum’ (fo. i o i v). But, as this type of entry reveals, the whole approach is more descriptive than normative: there are no warnings about the rareness of ‘homululus’, and, apart from vague warnings against archaisms and medieval authors such as Papias, there is no evidence of a canonical mentality in the work. Gellius and Macrobius are cited as often as Cicero and Quintilian, and the student is invited to ‘imitate’ every author cited; so under ‘bibere’ he writes: ‘Apuleius dicit, quern cum aliis imitari poteris sic: “ Abstemius a temeto” idest vino’ (‘Apuleius, whom you can imitate along with other writers, says, ‘more abstemious as regards alcohol’ , i.e. wine’, fo. 25'). It is this indiscriminate attitude that causes the dispute with Valla. Valla claimed that quisque should only be used with the super­ lative form of the adjective, but Antonio retorted that people of this opinion should go to the bottom of the class, since Macrobius uses it with the positive form: ‘Sed recubant in ludi novissimo loco. Legant M acrobium , qui in singulari numero neque superlativo dixit: “ die quoque” , idest omni, et “ homine quoque” ’ (‘But they should remain in the beginners’ class in the school. They should read Macrobius, who uses the singular and not the superlative to say, “ each day” , i.e. every, “ each man” , i.e. every’, fo. i65r).33 V alla’s answer is that Macrobius may be a suitable “ Siculis orator non, sed arator erit” . If you wish to imitate Cicero, this figure is suitable for an exordium, when one wants to move the audience to laughter by insinuation. It is rarely used in the narration or division or the other parts of an oration. It suits demonstrative and the other kinds of oratory, if they are not serious cases; if they are serious, you should use it sparingly or not at all. . . . It is best used when writing in the lowest rather than the other styles’, A. i2r). 33 In the proem to Elegantiae ii (Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. E. Garin (Milan, i 952), 606) Valla mentions a rival who had plagiarized then garbled his rules on the use of per, quam, and quisquam with adjectives: this was presumably Antonio da Rho.

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source for erudite content but not for elegant usage, and that Antonio will find no parallels of this use in Cicero or Quintilian.34 But despite or perhaps because of V alla’s criticism, Antonio sticks to his position, adding elsewhere: ‘Et si michi Raudensi credis, hoc habeto: ignorato Macrobio Virgilium ignorari oportere’ (‘I f you trust me, Antonio da Rho, then bear this in mind: if you do not know Macrobius, you cannot know Virgil’ , fo. 73v). V alla also attacks the dubious Latinity of scholastic terms such as ‘aliqualiter’ and ‘appropriate’ as well as the ver­ nacular overtones in ‘appodiare’, ‘birretum’, ‘camisia’, ‘datiarii’ , ‘monstra’ (meaning a display), and ‘torneamentum’. Scholastic terms, vulgarisms, and rarities from late Latin are listed indis­ criminately in the De Imitationibus, though they are usually glossed by classical equivalents.353 6In his enthusiasm for Gellius he quotes approvingly Gellius’ unique verb ‘retare’, his adjective ‘amorabundus’ (a synonym for the equally rare ‘filocaptus’), and the archaic ‘ex manubiis’.3® The major entries are six technical items: eloquentia, epistola, laudare, orthographia, poeta, rhetorica; and the authorial entries on Seneca, Terentius, Tullius, and Virgilius. Under eloquentia we find advice on how to embellish a speech, how many clauses to use in elaborating a sentence, and what are the best rhythms for the end of a sentence. For embellishment he cites De Oratore 3. 148 ff. on the use of unusual words, neologisms, and metaphors. 34 ‘Quid est autem cur meum praeceptum tantopere derideas? quia Macrobius aliter usurpat? esto. Quid Cicero Quintilianusque, quos in primis imitandos propono, usurpantne et ipsi aliter, an non? si usurpant, cur non eorum profers potius exempla? Quid Macrobium unum, doctum quidem virum, sed nequaquam ex eloquentibus mihi obiicis?’ (‘Why do you make such fun of my rule? Because Macrobius’ usage is different? What if it is? What about Cicero and Quintilian, who I think should be imitated above all others? Does their usage conflict with my rule or not? I f it does, why do you not produce examples from them instead? Why do you quote me just one author, Macrobius, a learned man certainly, but not a very elegant writer?’ , L. Valla, In Errores Antonii Raudensis Adnotationes, in Opera Omnia (Basle, 1540; repr. with an introduction by E. Garin, 2 vols.; Turin, 1962), i. 412). 35 e.g., ‘Appodiare: inniti, niti, inherere quasi idem sonant. Tolle imitationes. Cicero ait: “ Tu unus eris in quo nitatur civitatis salus” idest appodietur’ ('Appodiare (to prop up): to uphold, to lean, to aim are all near synonyms. Take these examples: Cicero says, “ You will be the one man who upholds the safety of the state” i.e. props up\ fo, I3V). 36 The number of lexical rarities and the absence of any critical comment about them undermines the second part of Fubini’s claim: ‘ne rimase estraneo il proposito . .. di orientarsi verso forme ciceroniane, evitando termini rari’ , in R. Fubini, ‘Antonio da Rho’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, iii (Rome, 1961), 576.

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For the correct number of clauses we are given seven different sententiae on the subject of peace ranging from one to seven clauses, Antonio’s advice being to use between three and seven. The section on rhythm rejects the medieval cursus and discusses prose rhythm in classical terms. Antonio notes the different counsel offered on this topic by Capella, Quintilian, and Cicero: ‘ [Capella] suo fretus ingenio neque Ciceronem neque Quintilianum emulatur. Quintilianus autem auctor exactissime diligentie non semper Ciceronis sententiam probat’ (‘Capella relies on his own genius and does not try to rival either Cicero or Quintilian; but Quintilian, an author of rigorous diligence, does not always approve Cicero’s views here’, A. 70’); but regards Cicero as the principal authority on the subject (‘nunc ad Ciceronem hac in re principem redeamus’ , fo. jo r). Under ‘rhetoric’ he considers the four major components of eloquence (natura, ars, imitatio, exercitatio) and reiterates the view expressed in the proem: ‘malle imitationem sine arte quam artem sine imitatione possidere’ (‘it is preferable to be able to imitate without knowing the rules of rhetoric, rather than to know the rules of rhetoric without being able to imitate’, fo. 2i5v).37 The authorial entries amount merely to anthologies of impor­ tant passages both from the author’s works and from other writer’s comments on the author. This anthological approach, as well as the word-list structure, stem from the medieval peda­ gogical tradition. Barzizza’s De Orthographia had contained an alphabetical lexicon of usage, while his commentary on Ad Herennium book 4 illustrated where various figures of speech could be deployed in an oration.38 But as with Barzizza so with his pupil: the form of the work may be medieval but in substance and spirit the De Imitationibus is largely humanistic. There are polemical references to the medieval lexicons, the Catholicon (fo. i2v) and Balbi’s Lexicum (fo. 22v); some of the major entries betray an antiquarian interest worthy of Biondo (e.g., ‘bissextus’, ‘consul’, ‘denarus’, ‘exercitus’, ‘ludi’, etc.); while the dedication of the work to Landriani and the constant citing of Quintilian and Cicero, especially the De Oratore, all reflect the enthusiasms 37 Cf. Quintilian io. 2. 1: ‘Neque enim dubitari potest quin artis pars magna contineatur imitatione5 (‘nor can there be any doubt that imitation constitutes a large part of the art of oratory’). 38 For these two works, see Mercer, The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza, 50-1, 67.

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of the decade after the Lodi discovery. Unlike Bruni, Antonio defends ‘mihi’ and ‘nihil’ as the correct spelling, citing the evid­ ence of the older manuscripts, and aware that this will arouse the ire of his rivals: ‘Mihi: et nihil sine c scribi debent. Sic enim in omnibus libris antiquis quam quam id moleste ferant grammaticuli nostri temporis’ {‘Mihi and nihil should be written without a c. That is how the words are written in all ancient manuscripts, although this fact annoys the ignorant grammar­ ians of our epoch’, fo. i44r)- The long section on orthographia testifies to the importance of a problem which had been preoc­ cupying humanists from the days of Salutati to Tortelli’s impor­ tant treatise on the topic. Here the Milanese humanist is critical not of the moderns but of the archaizers who write ‘adcurro’ not ‘accurro’, ‘adferro’, ‘adgnosco’, and other forms which he con­ siders as ‘nimis antique’ (fo. i68v). His views on the evolution of Latin are similar to those held by Guarino,39 reflecting both the growing perception of Latin as a dynamic rather than a static language, and the atmosphere of the dispute between Biondo and Bruni in 1435. Although not of the same rank as Valla, Antonio da Rho impresses by the breadth of his knowledge in an age devoid of concordances, and by his understanding of the need for a substantial work on imitatio. His own Latin— for example, in his Apologia (1428)— was as eclectic as the entries in the De Imitationibus suggest;404 1and he articulates in that work his enthu­ siasm for Gellius’ ‘elegantia’ and Macrobius’ ‘suavitas dicundi’,4' as well as appreciating the Latin of a whole range of medieval writers. Yet he was aware of the limitations of Petrarch’s Latin compared with that of his contemporaries: ‘ [Petrarce]. . . non eum splendorem suavitateinque dicundi, qua multi impraesentia pollent, ascribimus’ (‘we do not attribute to Petrarch that splen­ dour and sweetness of style that many today possess’), and felt that, although Petrarch’s attempt to imitate several Latin au­ thors prevented him from reproducing the style of any single author, nevertheless he was unsurpassed in the vernacular: ‘Quo fit, ut dum multos aemulabundus exprimere certarit, ne unum 39 Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, ii. 503-11. 40 See the scholastic and abusive terminology in Antonio da Rho, Apologia, 64, 92112. 41 Ibid. 70.

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ex eis priscis quidem reddere potuerit, quippe tamen qui vulgari et quotidiana maternaque musa omnes excessit’ (‘Consequently, while striving to rival and imitate many authors, he could not reproduce the style of any single one of the ancients, even though he outstripped all others in his vernacular poetry’).42 Indeed in another work, De Numero Oratorio, he attacks Petrarch’s and Salutati’s abuse of the cursus velox in the opening paragraph: ‘Quamquam Cicero hoc cursu aliquando utitur, nos tamen hoc cursu rarius utemur, ne Petrarcham aut Collutium quorum sermo pene totus hoc dicendi genere scatet imitari videamur’ (‘Although Cicero does sometimes use this cursus, we should be more spar­ ing in our use of it, lest we seem to be imitating Petrarch or Salutati: nearly all their Latin works abound in this rhythm’).43 V alla’s hostility to Antonio da Rho was aroused by fear of both general and particular forms of plagiarism, since the De Imitationibus and the Elegantiae dealt with broadly similar areas. Indeed on several occasions Antonio defines his work as being concerned with elegantiae as well as imitationes: ‘Sufficit mihi elegantias dicere in hoc munere et imitationes splendoresque verborum’ (‘M y sole concern in this work is to provide elegant usage, and splendid lexis and phrases to imitate’, fo. i66v).44 Valla was a scholar of greater stature and could easily fault Antonio’s suspect Latin, his unreliable readings, and his lack of a critical approach to the authors cited.45 The Elegantiae inaugurate a new epoch, not just in content but also in form: V alla departs from the medieval tradition of the alphabetical wordlist to present an 42 Ibid. 80-2. 43 There are two manuscript versions of the treatise: Milan, Ambrosiana, MS B. 124 Sup., fos. I4gr- i 5 i v; Brescia, Queriniana, MS A. V. 4, no. 5, fos. 114 -117”. I quote from the Ambrosiana MS. 44 Cf. ‘imitationes et elegantias signo’ (‘I list here examples and elegant usages’, fo. 68r); ‘De his igitur imitationibus maxime que versantur circa elegantiam vocabulorum splendoremque verborum totus hie liber est editus’ (‘This whole work is concerned with these examples of usage, especially those which deal with elegance of phrase and the riches of lexis’, fo. 2I5V). 45 For faulty readings, see Valla’s attack on Antonio’s reading o f ‘fautio’ for ‘factio’ in Sallust (fo. ior); and Antonio is mistaken also about the spelling of ‘suavium’: ‘Apud Papiam inveni “ suavium” et non “ sabium” ; sed tamen in codicibus antiquis inveni semper “ sabium” dictum esse et non “ suavium” . Tu autem tene antiquos, si placet. Sed imitationes vidende sunt. . .’ (‘In Papias I found “ suavium” not “ sabium” ; yet in ancient codices I always found “ sabium” and not “ suavium” . You should follow the ancients, if you want a rule. But watch how they use the word .. .’, fo. 2 2 v).

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erudite series of disquisitions on problems of lexis and syntax. He attacks authors dear to Antonio such as Macrobius, Gellius, and Apuleius. His condemnation of the latter is indicative of the critical gulf that separates him from Antonio da Rho: neque vero Raudensi faciendum fuit, ut tam saepe A. Gellium pro teste afferret, hominem curiose nimis et superstitiose loquentem. Quid dicam de Apuleio, in eo praesertim opere, cuius nomen est de Asino Aureo? cuius sermonem si quis imitetur, non tam auree loqui quam nonnihil rudere videatur.46 (Da Rho should never have cited Aulus Gellius so often as a witness, since he writes in a very strange and mannered style. Far less should he have cited Apuleius, particularly in the work entitled The Golden A m : if anyone were to imitate its style, he would produce not so much golden eloquence as some asinine braying.)

4. Guarino Veronese Like Barzizza, Guarino da Verona (1374-1460) was an influen­ tial teacher in Northern Italy and their paths crossed occasion­ ally.47 The two men wrote letters to each other, and Guarino’s works De Dipthongis and Vocabula are similar to the basic peda­ gogical texts written by Barzizza. Guarino is important not only as a teacher, but also in typifying the progress (and limitations) of early Quattrocento humanists, as he gradually distanced him­ self from the dictamen style of Latin, which he had been taught in his youth by Giovanni Conversino da Ravenna, and embraced the less florid Latin of classical writers. Two of the factors which led to this evolution in Guarino’s Latin were his learning of Greek under Chrysoloras and his contact with Florentine humanists after his return from the East in 1408. Like Bruni, he translated a number of works from Greek into Latin: Lucian’s Calumnia (1403), Isocrates’ Ad Demonicum (1405), and several of Plutarch’s Lives; and he felt that Bruni had achieved an authentically Ciceronian Latin: ‘ita Ciceronem exprimit, ut sua [eloquentia] ex Cicerone orta quam imitata ,6 Valla, Opera Omnia, i. 412. 47 For the details of Guarino’s biography, see primarily Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, ed. R. Sabbadini— hereafter cited in the text as Ep.— and R. Sabbadini, Vita di Guarino Veronese (Catania, 1896) repr. in id., Guariniana (Turin, 1964).

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dixerim’ (‘Bruni writes so much like Cicero that his eloquence seems to be not merely an imitation of Cicero’s eloquence, but to have sprung from the Roman orator himself’, Ep. i. 103); yet he differed from him in being prepared to retain a number of Greek words in his versions (‘philocalos’, ‘philoponia’, ‘monarchia’, ‘democratia’) and to justify this by citing Quintilian 1. 5. 8: ‘et confessis quoque graecis utimur verbis, ubi nostra desunt’ (‘and we openly use Greek words where no Latin terms are available’, Ep. i. 5).48 Guarino follows his fellow humanists in abandoning the me­ dieval cursus, rejecting the use of vos as ‘plebeius’ {Ep. i. 269-71), and attacking the Latin of Trecento scholars such as Pietro da Moglio, Salutati’s teacher, for its obscure vocabulary. By con­ trast Guarino points to and quotes from Cicero {Pro Roscio Am. 16) as the perfect model, stressing his clarity and use of every­ day words: Ab quo tam aperta, tam clara, tam familiaris usurpata est dicendi consuetudo, ut praeter concinnam et aptissimam verborum et sententiarum compositionem vulgaria omnia ferme et in medio posita communi quodam usu atque ‘in hominum ore et sermone versentur’. {Ep. i. 85-6) (In Cicero there is such an open, clear, familiar style that apart from its elegant and natural coupling of words and phrases, the vocabulary is almost all everyday lexis within the common grasp of daily usage, words that ‘are commonly in the mouths and talk of men’.)

Ciceronianism for Guarino, as for Petrarch and Salutati, meant a return to a classical elegance that was characterized primarily by clarity of diction. He puts this into practice in this same letter when he advises that ‘hypomnemata’ was hardly ever found in the approved authors. In his introductory lecture to a course on Cicero’s letters again he stresses their benefit as models of a plain eloquence: ‘non difficillimas orationes non asperos artificii locos sed facile quoddam et planissimum dicendi genus delegi, quod suavissimo verborum ordine et leni sententiarum pondere lectorem alliciens prosit atque iuvet’ (‘I have not selected highly complex orations or passages bristling with artifice but the flu­ ent and plain style [of the letters], which with its elegant word 48 Bruni had criticized the medieval translations of Aristotle for their retention of words such as ‘oligarchia’ and ‘democratia’ (Bruni, Ep. ii. 216).

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order and gentle weight of ideas will attract the reader, and benefit and aid him’).49 This ideal of clarity was to be applied not only in epistles, but also in historiography: Dictio sit crebris per approbatos [scriptores] lectionibus incocta, aperta, virilis, quae rem . . . exprimat verbis non forensibus, non operariis non occultis non inusitatis sed apertis dignis gravibus, ut cum omnes intelligant, turn periti laudent et admirentur. (Ep. ii. 464-5) (The historian’s diction should be matured by frequent readings of approved authors, and be open and strong, explaining matters not with market-place or technical words nor with obscure or rare words, but with words that are open, dignified and grave, so that while all may understand the text, the experts will admire and praise it.)

