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Ex Cicerone et Aliis Quibusdam – An unknown phrase book of Mihovil Vrančić
Danko Zelić
; Institut za povijest umjetnosti, Zagreb
Ana Plosnić Škarić
orcid.org/0000-0002-9666-3575
; Institut za povijest umjetnosti, Zagreb
Sažetak
This paper presents a piece of writing entitled Ex Cicerone et aliis quibusdam, recently discovered in the Draganić-Vrančić family papers in the State Archives in Zadar. This is a compendium of 457 Latin phrases that Mihovil Vrančić (Šibenik, 1507? – 1571?) collected and made a fair copy of on slightly more than 16 sheets of paper of paper in a 220 × 305 mm sized volume. That this is certainly an autograph of Mihovil Vrančić is borne out by a comparison of palaeographic and usage characteristics of the manuscript with those of other texts he wrote with his own hand.
At the beginning of the 19th century, almost all the writings of Antun, Mihovil and Faust Vrančić kept in the family archives in Šibenik were given or sold to Hungarian collectors and, along with two letters sent from Šibenik to his son Faust in Padua in 1569, this work of Mihovil Vrančić is the only document from his pen to have been preserved in Croatia.
Notwithstanding the formal heterogeneity of the writing – consisting of words, phrases, phrasemes, idiomatic expressions, sayings, adages, proverbs and sententiae – because of the similarity of their contents and the obvious purpose of the little volume, to serve as a manual of phrases, we have decided to call this volume of Vrančić’s a phrasarium or phrase book.
Although the title of the manuscript and the heading Phrases Ciceronianae a Mich. Verantio collectae subsequently added in the hand of Mihovil’s son Faust Vrančić (1551, Šibenik – 1617, Venice) on the outer sheet of the volume indicate that it is a collection of excerpts from someone’s reading, there are no other indications in the text of the origins of the pieces so culled. Research carried out with open-access Internet tools showed that as well as Cicero and other authors of letters in his epistolarium the compendium contains fragments of other Roman writers, mainly historians, and to a lesser extent modern epistolographers and historiographers.
The majority of originals were found in the canonical works of ancient Roman prose. In Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares 219 phrases were identified; in the works of Tacitus 84 (79 in the Annales, 5 in the Historiae), 37 in the Historia Romana of Velleius Paterculus, in the works of Caesar 25 (17 in De bello Gallico and 8 in De bello civili). From Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia came 9 originals, and ten of them were found in the Letters of Pliny the Younger (C. Plinii Caecilii Secundi epistulae). Three originals, finally, are from Declamationes maiores, a work believed in the Renaissance to have been written by Quintillian, and two from Claudian’s Carmina. All in all, phrases from epistolographic works of Roman antiquity account for a bit more than a half of the total number of entries in the phrase book (229), and about a third come from historiographic writings (146). Not belonging to these genres are only Pliny’s Natural History, PseudoQuintillian’s rhetorical primer and Claudian’s collection of poems, the only one among the excerpted sources to have been written in verse.
In all, fifty six phrases, a little more than a tenth of all the entries in the phrase book, are taken from texts of early modern authors. Thirty-four come
from publications of two influential fifteenth-century Italian humanists – fourteen from the letters of Giovanni Antonio Campani (1429–1477) and twenty from the correspondence and other writings of Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494). Then, five phrases are taken from the popular encyclopaedic compendium Commentariorum rerum urbanarum libri XXXVIII of Raffaello Maffei (Raphael of Volterra), first printed in Rome in 1506. Mihovil Vrančić also included in his book thirteen phrases from Erasmus’ Adages and, finally, three from the historiographic work De statu religionis et reipublicae Carolo Quinto caesare commentarii (Basel 1555) written by Johann Sleidan of Luxembourg.
Most of Vrančić’s entries differ from the originals, and illustrations of how the compiler modified and adapted them in terms of lexis, style and meaning are given from selected and characteristic examples.
In the concluding part of the paper, the issues of the time of origin and the immediate purpose of the Vrančić manuscript are considered. All the evidence would suggest that the phrase book was written at a breath, which means that at some moment the author determined to arrange and copy out in a separate booklet his own, earlier-collected, reading notes. It can thus be inferred that Mihovil Vrančić put the phrase book together at the end of his life, as a contribution to the education of his son Faust Vrančić, probably in the first years of Faust’s studies in Padua, i.e. in 1568 or 1569.
The importance of the phrasarium of Mihovil Vrančić stems primarily from the fact that it is the only work of its kind known in the corpus of texts of Croatian early modern Latinism; to some extent it may be compared, if only provisionally, with the much more monumental Repertorium of Marko Marulić. Conceived as a handbook of phrases, the Vrančić booklet of excerpts is also valuable as a direct testimony to a specific segment of the philological work of sixteenth-century humanist men of letters.
Ključne riječi
Mihovil Vrančić; manuscript; compendium; phrases; Cicero; epistolography; humanism; State Archives in Zadar
Hrčak ID:
304376
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.6.2023.
Posjeta: 263 *