[Par Cecilia Sideri, chercheuse post-doctorale en littérature italienne à l’Université de Vérone, chercheuse invitée ERC AGRELITA]

During the Middle Ages, the direct knowledge of Classical Greek texts had been almost entirely lost in Western Europe. A systematic process of rediscovery, reception, and re-elaboration of the Greek intellectual heritage first started in Italy around 1397, when the Byzantine Manuel Chrysoloras arrived in Florence and took up the first chair of Greek language of the Early modern Western World. Chrysoloras brought with him several manuscripts containing Greek works unknown to Western Europeans and started teaching Greek to a generation of young humanists. The revival of this language and the gradual diffusion of Greek texts strongly impacted European culture, in nearly every single field of knowledge. However, a solid mastery of Greek was not easy to achieve, and it was attained by very few humanists. A large-scale diffusion of Greek texts became possible only thanks to an intense activity of translation into Latin, undertaken since the beginning of the xv^th century by the humanists who had had the opportunity to learn Greek.

This was a crucial step, but still not enough to reach a much wider readership, potentially interested in the rich variety of ‘new’ Greek texts, but unable to access either the originals or Latin versions. Therefore, from the second half of the xv^th century onwards, we assist to a wave of vernacularisation of the same Greek works that had been previously translated into Latin. Such vernacularisations (in Italian, French, German, and other European languages) were usually based on pre-existing Latinisations: they are indeed indirect, mediated translations. This circumstance makes them research objects of outstanding interest, especially from a linguistical perspective.

Given their high appeal of novelty (and easy readability!), it is not surprising if the more illustrious rulers around Europe (Kings, Princes, and Lords) aspired to acquire these vernacularisations for their own libraries. The translators, being aware of this interest, often addressed their versions to this type of prestigious dedicatees, as a precious gift aimed at obtaining their patronage and economic reward.

The Bibliothèque Municipale of Lille preserves a remarkable exemplar of vernacularisation of a Greek text, manuscript 324. It contains a translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia in Italian vernacular, made by the Florentine humanist Iacopo Bracciolini (1442-1478) in the 1470s. The library offers full digitization of the item. It is worth having a look at it, to get acquainted with the object: https://bm-lille.fr/patrimoine/ead-viewer/a-inventaire_MS/n-D31013524.

Iacopo based his translation on the Latin version prepared some decades before by his father, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), one of the most influential Italian humanists. Poggio had addressed his version to Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples. Therefore Iacopo, conceiving himself as an heir of his father’s intellectual legacy, sent his vernacular version to Alfonso’s son, Ferrante of Aragon, who had succeeded his father as king of Naples and was an assiduous reader of vernacularisations of Classical texts. The Cyropaedia was a perfect homage for him: it is indeed the account of the education and life of the founder of the Persian empire, Cyrus the Great, presented as a model of a good ruler. The image below shows the title of the dedication to Ferrante.

The exemplar preserved in Lille detains a special role in the manuscript tradition, since it seems to have been the dedication copy prepared for Ferrante under Iacopo’s control. The material features of the manuscript are the ones of a luxury exemplar: it is made of 163 folios of fine parchment (in a big format: 274 × 188 mm), it has wide margins, it is richly illuminated, and its head and tail are embellished by golden decorations. The image below, along with the one shown above, gives an idea of the impression of magnificence this manuscript gives at first sight when the reader opens it.

The composition, the page layout, and the ruling are typical of humanistic parchment manuscripts produced in Florence in the 1470s-1480s: gatherings are mostly of 10 folios, written full page, ruled with a hard point, written above the top line (26 text lines/26 lines). The scribe of the manuscript may be identified with Niccolò Riccio, a very prolific Florentine copyist who wrote more than sixty manuscripts between the mid 1450s and the late 1480s, most of which for important libraries such as those of the Medici and of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. He uses very neat antiqua-style handwriting, and he is characterised by a variety of different ways of writing catchwords: in the 1470s, he used to collocate them in the inner margin of the last folio of each quire, in a horizontal position, with the Roman number of the quire written below (see, e.g., folio 24 v).

The stunning illumination of the manuscript is attributed to a Florentine artist, Francesco Rosselli (1448- after 1508). Several decorative elements of the two opening pages lead to the conclusion this manuscript was prepared for Ferrante. His coat of arms appears in folio 4 r, topped by a kingly crown; the coat of arms of the house of Aragon (four red pallets, or ‘bars’, on a golden background) is found also in folio 3 v, held by two putti.

The same folios 3 v-4 r are filled with a great number of Aragonese emblems: the burning chair, the jar with lilies, the wheat germs, the spider, the knot, the open book, the mountain of diamonds, the motto “[Ante] sienpre Arago[ra]”.

Moreover, in folio 4 r, inside the initial “V”, it is possible to see a golden medal carrying a portrait of king Ferrante, and his name.  

This element is useful to confirm the Aragonese provenance of the Lille manuscript 324, which seems to have traveled a lot. Indeed, an inventory dated 1527 has survived, listing a series of manuscripts once belonging to the Aragonese library of Naples, which, after a period in France, were brought from Ferrara to Valencia in 1527: this inventory mentions a vernacular Cyropaedia and describes its illumination in every detail, in a way that corresponds perfectly to the Lille manuscript, including “una medaglia de oro con la imagine del re Ferrante primo”. The subsequent history of the exemplar is unclear. It was still in Valencia in 1550, at the death of Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria (son of the last Aragonese King of Naples, Federico III), since it appears in a list of manuscripts left that year to the monastery of San Miguel de los Reyes, from which it must have been subtracted. We don’t know how and when it eventually arrived in Lille.

Two last curiosities in the manuscript should be mentioned. Firstly, it is fully supplied with notabilia and marginal corrections by a hand which shows a very close similarity with Iacopo Bracciolini’s own hand. Indeed, this was most probably an authorial revision, conducted before the presentation copy was sent to Ferrante. A useful comparison can be conducted on other manuscripts annotated and/or corrected by Iacopo, e.g., manuscript Urb. lat. 224 and manuscript Urb. lat. 491 in the Vatican Library, or manuscript Plut. 68.12 in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence.

The second curious circumstance about this manuscript is that it seems to have had a very close ‘brother’, manuscript 78 C 24 in Berlin Kupferstichkabinett. This exemplar is written by the same scribe as Lille manuscript 324 (Niccolò Riccio), it has an almost identical page layout, it is annotated by the same hand (probably Iacopo’s own hand), it has the Aragonese coat of arms, and emblems, as well as an opening illuminated page representing a triumphal scene with Ferrante as a protagonist; last but not least, it was a companion traveler of the Lille exemplar, since it is registered as well in the two abovementioned inventories: hence, the common destiny of the two manuscripts is traceable since 1550. Further research will hopefully explain why Iacopo Bracciolini apparently made prepare two different presentation copies for Ferrante of Aragon.

Pour citer ce billet : Cecilia Sideri, “A translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia in Italian vernacular (Bibliothèque municipale de Lille, circa 1470, Ms. 324)”, dans le carnet de recherches AGRELITA Project ERC Advanced Grant, ISSN 2827-7031, 08/03/2023, https://agrelita.hypotheses.org/3055.

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