Guarino’s own Latin was paid the compliment of being termed Ciceronian (i. 93, 98) and he insisted that Cicero should be committed to long-term memory (i. 250), particularly his letters, which should be imbibed like milk: ‘decrevi enim ut duce me aut certe comite hunc Ciceronis stilum imbibat, quern illi uti quaedam lactis alimenta instillabo’ (‘I decided that under my guidance, or at least in my company, he should imbibe Cicero’s particular style, with which, as with nourishing milk, I would feed him’, i- 367)The discovery of the Lodi manuscript predictably delights Guarino, who feels that it will lead to his generation reaching a new peak of erudition (i. 333). Guarino links the revival of learning directly to this recovery of Cicero, and uses the actual 49 Cited in R. Sabbadini, Storia e critica di testi latini (Catania, 1914), 58. Similarly in Angelo Decembrio’s Politia literaria (c.1460), which reflects Guarino’s teaching, there is a rejection of Cassiodorus’ use of an ornate exordium in letters, pointing instead to Cicero and the Younger Pliny as models who start immediately with the nanatio: ‘Falluntur namque arbitrantes ut sunt paedagogi plerique, epistolam non ornatissime componi nisi oratoris exordio praefulgeant. In quo genere sunt Cassiodori epistolae. .. . Sunt et nonnullorum epistolae, ita principiorum ambagibus involutae, ut quid ipsi sentirent, fortasse nescirent. Sed Tullianae Plinianaeque videantur, in quibus a narratione frequentissime statim incipitur, ab exordio autem rarissime’ (‘Like most schoolteachers, they erroneously believe that a letter is not elegantly composed unless it gleams with a rhetorical exordium. The epistles of Cassiodorus are like that. . . . Some people write letters which are so convoluted in their openings that the writers themselves are not really sure of what they mean. But one should look at the epistles of Cicero and Pliny, which very often begin immediately with the narration, and very rarely start with a formal exordium’, A. Decembrio, Politiae Literariae Libri VII (Augusta Vindelicorum, 1540), fo. V III').

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metaphor of Renaissance when congratulating Barzizza on his work on the Lodi texts: ‘renascens ad superos Cicero [te] primum in terris delegit hospitem’ (‘Cicero reborn in our time selected you as his first host on earth’, i. 345). When another Cicero text reaches Verona in 1425 he sees it as an omen of Verona’s sharing in the ‘reviviscentes disciplinae’ (i. 452), and Guarino even uses ‘studia Ciceronis’ as a synonym for ‘studia humanitatis’ (ibid.). A letter of 1452 illustrates the mature Guarino’s views on the significance of Cicero for the Renaissance. His son had found some of Guarino’s early letters and had criticized their ‘vocabula . . . latini sermonis proprietatem minime redolentia’ (‘words . .. which do not smack of the proper use of Latin’ , ii. 582). Guarino then charts his own progress from follower of dictamen to disciple of Cicero, linking it to the general evolution of Latin since Cicero’s time. The premiss is that even in antiquity progress was made only when writers appreciated and emulated Ciceronian Latin: ‘solaque ciceronianae dictionis quondam aemulatio ac delectatio vehementem proficiendi causam induxerat’ (‘the emulation of and delight in Cicero’s style which was evident in antiquity was enough of itself to provide a powerful impetus towards rhetor­ ical progress’, ibid.). When Cicero was replaced by medieval texts such as ‘Prosperus’, ‘Eva Columba’, and ‘Chartula’, Cicero’s plain eloquence disappeared before a barbaric florid style (‘Uti beata quaedam tunc adorabatur ubertas’ (‘a certain florid style was then adored as something wonderful’) ), of which he quotes a specimen: ‘Vobis regratior, quia de concernentibus capitaniatui meo tarn honorificabiliter per unam vestram litteram vestra me advisavit sapientitudo’ (‘I thank you because your wisdom has advised me so honourably through one of your letters of those things that concern my holding of the post of captain’, ibid.). Though he may have written in this manner in his youth, Guarino and his colleagues would now bristle at the unclassical lexis, the use of vos, the circumlocution ‘vestra sapientitudo’ , as well as the solecism of ‘littera’ in the singular. The revolution, according to Guarino, was effected by Chrysoloras, who during his stay in Florence became responsible for the ‘reflorescentis eruditionis’ (ii. 583): from his school spread the seeds of what was to prove a rich harvest of literature. How could the Greek taught by Chrysoloras revolutionize the way Italian humanists wrote Latin? Guarino does not specify this, but, as we have seen in the case

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of Bruni, it was probably Chrysoloras’ encouragement to trans­ late Greek works into Latin that sharpened the linguistic sen­ sitivity of men like Bruni and Guarino. Although Guarino was convinced that Cicero represented the peak of Latin eloquence (ii. 505), he never restricts himself to Ciceronian lexis. He eschews the florid dictamen style and aspires to a classical clarity, but his Latin remains flexible and varied. In 1419 he acquired a manuscript of Pliny’s Letters (i. 233) and shortly afterwards he writes a letter (i. 238-41), inviting his friends to share the delights of his villa in V al Policella, imitat­ ing Pliny’s description of his estate in Ep. 5. 6. A brief analysis will clarify what imitatio meant in practice to Guarino. At the start of the letter Pliny states his theme: ‘accipe temperiem caeli, regionis situm villae amoenitatem quae et tibi auditu et mihi relatu iucunda erunt’ (‘I will tell you about the climate, the landscape of the area, and the delightfulness of the villa, which will be pleasant for you to hear and for me to re­ count’, Ep. 5. 6. 3). Guarino’s opening statement is similar: ‘eritque et vobis cognitu et mihi narratu non iniocundum, si quae sit caeli temperies, regionis situs et villae amoenitas scripto meo intellexeritis’ (‘and it will be not unpleasant for you to learn and for me to narrate if I inform you in my letter of the climate, the landscape of the area, and the pleasantness of the villa’ , i. 239). The humanist signals his imitation by retaining the six substantives of the original (though he changes the case from accusative to nominative), and in the course of the letter he deals with the three topics in the same order as Pliny, though in only about a third of the length, as he avoids Pliny’s technical details about the interior of the house, the terrace, and the hip­ podrome. But Guarino also varies some elements to avoid ver­ batim imitation, apparently following rather basic precepts such as those in Barzizza’s treatise. Thus he shifts from singular (‘accipe . . . tibi’) to plural (‘vobis . . . intellexeritis’), and vice versa (Pliny’s ‘erunt’ becomes ‘erit’ ); from positive plural (‘iucunda’) to negative singular (‘non iniocundum’); substitutes synonyms (‘tibi auditu et mihi relatu’ becomes ‘vobis cognitu et mihi narratu’) and reverses the order of clauses (‘accipe . . . erunt’ changes to ‘e rit. . . intellexeritis’). Both basic and more complex forms of imitatio are in evidence throughout the letter. In one particular area Guarino’s imitatio becomes aemulatio. Pliny describes the land and the rainfall thus:

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sed ubi aquae plurimum, palus nulla, quia devexa terra, quidquid liquoris accepit nec absorbuit, effundit in Tiberim. Medios ille agros secat navium patiens, omnesque fruges devexit in urbem, hieme dumtaxat et vere; aestate summittitur immensique fluminis nomen arenti alveo deserit, autumno resumit. (Pliny, Ep. 5. 6. 11 fF.) (But even where there is a lot of water, the ground is not marshland, because the earth slopes, and whatever water it receives but does not manage to absorb, it channels into the Tiber. The Tiber cuts across the middle of the fields, wide enough to have ships, and to carry all the produce into the capital, at least in winter and in spring: in summer it diminishes and abandons the name of a great river, reduced to an arid bed, only to resume the name again in the autumn.)

Guarino imitates, varies, and finally outdoes Pliny, as the Adige does the Tiber: ibi enim aquarum satis, fontes plurimi, palus nulla, quia quicquid liquoris devexa tellus excipit, nusquam per moram sordere patitur: aut enim ad alenda quae creavit absorbet aut quasi tributaria transfundit in Athesim, qui Veronensem agrum secat non mediocrium navium et maximarum ratium patiens; nec, ut multa antiquorum litteris decantata solo nomine flumina, magni nomen fluminis amittit nec aestate etiam sole sub ardenti aquae altitudine destituitur; quin undanti semper fluit alveo. (i. 240) (There is enough water there, plenty of streams, no marshland, be­ cause whatever water the sloping earth receives is never allowed to stagnate through delay: either it absorbs the water in order to increase what it already has created, or it channels it as a tributary into the Adige, which cuts across the fields of Verona, capable o f carrying not just medium-sized but also the largest ships: the Adige, unlike many rivers in ancient literature which are celebrated in name only, never loses its name, nor in summer does the depth of its waters ever dimin­ ish, even under a burning sun; it always flows along in a bed rich in waves.)

In the first part of this passage Guarino deploys the basic strat­ egy of substituting singulars and plurals (‘aquae’ becomes ‘aquarum’), positives and negatives (‘nec absorbuit’ becomes ‘absorbet’), and varying synonyms (‘terra’ is replaced by the more poetic ‘tellus’, ‘accepit’ by ‘excepit’).50 But in the second 50 The Ciceronian Cortesi will single out Guarino’s use of poetic lexis as one of the defects of his style: ‘utitur plerumque imprudens verbis poeticis quod est maxime vitiosum’ (‘he unwisely uses poetic words, which is a major defect’, Cortesi, De Hominibus Doctis, ed. Ferrau, 123).

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part he strives to outdo his model in terms of content, suggesting the Adige can take bigger vessels than the Tiber and is less affected by summer’s drought, and actually alluding to the subtext in the phrase ‘multa antiquorum litteris decantata . . . flumina’. But Guarino, though prepared to accept Pliny as a model, is not totally eclectic. If Angelo Decembrio’s portrait of him in his Politia Literaria is accurate, Guarino rejects Apuleius’ style, cas­ tigates those who use too many diminutives, and lumps both the vernacular and Latin works of the Tre Corone alongside other medieval writers such as Walter of Chatillon, Isidore, and Cassiodorus.5' He was certainly in touch with men like Matteo Ronto, author of a Latin verse translation of the Divina Commedia, as well as of a stylistically bizarre letter to Guarino (ii. 118);52 with Tommaso da Fano, a pupil of the Apuleian Marzagaia da Verona;53 and with Iacopo della Verita, who ended his letter 51 ‘ [Apulei] stilus ideo varius, incompositus, rigidusque, auctori graeco minor fuerit nostri sermonis familiaritas’ (‘Apuleius’ style is inconsistent, inelegant, and rather stiff, because as a Greek author he will not have been very familiar with Latin’, A. Decembrio, Pol. Lit. I. 4, fo. X r). For his attack on diminutives as ‘turpia muliebriaque vocabula ut ingeniolum, studiolum, m o d u lu s...’ (‘base, effeminate words such as ingeniolum, studiolum, modulus. . .’), see III. 27 (fo. L V IIr). On the Tre Corone, he decides ‘non tamen eos audemus in hanc politiorem quam nunc struimus bibliothecam admittere, alius quippe eis locus assignandus est. Cum Gualfredis, Gualteriisque similibus, cum Cassiodoris et Isidoris palatini stili lampade, ut ipsi dicerent, coruscantibus’ (‘we would not dare to admit them into this more polished library which we are drawing up at present, for they should be assigned to some other place. With the Walfreds, and Walters, and their like, with the Cassiodoruses and Isidores whose works glisten, as they claim, with the Palatine lamp’, I. 6, fos. Xr~Xv). More specifically he attacks Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati for their vulgarisms in Latin: ‘nam quid de Petrarcha dixerim, et Boccatio, Collutio, Pierioque omnis tempestatis illius scriptoribus, in omnibus epistolis, quae adhuc extant, ut arbitror, cernere nonnumquam licuit, scaramucciam pro dimicatione aut proelium, badaluchum pro tumultu, roncinum pro equo, capitaneum pro duce, et id genus plurima’ (‘What can one say about Petrarch, Boccaccio, Coluccio Pierio [Salutati], and the writers of that whole age, in all of whose epistles that have survived, it is possible often to come across “ scaramuccia” for “ dimicatio” or “ proelium” , “ badaluchus” for “ tumultus” , “ ronzinus” for “ equus” , “ capitaneus” for “ dux” , and countless similar examples’, III. 27, fo. L V IIr). And Dante is censured for not being content with Greek and Latin models, but instead being influenced by medieval religious writers, who are condemned as ‘plebeiae penitus loquendi consuetudini dediti’ (‘wholly given over to a plebeian way of writing’, V. 64, fos. C X I ^ - C X V 1). 52 The letter is addressed to ‘ad faculentum virum magistrum Guarinum Veronensem’, and abounds with lexical oddities such as ‘innutio’, ‘stratilatibus’, ‘commanipularis’, as well as Greek citations of the Old Testament and extracts from Roman law. 53 Sabbadini calls him ‘un seguace della corrente apuleiana’ (Guarino, Ep. iii. 103). He wrote a De Modemis Gestis in alliterative Latin, which can be sampled in

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to Guarino thus: ‘Vos vero velim breves ad me perscribere et valitudinem vestram et vestrorum. Valete. Valitudinem meam diligentissime curabo’ (‘I would like you to reply briefly, and I hope you and yours keep well. Farewell. I shall carefully look after my own health’ , i. 269). Guarino in reply criticized the ending, but more for its unclassical use of the plural than for its excessive alliteration (i. 271). Despite the praise lavished on him by his contemporaries, Guarino’s Latin came under fire in his own lifetime. George of Trebizond (1395-1472/3), in the last book of his Rhetorica (1433), attacked Guarino’s most famous work to date, the oration for Garmagnola (1428).54 He takes three passages from Guarino’s speech, condemns them for being ‘absurde composita’, and pro­ ceeds to rewrite them in more fluid periods.55 In the first passage he shows how to make one flowing period out of Guarino’s halting three sentences. In the final passage Guarino had written: nulla enim tam ingens, tam clara, tam admirabilis res gesta est, quam vetustas non obscuret, et oblivio, nisi literarum splendor, et scribentium lumen accenderint.56 (No exploit, no matter how great, how famous, how admirable, has ever been accomplished which the passing of time and oblivion will not obscure, unless it has been lit up by the splendour of literature and the brilliance of authors.)

The Greek humanist tidies up Guarino’s clumsy order in the second half of the sentence, rewriting it as ‘nulla enim tam ingens, tam clara, tam admirabilis res gesta est, quam vetustas et oblivio, nisi literarum splendor, et scribentium lumen accenderint, non obscuret’. George’s main point in this exercise is to emphasize that compositio is as important as lexis: ‘Compositionem vero non ego ideo plurimum probo, quia delectum verborum despiciam, his words on Salutati: ‘Amplissima facundioris ingenii facultate, felicioris fortune fastigio locandus Colutius Pierius Lucanus . . (‘Because of his wide-ranging ability in eloquence, Coluccio Pierio [Salutati] of Lucca must be ranked at the apex of good fortune and fame . . quoted in Salutati, Ep. iv. 508-9). 54 G. Trapezuntius, Rhetoricorum Libri V (Venice, 1523), 68r-6g'. On this and on his other works, see J. Monfasani, George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of his Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden, 1976). 55 Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 138—9, analyses the second passage, illustrat­ ing the contrast between George’s ‘compositus’ style and Guarino’s ‘dissolutus’ manner. 56 Rhetoricorum Libri, 68v.

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sed quoniam difficilior sit atque altior’ (‘I do not give my maxi­ mum approval to “ compositio” in order to deride lexical choice, but because it is more difficult and more profound’).57 But he also takes issue with Guarino’s sloppy syntax, as well as his diction: ‘cur enim, cum non historiam scribat, sed in demonstratione versetur, “ verumenimvero” , et statim in principiis occupaverat . . . non video, maxime, cum nusquam fere apud Ciceronem hoc legerit’ (‘I do not understand why, when he is not writing a his­ tory, but rather a piece of epideictic rhetoric, Guarino should have used “ verumenimvero” , and in the first position in the sentence too; especially as he will not have read this anywhere in Cicero’).58 Guarino’s Latin had already come under attack in the 1430s, particularly from more rigorous stylists like George. Admittedly the Greek was one of the many humanists with a penchant for polemic; but he was also a knowledgeable critic who anticipated in some sense the rigorous Ciceronianism of the second half of the century. In 1426 he had written a short tract De Suavitate Dicendi which comes close to recommending restriction of Latin to words found in Cicero.59 In the Rhetorica his admiration for the Roman orator is such that he feels Cicero would have been a better historian than Livy,606 1 but like other humanists of the time he stops short of the radical step of restricting Latinity to Ciceronian usage, and does himself use a number of unciceronian terms (‘summissio, ‘transumptio’, etc.).6' Confirmation that Trebizonda’s critique of Guarino is inspired by Ciceronianist sensibilities rather than personal rivalry is provided by Cortesi’s analysis in the De Hominibus Doctis. There Cortesi agrees that 57 Rhetoricorum Libri, 68v. 58 Ibid. 59 ‘Habes, Hieronyme, de suavitate meum iudicium. Quod ita sequere ut Ciceronis imitatione perficias eius verba . . . Tu ita imiteris ut ad propositum tuum nunc ab Cicerone, modo ab aliis et Aristotelica magis quam optime tenes philosophia tractis acutissime . . . sententiis verba Ciceronis accommodes’ (‘That, Girolamo, is my opinion on “ Suavitas” . You should follow it in such a way as to imitate Cicero and improve on his words . . . You should imitate in such a way as to borrow for your own purposes at times from Cicero, at times from others, and you should be able to accommodate Ciceronian words to ideas carefully drawn most of all from Aristotle, with whose philosophy you are extremely familiar’), cited from Vat. Lat. MS 6292, fo. 173r, in Monfasani, George of Trebizond, 294. For George’s links with the Ciceronianism of Cortesi and Pontano, see L. D ’Ascia, ‘La retorica di Giorgio da Trebizonda e l’umanesimo ciceroniano’, Rinascimento, 29 (1989), 193-216. 60 Monfasani, George of Trebizond, 294. 61 In his rewriting of the second passage from Guarino’s speech, he criticized other things but clearly accepted the unciceronian term ‘machinamentis’.

