Pietro da Montagnana: la vita, gli studi, la biblioteca di un homo trilinguis

Autor: Gamba, Eleonora
Rok vydání: 2016
Předmět:
Popis: Pietro Floriani da Montagnana (ca. 1395/97-1478), a Paduan humanist known for his trilingual book collection, studied Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He became priest in 1420-1422, and rector of the parishes of St. Luke (1431) and St. Firmus (1433), obtaining other benefits sine cura such as the chantry of St. Mary Magdalene and Catherine in Paduan cathedral (1426) and the canonry of St. ‘Maria di Boccon’ (1432). He was also inscribed in the brotherhood of the Holy Spirit in Sassia in Rome (1457). After a first licentia testandi (1459), he obtained a second one (1465) in which his books were explicitly mentioned. On the 13th of March 1477 he made a will in favor of the regular canons of the Lateran of S. Giovanni di Verdara, and arranged with a donatio inter vivos that his books would join the library of the monastery, but retained his usufruct on them. Once he moved into the monastery, he officially gave up the parish of St. Firmus in November 1478 and died less than a month later. He also worked as a lifelong grammar teacher, first reporting directly to the cathedral chapter and later, after the school reform promoted by Pope Eugenius IV, as a salaried teacher by Volpe legacy (1442-1469). Besides teaching to the poor boys of the cathedral’s school, he also taught to a boy called Bernardino, dedicatee of one of Pietro’s grammatical works, and to Benedetto Mariani, an influent member of the Servite Order. He also studied with, and taught to, the Byzantine humanist John Argyropoulos, who lived in Padua from 1441 to 1444 and who wrote or added his own notes to 13 Greek and Latin manuscripts belonging to the library of Pietro da Montagnana. Pietro knew at least another Greek scribe, the Cretan Immanuel Rusotas, who got into debt with him in 1465. He was involved in a legal dispute with the canon Giovanni Barbo (1470) about a manuscript of Livy: Pietro had deposited it in a Jewish pawnshop, but Giovanni Barbo asserted that it had been stolen from him years before. In 1472 Pietro had a contention with another Paduan canon, Geremia Badoer, who was the new holder of the St. Mary Magdalen chantry and didn’t want to recognize Pietro certain retirement benefits. There are two iconographic evidences of Pietro da Montagnana: a fresco in the library of San Giovanni di Verdara and a miniature on one of Pietro’s grammatical works. On the other hand, the famous picture of Pietro da Montagnana in the Fasciculus medicinae does not show the humanist, but a doctor having the same name. Pietro’s manuscripts bear witness of his Latin, Greek and Hebrew handwriting: the Latin one has a diachronic variation, the Greek one, inspired by Manuel Chryoloras, is uniform. Some notes, both Latin and Greek, betray phenomena of imitation, some others are flickering and are ascribable to the last years of his life. The texts in his library were carefully corrected, collated, and annotated. To do so, he used particular reference signs and attention marks. In several manuscripts of Latin authors, such as Aulus Gellius, Lactantius, and Cicero, he restored the graeca, and he did the same in the Servian Vocabularium written by Guarino. He usually restored materially the codices which were in poor conditions. Among the translations usually ascribed to him on a paleographical basis, only those of Herodotus, Georgios Scholarius, Arisophanes, Theocritus, Agapetus and the epistolographs were written by him. He also translated into vernacular some parts of the Hebrew Bible. The translations of Philostratus, Sophocles, and Euripides, on the other hand, are by John Argyropoulos, while the Latin version of the Greek grammar in ms. Marc. lat. XIII, 15 is still unidentified. He composed three grammatical works, which circulated only in manuscript form: the Reportationes relativorum (in two versions), a remake of Orthographia by Gasparino Barzizza and an edition of Donatus’ Ars minor. His choice to give his whole book collection to the monastery of St. Giovanni di Verdara was common to many other Paduan savants of the XVth and XVIth centuries (G. Marcanova, B. Dal Legname, G. Calfurnio, etc.). Nevertheless, the library of St. Giovanni di Verdara went partially lost during the next centuries and just half of the book heritage remained in 1783, when the monastery was closed and the manuscripts were raked by the S. Marco library in Venice. Some books are known to have ended in the hands of H. Scrimgeur, G.V. Pinelli, M. Gude, Th. Coke, J. Gibson. The library belongings can be verified (in part) through four indexes pertaining the years 1599, 1600, 1639, and 1760. Pietro da Montagnana’s book collection has been pieced together. His Greek manuscripts were 27, and came from different times and places of origin. Among them, there are two groups. The first one consists of five manuscripts written by an anonymous scribe who worked in Veneto in 1460s and 70s, the second one of manuscripts copied by John Argyropoulos. The Latin library has 84 items, mostly made of parchment and beautifully illuminated. The majority of these manuscripts comes from Veneto and consists of grammatical texts. The Hebrew library counts 11 manuscripts, and among them are the Bible, grammars and vocabularies. The incunabula are 8, but for two of them the present location is unknown. Pietro da Montagnana owned about twenty more texts, which have been impossible to trace. All the Greek and Latin manuscripts have been examined, and their description can be found in chapter 4. Appendix A contains the archival documents used for the reconstruction of Pietro’s biography. Appendix B has two lists: the first one of manuscripts for the first time ascribed to his library, the second one of manuscripts which have been considered, but cannot be included.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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