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A New Count Has Come to Town: Welcoming Oration of Ioannes Rosanus of Split in Honour of Alvise Cappello
Bratislav Lučin
orcid.org/0000-0003-2356-0353
; Marulianum, Split
Ioannes Rosanus
Sažetak
The topic of this paper is the oration In aduentu clarissimi uiri Aloysii Capello, Spalatine urbis prętoris dignissimi, the author of which was Ioannes Rosanus (Ivan Rozan) of Split. The speech is extant in a handwritten codex kept in the Marciana National Library in Venice, call no. Marc. Lat. Cl. XIV, 246 (= 4683), on ff. 146r-150r. It was first mentioned by Giuseppe Praga in 1930, but has never been published or subjected to scholarly study. The oration is accompanied by Rosanus’s letter to Marin Sanudo the Younger (f. 145v). Taking everything into account, the text of the oration is autographic, while the epistle to Sanudo was written by another hand (cf. Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). That the oration is an autograph can be concluded from the corrections put into the text of the speech by the same hand (cf. the notes in the edition of the text appended here). These, together with the untidiness of the handwriting and certain mistakes show that we are dealing with a working copy.
Little is known about Ioannes Rosanus. In 1499, Ser Ioannes Rosanus went with Ser Cyprianus the dyer (tintor) as envoy from the commoners of Split to the Venetian syndics intra Culphum Bernardo Loredan and Nicolò Dolfin. From the title of Ser it can be concluded that he was both well reputed and probably wealthy, which is also borne out by the circumstance of his having been selected as envoy. These two representatives of the commoners asked the syndics permission for the commoners to meet in »a congregation«, i.e., that the right that they had during the time of Count Giovanni Bollani (1481-1484) be revived. On June 30, 1499, the syndics granted the request and instructed the Split Count Marino Moro (1497-1499) accordingly. In the census of Split of 1507, Ioannes Rosanus was recorded as Ser Zuan Rosan, who lived in civitate veteri, that is, the part of Split within Diocletian’s Palace.
It can be seen from the oration that Rosanus had been educated in the studia humanitatis, but no other works of his are known. Still there was a certain poet Rosanus that was praised in their epigrams by Gilberto and Marco Antonio Grineo, humanists and teachers who were active in Trogir and Split around 1496 to 1501. From one of the epigrams we learn that Rosanus wrote a poetic panegyric to the »Venetian Moro« (that is, the Split count, Marino Moro, who is known to have been, like Bollani, well inclined to the commoners). It is reasonable to conclude that Rosanus the representative of the commons, Rosanus the poet and Rosanus the orator were one and the same person.
Venetian Count Alvise Cappello (son of Francesco), in whose honour the oration was composed, arrived in Split on May 13, 1504 and remained in this post until May 31, 1507. Rosanus is not the only writer in Split to have praised Cappello: in two of his poems Franciscus Natalis (Frane Božićević) wrote extensive panegyrics on him (nos. 33 and 46 in the edition of Miroslav Marković of 1958). It is not known what Cappello’s attitude to the commons was, whether, in other words, he went on with the policies of Bollani and Moro.
Rosanus’s oration is interesting for several reasons. It is a previously unknown text of an author who has himself been unknown to literary history. In terms of literary genre, it is an oration in adventu, a panegyric in honour of the arrival of a count from Venice at post. It accordingly belongs to a group of occasional ceremonial speeches that were a salient part of Venetian social rituals and that appeared with the oncoming of the humanist movement. Particularly important are the speeches related to the proclamation of a new doge or the arrival of a new, or the departure of the old, local governor (the count). The first kind is called orationes in creatione ducis and the second might be named orationes in adventu / in discessu praetoris. The first kind is well known and richly documented, at least in connection with orators from the Venetian Terraferma (to date, only seven speeches concerning a newly elected doge given by representatives of the Dalmatian commune have been identified). As for the other kind, the orationes in adventu / in discessu praetoris, the information is a good deal less extensive for the records have not yet been thoroughly researched, but all speeches known to date derive from the Venetian mainland possessions. Rosanus’s oration is the first known speech in adventu written in Dalmatia, and is interesting if only because of that uniqueness. It is given additional interest by its writer having been not a patrician but a commoner.
The contents and structure of the speech, and the Biblical, Patristic and classical references with which it is densely studded, undoubtedly identify Rosanus as an author educated in the humanist tradition. The speech is characterised by his ostentatious need to show off the diversity of his learning: in the little space of the text he quotes a string of Greek, Roman and Early Christian writers (Plato, Diodorus of Sicily, Plutarch, Cicero, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Propertius, Ovid, Seneca, Pliny the Elder, Martial, Juvenal, St Jerome, (Pseudo-)Augustine and so on; he is liberal in his quotes from the Bible; he mentions lesser known facts from ancient history, introduces allusions to myth and astronomy. Attention is drawn by Rosanus’s programmatic invocation (in the letter to Sanudo) of St Jerome, as a literary model, which might at first sight, considering the genre of epideictic oratory, confuse the reader. What is particularly fascinating is the fact that the Split orator clearly knew the works of Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), one of the most celebrated humanists of the Italian Quattrocento, responses to whom on this side of the Adriatic are little known. Of course, it will be necessary to place Rosanus’s panegyric in adventu in the generic context of occasional oratory in the Venetian Republic and to analyse the extent to which he had adopted the then omnipresent Ciceronian rhetorical model. However, such tasks remain outside to the first edition of the oration for Alvise Cappello. It brings Ioannes Rosanus before us as a new and previously totally unknown name of Split and also, then, of Croatian humanism.
Alongside the study, the editio princeps of Rosanus’s oration is printed. Since I consider the Marciana manuscript to be a (partial) autograph, I have retained author’s non-classical orthography with all its inconsistencies. The notes beneath the Latin text contain the textual apparatus (printed in bold) and the sources of quotations and allusions (in italics); where it seemed useful, I have added some factual data and explanations (also in italics).
Ključne riječi
Alvise Cappello; Ioannes Rosanus (Ivan Rozan); Marin Sanudo the Younger; Split; ceremonial oratory; editio princeps; humanism; Venetian republic
Hrčak ID:
219716
URI
Datum izdavanja:
22.4.2019.
Posjeta: 2.300 *