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Guarino possesses some sort of imperfect eloquence and was an influential teacher, but his Latin was felt by the end of the century to have a certain ‘asperitas’. His style is considered ‘inconcinnum . . . ac salebrosum’ (‘inelegant. . . and rough’), his use of poetic words condemned, and Cortesi even quotes George’s critique of Guarino as ‘perfractum et in compositione puerilem’ (‘clumsy and inadequate in sentence structure’).62 Guarino makes no explicit pronouncement on literary imita­ tion, but it is clear that he regards the imitation of Cicero and the study of Greek as indices of the stylistic progress of his generation. His prose style is more classical than Trecento Latin, yet he implicitly susbcribes to the prevailing orthodoxy of a limited eclecticism, which could embrace the style of writers such as Pliny and poetic words, but not the excessive indulgence in rarities and diminutives characteristic of Apuleius. Later crit­ ics would also have felt unhappy at his many letters dealing with mundane matters, though Guarino could point to Pliny as a precedent. His description of the frugal meal he will provide for a friend echoes similar descriptions in Pliny (e.g., Ep. 1. 15): ‘non delicata fercula non pretiosa vasa non lautam supellectilem tibi polliceor, rapas fabamque corrodes, cratere bibes fagino et frugali uteris apparatu’ (‘I cannot promise you delicate courses, precious crockery, or sumptuous furniture, you will have to nib­ ble away at turnips and beans, drink out of a beechwood cup, and use frugal utensils’ , i. 205). Similarly the deliberately comic sketch of Chichibio, the bishop’s dubious cook, would have aroused critical comment on grounds of both content and style: ‘semper ex parsimonia id agit, ut muco et pediculis fercula pro condimentis adornet; qua providentia larido parcit et sebum mavult quam larvinam’ (‘in his meanness he always sees to it that instead of condiments he flavours the dishes with mucus and fleas; with this providential condiment he can save on ba­ con, and he prefers suet to lard anyway’, i. 472). Guarino’s elegant but eclectic and conversational Latin shares many simi­ larities with the Latin of Poggio Bracciolini, but, although George of Trebizond’s criticism of Guarino was to remain a lone voice until the second half of the century, the attack on Poggio’s style by his younger contemporary Lorenzo Valla was destined to have a more immediate and wide-ranging impact. 62

De Hominibtis Doctis, ed. Ferrau, 122-3.

7

THE DISPUTE BETWEEN POGGIO AND VALLA The quarrel between Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) and Lorenzo Valla (1406-57) is now regarded as one of the most significant literary debates of the Quattrocento." It not only highlights the difference between two generations of humanists, but it also documents a crucial stage in the history of Ciceronianism and prefigures the major polemics about imitation at the end of the fifteenth century. In this chapter the clearest order in which to analyse the complex material seems to be first to examine Poggio’s views on imitation in general; second, to consider the opposing views of Poggio and Valla as expressed in their polemic; and, third, to assess V alla’s broader importance in the humanist re­ covery of a classical style.

1. Poggio’ s Views on Imitation In many ways Poggio typifies the stylistic views of the first gen­ eration of Quattrocento humanists, notably in his embracing of a theoretical notion of Cicero as the supreme model, while in practice his Latin displays many unciceronian traits. This in­ consistency was first pointed out by Valla, and the judgement of posterity has sided with V alla in assessing Poggio’s Latin as unclassical.2 ' See L. Cesarini Martinelli, ‘Note sulla polemica Poggio-Valla e sulla fortuna delle Elegantiae’, Interpres, 3 (1980), 29-79; M. Tavoni, Latino, grammatka, volgare. Storia di una questione umanistica (Padua, 1984), 118-21; and now A. Mazzocco, Lin­ guistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists: Studies of Language and Intellectual History in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy (Leiden, 1993), 69-81, for a view of the dispute as a struggle between Florentine and Roman humanism. ’ For Poggio’s works I have used Poggius Bracciolini, Opera Omnia (Basle, 1538), ed. R. Fubini (4 vols.; Turin, 1964-9), cited in my text as Opera with volume and page number. Volume iii of this edition reproduces Poggio’s Epistulae, ed. T. De Tonelli (3 vols.; Florence, 1832-61) with Tonelli’s pagination, so for these I cite Tonelli’s volume and page number.

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For Poggio, even before the 1452 dispute with Valla, Cicero is not only superior to Quintilian, he is ‘princeps inter omnes’ (Tonelli, ii. 87). After the quarrel, in 1455, he condemns certain people’s (i.e. V alla’s) perverse preference for Quintilian over Cicero, and claims that whatever qualities he, Poggio, possesses as a Latinist derive from his model Cicero: ‘Quidquid tamen in me est, hoc totum acceptum refero Ciceroni quern elegi ad eloquentiam docendam’ (‘Whatever progress I have made [in Latin], I put down entirely to Cicero, whom I chose as the source of all eloquence’, Tonelli, iii. 177). Yet the bulk ofPoggio’s writings exhibits a flexible, almost conversational quality which draws on non-Ciceronian sources, even though in theory Poggio thought he was imitating the colloquial tone of Cicero’s dia­ logues and letters.3 In his first Latin dialogue, De Avaritia (14289), Poggio acknowledges its ‘planum nimis atque humile dicendi genus’ (‘extremely plain and humble style’), claiming that he enjoys the kind of eloquence which never obliges the reader to labour to understand its meaning (Opera, i. 1). He even hints that others may wish to rewrite these mere ‘copiolas’ (‘rough sketches’) more elegantly. Even if this is a modesty topos, Poggio exploits it consistently in his other major works, such as the De Nobilitate (i. 64), De Infelicitate Principum (i. 392), and the Facetiae (i. 420). And certainly Niccoli felt that this first dialogue lacked omatus, criticizing the names of unclassical interlocutors such as Bartolomeo da Montepulciano (Bartolomeus de Monte Politiano) and the mention of fra Bernardino (frater Bernardinus), Isidore and Burgundio of Pisa. Poggio defends his use of contemporary names, on the grounds that times, and religion, have changed. He admits to having eschewed omatus in many areas of the work, but defends this style by appealing to the precedent of Cicero himself, whose dialogues are written ‘tranquilla quadam et pacata eloquentia’ (‘in a relaxed almost casual kind of eloquence’) and re­ flect conversational language (Tonelli, i. 278-80). In another letter on the same topic, he upholds his right to appear less eloquent in his dialogues than in his letters, for this was true of Cicero himself: 3 Cf. R. Spongano, ‘La prosa letteraria del Quattrocento’, in Leon Battista Alberti, Iprimi tre libri della famiglia, ed. F. C. Pellegrini (Florence, 1946), pp. vii-xxxii (esp. pp. vii—viii). G. Holmes notes that Poggio ‘managed to turn the Latin dialogue into something like a living form of expression’ (The Florentine Enlightenment 1400—1450 (London, 1969), 102).

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longe redundantior, copiosiorque est in epistolis, quam in suis Dialogis, exceptis Libris De Oratore. Temperatum est, neque redundans, sed quietum et pacatum scribendi genus Dialogorum: epistolae autem ornatiores, uberioresque videntur. (Tonelli, i. 282) (He is far more verbose and copious in his epistles than in his dia­ logues, except for the De Oratore. His style in the dialogues is restrained not verbose, a relaxed almost casual eloquence; his epistles, however, seem to be more ornate and richer.)4

But even in his own epistles, Poggio still retains and justifies their extempore tone: quum in ipsas [epistulas] coniicerem quidquid in buccam venerat, ita ut etiam quaedam vulgaria, quamquam iocandi gratia, inserantur. . . . Scripsi autem illas ex tempore et manu veloci, ut rescribendi neque ocium esset neque voluntas. (Tonelli, i, p. x) (since I jotted down in my epistles the first words that came into my mouth, so that some rather vulgar phrases were inserted, though al­ ways in jest. . . . But I wrote the letters extempore and with a quick hand, so that there should be no time nor inclination to rewrite them.)5

Unlike Bruni, Poggio accepts the need to write ‘Bartolomeus de Monte Politiano’, and even rebukes a friend for writing ‘Matteus Bardus’, since ‘bardus’ can mean ‘stupid’ in Latin, whereas ‘de Bardis’ would have eliminated all ambiguity (Tonelli, i. 17980). This conversational tone gradually evolves into a personal poetics in all of Poggio’s writings. In the prologue to the Disceptatio Convivalis (1450) he observes that less serious topics and styles are not to be despised, especially if they can be handled with wit: ‘non repudianda sunt humiliora exercitia, praesertim cum non omnino salis vacua, et remissius quoddam orationis genus’ 4 This view of the epistle as requiring a more ornate style than the dialogue is found throughout the Quattrocento. Poliziano reiterates it in a crucial passage at the start of his lectures on Statius: ‘Maiore enim concinnatione epistola indiget quam dialogus: imitatur enim hie extemporaliter loquentem . . . at epistola scribitur et quodammodo munus mittitur’ (‘The epistle requires greater embellishment than the dialogue, for the latter imitates an impromptu speaker . . . while the epistle is written down and is sent almost as a formal gift* (Poliziano, Commento inedito alle (Selve3 di Stazio, ed. L. Cesarini Martinelli (Florence, 1978), 18). 5 Despite the echo of Cicero, Ad Atticum 1. 12. 4, here, this is not a mere topos. Modern critics concur with the verdict of M. Aurigemma, ‘Poggio Bracciolini’, in Orientamenti culturali: I minori (Milan, 1961), 427-68: ‘una lingua che non solo ha come modello la lingua epistolare di Cicerone . . . ma e poi, seguendo in parte un cosciente principio, antipedantesca ed antipuristica’ (pp. 436-7).

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(‘these humbler exercises, which are in a more relaxed style, are not to be despised, especially if they are not entirely devoid of wit’, Opera, i. 32). These ‘disputatiunculae haud sane graves’ (‘casual, not very serious discussions’) are aimed at a less learned audience; and Poggio confirms his stylistic pluralism when in the second book of the Disceptatio he argues that, although canon law is framed in inelegant Latin, it is rich in ‘sententiae’, thus satisfying its audience, ‘qui sententias magis quam verborum ornatum aucupantur. Nam si nil tibi placet nisi splendide et ornate dictum, tuos et philosophorum omnium libros contemnes’ (‘who are more interested in the ideas than in the elegance of the words. For if you do not like anything that is not said splendidly and ornately, you condemn your own works and those of all philosophers’).6 The fullest statement of Poggio’s stylistic credo occurs in the preface to the work which was to secure him an international reputation, the Facetiae (1438-52). He anticipates criticism both of the scurrilous content of the work and of its colloquial tone; but he counters this with the defence that it is excessive to de­ mand eloquence ‘in rebus infimis vel in his in quibus ad verbum vel facetiae exprimendae sunt vel aliorum dicta referenda’ (‘in these low matters, or in ones in which jokes or other people’s sayings have to be recounted verbatim’ , Opera, i. 420). He com­ bines this defence with the familiar advice to others to rework the same material in order to enrich Quattrocento Latin: ‘quo lingua latina etiam levioribus in rebus hac nostra etate fiat opulentior’ (ibid.). Poggio’s objective in writing the Facetiae is to enrich Latin by extending it to lighter matters (‘quo lingua latina etiam levioribus in rebus hac nostra aetate opulentior fiat’ (‘so that the Latin language should in our age become richer even in these lighter subjects’) ) and by writing elegantly (‘non absurde . . . non inconcinne’ (‘not absurdly. . . not inelegantly’) ) about subjects which were thought difficult to treat in the learned lan­ guage. Quoting Lucilius, he claims the work is to be read ‘a facetis et humanis’ (‘by the witty and the cultured’ , ibid.), thus associating it with the tradition of Latin satire. What Poggio does not say is that even his inspiration to deal with witticisms 6 C ite d from E. G a rin (ed.), La disputa delle arti net Quattrocento. Testi editi e inediti (Florence, 1947), 8.

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came from one of the popular Ciceronian texts of the time, the second book of De Oratore. As Tateo has shown, Poggio’s comic style in the work is eclectic, reflecting vernacular and Plautine elements as well as a range of other sources. Poggio thus saw Ciceronianism as a liberating rather than a restricting influence.7 The only work that does not conform to this conversational poetics is the Historia Florentine, begun in 1453 as the official continuation of Bruni’s history, after Poggio’s appointment as Florentine Chancellor.8 The opening sentence deliberately imitates the beginning of Livy’s history and Sallust’s Jugurthine War: Ea scripturus bella, quae Florentinus populus cum Vicecomitum familia, quaeve cum ceteris . . . gessit, operae pretium putavi initia, variumque urbis nostrae statum usque ad primum cum Archiepiscopo bellum recensere paucis. {Opera, ii. 97-8) (Setting out to write about those wars which the Florentine people waged with the Visconti dynasty and with others, I thought it worth while briefly to recount the war’s beginnings, and the changing state of our city in the period up to the first war with the Archbishop.)9

Poggio does not develop any theory of imitation, but the key phrases recur often enough to allow us to infer his ideal of writ­ ing ‘non insulse’, ‘non absurde’, ‘non inconcinne’, ‘non omnino salis vacua’.10 He recognizes Cicero as the best literary model, and in his letters, dialogues, and even the Facetiae seeks to imitate him in broad terms, though always remaining eclectic and even 7 F. Tateo puts it well: ‘II modello ciceroniano funzionava tuttavia in Poggio in un modo particolare, per le possibility che offriva, non per i vincoli che pur introduceva’ (‘La raccolta delle Facezie e lo stile “ comico” di Poggio’, in R. Fubini et at. (eds.), Poggio Bracciolini ig8o-ig8o. Net VI centenario della morte (Florence, 1982), 221). 8 M. Aurigemma, ‘Poggio Bracciolini’, 440: ‘lo stile della Historia e reso piu gonfio di quanto non soglia Poggio . . . dalla “ gara” impegnata col Bruni, che si combatte sul piano dell ‘ornamentazione.’ 9 Cf. ‘Facturusne operae pretium sim . . .’ (Livy 1. 1); ‘Bellum scripturus sum quod populus Romanus cum Iugurtha rege Numidarum gessit’ (Sallust, lug. 5. 1). D. J. Wilcox, (The Development of Florentine Humanist Historiography in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 131) overstates the case in claiming that, where Bruni imitated Livy, Poggio followed Sallust: there is no explicit or implicit rejection of Livy as a model by Poggio at this stage. Even in his Latin version of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia he omitted ‘quae . . . concinne dici latine vix posse viderentur’ (‘those things that can scarcely be translated with any elegance into Latin’)— cited by N. S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton, NJ, 1970). 149 n. 13.

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conversational in his diction. Poggio had no sensitivity to the various stages of Latin, from the archaic to the medieval and contemporary;11 consequently a humanist of the next generation such as Paolo Cortesi can pinpoint this divergence between Ciceronian theory and practice in his accurate assessment of Poggio’s Latin: Tendebat toto animo et quotidiano quodam usu ad effingendum M. Tullium. . . . Earn . . . dicendi laudem Poggius si non facultate at certe voluntate complectabatur. (Poggio tried by willpower and through a daily familiarity with his works to reproduce the style of Cicero. . . . He certainly pursued that ambition with his will, though he fell short of it in his ability in Latin.)12

Cortesi perceives the paradox in Poggio: his theoretical stance as a rigid Ciceronian is contradicted by his expansive, eclectic Latin practice. Poggio first entered the literary scene as a member of the humanist avant-garde, disagreeing with Salutati about the classical qualities of Petrarch’s Latin. In the last decade of his life he still considered himself a Ciceronian, yet he was demon­ strably less of a Ciceronian than his opponent Valla, and his lively but lax Latin came under the relentless fire of this leading light of the younger generation of humanists.

2. The Dispute between Poggio and Valla The dispute between Poggio and Valla began in 1452 when Poggio learned that some critical remarks about his Latin had been inserted in the margin of a copy of his letters. He presumed that V alla was the critic, but in fact the culprit was one of V alla’s students. Poggio wrote an invective (Oratio I), attacking V alla’s Elegantiae, which elicited a three-book counter-attack 11 ‘Quello che non c’e in Poggio e proprio il sentore dell’arcaismo, questa e la linea di demarcazione; e parimenti il suo ciceronianismo e altra cosa da quello di fine Quattrocento, non e l’inizio del ciceronianismo, o un ciceronianismo poco documentato5 (Tateo, ‘La raccolta delle Facez,it\ 231). 12 P. Cortesi, De Hominibus Doctis, ed, G. Ferrau (Palermo, 1979), 135-6. Modern critics concur with this judgement: R. Fubini talks of his ‘latino innovatore e “ parlato” ’ (introduction to Opera, p. vii); E. Bigi, ‘Bracciolini, Poggio’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, xiii (Rome, 1971), 640—6, discusses his ‘libera imitazione del modello ciceroniano, [la] ricca varieta di lessico, [la] aderenza, specie sintattica, al volgare contemporaneo’ (p. 643).

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(Valla’s Antidotum Primum. Libri III). Poggio retorted with an­ other three books (Orationes II-IV ), but V alla responded with a two-act Apologus\ Poggio’s response (Oratio V) in the spring of 1453 was met by V alla’s second Antidotum, to which Poggio never replied, partly because he became Florentine chancellor, but more importantly because he was clearly defeated by Valla on philological grounds: in the end Poggio could not answer V alla’s criticisms, which he dismissed as merely ‘disputatiunculae cuiusdam pedagogiculi stulti’ (‘the quibblings of a foolish little pedant’, Opera, i. 194), and resorted to abuse.’3 Poggio’s Oratio I has two aims: to defend his epistles against V alla’s (or his student’s) criticisms, and to attack V alla’s major work to date, the Elegantiarum Linguae Latinae Libri VI. In his reading of the latter Poggio concludes that Valla attacks all the recognized authorities: Donatus, Servius, and Priscian in gram­ mar; Aristotle and Boethius in dialectic; Livy and Sallust in historiography; Cicero in rhetoric; and in brief: ‘omnes damnat praeter unum Quintilianum quem doctissimum omnium qui unquam fuerunt, et ipsi Ciceroni in eloquendi arte praefert’ (‘he condemns everyone except Quintilian alone, whom he regards as the most learned man who ever lived, and whom he prefers to Cicero in writing about rhetoric’, Opera, i. 189). Poggio claims to be a Ciceronian in expressing outrage at V alla’s criticism of the Roman orator, but this only allows Valla to deride this champion of Cicero who uses words and syntax that would never have been approved by him. While neither humanist is a strict Ciceronian, it becomes clear that of the two only Valla possessed the critical potential to become one. V alla’s onslaught on Poggio’s Latinity reflects a greater sen­ sitivity to periods of Latin than that found in any of his pred­ ecessors. Petrarch and Bruni had sensed and rejected ‘barbaric’ Latin, which for them meant contemporary or scholastic usage. But Valla was able to detect three different layers of unciceronian elements in his adversary’s Latin: not only Poggio’s vulgarisms,13 13 For chronological and other details of the dispute, see L. Valla, Antidotum Primum. La prima apologia contro Poggio Bracciolini, ed. A. Wesseling (Amsterdam, 1978), 2539, cited henceforth as Wesseling, with page no.; S. I. Camporeale, ‘Poggio Bracciolini contro Lorenzo Valla. Le Orationes in Vallam\ in Fubini et al. (eds.), Poggio Bracciolini 1380-1980, 137—61; L. Valla, Antidotum in Facium, ed. M. Regoliosi (Padua, 1981), pp. lxxxi-lxxxiv; id., Epistole, ed. O. Besomi and M. Regoliosi (Padua, 1984), 356—7.

