Original scientific paper

Marino Becichemo and the Dubrovnik Codices of the Heroides

Neven Jovanović orcid.org/0000-0002-9119-399X ; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract

Marino Becichemo (1468–1526), member of a patrician family from Shkodër (Skadar, Scutari) in Venetian Albania, left his native city as a child, before the city surrendered to the Ottomans (1479). Becichemo received a humanist education in Brescia, where he had relatives (members of the Pagnani family), and in Padua. He married in Ulcinj in 1485, then worked as a scribe in Bar (Antivari) and as a teacher in Dubrovnik (1494–1496). Having served as secretary of Melchiorre Trevisan, commander of the Venetian fleet, Becichemo in 1499–1500 finally received confirmation of his status as a Shkodër refugee (which entailed certain privileges) and became a citizen of Venice. He worked as a private teacher and exchanged polemics with Raffaele Regio; soon he moved, first to Padua, then to Brescia, where he became teacher of the communal school (1501–1508). While teaching in Brescia he published two collections of speeches and philological treatises (on Apuleius, Victorinus, Cicero, and Pliny the Elder). During the first phase of the War of the League of Cambrai (1508–1510) Becichemo was once again teaching in Dubrovnik. In 1511–1516 he worked again as a private teacher in Venice, trying to get a position at the public school of Saint Mark, but also in the Mantua of Isabella d’Este. From 1517 to the end of his life Becichemo taught rhetoric at the University of Padua; there he was in competition with Romolo Amaseo and Battista Egnazio, in contact with Vettor Fausto and Zaccaria Ferreri, and was a member of an informal group of humanists that were interested in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s works.
A commented edition of Ovid’s Heroides edited by Nicolaus Scoelsius (Nicolò Scelsio Michele Luttareo from Barletta) and published in Venice in 1525 by Ioannes Tacuinus (Edit 16 CNCE34901) contains, among other philological supplements, Becichemo’s Ovidianae annotationes, or In Heroidum epistulas annotationes (title before text: Ex Ragusinis in Epistolas Ouidii obseruationibus Marini Becichemi Scodrensis excerpta). The annotations have two prefaces: one from 5 June 1525, addressed to Filippo Foscari, a noble Venetian student of Scelsio; the other is addressed to the Rector and the Senate of Dubrovnik, and is dated 1 May 1495. The letter to the Rector and the Senate provides the information that the notes of Ovidianae annotationes were taken by Becichemo’s Dubrovnik students and local people (including members of the Senate) who visited his lectures. The commentary consists of 241 brief annotations for all the Heroides, including the letter of Sappho to Phaon (which is the last item in the collection for the Renaissance readers). Becichemo explains problems of ancient culture, of style and metre, drawing on ancient authors but also on Renaissance commentators. An important source for Becichemo is the commentary of a certain Minutianus, sometimes confused with the Apuleius grammaticus; I was not able to identify the exact work Becichemo is citing.
Establishing the text of the Heroides is an important component of Ovidianae annotationes. Becichemo starts from the »vulgate« and compares readings from the »old exemplars« (which could be manuscripts, but also early printed editions). Forty (of the 241) annotations mention the names of owners of codices that contain different readings (the first such annotation is number 88). Six owners of codices (not including Becichemo himself) are cited; three of them are citizens of Dubrovnik, three are citizens of Brescia. Among them, the Dubrovnik patricians Ivan Gučetić (1451 – 11 March 1502) and Ilija Crijević (1463 – 15 September 1520) are well known as poets and are described as such by Becichemo; the third person, a member of the Menčetić family, is most probably Petar Menčetić, son of Marin (c. 1451 – 2 February 1508), who in the archival documents often gets the attribute »poeta« or »poeta laureatus«. The citizens of Brescia are all teachers: Bernardino Laurino (resident of Brescia from 1480, died before 1517), Marco Picardi (resident from 1472, not mentioned after 1512, connected with counts Martinengo), and Alessandro Caravelli.
