Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI, ARIOSTO, and DOSSO DOSSI

1966; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1179/007516366790558156

1748-6181

J. H. Whitfield,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

In Sabbadini's classic work on the rediscovery of the codices in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was a short chapter headed Le jinte scoperte. In this he chronicled those letters from Augustus to Horace, from Phaon answering Sappho, the oration of Catiline replying to Cicero's indictment, and other similar inventions of fifteenth-century scholarship, often merely exercises which had only casually been passed off as ‘finds’. And in this category Sabbadini placed that comedy of Alberti Which, written at the age of twenty, was hailed as the work of antiquity, and Which still turned up in print in 1588 as the Work of the unknown, but ancient, Lepidus. But Sabbadini did not notice that there was another trifle of Alberti Which belonged to this same class. It is the Intercoenalis, or supper-piece, Virtus, which Mancini had published With the sixteen others then thought to be the sole survivors in 1890. And his initial note to the text of Virtus presented the information which Sabbadini might have used for his own book of fifteen years later. That is to say, that this dialogue had been attributed to Lucian in the fifteenth century, and printed with his works; while among the manuscripts that made the same assertion for it there was the additional attribution of the translation into Latin to Carlo Marsuppini Aretino. At the same time Mancini recorded the remark in the Vita anonima of Alberti (often attributed to Alberti himself, and certainly close enough to him to have authentic information) that Alberti was wont. ‘quaedam opuscula sua aliis tribuere’. There has never been, I think, any suggestion of the moment or the machinery for this transference of a work by Alberti to the account of either Carlo Aretino, or of Lucian. Yet there can be no doubt that Virtus belongs to Alberti. Apart from the other manuscripts Which Mancini listed in his note he found it firmly embedded in the Intercoenales in the Bodleian manuscript from which he published them. And there also, to underline the certainty of Alberti's authorship, Eugenio Garin found it in the new Pistoia manuscript with forty-two Intercoenales, twenty-five of them unknown before. For here the first twO books correspond exactly to Mancini's text, with Virtus in Bk. I.