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but also his use of forms derived from late Latin, and even words and constructions found in other classical writers but not in Cicero. Amongst the many words deriving from vernacular us­ age in Poggio’s epistles Valla cites: ‘disturbium’ (Wesseling, 147), ‘portitor’ for the classical ‘tabellarius’ (p. 209), ‘bursa’ (p. 228), and ‘pasta’— on this last almost literally macaronic usage Valla comments: ‘Qui “ pastam” dicis miror cur non potius “ pizzas” aut “ schiacciatas” dixeris’ (‘Since you write pasta [in Latin], I wonder why you do not also write pizza and schiacciata as well’, p. 236)! Likewise many constructions reflect volgare influence and are therefore pilloried: ‘presumat corrigere’ (p. 98), ‘tecum volui congratulari’ for classical ‘volui tibi gratulari’ (p. 196), and ‘Nihil tarn homines impedit ad sapientiam pervenire’ in­ stead of ‘quominus ad sapientiam perveniant’ (p. 236).14 It is indicative of the gap between Poggio and his fellow humanists that, whereas Petrarch had consciously used intercedere in its med­ ieval meaning, Poggio does so unwittingly, and Valla points out that in Cicero it means ‘ad impediendum intervenire’ (p. 202). Amongst generally unclassical locutions V alla notes that destinare in the sense of mittere is only found ‘apud quosdam posteriores’ (pp. 136-7), ‘recolo’ does not mean ‘recordor’ in classical use (p. 142), while there is no ancient evidence for ‘insimul’ (p. 190), ‘noviter’ (p. 202), or ‘effectores malorum operum’ (p. 206). V alla even knows that consultor in the sense of adviser is only found in Sallust and Gellius: ‘ “ Consultor” nescio an alius ante Salustium dixerit pro eo qui consilium dat, quem nescio an aliquis imitetur nisi Aulus Gellius, qui sectator est frivolarum elegantiarum’ (‘ Consultor meaning ‘adviser’ was not, I think, used by any writer before Sallust, and he was imitated in this only by Aulus Gellius, who is obsessed with rather frivo­ lous turns of phrase’, pp. 196-7). As for his knowledge of Cicero, again Valla is far more precise than Poggio. Poggio had claimed that ‘leguleius’ and ‘architectandi’ , used by Valla in the first proem to the Elegantiae, were unciceronian; but V alla is able to quote the exact passage from Be Oratore (1. 55. 236) and De Finibus (2. 16. 52), where they *4 On Valla’s terminology for the vernacular, see M. Tavoni, ‘Lorenzo Valla e il volgare’, in O. Besomi and M. Regoliosi (eds.), Lorenzo Valla e VUmanesimo italiano. Atti del Convegno Intemazionale di Studi Umanistici (Parma, 18-ig ottobre 1^84) (Padua, 1986), 199-216.

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occur (p. 170). Not only is he aware that Poggio’s ‘ut plurimum’ (p. 188) and ‘econtra’ (p. 190) are not Ciceronian, but he also shows that Cicero uses only ‘affectio’, whereas Quintilian and later writers opt for ‘affectus’ (p. 132). In syntax he proves that Cicero writes ‘accepi litteras’ not ‘recepi litteras’ (p. 190), that he uses ‘gratias agere’ in the plural, but with ‘referre’ the singular must be used (‘gratiam referre’, pp. 144-5), ar|d that ‘abhorrere’ cannot take an accusative (pp. 192, 208). He even knows that ‘intermedius’ occurs only once in Cicero (Orator, 6. 21) and correctly suspects it is a faulty reading (p. 186). Valla also displays his superiority in sentence construction. He reduces Poggio’s clumsy thirty-seven-word opening sentence in Oratio I to twenty-one words, eliminating the hexameter rhythm at the beginning and end, and reducing tautologous clauses like ‘in quibus honoris et existimationis laus aut ingenii fama a malivolis in discrimen adduci videatur’ (‘in which matter praise of someone’s honour and reputation, or the fame of his genius appears to have doubt cast on it by wicked-minded people’) to the essentials: ‘cum honor et existimatio in discrimen adducitur’ (‘when doubts are raised about someone’s honour and reputa­ tion’, pp. 184-5). V alla’s polemic against Poggio not only confirms his superi­ ority as a Latinist, but also provides evidence of his own literary taste. He is not so rigid as to tie himself to one writer, nor to conclude that one instance of a word or phrase legitimizes it. Thus, although Poggio had cited three instances (from Cicero and Terence) to show that per could be used with the superla­ tive, Valla points out that in the Elegantiae he had claimed that per was rarely, not never, used with the superlative, and that therefore it was more elegant to adhere to the norm, using per only with the positive form of the adjective, and quam with the superlative (pp. 138-40). For similar reasons of majority usage he still objects to Lactantius’ ‘placidiora queque animalia’ in­ stead o f ‘omnia’, Boethius’ ‘quam facillime’ and Priscian’s ‘quam frequentissime’ (p. 160). He also reiterates his view of Servius, Priscian, and Donatus as ‘mediocres’ when they differed from the ‘summi scriptores’ (p. 154). Yet on occasions Valla is pre­ pared to support his usage of a form such as ‘nuperrimus’, on the grounds that it occurs in Priscian (p. 176). Naturally there is also the blanket condemnation of medieval authors such as

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Uguccione, Balbus, and Accursius (p. 124), but Valla is also careful to delimit zones of acceptability within ancient writers. Thus Gellius is regarded as an unreliable model (‘sectator frivolarum elegantiarum’, pp. 196-7), not only for his use of ‘consultor’, but also for his faulty definition o f ‘resciscere’ (p. 162), and his use o f ‘exercitium’ , which is not found in Cicero (p. 214). These invectives, though concerned with grammatical minu­ tiae, nevertheless are indicative of the gap that was opening up between the two generations of humanists. Poggio professes a notional Ciceronianism which he is incapable of realizing in literary practice; Valla possesses the critical intelligence to be a rigid Ciceronian, but would never restrict himself to the usage of one author. Poggio defends not only Cicero but the whole medieval ‘establishment’ attacked by Valla: Boethius, Priscian, Servius, Donatus. In defending his use of ‘instar’, he points to similar usage in Cicero, Virgil, Apuleius, ‘et caeteri qui latine scripserunt’ (Opera, i. 192). Like Antonio da Rho, Poggio has no hesitation in coupling prose-writers with poets, and Cicero with Apuleius; whereas V alla’s objective is always to discern degrees of acceptability, and he rejects, as we have seen, not only Apuleius as a model, but also Gellius and Macrobius. But if Valla anticip­ ates the late Quattrocento writers in his severe periodization, nevertheless he would never qualify as a strict Ciceronian, since he accepts a plurality of ‘optimi auctores’. In the dispute with Poggio he is at pains to point out that his enthusiasm for Quintilian is not an attack on Ciceronianism, but that the two authors are in fact indivisible: De quibus duobus ita sentio . . . neminem posse neque Quintilianum intelligere, nisi Ciceronem optime teneat, nec Ciceronem probe sequi, nisi Quintiliano pareat, nec unquam fuisse quempiam eloquentem post Quintilianum nec esse posse nisi qui se totum arti eius formandum imitationique tradiderit. (p. 108) (My opinion of these two authors is this . . . that no one can understand Quintilian unless he knows Cicero well, and no one can follow Cicero correctly unless he obeys Quintilian’s rules; and that there has been no eloquent writer since Quintilian, nor can there ever be, unless he devotes himself entirely to being trained by his rules and by imitating him.)

Like Petrarch, then, Valla followed Quintilian’s own advice (10. 2. 24-6) about not having just one literary model, and he

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is explicit about his pluralism in the dispute with Poggio: ‘At in lingua Romana non me ad unum Ciceronem astringis. Igitur aliorum quoque testimonia possum repetere’ (‘But in the use of Latin you cannot bind me just to Cicero. I am therefore free to seek out the testimony of other writers’, p. 172).

5. Valla and the Recovery of a Classical Style That the dispute between Poggio and Valla was considered even then as a battle between generations is confirmed by other evid­ ence. In 1454 Poggio, writing to Guarino, feels that they belong on one side of a generation divide, with V alla and his supporter Niccolo Perotti on the other (Tonelli, xi. 110-12). Valla not only attacks the Latin of Poggio and Bruni, as we have seen, but constantly stresses that his revolutionary work is aimed at the younger generation.15 His whole career was characterized by his polemical approach to his contemporaries and elders.'6 He burst upon the scene with his youthful work, Comparatio Ciceronis Quintilianique (1426), unfortunately now lost, which shocked the humanist establishment by claiming that Quintilian was supe­ rior to Cicero. His subseqent career was punctuated by a series of polemics with other humanists, including Antonio da Rho and Bartolomeo Facio as well as Poggio. But, before turning to the disputes, we should consider V a lla ’s major work, the Elegantiarum Linguae Latinae Libri VI (1440—8).17 The proem to the first book represents V alla’s clarion call to his colleagues to restore the Latin language. Although the Roman '5 The proem to Elegantiae book 4 concludes: ‘Quae probatum iri bonae mentis iuvenibus, nam senes desperandi sunt, confidimus’ (‘I am confident that young men of sound judgement will approve of what I say, for there is no hope for the older generation’ , in Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, ed. E. Garin (Milan, 1952), 622). In a letter to Giovanni Serra, c. 1440, he claims that in the Elegantiae ‘seculo nostro .. . posterioribus consulere volebam’ (Epistole, 201). ,6 Apart from his criticism of Bruni’s Latin noted in Ch. 5, Valla also tried to outdo his Latin translation of Demosthenes’ Pro Ctesiphonte, deliberately trying also to imitate and outdo Demosthenes himself, and to prove that Latin was as rich a language as Greek— see F. Lo Monaco, ‘Per la traduzione valliana della Pro Ctephisonte di Demostene’, in Besomi and Regoliosi (eds.), Lorenzo Valla e I’Umanesimo italiano, 141-64 (esp. 155-61). 17 There is as yet no critical edition of the Elegantiae, so in what follows I continue to cite from the edition in Opera, except for the six proems which are edited in Prosatori, 594—630.

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Empire has fallen into desuetude, the language of Rome can still be revived, he argues, and indeed must be restored if the arts which depend on it (not just literature but also painting, sculp­ ture, and architecture) are to progress. Such has been the qual­ ity of recent scholarship that V alla is confident that this restoration will take place: ‘confido propediem linguam romanam vere plus quam urbem, et cum ea disciplinas omnes, iri restitutum’ (‘I am confident that soon the language of Rome, rather than the city of Rome, and with the language all the other arts and sciences, will be restored’, Pros. 598). He compliments his contemporaries who have engaged in writing Latin histories, in translating from Greek, and in composing poetry or orations; but these are like the early foundation of Veii or Ardea in Ro­ man history. What is really needed is a new Camillus to restore the Capitol in Rome itself, and that is the significance which Valla attaches to his linguistic enterprise in the Elegantiae. In the other proems he delimits the boundaries of corrupt Latin in the grammarians (book ii), the jurists (book iii) and the theologians (book iv). Donatus, Servius, and Priscian are the last triumvi­ rate of sound grammarians, before unreliable moderns like Isidore and Papias. The language of the ancient jurists is, of course, superior to the ‘Gothic’ impurities of men such as Accursius. Amongst the early theologians, Jerome clearly imitated Cicero’s philosophical style: ‘Ciceronis stylum cupiebat exprimere, stylum, inquam, quali ille utebatur in quaestionibus philosophiae’ (‘He wanted to reproduce Cicero’s style, by that I mean the style he adopted in his philosophical discussions’, Pros. 616). Indeed, in an expansion of a favourite image from the imitation debate, the early Fathers are seen as bees feeding on the flowers of ancient eloquence, while modern theologians are compared to ants steal­ ing and hiding grains from others.18 Thus on the major question of the correct style for legal and philosophical writings V alla is clearly on the side of Bruni against Alonso, of Barbaro against Pico. 18 ‘Veteres illi theologi videntur mihi velut apes quaedam in longinqua etiam pascua volitantes, dulcissima mella ceraque miro artificio condidisse; recentes vero formicis simillimi, quae ex proximo sublata furto grana in latibulis suis abscondunt’ (‘The ancient theologians seem to me like bees who regularly flew even to distant fields and created the sweetest of honey and wax with astonishing skill; modern theologians, however, are very like ants, who steal grain from their nearby neighbour and bury it in their secret holes’, Pros. 622).

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In the Elegantiae itself there are traces of his youthful enthu­ siasm for Quintilian, particularly when pointing out his superi­ ority over later grammarians: ‘In hoc ego a Prisciano libere dissentior. . . autoritate et potissimum Marci Fabii quern omni­ bus sine controversia ingeniis antepono’ (‘O n this topic I openly disagree with Priscian. . . and I am supported in particular by the authority of Marcus Fabius [Quintilian], whom I place unequivocally above all other geniuses of antiquity’, Opera, i. 37). Yet, as we saw in the polemic with Poggio, Valla never restricts usage to the authority of one single writer, not even his beloved Quintilian. The treatise, covering both lexis and syntax, is more descriptive than normative, describing the usage of the ‘maximi auctores’, and stressing frequency and the norm, rather than the single instance, as the criterion for contemporary writ­ ers: ‘non legem scribo, quasi numquam aliter factum sit, sed quod frequentissime factitatum est, praesertim a Marco Tullio Marco Fabioque’ (‘I am not drawing up a law, as though no one else had ever written differently, but rather I am establishing what has been the most common practice, especially in the writ­ ings of Marcus Tullius [Cicero] and Marcus Fabius [Quintilian]’, Opera, i. 92). Cicero and Quintilian represent the peak, and it is interesting that, perhaps because of the latter’s views, V alla has little to say about Seneca. As for later authors, from the fourth to sixth centuries, De Caprio has shown that they receive a mixed press, attracting negative quotations in a third of cases; while the late medieval authors are universally criticized.19 The views expressed in the Elegantiae are consistent with V alla’s approach in other works. In his Repastinatio Dialectice et Philosophie (c. 1440-8) he attacks the language of scholastic philosophy, urging the philosophers to return to the more natural language of the Ciceronian tradition of philosophy: ‘At philosophia ac dialectica non solent ac ne debent quidem recedere ab usitatissima loquendi consuetudine et quasi a via vulgo trita et silicibus strata’ (‘But philosophy and dialectic do not usually, and should not in any case, depart from the usual way of writing, as though leav­ ing the official road or path trodden by the multitude’, Opera, '9 These statistics, as well as much else in this paragraph, derive from the excel­ lent study of V. De Caprio, ‘La rinascita della cultura di Roma: La tradizione latina nelle Eleganze di Lorenzo Valla’, in P. Brezzi and M. de Panizza Lorch (eds.), Umanesimo a Roma net Quattrocento (Rome, 1984), 163-90.

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i. 651). Even in a late speech in honour of Thomas Aquinas (1457), Valla still maintains his contempt for the scholastic lan­ guage of recent theologians: ‘quae novi theologi semper inculcant: ens, entitas, quiditas, identitas . . (‘the terms which modern theologians are always repeating: ens, entitas, quiditas, identitas . . Opera, ii. 350). As for V alla’s other two major polemics, the diatribe against Antonio da Rho, Raudensiane Note (1449), was at one stage in­ tended to be an appendix to the Elegantiae.2° Like the invectives against Poggio and Facio, it is a rather pedestrian list of his opponent’s Latin errors. Both Antonio’s syntax and lexis are attacked: ‘aspirare ad studia’ should be ‘aspirare studiis’ (Opera, i. 392), ‘ex maxima parte’ is what is found in Cicero, not Antonio’s ‘pro maiore parte’ (i. 421), and so on. In lexis Valla objects to both scholastic terms such as ‘aliqualiter’ (i. 393), ‘discretio’ (i. 415), and ‘praesentialiter’ (i. 419), and to vulgarisms like ‘avisare’ (i. 397), ‘induciari’ (i. 406) and ‘granellum’ (i. 438). He has more fundamental criticisms to make of the length of Antonio’s work (i. 391, 417) and of its title. De Imitatione is too vague, according to Valla; he should have added Eloquentiae to the title (i. 391).2 21 Even imitatio is not quite accurate: ‘Imitationem 0 vocas qui magis usus, consuetudoque atque exercitatio vocari debet’ (‘What you call “ imitation” ought rather to be called usage, custom and practice’, i. 424). But the most significant feature of V alla’s dispute with Rho is, as we saw in the previous chapter, the former’s superiority in discerning categories of acceptable authors: Apuleius, Macrobius, and Gellius may be interesting sources of lexical curiosities, but not of sound Latin usage. The polemic with Bartolomeo Facio (1400-57) illustrates V alla’s rigour in another area, that of historiography. Valla had written the Gesta Ferdinandi Regis Aragonum in 1445-6, and at the outset had tackled one of the major problems for humanist his­ torians, the changed nomenclature of place-names. V alla’s solu­ tion is to adopt contemporary forms, since he is writing for present 20 See M. Regoliosi, ‘Le due redazioni delle Raudensiane Note e le Elegantiae del Valla’, in G. Billanovich and R. Avesani (eds.), Vestigia. Studi in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich (2 vols.; Rome, 1984), ii. 5 5 9 -73 . 21 This suggests that Valla probably saw a first redaction of Antonio’s work, since the definitive title (De Imitationibus Eloquentie) suggests that Valla’s (or others’) criti­ cisms had been taken to heart.

