Colloquia Maruliana, Vol. 14 , 2005.
Original scientific paper
Marulić's Hand on the Codex Traguriensis (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, lat. Parisiensis lat. 7989)
Bratislav Lučin
Abstract
The name of the somewhat enigmatic writer of the Satyricon, one of the most intriguing works of ancient prose literature, must be one of the very last that until about ten years ago we would have linked with Marulić. True, the contents and tone of a large part of the Glasgow verses found in 1995 by Darko Novaković showed us that Marulić, particularly in his youth, would sometimes be freer in his thematic and lexical choices than we might have ventured to assume before that. The mention of the name of Petronius in one of the epigrams of the Glasgow manuscript (no. 49) did not necessarily imply that the Roman writer meant any-thing more to the Split humanist than the mere name. Still, Novaković’s attentive expertise showed that in another point in the Glasgow collection (in epigram no. 40) there is a hexameter clausula that entirely coincides with the close of one of Petronius’s hexameters, and the commentator concluded, with some slight reserves, that it would seem that Marulić knew Petronius at first hand.
Dealing quite recently with the literary papers of Trogir’s Petar Cipiko (Petrus Cepio, Cippicus, obiit ca. 1440), the progenitor of a renowned family of humanists, I decided to deal in a little more detail with the intriguing fact that it was precisely in the Cipiko family library that the only text in the world of Trimalchio’s Feast (Cena Trimalchionis), the greatest and most completely preserved unit from Petronius’s work, had been found. This discovery was due to Marin Statilić (Statileo) who ca. 1653 in the library of Nikola Cipiko in Trogir came upon a codex with works by several ancient authors, among which was the famed Cena. Today the MS is kept in the National Library in Paris marked as codex Parisiensis lat. 7989 olim Traguriensis.
The Trogir codex contains primarily verse compositions: on pp. 1-184 po-ems of Tibullus, Propertius and Catullus, as well as Ovid’s Epistula Sapphus ad Phaonem (Heroides XV). Then come the fragments of the Satyricon: first of all (185-205) those that are also to be found in a large number of other manuscripts (in the discipline these fragments are called excerpta vulgaria), and then (pp. 206-229) the unique Cena Trimalchionis. At the end there are several poems: Virgil’s Moretum (pp. 229-232), Claudian’s Phoenix (pp. 233-237) and a short composition Ad Leonem ebreum (p. 249).
In my investigations concerning the fate of the Trogir manuscript I started off from a few photographic reproductions: among them there was a photograph of a page on which the beginning of the poem Phoenix by Claudian was written out; Claudius Claudian, a writer of the end of the 4th century, was the “last great poet of Rome”. This copy was not very interesting to the discipline because it had almost no importance for the establishment of a text of the poem concerned. While most of the codex was written with an early Humanist ductus characteristic of the early 15th century, it was long ago observed that the copy of Phoenix was created much later. Albinia Catherine de la Mare, one of the greatest authorities on the handwriting of Humanism, says, with some caution in the dating, that the Phoenix was written by “an early sixteenth cent. (?) italic hand”. It is worth mentioning that, in spite of the precise temporal determinations of some of the kinds of ductus in the codex, so far the identity of not a single copyist has been discovered. So my surprise was enormous when at the very first glance at the “early sixteenth cent. (?) italic hand”, i.e., the hand that had copied out Claudian’s poem, I was able to recognise the characteristic strokes of Marulić’s penmanship (see the photographs appended).
Marulić wrote out Claudian’s text (taking it from an unknown source) on the empty pages that had been left over from the copying of Trimalchio’s Feast and Virgil’s poem at the end of the volume when the copyist had completed his job. Marulić’s copy then is not done in a separate little leaflet that could then have been tacked on subsequently to the main part of the codex, but it was written on the same support as the whole volume, with which it makes a single item, a single material unit.
But this, judging all in all, is not at all the only trace of Marulić’s hand on the Trogir MS with the work of Petronius. The whole of the codex is furnished with numerous marginalia, which have been ascribed by detailed palaeographic analysis to three different scribes; the third of them, as A. C. de la Mare mentions, is precisely the owner of that “early sixteenth cent. (?) italic hand” that copied out Claudian. From this only one conclusion is possible: the writer of these marginalia, to date totally anonymous, was none other than Marko Marulić.
A. C. de la Mare informs us further that in the third hand, marginalia and variant readings have been entered in the margins of all the texts in the codex - all except Trimalchio’s Feast. But the copyist of Claudian’s poem did not just write short glosses to the poems of the Roman love elegists and to Petronius’s excerpta
vulgaria, but made many additions to the text of Catullus’s poems. In so doing, the owner of this “italic hand of the early sixteenth century (?)” relied, as the discipline has determined, on a commentary on Catullus published in 1496 by Palladio Fosco, and perhaps on the 1502 Aldine edition. And someone who patiently enters marginalia, studies variant readings, inputs explanations and comments, adds the text of author whom he was clearly particularly fond of in the empty pages, someone who acts like this is certainly not an accidental and incidental user of the codex, but its genuine and permanent owner.
The Trogir Codex was created, as long ago established, around 1423-25, prob-ably in Florence. For a long time all trace of it was lost, until ca. 1653, as already observed, Marin Statilić took it down from the shelf of the family library of the Cipikos and announced this news to the world (the first edition of Trimalchio’s Feast appeared in Padua in 1664). In the darkness of this total and more than two-century long disappearance only the light of a note on the first page of the MS has glimmered: “Questo libro sia di me Pola[n]tonio Cipico”. This so far, as it seems, unanalysed note (there are two Paolo Antonios; one died in 1533 and the other in 1570) confirms for us the already probable assumption that the codex had been in the Cipiko library long before Statilić’s find. Now we can throw light on a vast part of the dark ages of the history of the Trogir manuscript. Now, that is, we know that the codex in the period round the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, and perhaps for the whole of Marulić’s life, was in Split, in the hands of Marko Marulić.
Many of the old puzzles about the Trogir MS come back now with increased strength, and new ones also crop up (A. C. de la Mare, faced with a number of unknowns, not accidentally called it “that mysterious manuscript, the Codex Traguriensis”). Who was the copyist of the main part of the codex? How and when did it fall into Marulić’s hands? How, and when, and whither, and why, did it leave them? Furthermore: is it to be ascribed to mere coincidence that the second edition of Petronius’s excerpta vulgaria (Venice, 1499) was published by Bernardinus Venetus de Vitalibus, who was soon to become not only the long-term but - we would venture to say - the authorised printer of Marulić’s works? For it was he who printed the De Institutione (1506-1507), De Humilitate et Gloria Christi (1519), Epistula ad Adrianum VI Pont. Max. (1522) and Dialogus de Laudibus Herculis (posthumous, 1524).
Before further conclusions can be adduced - or if not conclusions then at least plausible hypotheses - there is a vast task of patient and detailed study of the Trogir manuscript sub specie Maruli, which I have actually started. But whatever the answers, and whatever questions remain unanswered, it is already beyond doubt that this is a major gain for our knowledge not only of Marulić’s humanistic pro-file, but of the Trogir MS history as well, and that it will have far-reaching consequences. Some not at all marginal chapters not only of Marulićan philology, but also of humanist philology in general, will have to be rewritten.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
8938
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2005.
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