Original scientific paper
First after Petrarch: the Reception and Perception Paths of Marulić's Collection In epigrammata priscorum commentarius
Gorana Stepanić
Abstract
In epigrammata priscorum commentarius (A commentary on the old inscriptions) created between 1503 and 1510, is a collection of ancient inscriptions complete with commentaries, and is counted among Marulić’s small prose works and works of an antiquarian and local-community character. The structure of the work is tripartite: after a prose introduction, or dedication to Marulić’s friend Dominik Papalić, comes the first part of the inscriptions with commentaries, those that are to be found in Rome (Romana, a total of 36 inscriptions), with the transcript of one military testament (Militis cuiusdam testamentum); then comes part two, 75 inscriptions from the rest of Italy (Externa). The third part consists of a prose fore-word the addressee of which is Papalić again, and 18 inscriptions from Salona (Salonis). After the Salona inscriptions comes the Peroratio of the work and an-other 11 inscriptions found subsequently in Salona (Salonis postea repertum).
The text of the Commentary is the only known Marulić work that has not yet been printed in its entirety, while interest in the Marulić collection of epigraphs was renewed by the paper of Darko Novaković in 1998, written in response to the finding of the autograph of the Commentary, explaining in detail the filiation of the accessible manuscripts of the Commentary and their relation to later editions. The work was printed in partial editions, from Lucić’s (Venice, 1673, just the Salona epigraphs), via Kukuljević’s (Zagreb, 1869, only the paratexts), Mommsen’s (Berlin, 1873, only the Salona inscriptions), Ljubić’s (Zagreb, 1876, the Salona part of the text), Šrepel’s (Zagreb, 1901, the paratexts) to the last, Lučin’s (Split, 2005, paratexts). Parts of the text that are most commonly published are the paratexts in the Commentary particularly the foreword to the Salona part of the collection. This is a text that tells of the local interests of Marulić the antiquarian, a text that provides information about the glorious past of Salona and Split, and a description of Diocletian’s Palace as it was in Marulić’s time.
Apart from these segments and the motives that particularly intrigued previous editors of the text of the Interpreter, in the foreword to the Salona part of the collection, there are some particularly interesting sections of motifs that appear in the texts of several Italian Humanists of the 14th and 15th centuries. In the texts of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder (1370-1444) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) devoted, partially or in whole, to questions of the passing of time and the tragic state of the devastated and abandoned an-cient ruins in Rome, there are, as in the Marulić text concerning the Salona ruins, the following motifs: a) the wandering of two Humanist friends around the ruins of an ancient city; b) the vicissitudes of fate, which brings down the mightiest empires; c) the quotation of Virgil’s verses to bear out the ideas about the ephemerality of the world; d) inscriptions as source of knowledge about history, quite equal to literature itself; e) the abandoned and weed-covered buildings of the ancients. Salona and Split in a small scale represent the ruined and abandoned Rome of the Italian authors. The coincidence of motifs among the three older Humanist authors and Marulić show the Split author to have been well versed in the modern discourse of the Humanist lament over the downfall of the aesthetically and intellectually superior ancient culture.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
11907
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2007.
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