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and future generations; so he will use ‘Florentia’ not the classical ‘Fluentia’, ‘Ferrara’ not ‘Forum Arrii’.22 This may seem incon­ sistent with his stance against vulgarisms in other works, but the terms he uses to describe the modern and ancient forms prove that he is actually being consistent with his regular practice of privileging ‘consuetudo’ over ‘auctoritas’. His espousal of ‘nostrorum temporum consuetudo’ over ‘vetustatis auctoritas’ is maintained not only in dealing with place-names but also in other areas of his history, and it was these unclassical elements that led to Facio’s Invectivae in Laurentium Vallam (1447).23 Facio’s linguistic criticisms cover three broad areas: vulgarisms and allusions to contemporary culture, religious terminology, and other stylistic lapses. He attacks V alla’s use of ‘infans Castellae’ (Rao, 72) instead of a more classical periphrasis, ‘Maometani’ instead of ‘Afri Hispaniae incolae’ (pp. 72-3), ‘leugis’ instead of a classical unit of measurement (p. 74), ‘parlamentum’ (p. 102), and V alla’s allusions to Orlando and Rinaldo (p. 78). Most of all he objected to his neologisms ‘bombardae’ (p. 73) and ‘equerios’ (p. 82), particularly as they were accompanied by lengthy explanations, which contravened the historiographical rule of brevitas. Amongst religious allusions he criticizes the mention of ‘edem Dive Marie cognomine Custodientis’ (p. 72), the description of the images on religious banners (p. 77), and the use of the unclassical ‘prophetare’ (p. 98). He also objects to poetic phrases such as ‘acre prelium surgit’ (p. 74), ‘convolvens flameas pilas’ (p. 75), and the metaphor in ‘templum mugiebat’ (p. 75). Apart from these stylistic points, Facio also found fault with V alla’s subject-matter, claiming that Valla had contravened decorum in describing King Martin snoring during an embassy (p. 96), or being hauled by a pulley on to his nuptial couch (p. 97), and in recounting the details of a public cremation (p. 83). Valla replied to these criticisms in his Antidotum in Facium (1447).24 On ‘infans Castelle’ he feels that this particular title, like that of the French king’s son (‘delphinus’), needs to be ” L. Valla, Gesta Ferdinandi Regis Aragonum, ed. O. Besomi (Padua, 1973), 11. 83 In what follows I cite from B. Facio, Invective in Laurentium Vallam, ed. E. I. Rao (Naples, 1979). 84 In what follows I cite from L. Valla, Antidotum in Facium, ed. M. Regoliosi (Padua, 1981).

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made more explicit than just ‘regis films’, in the same way that the Pope and the Genoese Doge need to be distinguished from the classical equivalents ‘pontifex’ and ‘dictator’ (Regoliosi, 95). Similarly with ‘Maomettani’, V alla’s precise term is clearer than Facio’s generic alternative (p. 100). As for ‘leugis’, not only does Jerome use the word, but Xenophon often quotes foreign units of measurement, and in any case Valla had softened the neo­ logism’s impact by prefacing it in the classical manner with ‘ut illi loquuntur’ (p. n o ). On ‘parlamentum’ , he shows that Livy and Pliny often mention local names of institutions (p. 137). ‘Bombardae’ are so different from ancient technology that to use the generic ‘tormenta’ suggested by Facio would be positively misleading; instead V alla embraces the Ciceronian principle that ‘nova res novum vocabulum flagitat’ (p. 106). In any case, Valla is merely using a word already employed by others (‘a pluribus in usum recepto utor’, p. 106) and he claims that the neologism is valid in that it has a Greek etymology. He insists that, when it comes to new technology, unknown to the ancients, the con­ temporary writer must use a neologism, as the ancients them­ selves did: Valla had even written a little treatise on the Latin for such words as clock, cotton, sugar, football, and spectacles (p. 107)!25 His discussion o f ‘equerios’ is justified both by the pre­ cedent of similar digressions in Thucydides and by the necessity to distinguish the word from confusing synonyms (pp. 234-5). On the question of religious matter and terminology Valla shows himself to be more flexible than the ‘Ciceronianist’ Facio. The latter had criticized V a lla ’s use o f the unusual form ‘parciturus’ , despite precedents in Jerome, but Valla argues for Jerom e’s greater authority in usage over a similar form in Apuleius (p. 12). Similarly he justifies the form ‘primigenius’, even although his opponents claim it is found ‘apud solos ecclesiasticos’ (p. 67). Valla is happy to use ‘monasterium’ , since it is used by the Church Fathers, while ‘sanctimoniales’ is found in the Codex and is derived from ‘sanctimonia’ , a sound Ciceronian term (146—8). On ‘prophetare’ he agrees that it is a 25 Gesta Ferdinandi, 194-204, prints a passage which may represent the treatise, dealing with the Latin for clock, bell, compass, cannon, stirrup, mill, cotton, organ, sugar, football, candles, goldleaf, and spectacles. See also O. Besomi, ‘Dai Gesta Ferdinandi Regis Aragonum del Valla al De Orthographia del Tortelli’, Italia medioevale e umanistica, 9 (1966), 75-121.

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Christian word, but for that reason he rejects the pagan alter­ natives suggested by Facio (‘divinare’, ‘ariolare’, etc.); ecclesias­ tical words like ‘ecclesia’ itself, ‘episcopus’ , ‘baptisma’, and the rest are justified both by their use in Christian authors, and by their existence in Greek; in any case, Macrobius uses ‘prophetas’ (pp. 128-9). Where Facio had accused Valla of ignoring the rich alternatives in classical Latin, Valla proves that it is the strict Ciceronians who limit themselves to ‘pauculis litteris’ (p. 148). To Facio’s calls for classical brevitas in historiography Valla re­ sponds with his more accurate, even Christian pursuit of veritas.262 7 Although he had criticized Poggio’s use of the poetic adjective ‘desueta’ for ‘insueta’ (Poggio, Opera, i. 228), and the active use of the adjective in ‘fons irriguus’, which echoed a line from the Georgies 21 V alla’s justification of his own use of poetic terms in the dispute with Facio is not inconsistent, since historiography tolerates a higher style than the epistle (pp. 113, 121—2). Time and again Valla proves his superior sensitivity to different ages of Latin. ‘Beneficiarios’ may mean, as Facio says, a kind of soldier in Vegetius, but the latter is not ‘pereruditus’ (pp. 154-5); con­ trary to Facio’s objections, he shows that in Cicero himself ‘cuniculi’ exists in the plural (p. 60), that ‘pompa’ is used in a secular sense— and Facio’s alternative ‘celebritas’ does not mean ‘a ceremony’ but ‘a crowd’— (pp. 161-2), and that ‘cum bene magna manu’ has a close Ciceronian precedent (p. 140). As for the lack of decorum in the subject-matter of the Gesta, Valla again appeals to classical precedent, not only in the more lurid descriptions of Suetonius and Tacitus, but also in Livy (pp. 243-4). Valla appears deliberately to insist on his imitation of the private histories of Suetonius and Tacitus, regarded by Facio and Panormita as ‘mediocres’.28 Even Facio’s attempt to rewrite V alla’s sentence about the cannon is proved to be de­ fective: apart from ending the sentence with a hexameter rhy­ thm, Facio’s ‘tormentorum eneorum fragor’, for V alla’s ‘crepitus 26 On this clash between brevitas and veritas, see G. Ferrau, ‘La concezione storiografica del Valla: I Gesta Ferdinandi Regis AragonunC, in Besomi and Regoliosi (eds.), Lorenzo Valla e VUmanesimo italiano, 265-310. 27 ‘Hoc est quod parum cautos fallit, quod putant idem sibi licere quod poetis’ (‘This is what deceives the careless writers, who believe that they enjoy the same licence as poets’). See the edition of Valla’s Apologus in S. I. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972), 479-534 (496). 28 See Ferrau, ‘La concezione storiografica del Valla’, 300.

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bombardarum’, is inaccurate both in its vague periphrasis for cannons, and in the fact that ‘crepitus’ is the more appropriate word for their noise (pp. 156-60). On broader rhetorical ques­ tions Facio is shown to be on the same rather basic level as men such as Antonio da Rho. When Facio criticizes one of V alla’s rhetorical figures as suitable for confirmatio or confutatio in ora­ tions not for historical narration, Valla counters that Quintilian approves of such ornament in narration, and adds: Quis te magistellus edocuit que cui parti orationis exornado aut figura conveniat, quasi non omnibus ubique habeat locum? Intelligo te Alani cuiusdam . . . potius quam Ciceronis ac Quintiliani precepta sectari. (pp. 215-16) (What ignorant schoolteacher taught you which embellishment or figure belonged to what part of an oration, as though they did not all have a place somewhere in all discourse? I realize now that you follow the rules of some grammarian called Alanus rather than Cicero and Quintilian.)

On several occasions he warns against Facio’s excessive reliance on the Ad Herennium, a work that Cicero himself contradicted elsewhere (pp. 120, 292, 389). Valla, then, opts for the same conclusion as Flavio Biondo when confronted with the problem of Latin nomenclature. In­ deed he may have taken the idea from Biondo, since he had read part of Biondo’s Decades in Naples in 1443.29 At the start of the third decade, Biondo confronts the problem of altered terminol­ ogy relating to leaders, military technology, and place-names. Imperator can mean both ‘leader’ in its classical sense, and ‘em­ peror’ in contemporary usage, dux can mean ‘captain’ or ‘doge’; and there is also the problem, dealt with at the start of the century by Salutati and Bruni, of writing elegantly about ‘Paulum de Ursinis, Ioannem Franciscum de Gonzaga, capitaneum generalem, montem Sanctae Mariae in Georgio’ and so on.30 In technology, what ancient writers called ‘scorpiones’ are now known as ‘balistae’, and no classical historian had ever heard of ‘bombardae’. Biondo’s common-sense approach is to opt for the modern unclassical terminology, believing that its clarity and 29 See Besomi, ‘Dai Gesta\ 85. 30 F. Biondo, De Roma Triumphante Libri X, Romae Instauratae Libri III, Italia Illustrata, Historarum ab Inclinatione Romani Imperii Decades III (Basle, 1531), 393.

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usefulness will outweigh its inelegance. The absurd alternative would be to use a thirty-eight-word periphrasis instead of bombardare.3' Lorenzo Valla was by far the most sensitive Latinist of the first half of the fifteenth century. If the chief merit of Poggio and his generation had been the discovery of important texts, such as Quintilian, the De Oratore, and the Brutus, V alla’s aim was to attain a complete mastery of the linguistic implications of those and all other ancient texts. Hence his condemnation not only of the Gothic Latin of Cassiodorus, so prized by Salutati,3 132 but also of authors such as Priscian, which the educational writers of the previous generation, like Bruni and Barzizza, had accepted unquestioningly. Where other humanists like Antonio da Rho and Maffeo Vegio had enquired into the meanings of individ­ ual Latin words, Valla extended the research into all aspects of syntax and morphology; and where others like Guarino and Panormita continued to write poetry, Valla insisted on the im­ portance of establishing the proper rules for prose: ‘neque in hoc toto meo opere tam licentiam poetarum consector quam usum oratorum’ (‘in this whole work I am aiming at the usage of orators rather than poetic licence’, Opera, i. 22). The paradox remains, however, that the older generation of Poggio and Facio subscribed to a theoretical Ciceronianism, 31 ‘Quis enim . . . non vehementer admiretur, vas aeneum fusile, ferreumve, oblongum, tamquam cavo ex gutture in orbem dedolata librarum sexcentarum septingentarumque saxa, ignis ad interiorem partem sulphureis admoti pulveribus, et vaporis conciudi impatientis violentia evomens densissimos quosque muros perfringere, et opera quaeque solidissima dissipare?’ (‘For who would not be aston­ ished if I had to write instead about a vessel of molten bronze or iron, oblong in shape, capable of expelling from its hollow throat stones fashioned in the shape of balls weighing six or seven hundred pounds, because of the force of the vapour within which refused to be contained, after the application of fire to the sulphurous powders inside, and these balls breaking down the densest city walls, and shattering the stoutest defence works?’, ibid. 394). On the significance of Biondo’s decision for other historians, see G. Ianziti, ‘From Flavio Biondo to Lodrisio Crivelli: The Begin­ nings of Humanistic Historiography in Sforza Milan’, Rinascimento, 20 (1980), 3—39 (27-32).

32 ‘De aequali suo [jr. Boethii] Cassiodoro, qui apud nonnullos in pretio est, nunquam ideo facio mentionem quia cum regibus suis Theodorico et Alarico quo­ rum scriba fuit, gothicum sonat et barbarum’ (‘As for Boethius’ contemporary Cassiodorus, whom some people admire, I never mention him for the very good reason that along with his kings Theodoric and Alaric, whose scribe he was, his writings sound Gothic and barbarous’, Opera, i. 151).

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which in practice turned out to be a very loose eclecticism;33 while V alla’s theoretical eclecticism in its rigorous distinctions between periods of Latinity, and its tendency to restrict usage to Cicero, Quintilian, Livy, and Sallust, prepared the ground for the rigid Ciceronianism of the second half of the fifteenth century.34 The disagreement between Poggio and Valla over the significance of a passage in Quintilian (i. 6. 27) is emblematic of the distance between the two humanists. For Poggio, all the ancients spoke ‘latine’, while only the learned writers wrote ‘grammatice’; whereas for V alla strict grammatical analogy was what Quintilian meant by ‘grammatice’, while ‘latine’ applied to the genial departures from the norm characteristic of the great stylists in Latin. One final paradox is that, although Valla was the most know­ ledgeable Latin critic of his time, his flair lay in the precise use of the individual word, not in well-composed periods. For Valla, ‘elegantia’ related more to discerning the correct word amidst near-synonyms than to the broader stylistic notions of elegance.35 This is apparent in Cortesi’s criticism of V alla’s lack of that ‘conglutinatio et comprehensio verborum ’ which leads to ‘concinnitas’: ‘Conabatur Valla vim verborum exprimere et quasi vias, sed eas non rectas tradebat ad structuram orationis’ (‘Valla tried to express the power of individual words as well as the ways they came together, but he was unable to hand these on correctly for the purposes of structuring discourse’).36 V alla’s invectives and even his Elegantiae, in content crucial contribu­ tions to sound Latin, stylistically are anything but elegant. The humanists examined in these last two chapters wrote 33 See the conclusion to H. Harth’s introduction to her edition of Poggio’s letters: ‘Benche egli dichiaratamente si ispiri alio stile di Cicerone, il suo idioma e tutt’altro che genuinamente ciceroniano’ (P. Bracciolini, Lettere, i. Lettere a Niccolo Niccoli, ed. H. Harth (Florence, 1984), p. cxvi). 34 For Valla’s effective limitation of sound Latin to these few authors, see Cesarini Martinelli, ‘Note sulla polemica5, 66. The verdict of T. T. Tunberg, ‘The Latinity of Lorenzo Valla’s Gesta Ferdinandi Regis Aragonum’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 37 (1988), 30-78, is that Valla is ‘in no sense . . . a “ Ciceronian” since he appears to give equal weight to the usage of the “ Silver Age’” , though he does reject archaic and late Latin’ (p. 33). 35 D. Marsh, ‘Grammar, Method and Polemic in Valla’s Elegantiae’, Rinascimento, 19 (1979). 91-116 (100-1). 36 Cortesi, De Hominibus Doctis, ed. Ferrau, 144.

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exclusively in Latin, even though that Latin differed consider­ ably. In the following chapters we come up against humanists who, for the first time since the Petrarchan revolution, devoted considerable time to works in the vernacular. The intellectual activity of men like Guarino and Valla had been channelled into perfecting humanist Latin. But the bilingual output of writers such as Alberti and Landino will bring to the fore the question of imitative strategies in the volgare as well. In the second half of the fifteenth century writing in both languages starts to become the norm for humanists, and vernacular humanism now needs to be studied in detail.

PART THREE

Vernacular Humanism

8

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), a pupil of Barzizza, possessed his own copy of the Brutus and Orator, and like his teacher and other humanists studied hitherto, paid superlative compliments to Cicero whenever he mentioned him.1 ‘Marco Tullio Cicerone, quel nostro principe degli oratori’, says Lionardo in book 1 of Della Famiglia (Opere, i. 55); later he talks to Battista himself of ‘tuo Marco Cicerone’ (i. 84); and in a crucial passage Lionardo recommends the best Latin authors to study: E arei io caro e’ miei s’ausassero co’ buoni autori, imparassino grammatica da Prisciano e da Servio, e molto si facessero familiari, non a cartule e gregismi, ma sopra tutti a Tullio, Livio, Sallustio, ne’ quali singularissimi ed emendatissimi scrittori, dal primo ricever di dottrina attingano quella perfettissima aere d’eloquenza con molta gentilezza della lingua latina. (i. 71)

Here Alberti, like other humanists, distinguishes between the classical authors in their original texts and medieval manuals such as Chartula and the Grecismtis.2 Where he differs from his peers is in his appreciation of some other writers who are ‘crudi e rozzi’, but who should still be studied for their content, if not their language: ‘Cerchisi la lingua latina in quelli e’ quali 1’ebbono netta e perfettissima; negli altri toglianci l’altre scienze delle quali e’ fanno professione’ (i. 71). In practice, in his Latin works Alberti uses many terms not found in Cicero, Livy, or Sallust; throughout his life he continues to appreciate the content of the ‘scientific’ writers, and in his own technical treatises he writes as 1 See G. Mancini, Vita di L. B. Alberti (Rome, 1911); C. Grayson, ‘Alberti, Leon Battista’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, i (Rome, i960), 702-9. For the autobio­ graphy attributed to Alberti, see L. B. Alberti, Vita, ed. R. Fubini and A. Menci Gallorini, Rinascimento, 12 (1972), 21-78. In what follows references in the text are to L. B. Alberti, Opere volgari, ed. C. Grayson (3 vols.; Bari, 1960—73). 1 C. Grayson, ‘Cartule e Grecismi in Leon Battista Alberti’, Lingua nostra, 13 (1952), 105-6; G. Billanovich, ‘Leon Battista Alberti, il Grecismus e la Chartula’, Lingua nostra, 15 (i954). 70_I-

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one of them. Given Alberti’s considerable output in both lan­ guages, it will be necessary to examine separately first the Latin works and then the works in the vernacular.

i. Alberti’s Latin Works Alberti’s first Latin work, the Philodoxeos, was such a convincing imitation of an ancient comedy that it initially circulated as the product of a little-known comedian Lepidus. In practice, then, Alberti was capable of producing a language that seemed genu­ inely antique, as he himself noted in the Commentarium which he appended to the play: ‘et comicum dicendi genus et priscum quippiam redolebat’ (‘ [the style] was in harmony with the comic genre and had a classical feel to it’).3 The language of the play is not merely classical but at times Plautine, exemplifying a predilection for archaic forms that was to remain with Alberti throughout his literary career.4 Yet the fact that the play was in prose not in verse ought to have been sufficient indication that this was no genuine antique.5 In addition, the use of allegorical names for the characters, as well as the elements of late medi­ eval Latin in the dialogue, would have been proof to an expert like Valla that this was not the work of ‘Lepidus’.6 Alberti’s first prose work, the De Commodis Litterarum atque Incommodis (1428-32), displays in its polemical tone links with the earlier invectives by Petrarch and Boccaccio.7 But it contains an important introduction in which Alberti articulates for the first time his individual poetics in Latin. He confronts the same afioria that had faced Petrarch (Seniles, 5. 2), when he notes that 3 Philodoxeos, ed. L. Cesarini Martinelli, Rinascimento, 17 (1977), h i —234 (14.7). 4 Fubini, in his introduction to the Vita, talks of Alberti’s ‘predilezione per il linguaggio poetico (specie dei comici) arcaico o tardivo, e comunque raro’ (p. 41). 5 Antonio Barzizza, son of Alberti’s tutor, wrote his Latin comedy, Cauteraria, in prose, explaining in the prologue that even learned humanists are still ignorant of the metre of ancient comedy— see V. Pandolfi and E. Artese (eds.), Teatro goliardico dell’ Umanesimo (Milan, 1965), 448. 6 Cesarini Martinelli, in her edition of the play (pp. 226-7), lists the non-classical forms in the Philodoxeos. 7 Quotations in what follows are from L. B. Alberti, De Commodis Litterarum atque Incommodis. Defunctus, ed. G. Farris (Milan, 1971). L. Goggi Carotti in her edition (Florence, 1976) talks o f‘i due letterato-guida della sua formazione giovanile: Petrarca e Cicerone’ (p. 7).

