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A Poem by Guarino on Leonello of Ferrara
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2016
Abstract
This article revisits a set of sixteen hexameters by Guarino on the accession of Leonello d'Este in 1442. The poem was first published by Ian Thomson, whose text can be improved in several minor points as well as one major one. Thomson had already realized that Guarino's lines are not transmitted in their original order and had proposed to move lines 4–6 to follow line 11. The displacement is in fact even more extensive than he realized but has a simple mechanical explanation and a simple solution. Once the lines are properly distributed, the piece emerges as a dialogue between an unnamed speaker and the city of Ferrara, perhaps intended to accompany a visual representation of some sort. Thomson's theory that Guarino ghost-wrote the poem for an unnamed presbyter to present to Leonello is shown to be problematic.
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References
1 “Two Unpublished Items from Toledo MS 100.42,” Traditio 25 (1969): 411–16. On the second item (not discussed here), see also O'Connor, Eugene M., “More on the ‘Priapeum’ of Jacobus Cremonensis,” Traditio 45 (1989–90): 389–91. Thomson's discussion of the Guarino poem draws on his “Studies in the Life, Scholarship, and Educational Achievement of Guarino da Verona (1374–1460)” (PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, 1969), 1:253–56.Google Scholar I am grateful to an anonymous referee for several helpful suggestions.Google Scholar
2 The contents of the manuscript are listed in detail by Prete, Sesto, Two Humanistic Anthologies (Vatican City, 1964), who gives only the opening and closing lines of the poem. I owe thanks to the authorities of the Archivo y Biblioteca for a photograph of the relevant folio.Google Scholar
3 Est (both elided and unelided) is an exception to the general prohibition on monosyllables at line-end: there are six instances, for example, in the first book of the Aeneid alone (64, 77, 148, 386, 601, and 614).Google Scholar
4 For the bare ablative cf. Oxford Latin Dictionary, at desero 4. The construction is unusual with desertus but common with the semantically equivalent orbus. Google Scholar
5 In the Toledo manuscript the initial Q of Quae in line 9 is extended slightly to the left of the main block of initials; this probably points to the original layout in which line 9 was the opening line of the right-hand “stanza.” (I cannot account for the similar extrusion of I in Ista at the opening of line 12.) Google Scholar
6 Such confusions are found elsewhere. From my own experience I can cite the first poem in the prologue to Fulgentius, , Mitologiae , in Fabii Planciadis Fulgentii V. C. Opera , ed. Helm, Rudolf (Leipzig, 1898; repr., Stuttgart, 1970), 7–8, where one thirteenth-century manuscript (Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Theol. Phil. 4o 159) gives the lines (trochaic dimeters in that instance) in the order 1, 3, 5, etc., followed by 2, 4, 6, etc. — the result of mistakenly reading down rather than across, exactly as I propose has happened with Guarino's poem.Google Scholar
7 Guarino is known to have written inscriptions for artwork on other occasions. See Baxandall, M., “Guarino, Pisanello and Manuel Chrysoloras,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 183–204, especially at 186–88.Google Scholar