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A Manuscript of Cristoforo Landino's First Lectures on Virgil, 1462-63 (Codex 1368, Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Arthur Field
Arthur Field*
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan
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Extract

In a prefatory oration in the Florentine Studium in 1462 Cristoforo Landino indicated that his lectures for the coming academic year would be a commentary on Virgil. Hitherto considered lost, this commentary is extant in a complete draft of the lectures, Codex 1368 of the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. The manuscript is an important, new source both for Landino's earlier years and for the revival of philosophical studies in Florence in the 1460's: hence this announcement and brief description.

The manuscript has the form of a word-by-word commentary on the first seven books of the Aeneid, although a title, added on the flyleaf by a later hand, promises a commentary on eight books.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , Spring 1978 , pp. 17 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1978

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References

1 The praefatio was first edited by Roberto Cardini in 1970. He included the edition in his La critica del Landino (Florence, 1973) and his Cristoforo Landino, scritti critici e teorici (Rome, 1974). There is also an edition of the preface by Lentzen, Manfred in his Studien zur Dante-Exegese Cristoforo Landinos (Cologne and Vienna, 1971)Google Scholar.

2 No recent literature on Landino has considered the commentary as anything but lost, and when I examined the manuscript (May 25,1977) the available records of the Biblioteca Casanatense indicated that no one had either examined the manuscript or ordered a photocopy. I was led to the manuscript by Paul Oskar Kristeller's Iter Italicum (II, 95), which contains an excerpt, ‘Anon. comm. on Vergil's Aeneid (1463),’ from a handwritten catalogue. I intend later to present a fully developed study of Landino's lectures on Juvenal and Persius, 1461-62 (Cod. J 26 inf., Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan), and these lectures on Virgil, 1462-63, in the context of Florentine humanist and philosophical literature from the time of the Parlamento of 1458 to the death of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1464.

3 The scribe had extraordinary difficulties with Greek words: the spelling is only roughly phonetic and the corrections are numerous. These difficulties, plus the dating of the draft, would suggest that the scribe was working not from Landino's own draft of the lectures but from lecture notes.

4 Cod. Ambros. J 26 inf., fol. 225v. The date, July 24,1462, at the end of the commentary on Persius, has not been noted before since the verso of the fragmentary final folio has been attached to opaque paper. When I examined the manuscript (March 1977) the final folio was unattached on one edge and I could see the date.

5 The problem of the praefatio is discussed at length by Cardini, La critica, pp. 324-25, and Cristoforo Landino, scritti, II, 20-22.

6 The furor divinus gloss on the insana of Aen. III, 443 is retained by Landino in his 1488 commentary on the Aeneid (Cod. Law. plut. 53, 37, fol. 220).

7 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ed., Supplementum Ficinianum (Florence, 1937), 1, cxxixGoogle Scholar.