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the wealth of the classical tradition is so great as to deter young writers from anything but reading and admiring ancient works: ‘Ita et seria omnia et iocosa veteres ipsi complexi sunt. Nobis tantum legendi atque admirandi sui facultatem et necessitatem dimiserunt’ (‘The ancients themselves have so covered all serious and comic topics that they have bequeathed to us merely the opportunity or rather the necessity of reading them and admir­ ing them’, Farris, 44). When he adds that the few gaps left by the ancients have been filled by earlier humanists, these ‘maiores natu’ are probably men like Bruni and Vergerio since they write ‘historiam . . . mores principum ac gesta rerum publicarum eventusque bellorum’ (‘history. . . works on the behaviour of princes, official public histories dealing with the outcome of wars’ , ibid.). Alberti’s response is not to be browbeaten into silence by those humanists who disapprove of anything original and who are incapable o f producing anything themselves: ‘Nos vero iuniores modo aliquid novi proferamus, non vereamur severissima . . . iudicia illorum, qui cum ipsi infantes et elingues sint, tantum aures ad tognoscendum nimium delitiosas porrigunt’ (‘as long as we produce something original, we of a younger generation should not fear the extremely severe . . . verdicts of those who, just because they are incapable of speaking or writing anything themselves, use their excessively precious ears merely for judg­ ing others’, ibid.).8 This stress on the younger generation and originality, along with the admission that his Latin is something less grand than that found in antiquity (‘non prisce imprimis eloquentie’ (‘it does not belong particularly to the realm of clas­ sical eloquence’), ibid.), hints that even at this stage Alberti is an anti-Ciceronian. This first apology in Alberti for a less than classical style may merely be a modesty topos; but throughout all his writings there is an emphasis on originality and the pursuit of a personal, unadorned style that suggests that it is more than a rhetorical commonplace. Even in the De Commodis the ideal of a simple brevitas is not only outlined at the start, but is pursued in the rest 8 Perhaps this is the first of many polemical thrusts at Niccolo Niccoli, who was notorious for criticizing others’ works, but never wrote anything himself: see L. Trenti, ‘Leon Battista Alberti e Vespasiano da Bisticci’, Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 91 (1987), 282-9; ar>d M. C. Davies, ‘An Emperor without Clothes? Niccolo Niccoli under Attack’, Italia medievale e umanistica, 30 (1987), 95-148.

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of the work: he writes a treatise that has no explicit ancient precedent, and he constantly eschews exempla and amplificatio in order to adhere to his stylistic ideal.9 The epithets applied to his Latin by Alberti in the De Commodis (‘nuda’, ‘succincta’, ‘lenis’, ‘ieiuna’, ‘exilis’) are not merely rhe­ torically modest, but rather an accurate assessment of a style that does not conform to the Ciceronian ideal. Indeed Cicero warns against these qualities: ‘dicendi facultas non debeat esse ieiuna atque nuda’ (De Or. i. 218); ‘ [Xenophon] leniore quodam sono usus est’ (2. 58); ‘ne exilis, ne inculta sit vestra oratio’ (3. 97). Alberti concludes the treatise with a defence of his less than eloquent language that will become one of his hallmarks: ‘nemo reprehendat si malui parum eloquens quam nimium mordax videri’ (‘no one should reproach me for preferring to be less eloquent rather than too harsh’, Farris, 142). The Intercenales (1425-39) constitute one of Alberti’s most original and characteristic contributions to Quattrocento litera­ ture.101 In these short pieces he develops his ‘mordant’ tone, imitating a rather unusual model, Lucian." Thus his protests in the proems are again both conventional topos and a genuine justification of a different rhetorical ideal: the fully rounded Ciceronian period would not suit these brief, satirical pieces.12 In the proem to book ii, dedicated to Bruni, Alberti contrasts Bruni’s ‘summam vim et copiam eloquentie’ (‘supreme power and full maturity of eloquence’) with ‘puerili hoc nostro et inelimato dicendi genere’ (‘this juvenile and unpolished style of ours’, Garin, 127). The proem to book iv, dedicated to Poggio, 9 ‘oratio succincta e t . . . brevis’ (p. 52); ‘nudam orationem nostram futuram prediximus .. . idcirco hos omnes amplificationum locos fugiamus’ (p. 98); ‘Sed frustra atque ab instituto esset, in eiusmodi notissimis atque approbatissimis sententiis expoliendis vagari. . . . Nam succincta et lenis, ut vidistis, nostra fuit oratio eritque . .. facillima et brevissima’ (p. 120); ‘brevissime hunc locum transeundum censeo’ (p. 134); ‘oratio nostra. . . ieiuna exilis atque humilis’ (p. 142). There is a similar cult of brevity in his Apologi, of which he says: ‘si fortassis tibi subobscuriores aliquo in loco videbuntur, dabis veniam huic nostrae, cui vehementer studuimus, brevitati’ (Alberti, Apologhi ed elogi, ed. R. Contarino (Genoa, 1984), 44). 10 C. Grayson, ‘II prosatore latino e volgare’, in Convegno intemazionale indetto nel V centenario di Leon Battista Alberti (Rome, 1974), 275. 11 Cesarini Martinelli discusses his ‘imitazione di modelli piuttosto insoliti per l’epoca’ (Philodoxeos, 115 n. 2). 18 Alberti’s ‘gusto per le parole e le forme rare e ricercate’ is well illustrated by Garin: ‘Alcune Intercenales inedite’ , ed. E. Garin, Rinascimento, 4 (1964), 125—258 (126). Quotations in what follows will be from this edition.

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defends his choice of a challenging originality (‘difficillimis inventionibus’) as opposed to stylistic conformity (‘vulgatioris eloquentie’, p. 140), probably referring to his rejection of the Ciceronian dialogue adopted by most of his fellow humanists. But it is in the proem to book vii, dedicated to the pioneer of the Ciceronian dialogue, Leonardi Bruni, that we find the fullest statement of Alberti’s stylistic alternative to Ciceronianism. Striv­ ing to equal Cicero is like trying to catch the moon, says Alberti, yet everything is now judged by Ciceronian standards: In aliorumque scriptis pensitandis ita sumus plerique ad omnes fastidiosi, ut ea Ciceronis velimus eloquentie respondere, ac si superiori etate omnes qui approbati fuere scriptores eosdem fuisse Cicerones statuant. (p. 180) (In weighing up other men’s writings most o f us are so fastidious to­ wards all others that we want their work to come up to the standards of Cicero’s eloquence, as though in the past all writers who were found worthy were judged to have been the same as Cicero.)

This is absurd, he claims, since nature produced only one Cicero, and if he were reborn in Alberti’s day he would suffer from the same lack of classical texts and he too would be deficient in eloquence. Yet some critics accept only the grand and grandiose style, rejecting anything else as crude. Here again Alberti exalts content and originality (‘vim ingenii’) over Ciceronian style (‘flosculos et lautitiem tantum verborum rotundosque periodos’ (‘merely the flowers and superficial polish of words and rounded periods’)), clinching his argument by pointing out how varied eloquence is, so that at times even Cicero writes in ‘unciceronian’ fashion: ‘At enim varia res est eloquentia, ut ipse interdum sibi Ciceroni perdissimilis sit’ (‘But eloquence is a variable quality, so much so that even Cicero is sometimes most unlike himself’, p. 180). As in the De Commodis, he concludes by claiming that he prefers to be one who tries to contribute something different rather than standing in idle admiration of the past.13 13 Again this motif, found in many of Alberti’s works, may have as its target the fastidious, but unproductive Niccoli. The proem to Intercenales ii contains a fable about Pan’s most beautiful antique pipes being unable to produce any sound, while his most rustic pipes gave out ‘claram et festivissimam vocem’ (p. 127). Alberti’s Latin is clearly associated with the latter, while the alternative of silent contempla­ tion of precious antiques smacks ofNiccoli’s approach: ‘antiquius ad laudem ducimus posse vel ipsos rusticos in triviis ad saltum et festivitatem puerili hoc et inelimato

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Along with the Intercenales and the technical treatises, Momus is one of Alberti’s most ambitious and significant Latin works. In the proem he again talks of the difficulty of writing anything after considering the achievements of antiquity, and concludes that if anything is worth writing at all it has to be original either in content (‘incognitum atque incogitatum . . . res novas, inauditas’), or at least in style: ‘Proximus huic erit is, qui cognitas et communes fortassis res novo quodam et insperato scribendi genere tractarit’ (‘Next to the original writer will be he who treats material that is perhaps well known and in the common domain, but in a new and unanticipated style’).14 He regards his own style in Momus, a mixture of seriousness and humour, as something original in Latin literature, though a recent study has highlighted Alberti’s pursuit of classical lexis here in his gradual elimination from this work of non-classical compounds such as admirari, demirari, admiratio, etc.'5 The technical treatises exhibit the by now familiar concern for originality of material and for clarity and concision rather than eloquence. The opening words of De Pictura (1435) embrace the twin aims of brevity and clarity (‘De pictura his brevissimis commentariis scripturi, quo clarior sit nostra oratio . . .’ (‘In this very brief commentary on painting, in order that our discussion should possess greater clarity. . .), Opere, iii. n ) , while the use of the word ‘commentarii’ suggests an unpolished set of notes.'6 He distinguishes between the technical subtlety of mathematical writings and his own cruder treatment of his subject: ‘pinguiore idcirco, ut aiunt, Minerva scribendo utemur’ (‘our mode of dicendi genere movere, quam infinitis ornamentis comparandis per silentium consenescere’ (‘I thought it more worthy of praise to be able to move even rustic peasants at the crossroads to leap about and have fun with this childlike and unpolished style, rather than to remain silent and grow old acquiring infinite quan­ tities of ornaments’, p. 127).

14 Alberti,

Momus 0 del principe, ed. R. Consolo (Genoa, 1986), 24. 15 A. Perosa, ‘Considerazioni su testo e lingua del Momus dell’Alberti’, in P. Hainsworth et al. (eds.), The Languages o f Literature in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1988), 45-62. ,6 Similarly De Statua begins: ‘caeteris omissis, solum quod ad coeptam explicationem faciat brevissime transigamus’ (‘Leaving aside all other discussions, let us briefly deal only with what is relevant to the explanation we have begun to give . . Alberti, On Painting and Sculpture: The Latin Texts o f ‘De Pictura’ and ‘De Statua’, ed. and trans. C. Grayson (London, 1972), 122); and Elementa Picturae opens: ‘Quo scribendo sim brevis atque dilucidus. . .’ (‘In order that in this work I should be brief and extremely clear . . .’, Opere, iii. 115).

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writing will be in a rather unsophisticated fashion’, ibid.). The source of the phrase ‘pinguiore Minerva’ (Cicero, De Amicitia 19) confirms that it refers to a style which is the opposite of ‘subtilius’. Again this is more than a topos: throughout the trea­ tise Alberti is conscious of his stylistic aims and modifies vo­ cabulary and structure accordingly.'7 At the end of the first book he acknowledges that his technical subject does not permit ele­ gant treatment, but hopes to have attained his ideals of brevity and intelligibility: ‘sine ulla eloquentia brevissime recitata [sunt], . . . dum imprimis volui intelligi, id prospexi ut clara esset nostra oratio magis quam compta et ornata’ (‘These mat­ ters have been dealt with very briefly, without any trace of eloquence. . . . Since my first objective was to be understood, I took care that my discourse should be clear rather than polished and ornate’, Opere, iii. 43). Alberti outlines the originality of his enterprise in the dedica­ tory letter to Giovan Francesco Gonzaga (‘rei novitate’, iii. 9), and in the first paragraph of the treatise (‘a nemine . . . alio tradita litteris materia’ (‘a subject never before treated in writ­ ing by anyone’ ), iii. 11); but, apart from these traditional places for claiming originality, he insists on it elsewhere: at the end of book i (iii. 41), twice in book ii (47, 87), and at the end of the last book: ‘primi fuerimus qui hanc artem subtilissimam litteris mandaverimus’ (iii. 107). This is no cliche: Alberti is genuinely innovative in writing on painting in Latin, having no classical or contemporary models to follow, since Pliny’s chapters on art are more a history than a manual: ‘quando quidem non historiam picturae ut Plinius sed artem novissime recenseamus’ (‘since I have written not a history of painting, like Pliny, but an up-todate manual’, iii. 47). Even Alberti’s views on pictorial imitation reflect his literary ideals: his advice is to imitate nature not the work of another painter (iii. 101), and the prime ingredients in the composition of an aesthetically pleasing historia are ‘ipsa copia et varietas rerum’ (iii. 69).18 When it is possible to compare 17 At one point in book i he says: ‘Referamus brevissime aliqua de quantitatibus’ (‘let us say something very briefly about quantities’ , iii. 33); and in book iii: ‘Sed decet hunc totum locum de motibus brevissime transigere’ (‘But we should treat this whole topic of motion very briefly’, iii. 75). 18 For the link between Alberti’s pictorial and literary ideals, see M. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 (Oxford, 1971), 136-7.

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Alberti’s Latin with that of a contemporary, such as Guarino, in their translations of the passage from Lucian’s Calumnia, it appears that Alberti’s Latin provides a livelier rendering.'9 The other major technical treatise, De Re Aedificatoria (1452), professes at the start the objective of clarity: Sed cum huiusmodi rebus alioquin duris et asperis atque multa ex parte obscurissimis conscribendis me cupiem esse apertissimum et, quoad fieri poterit, facilem et expeditissimum.20 (But I would like to be very clear, and as far as possible, fluent and brief when writing about this kind of subject, which is rather difficult and technical and often very obscure.)

This sentence, while proclaiming the ideal of clarity, is at the same time complex and harmonious, the three ascending adjec­ tives (‘duris’, ‘asperis’, ‘obscurissimis’) being balanced by the three opposites (‘facilem’, ‘expeditissimum’, ‘apertissimus’).21 Here too the search for clarity is no mere commonplace: at the start of book vi Alberti details the difficulties of writing about architecture, the problems of explanation, nomenclature, and treatment (De Re Aedificatoria, ii. 441). The architectural treatise, unlike De Pictura, does have a clas­ sical model. But Alberti, even if he wanted to, cannot imitate Vitruvius closely, since the ancient text is so corrupt that the Latins thought he was trying to write Greek and vice versa. He does imitate him in structuring his treatise into ten books, and in borrowing many technical terms from him, but he deliberately avoids Vitruvius’ major fault in Alberti’s view, his obscurity: ‘ita scripserit ut non intelligamus’ (‘he wrote in such a way as to be unintelligible to us’, ibid.). Once more he stresses intelligibility rather than eloquence as his goal, ending this passage with a final barb against the half-Greek, half-Latin text of Vitruvius: ‘ita scripsimus ut esse Latina non neges et intellegantur’ (‘I have '9 N. Maraschio, ‘Aspetti del bilinguismo albertiano nel De Pictura’ , Rinascimento, 12 (1972), 183-228, notes Alberti’s lively ‘per capillos’ for Guarino’s poetic ‘caesarie’, and his specific ‘pulla’ for Guarino’s ‘obscura’ (216 ff.). Probably ‘pulla’ comes from one of Alberti’s favourite passages, Columella, 1 Pref. 24 (‘nigra terra, quam pullam vocant, ut in Campania’); for another echo of Columella’s preface see below, n. 26. 20 Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, ed. G. Orlandi and P. Portoghesi (2 vols.; Milan, 1966), i. 19. 21 Similarly De Pictura contained technical language but also balanced periodic sentences (Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 29-31).

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written in such a way that you will agree it is both sound Latin and clearly understandable’, ibid.).

2. Alberti’s Vernacular Works Alberti’s works in the volgare, whether technical treatises on painting or grammar, or moral dialogues, subscribe to the same stylistic ideals as the Latin works. Dealing with difficult, original subjects, he aims at a ‘stylistic middle ground’ of brevity, and unadorned clarity.223 2Even the Grammatichetta (c.14.40), the first grammar of the vernacular, now almost certainly attributed to Alberti, is described by its author in Albertian terms as ‘questo nostro opuscolo, in quale io raccolsi l’uso della lingua nostra in brevissime annotazioni’ (Opere, iii. 77). The grammar, modelled on the structure of Priscian’s Institutions 23 stems from the 1435 dispute about the status of the vernacular. In it Alberti espouses Biondo’s thesis, about the volgare originating from the barbarian invasions, but maintains that it too has a grammatical regularity like Latin. The work is linked with Alberti’s programme of en­ hancement of the vernacular which led to his revolutionary use of the volgare not only for moral dialogues but also for technical works and the serious poetry of the Certame Coronario of 1441.24 Della pittura (1436), Alberti’s own translation of De Pictura, differs little from the original, except in omitting some of the exempla, and some of the periodic balances of the Latin.25 The major difference is the prologue to the vernacular version, which bears no relation to the Latin dedication to Giovan Francesco Gonzaga, but is more suited to the vernacular context in being dedicated to Filippo Brunelleschi and in extolling the originality 22 ‘Alberti seeks a stylistic, methodological and social middle ground between the idealism of classical learning and the realities of contemporary experience’ (D. Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 80). 23 See Alberti, Laprima grammatica della lingua volgare. La grammatichetta vaticana, ed. C. Grayson (Bologna, 1964), p. xxxix. 24 On the Certame, see A. Altamura, II Certame Coronario (Naples, 1952); G. Gorni, ‘Storia del Certame Coronario’, Rinascimento, 12 (1972), 135-81. 25 Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 29-31, 132-3, illustrates the differences in language and exempla', while Maraschio, ‘Aspetti del bilinguismo albertiano nel De Pictura*, highlights the contrast between the technical Latin and the richer expres­ siveness of the vernacular (pp. 197, 214 ff.).

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of contemporary artists. Alberti rejects the topos that nature is now too old to produce geniuses, since in Florence he has seen that Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, Masaccio, and Luca della Robbia are as talented as any of the artists of antiquity; indeed they are superior in that in their own fields they had no ancient model to imitate: Confessoti si a quegli antiqui, avendo quale aveano copia da chi imparare e imitarli, meno era difficile salire in cognizione di quelle supreme arti quali oggi a noi sono faticosissime; ma quinci tanto piu el nostro nome piu debba essere maggiore, se noi sanza precettori, senza essemplo alcuno, troviamo arti e scienze non udite e mai vedute. (iii. 7)26

The idea of the present outdoing antiquity is at the antipodes from monolithic notions like Ciceronianism, and Alberti’s pref­ erence for original invention or style over imitation is present here as in Latin works, such as Momtis,27 The bulk of Alberti’s vernacular works are moral dialogues. They may not be original in content, but they are revolutionary both in their use of vernacular prose for serious topics other than local chronicles or novellas, and in their exploitation of the dia­ logue genre, hitherto the flagship of humanist writing in Latin. Indeed the Latin titles of the four books of Della famiglia (143340) hint at Latin works written on these topics by classical or humanist authors: i. De Officiis . . . et de Edueandis Liberis (Cicero, Plutarch); ii. De Re Uxoria (Francesco Barbara); iii. Economicus (Xenophon, Aristotle); iv. De Amicitia (Cicero). As he said in the Momus, Alberti’s ideal is to write either on an original subject or in an original way: his originality here is to treat these classical topics in the vernacular. In Della famiglia Alberti’s imitation of the Ciceronian dialogue is obvious particularly in the first two books, where the dialogue conducted by the older interlocutors for the edification of the 26 For the topos of nature growing old, E. H. Gombrich, ‘A Classical Topos in the Introduction to Alberti’s Della Pittura', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20 (1957), 173, refers to Pliny, Ep. 6. 21. But the source is probably Columella 1 Pref. 1-2, especially as that preface contains another idea found in Alberti’s pro­ logue, the notion that there are no writers to imitate in writing on agriculture, as well as the phrase ‘pingui Minerva’ (Pref. 33), used in the opening lines of De Pictura. 27 On the significance of the letter, see also C. Smith, ‘Originality and Cultural Progress in the Quattrocento: Brunelleschi’s Dome and a Letter by Alberti’, Rinascimento, 28 (1988), 291-318.

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young recalls the format of De Amicitia and De Senectute.iB The language of the proems to books i and iii attempts to reproduce the periodic style of Cicero in the volgare, especially the long opening sentence of the first proem. But although the rest of the work is latinate in diction, the epithet ‘Ciceronian’ could not be applied to the syntax: outside the proems, in the first three books there are only two lengthy periods, which are Ciceronian in length but not in structure.29 The ideal is again that of brevity (Opere, i. 65, 103, 118), and Battista’s praise of Lionardo’s speech is in line with the ideals expressed consistently in Alberti’s other works: ‘A me piace questa tua maravigliosa brevita, e in tanta brevita parse a me el tuo stile nel dire elegantissimo, facile e molto chiaro’ (i. 126—7). If a brief clarity is one stylistic goal pursued in Della famiglia, Alberti is also keen to stress its less formal tone. In book i the dialogue is defined, possibly echoing Petrarch’s phrase ‘me­ diocre domesticum et familiare dicendi genus’ (‘this everyday, middle style which is used for writing to friends’, Fam. 1. 1. 14), as being ‘uno ragionare domestico e familiare’, which is ‘non tanto pesato, non ridutto a sf ultima lima quanto altri forse desidererebbe’ (Opere, i. 62). At the beginning of book ii he notes that the relaxed, pleasant tenor of Lionardo’s speech is different from the formal approach of ancient writers (i. 83), and Lionardo himself expands on the difference between his style and that of ancient philosophy: ‘ne il ragionare nostro, el quale come vedi e tra noi domestico, si richiede essere gastigato ed emendato quanto quello de’ filosafi nelle loro oscurissime e difficillime questioni’ (i. 84).30 The epithets applied to the philosophical style represent the qualities Alberti rejects in this and other works: a polished style for obscure and difficult topics. Else­ where there is the familiar emphasis on content over form: ‘ragioneremo quanto potremo aperto e domestico; senza alcuna esquisita e troppo elimata ragione di dire, perche tra noi mi pare si richiegga buone sentenze molto piu che leggiadria di parlare’ 38 Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue, 81-2. 39 R. Spongano, ‘La prosa letteraria del Quattrocento’, in Leon Battista Alberti, / primi tre libri della famiglia, ed. F. C. Pellegrini (Florence, 1946), pp. xvi-xvii. 30 The same point is made elsewhere in the book: ‘in questi ragionamenti.. . domestici, qual prudente desiderasse eloquenza piu elimata o piu che si richiegga esquisita?’ (i. 102).

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(i. 105).31 Even in the first two books, then, despite the latinate diction, Alberti aims at something below the grand style. In book iii the unlearned character Giannozzo accurately insists on the unsophisticated quality of his speech (i. 163, 168, 170). Unlike other speakers, Giannozzo is unable to furnish classical exempla for his precepts, so he is not being humble when he insists that his speech has lacked eloquence, order, examples, and refer­ ences to classical authorities (i. 245). Although Alberti is reluctant to disrupt the classical atmosphere by referring to contemporary institutions— even Giannozzo uses a periphrasis for attending Mass (‘potrei ire al tempio a vedere il sacrificio e adorare Iddio’ , i. 158)— nevertheless Giannozzo continues the Albertian polemic against sophistry and literary philosophizing: Bene a me sogliono questi vostri litterati parere troppo litigiosi. Niuna cosa si truova tanto certa, niuna si manifesta, niuna si chiara, la quale voi con vostri argomenti non facciate essere dubia, incerta, e oscurissima. (i. 247).

Ironically, Alberti has a definite classical model for both the substance and style of Giannozzo’s contribution: ‘sentirai lo stile suo nudo, simplice, e in quale tu possa comprendere ch’io volli provare quanto i ’ potessi imitare quel greco dolcissimo e suavissimo scrittore Senofonte’ (i. 156). Although the source for this approval of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus may be Cicero (De Am. 59), Alberti is unique in the Quattrocento in imitating Xenophon, who was regarded not as the equivalent of Cicero, but as the epitome of the middle style, at times the antithesis of Cicero.32 The choice of epithets (‘nudo, simplice . . . dolcissimo e suavissimo’) and their sources confirm that Alberti sees Xenophon as representing the ideal of the middle style.33 It has long been recognized that this third book imitates Xenophon’s Oeconomicus both in subject-matter and in the character of the 31 His sources for the ideal of writing ‘pingui Minerva’ oppose it to philosophical writing which is ‘obscurum’ or ‘subtilius’ (Cicero, De Am. 19, Columella, 1 Pref. 33). 32 Cicero says the Oeconomicus is written ‘copiose’ {De Sen. 59), and Alberti often praises ‘copia’ along with brevity (i. 52, 94, 299, 328; ii. 160, etc.). Xenophon is one of the models of the Atticists attacked by Cicero in Orator, and is associated by him with the middle style, writing merely for ‘delectatio’, the object of the middle style (Or. 63-9). 33 Cicero calls Xenophon’s style ‘lenis . . . dulcior’ (De Or. 2. 58), ‘melle dulcior’ (Or. 32); while Quintilian refers to his ‘iucunditas’ (10. 2. 82).

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protagonists.34 But it is clear from his other statements on style that Alberti sees in the Greek author a model for his ideals of clarity and brevity, and that he consequently imitates Xenophon in style as well. Book iv, although written about six years after books i-iii, c. 1440, still projects itself both as a vernacular imitation of the symposia described by Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch (Opere, i. 265), and as a complement to Cicero’s treatise on friendship, and the relevant passages in Aristotle, Lucian, and Seneca (i. 286). At the start of this book Alberti puts into the mouth of the jester Buto a jibe at ancient writings on amicitia: ‘Forse que’ vostri savii, quali scrissero belle cose dell’amicizia, poco si curavano in quella parte amicarsi femmine . . . Pertanto vi consiglio, credete meno a questi vostri che sanno dire bello, ma cose inutili’ (i. 264). This critique is continued in Piero’s anec­ dotal but practical account of his experiences at courts, which is contrasted positively with ‘scolastice e definizioni e descrizioni in ozio e in ombra fra’ litterati’ (i. 285). Although Adovardo’s classical exempla earn him praise for being ‘non poco facundo e copioso’ (i. 299), the work ends with approval of the more fam­ iliar Albertian ideal: ‘questa tua brevita pregna di maravigliose sentenze e ottimi essempli’ (i. 341). On the whole, Dellafamiglia does not aim at a vernacular equi­ valent of Ciceronian prose. Even in the first two books, and more obviously in the third, there are as many vulgarisms as latinisms, plenty of homely proverbs, and many diminutives.35 Linguistic­ ally only the proems and the fourth book are more latinate. But even the famous proem to book iii, despite the latinate periods, reflects stylistic ideals articulated elsewhere, as well as containing a revolutionary programme for the vernacular. As in other works, here too Alberti attacks the unproductive admirers of Latin (‘questi biasimatori in quella antica [lingua] sanno se non tacere’), and stresses practicality and intelligibility as well as original­ ity: ‘forse e’ prudenti mi loderanno s’io, scrivendo in modo che ciascuno m’intenda, prima cerco giovare a mold che piacere a pochi, che sai quanto siano pochissimi a questi di e’ litterati’ (i. 155). Alberti concludes that the best way to imitate Latin 34 Pellegrini, in I primi tre libri dellafamiglia, 234, illustrates the imitation in terms o f‘materia’ and in the character ofGiannozzo, who reflects Xenophon’s Ischomachus. 35 For vulgarisms, see Spongano, ‘La prosa letteraria del Quattrocento’, p. xxiii; for diminutives see Opere, i. 32 ff., 49, 217, etc.

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writers is to use, like them, the mother tongue for erudite works, in order that it might develop and become ‘elimata e polita’ (i. 156). Book iv was written in connection with the Certame Coronario of 1441, and is almost a prose equivalent of the hexameter ver­ nacular verse that Alberti wrote for the competition on the same subject of amicitia (ii. 4s).36 In both works the volgare is ennobled by a classical veneer which remains external to it and plays no further role in the development of the vernacular. Even Alberti’s friend and fellow participant in the Certame, Leonardo Dati, criticized the style of the proems as too grandiose for the volgare-. ‘in stylo grandiori ac forsan asperiori praesertim in libri primordio quam Florentina lingua aut non literatorum hominum judicia toleratura esse videantur’ (‘especially in the proem to the work [you write] in a style that is too grandiose and perhaps harsher than the Florentine language or the judgement of men who know no Latin can tolerate’).37 The Certame Coronario (1441) ended in stalemate, with the panel of humanist judges refusing to award the silver laurel wreath for any of the vernacular compositions on friendship. It was probably Alberti who penned the anonymous Protesta, in which he berated the humanists for not imitating antiquity by refusing to encourage literary competitions of this sort. Certainly the Protesta shows a sensitivity to the diachronic development of both Latin and the vernacular, which is paralleled in the proem to Dellafamiglia book iii, and which shows close reading of Quint­ ilian: ‘dorremocj se forse voi volessj da questa nostra eta quello non volsero quellj antichi dalla loro, prima che.lla lingua latina fosse, quanto ella poj fu, chulta, e.ssi stettono contentj a que’ primj poetj quali essi aveano forse ingegniosi, ma chom poca arte.’38 The Teogenio (1440), whose central characters all have Greek names of moral significance, also reveals Alberti drawing on Greek dialogues as much as Latin ones. The opening pages recall the idyllic setting of Plato’s Phaedrus. Where Plato mentions a stream, a plane tree, the shade, breeze, and grass (Phaedrus 229A), 36 For the latinate tone, see Grayson, ‘II prosatore latino e volgare’ , 283; and Spongano, ‘La prosa letteraria del Quattrocento’, p. xxviii. 37 Cited by Grayson in Opere, i. 380. 38 Cite.d from Gorni, ‘Storia del Certame Coronario’, 172. Cf. Quintilian 10. 1. 40, where Cicero is said to have imitated even the earliest orators: ‘cum se Cicero ab illis quoque vetustissimis auctoribus, ingeniosis quidem, sed arte carentibus, plurimum fateatur adiutum’ (emphasis added).

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Alberti expands and varies these elements: Tombra lietissima di questi faggi e abeti, e atorno, dovunque te volgi, vedi mille perfettissimi colori di vari fiori intessuti fra el verde splendere in fra l’ombra . . . l’aura . . . l’argenteo e purissimo fonte’ (Opere, ii. 57-8). Later in the first book Alberti illustrates his pluralistic approach to the canon of classical authors. Genipatro reads both Greek and Latin texts: in festive mood he will read Plautus, Terence, Apuleius, Lucian, Martial; for instructive reading he consults those who write ‘deH’agricoltura, e della educazione de’ figliuoli, e del costumare e reggere la famiglia, e della ragion delle amicizie, e della amministrazione della republica’ (ii. 74); or else he turns to works of moral philosophy. This list is rep­ resentative of Alberti’s tastes: he too wrote comic works like Terence, satirical pieces like Lucian, works on husbandry, the family, and ethics. He is unusual not only in his enthusiasm for Lucian at this stage in the century, but also in his appreciation of writers on agriculture. In the short work Villa he deliberately emulates the pithy style o f the Elder Cato.394 0The Teogenio is a serious moral work in the vernacular, and like the other major works it aims at intelligibility (‘E parsemi da scrivere in modo ch’io fuSsi inteso da’ miei non litteratissimi cittadini’ , ii. 55) and brevity (‘quest’operetta . . . questi libretti’, ibid.): in fact Teogenio is the shortest of Alberti’s major dialogues. The Profugiorum ab Aerumna Libri (1441-2) also embrace the rhetorical objectives of copia and brevitas. The start of book ii remarks how the first book ‘con quanta brevita .. . raccolse molta copia d’ottimi ricordi e sentenze’ (ii. 137), while the start of the third lauds Pandolfini’s ‘incredibile brevita, iunta con una maravigliosa copia e pienezza di gravissimi e accommodatissimi detti e sentenze’ (ii. 160). As in the De Commodis, these ideals are not only mentioned at the beginning of each book, but are pur­ sued throughout the work: speakers often restrain themselves with formulae such as ‘ma non voglio estendermi, ch’io sarei prolisso’ (ii. 118), or ‘non voglio stendermi in amplificare e coadornare questo luogo’ (ii. 170).40 Again brevity here is seen as the antithesis of adornment. 39 Grayson notes its ‘stile asciutto e sentenzioso, lontano dal volgare piuttosto rettorico generalmente adoperato dall’Alberti, e forse da attribuirsi al tentativo di imitare in volgare la prosa latina di Catone’ (i. 456). 40 Similar remarks are found in ii. 153, 172, 176, 182, etc.

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The most important passage occurs at the start of book iii. As in De Commodis, Alberti dwells on the problem of originality, citing Terence’s ‘Nihil dictum quin prius dictum’, but here he embroiders it with a typical metaphor. He draws a parallel between the man who invented mosaics from the fragments left over from the construction of the ancient temple of Ephesus, and the contemporary writer who adorns his work with the precious fragments of the temple of classical culture (ii. 160-1). The only originality left to the modern writer lies in selecting a different variety of classical gems and arranging them in a new context: E veggonsi queste cose litterarie usurpate da tanti, e in tanti loro scritti adoperate e disseminate, che oggi a chi voglia ragionarne resta altro nulla che solo el raccogliere e assortirle e poi accoppiarle insieme con qualche varieta dagli altri e adattezza dell’opera sua, quasi come suo instituto sia imitare in questo chi altrove fece el pavimento. (ii. 161)

The search for originality and variety are typically Albertian, but the stress on fitting the ancient fragment appropriately into one’s own discourse derives from classical imitation theory.41 Pandolfini is then praised not only for having gathered together such antique gems and arranged them fittingly in his discourse, but also for having tackled an original subject (‘faccenda da niuno de’ buoni antiqui prima attinta’, ibid.). De Iciarchia (1469), a later work, exhibits differences of lan­ guage and structure from the other dialogues. The language is more fluent and less Latinate;42* and the dialogue is Socratic rather than Ciceronian, with greater interaction amongst the participants replacing the lengthy monologues of earlier works. As in Platonic dialogues, the interlocutors begin by establishing the definition of key terms like ‘comandare’ and ‘principe’ (ii. 193 ff.). Along with less latinate diction there are fewer classical exempla cited. But despite these differences, the overall stylistic ideals remain similar to those of earlier works: brevity, the middle 41 Cicero, De Or. 2. 89 ff. Petrarch also stresses the blending of different elements into one style (Fam. 1. 8. 5; 22. 2. 16). On the importance of this passage as a key to Alberti’s poetics of ‘mosaic’ rewriting, see R. Cardini, ‘II Nemico dell’Alberti’, in his Mosaici. II ‘Nemico’ dell’Alberti (Rome, 1990), 1-50 (esp. 4 ff). 42 Cf. Grayson, ‘II prosatore latino e volgare’, 283: ‘La sua prosa ivi non ha piu quella densa compagine di lingua e di stile caratteristica del decennio fiorentino; e piu pacata, meno impacciata.’ Similarly Spongano observes that ‘la linea di svolgimento della sua prosa e nella progressiva epurazione del latinismo’ (‘La prosa letteraria del Quattrocento’, p. xxviii).

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style, the ‘ragionamenti domestici’ (ii. 204) as opposed to the style of the ‘scola filosofica accurata’ (ii. 219). Alberti is more eclectic in imitative theory and practice than any of his predecessors or contemporaries. He approves not only of Cicero and Plato, but also of Cato, Lucian, and Xenophon. In practice he extends the frontiers of humanist Latin to cope with the technical exigencies of his treatises on painting, sculp­ ture, and architecture; and in his satirical pieces he draws on the full range of the comic writers of antiquity. Even when not deal­ ing with technical matters, his Latin is more lively than that of a pedagogical humanist like Guarino.43 In the vernacular he is equally original: he employs it to deal with subjects hitherto reserved for Latin, which helps explain his latinate prose, rather than attempting to follow Trecento prose-writers like Dante or Boccaccio. Even in vernacular poetry he transfers humanist gen­ res such as elegies and pastorals into the volgare.44 In linguistic terms his vernacular is almost as lively as his Latin: once one goes beneath the classical patina, there are similar amounts of neologisms, compounds, and technical terminology.45 But despite the variety of Alberti’s output, there emerges a consistency of stylistic priorities, an emphasis on originality over imitation, content over form, clarity over ornatus. Alberti could never have advocated the imitation of just one model; in theory he approves of a plurality of models, and in practice his writings betray an ‘eclectic classicism’.46 He knows that ‘varia res est eloquentia’, and he represents a major opposition to Ciceronianist tendencies. Indeed in his taste for Greek writers, and for the technical texts of Pliny and Vitruvius, Alberti anticipates the ex­ treme anti-Ciceronian movement of the end of the Quattrocento.47 45 Maraschio, ‘Aspetti del bilinguismo albertiano nel De Pictura’ , 216. There is also a brief account of the qualities of Alberti’s unciceronian Latin, as well as a list of his many compound terms, in D. Marsh, Leon Baptista Alberti: ‘Dimer Pieces’ . A Translation of the ‘Intercenales’ (Binghamton, NY, 1987), 10—11. 44 For the elegies, see Mirzia and Agilitta (Opere, ii. 11-21); for the eclogue see Corimbo and Tirsis (ii. 22-7); as well as C. Grayson, ‘Alberti and the Vernacular Eclogue in the Quattrocento’, Italian Studies, 11 (1956), n -2 g . 45 M. Vena, ‘Alberti’s Linguistic Innovation’, in G. Rimanelli and K. J. Atchity (eds.), Italian Literature: Roots and Branches. Essays in Honor of T. G. Bergin (New Haven, Conn., 1976), 243-63 (255). 46 Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue, 94. 47 On the anti-Ciceronians, see C. Dionisotti, Gli umanisti e il volgare tra Quattro e Cinquecento (Florence, 1968); J. D ’Amico, ‘The Progress of Renaissance Latin Prose: The Case of Apuleianism’, Renaissance Quarterly, 37 (1984), 351-92.

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This perhaps explains why Girolamo Massaini, editor of the 1500 edition of some of Alberti’s Latin works, was at pains to emphasize that Alberti’s eclectic Latin was due not to his ignorance but to his following of Cicero’s precepts for expanding the language, and that he was therefore to be differentiated from the extreme Apuleians of the turn of the century: Licet enim in quibusdam licenter nimis agere videatur, id omne [non?] ex verborum ignoratione, sed consulto factum ab eo scias: non enim ignorabat quantum in unaquaque re litteraria posset, et cancellos sibi praescriptos recte tenebat, sed memor Ciceronis died censebat augentem [augendam?] latinam linguam nova quaedam (licet pauca), nonnulla vero arbitratu suo dicere decere. (Although he does seem in certain areas to write in an unclassical manner, you should realize that he did so deliberately, not out of ig­ norance of the correct terminology. For he was not unaware of his capacities in each different area of Latin, and he duly stayed within the bounds prescribed, but remembering the words of Cicero himself, he thought that in expanding the Latin language, he was allowed to in­ vent a few new terms, some of them at his own discretion.)48

Alberti’s anti-Ciceronianism goes hand in hand with his quali­ fied admiration of antiquity, his championing of contemporary art and language, and his pursuit of originality. Alberti’s younger contemporary, Cristoforo Landino, in his assessment of Alberti’s importance stressed the very qualities of versatility and varietas which have come to the fore in the works we have been exam­ ining: ‘come nuovo camaleonta sempre quello colore piglia il quale e nella cosa della quale scrive’.49 And Landino, who turned many of Alberti’s practical achievements into a theoretical pro­ gramme, must now be studied in the next chapter. 48 Cited by Grayson, ‘II prosatore latino e volgare’, 280. The passage goes on to defend Alberti from possible attacks from those who cultivate ‘abscondita et exoleta verba’. Cf. Grayson’s own conclusion: ‘si opponeva in latino alle tendenze ciceroniane dei contemporanei, preferendo una sua eloquenza mezzana, piu aderente al tono e al contenuto etico del genere satirico; ne altrove ambiva in latino ad uno stile ricercato, se non forse nel lessico. Ma nel volgare . . . l’Alberti miro spesso piu alto, cercando il periodo piu ampio e convoluto’ (p. 285). See also G. Ponte, ‘L ’ideale letterario di Leon Battista Alberti’ , Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 77 (1973), 5-25; id., ‘L ’ideale letterario’, in his Leon Battista Alberti. Umanista e scrittore (Genoa, 1981), 112-45. 49 C. Landino, Scritti critici e teorici, ed. R. Gardini (2 vols.; Rome, 1974), i. 120. Perhaps Landino is thinking of Alberti’s anti-Ciceronian espousal of Xenophon as a model, when he praises his ‘acticam eloquentiam’, in his De Vera Nobilitate, ed. M. Lentzen (Geneva, 1970), 40.

9

CRISTOFORO LANDINO The importance of Cristoforo Landino (1424-98) in the literary history of the Quattrocento has recently been reassessed, notably by Cardini and Field.1 Both in general terms and particularly in his views on literary imitation, Landino acts as the main link between Alberti and the circle of Poliziano and Lorenzo. For a comprehensive picture of his critical ideas it will be necessary to consider three different areas of his activity: first, his own Latin poetry and his critique of Latin verse in general; second, his Latin dialogues and his views on Latin prose; and, third, his thoughts on literature in the vernacular.

1. Landino and Latin Poetry The bulk of Landino’s verse is a collection of Latin lyrics enti­ tled Xandra, similar to other fifteenth-century collections both in style and in being named after the poet’s lady. The first version (B) of the work belongs to the years 1443-4 and consists of fiftythree lyrics, dedicated to Alberti. The later, definitive redaction (A) numbers eighty-two poems in three books, collected and dedicated to his new patron, Piero de’ Medici, around 1459. A comparison of these two versions allows us to document the first significant change in Landino’s literary models. The poems of B, which were to form the nucleus of the first book of A, mostly imitate Catullus, Martial, and Horace. Like Catullus, Landino opens' B with hendecasyllables, dedicating the collec­ tion to Alberti: he aligns his poems not with Alberti’s ‘severiores 1 R. Cardini, La critica del Landino (Florence, 1973); C. Landino, Scritti eritici e teorici, ed. R. Cardini (2 vols.; Rome, 1974), cited in the text as Scritti; for other works I have used and cite from Carmina Omnia, ed. A. Perosa (Florence, 1939); Disputationes Camaldulenses, ed. P. Lohe (Florence, 1980). See also A. Field, ‘Cristoforo Landino’s First Lectures on Dante’, Renaissance Quarterly, 37 (1986), 16-48; id., The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton, NJ, 1988).

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libros’ but with his humorous works, Canis and Musca, and calls them ‘sales leves et placidos labores’ (‘light-hearted witticisms, not serious pieces’, Bi = A i. 13). In general metrical terms, however, B is dominated by elegiac verse, with only two poems in hendecasyllables (Bi, B46), four in Horatian Sapphics (B44, B45, B47, B50), and one in hexameters (B48). That this first redaction belongs to the period immediately after the Certame Coronario is confirmed by Landino’s contaminatio (B23) of ver­ nacular and classical traditions in a Latin version of Petrarch’s ‘S’Amor non e . . .’ (RVF 132); and also by his other two poems in praise of Leon Battista (B16, B27) and his hexameter poem in praise o f one of the Certam e’s participants, Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti (B48). In the definitive version (A) Landino changes both literary patrons and models. Out go the last three poems connected with the Alberti (B16, B27, B48), while the one which is retained is moved from its dedicatory position (Bi —> A 1. 13). The collec­ tion now opens not with the light-hearted Catullan hendeca­ syllables but with the more serious elegiacs dedicated to Piero de’ Medici (A 1. 1). Even the concluding poem (B53 = A 1. 33), which is retained, undergoes an elevation of status as its title shifts from ‘Ad libellum’ to ‘Ad librum’. This new serious tone is reflected in Landino’s elimination of the more obscene poems (Bg, B39) and the slighter couplets (B2, B3, B7, B16, etc.) of B. Although he retains the Catullan poem about his ‘mentula’ , this is tolerated on account of its pun with ‘menta’ (B49 = A 1. 31). Other poems of this sort are more indebted to vernacular than to classical allusiveness: ‘De theologo contionatore luxurioso’ (A 1.9) belongs to the novella tradition, dealing with a friar who is caught in a convent; another epigram (A 1. 10), about someone claiming to be nobler than the Bardi, is reminiscent of some of Boccaccio’s stories (e.g. Dec. 6. 6); another sums up the plot of many novelle: ‘Ut moechos abigat, uxorem credis amato, I Binde, sacerdoti: creditur agna lupo’ (‘Bindo, you entrust your wife to that popular friar so that he will drive away adulterers: as well entrust a lamb to a w olf’, A 2. 24). These later epigrams thus move from a strict imitation of classical models towards a contaminatio between the Latin and vernacular traditions. This tendency is extended to the other genres included in the Xandra. In the earlier redaction, Landino had made one attempt

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at a Petrarchan sonnet in Latin (B23 = A 1. 14); not only is this poem retained in A, but many similar attempts at synthesis are added. That this is a conscious imitation of volgare poetry is confirmed by the fact that the compositions which exhibit Petrarchan influence most strongly are the new opening ones (A 1. 2, 1. 3, 1. 5, 1. 7). The first poem after the dedication echoes many of the motifs of Petrarch’s first sonnet: Si quis at hamatis transfixus corda sagittis pertulerit nostri vulnera cruda dei, hie veniamque dabit simul et miserebitur ultro Praesertim ignoscet nimium iuvenilibus annis. (A 1. 2. 7-13) (Any person who has had his heart pierced by the pointed arrows of our god of love and suffered his cruel wounds, will both grant me pardon and even pity me . . . In particular he will pardon my youthful years.)2

Many other ideas in the poem are Petrarchan: Sandra’s eyes petrify him like those of Medusa, Love found and captured an unarmed poet, the heart can never recover from the wound of Love. The third poem (A 1. 3), like Petrarch’s third poem, is entitled ‘Quo tempore amore oppressus sit’. The fifth poem provides a Latin equivalent of the standard volgare description of the woman: blonde hair spread out in the breeze, eyes like stars, ruby lips, teeth like ivory. All this effects a predictable Petrarchan paradox (‘solus amans magno misere frigescit in igne, I aestuat horrenti frigore solus amans!’ (‘Only the lover freezes in the midst of a huge fire, only the lover burns when the cold freezes everything else’) 1. 5. 41-2) and leads to the familiar comparison with the salamander. The overall importance of the Petrarchan model is underlined by the fact that the plurality of loose women of B, modelled on the several classical courtesans who appear in Horace’s and O vid’s lyrics, is replaced by the dominance of the one lady, like Laura. Other poems provide instances of a Latin Petrarchism that is not restricted to content. Apart from the Latin sonnet which is 2 More a translation than an imitation of ‘in sul mio primo giovenile errore . . . I ove sia chi per prova intenda amore, I spero trovar pieta non che perdono’ (Petrarch, RVF 1. 3-8).

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retained from the first redaction (A 1. 14), there is even a Latin sestina, with characteristically Petrarchan end-words: ‘furor’, ‘noctes’, ‘labores’, ‘luctus’, ‘quies’, ‘iuventa’. It even concludes with the obligatory adynaton involving all six words: Sed prius Aeolio crescent sub vellere noctes, atque labor Phoebi poterit sibi ferre quietem, quam furor aut luctus sinat hanc laetam ire iuventam. (A 1. 7. 37-9) (But night will sooner grow on the Aeolian fleece, and Phoebus’ labour will sooner bring him rest, than the frenzy of love and grief will allow my youth to pass in happiness.)3

The second book continues this process of contaminatio. One poem (A 2. 7) is a combination of a classical paraclausithyron and a Petrarchan anniversary poem. The next poem records the fifth year of the poet’s affair but combines it with a celebration of the Tuscan countryside which is reminiscent of Horace’s idyll of the Sabine country (Odes 1. 17). Another (A 2. 9) incorporates much o f the landscape, and some of the alliteration, o f ‘Solo e pensoso’: Sunt ripae et ripas praeterfluentia curvas flumina, sunt testes frondea rura mihi Me vos in vestris vidistis montibus olim errantem frustra saepe latere, ferae. Nam quid profeci? Sequitur deus ille nec usquam improbus a nostro pectore flectit iter. (A 2. 9. 5-12) (The winding riverbanks and the rivers flowing past them are witnesses to my love, as is the leafy countryside . . . The wild beasts have often in the past seen me wandering and hiding in vain amid their mountains. But what good did it do me? The god of love relentlessly accompanies me and never ventures far from my heart.)4 3 Alberti too was keen on the sestina in the vernacular (Open, ii. 9, 48, 50). The Latin sonnet began with Salutati and would continue in the strange Latin poetry of Lancino Curzio at the turn of the century. 4 ‘. . . si ch’io mi credo omai che monti et piagge I et fiumi et selve sappian di che tempre I sia la mia vita, ch’e celata altrui. I Ma pur si aspre vie ne si selvagge I cercar non so, ch’Amor non venga sempre I ragionando con meco, et io con lui’ (RVF 35.

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This practical contaminatio between the Latin and vernacular poetic traditions will have its counterpart in Landino’s theory of trasferimento from Latin into the volgare. Landino’s pursuit o f a chaster tone in Latin lyrics stems from his privileging of the Petrarchan over the classical tradition of love poetry. Not only do the earlier obscene epigrams disappear, but where Propertius had been attracted as much by Cynthia’s culture as her beauty, Landino is more impressed by Sandra’s ‘mores venusti’ (A 2. 4. 27) and her ‘virtus muliebri in corde virilis’ (A 2. 23. 60). The model for Sandra is not so much Cynthia as Petrarch’s ‘Laura pudica’ (A 3. 10. 4). Years later he will explicitly cite Petrarch’s moral tone as the element which renders his poetry superior to that of antiquity: E ’ negli affetti amatori or lieto or mesto, e in forma tutti gl’esprime che n e o a Ovidio lo pospongo ne a Properzio. M a quello in che otdene sopra tutti la palma, in ogni lasciva materia, benche sia giocondissimo, nientedimeno osserva lieta modestia ne mai diviene osceno. (Scritti, i.

138)5

In the second book of Xandra even the few risque epigrams and Sapphics disappear to make way solely for elegiacs. In book iii the serious, civic tone is even more pronounced: there are no love lyrics at all, merely poems in praise of the Medici, on the origins of Florence, on the Aragonese war; epitaphs on famous Florentines; and elegies for the dead— Landino’s brother, Marsuppini, Poggio, and Cosimo’s grandson. The only time Sandra is mentioned she is dismissed as an unsuitable subject in time of war (A 3. 5. 1-10). Even in the non-amatory verse of this last book Landino is still imitating classical love poets who regu­ larly included poems on more serious topics. Ovid had included the elegy on the death of Tibullus in Amores 3. 9, while the whole of Propertius’ fourth book was devoted to patriotic matter. In 5 5 Most critics acknowledge Propertius as Landino’s chief Latin model. Cardini adds that he is a ‘modello che gia di per se costituiva una certa novita rispetto alia lirica latina del primo Quattrocento’ (La critica del Landino, 3). Tateo talks of Tutilizzazione del petrarchismo in un contesto d’imitazione prevalentemente properziana’— see A. Tartaro and F. Tateo, II Quattrocento. L’eta dell’ Umanesimo (Bari, 1971-2), 380-1. See also D. Coppini, ‘Properzio nella poesia d’amore degli umanisti’, Colloquium Properiianum (Secundum) g.xi.igyg (Assisi, 1981), 169-200 (177). But this passage from the Proemio al commento dantesco, as well as Xandra A 1. 21, 22, 25, etc., shows that Ovid was also a model.

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fact Landino’s poem on the founding and development of Flor­ ence (A 3. 3) is clearly modelled on Propertius 4. 1, where the poet celebrates the rural origins of imperial Rome. Landino works into his poem an interesting imitation of Virgil, which testifies to his growing importance as Landino’s poetry evolves.6 De­ scribing Vieri de’ Medici calming the fury of the popolo in 1393, Landino reverses the famous simile applied to Neptune (Aeneid, 1. 148 ff.) by comparing Cosimo’s ancestor to the sea-god calm­ ing the waves (A 3. 65-84). The longest poems in this last book are the elegies for Marsuppini (3. 7) and Poggio (3. 17). Both include a resume of vernacular Florentine culture: the first claims that Claudian was a Florentine, and that his poetic legacy was taken up by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Bruni (3. 7. 197— 206).7 The second sees the Tre Corone and Salutati as the fore­ runners of Marsuppini and Poggio (3. 17. 23-36). By 1459, then, Landino is moving away from love poetry— although he will write some Latin lyrics on Neoplatonic themes for Bernardo Bembo in 1475 (Carmina, 158-72)— towards the chaster, serious poetry of both the classical and vernacular traditions. The poets Landino lectures on in the Florentine Studio between 1458 and 1472 confirm this trend: they are not the love lyricists, but the moral poets, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius, as well as Petrarch and Dante.8 In theoretical terms Landino at times sees imitation Platonically as the imitation of celestial harmonies, as in his Praefatio in Virgilio, the introductory lecture to his 1462 course on Virgil. But he nowhere reaches the conclusion of other Platonists that rhetorical imitation of other writers is to be replaced by the poet’s furor-induced mimesis of divine truths. In his later Commentarium in Virgilio (1488), he discusses Virgil’s imitation of other writers in terms reminiscent of Petrarch, stressing the Latin poet’s achievement of a personal tone despite the numerous borrowings: 6 Cardini notes that ‘la forte presenza deWEneide costituisce la maggior novita stilistica di quest’ultimo libro’ (La critica del Landino, 7—8). 7 The annexation of Claudian for Florentine culture was standard practice by Landino’s time: see F. Villani, De Origine Civitatis Florentie et de eiusdem Famosis Civibus, ed. G. C. Galletti (Florence, 1847), 6, a text later exploited by Landino for the ‘Apologia’ section of his Proemio al commento dantesco (