Becichemo’s annotations which refer to codices of known owners comment on Heroides 9, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21 and 15 (Sappho to Phaon); Sappho’s epistle has the largest number of such comments (24 annotations). The largest number of individual readings come from the codices of Crijević (20), Gučetić and Picardi (16 each), the smallest from Menčetić (11) and Laurino (10). In assessing textual variants, Becichemo uses six strategies, some of which, in allowing the coexistence of other, equally valid readings, differ from those used by the modern philologists. The strategies are: 1. the commentator does not give his opinion (annotations 88, 162, 189, 192, 197, 208, 210, 218, 229, 238); 2. he allows several readings (annotations 91, 171, 181, 209, 212, 213, 215, 225, 226, 228, 231, 234, 236, 237); 3. he chooses a correct reading, but does not provide a reason for his choice, or simply states that he likes or dislikes a reading (91, 131, 216, 233, 239); 4. he provides grammatical, prosodic, stylistic and aesthetic arguments for a reading (128, 136, 158, 159, 162, 163, 168, 201, 207, 209, 214, 215, 217, 223, 237); 5. he prefers readings from older codices (88, 128, 91, 128, 136, 158, 163, 168, 171, 189, 207, 209, 218); 6. he argues from the context of the poem and from the ancient realia (131, 136, 211, 225, 228, 231, 234). Precisely in the case of the textual tradition of Heroides, detailed explorations have shown that systematic selection among a large number of coexisting readings is impossible, and the editors still have to rely on subjective, lexical, metrical and stylistic criteria.
Becichemo’s annotations at the same time adopt a polemical stance to an earlier commentary, the Ioannis Baptistae Egnatii Veneti in Heroidas Ouidii, Sappho et Ibin obseruationes by the Venetian schoolmaster Battista Egnazio (Giovanni Battista Cipelli, 1478–1553). Egnazio’s brief collection of observations was first published in 1515, but it is also reprinted in the collection of commentaries from 1525, where it immediately precedes Becichemo’s Ovidianae annotationes. Egnazio was Becichemo’s competitor in Venice after the death of Raffaele Regio in 1520; in the foreword to the Annotationes Becichemo criticized Egnazio’s Racemationes (without naming the author) as plagiarism. Because Egnazio’s Obseruationes were first published ten years before the Ovidianae annotationes, Becichemo needs to persuade the readers that his philology is superior to Egnazio’s. I see this as one of the reasons why Becichemo names the owners of codices from Dubrovnik and Brescia, and why he provides two forewords to his collection of annotations – one of them polemical, and one from 1495. A comparison of Egnazio’s and Becichemo’s notes on the same verses shows that Becichemo takes care to use more material (while some formulations are identical in Egnazio’s and Becichemo’s notes) and that he chooses variants which Egnazio had rejected (cf. annotations 207, 209, 211, 212, 215, 223, 225, 229); annotation 123 openly criticizes Egnazio’s emendation. Becichemo’s polemical discussion with Egnazio throws some doubt on information about codices from Dubrovnik and Brescia – was it all invented to add weight to Becichemo’s notes? In 1525, all owners of codices from Dubrovnik, and at least one from Brescia (Laurino), were already dead, so they would not have been able to contradict Becichemo’s claims. Currently the falsification cannot be either confirmed or refuted. Independent sources, however, testify to the humanist and philological interests of Gučetić and Crijević (both were readers of Ovid); it is also hard to imagine Becichemo making up such a large number of variants (which are also validated by the modern surveys of the textual tradition) and other details.
Be that as it may, in the 1525 edition of the Heroides Marino Becichemo appeared as a former teacher from Dubrovnik who used his stay in the city to assess readings in local Ovidian codices from a philological standpoint, joining forces with learned citizens (and comparing the readings further with the Brescian ones). This makes Dubrovnik a culturally important place, home of ancient codices and enlightened patricians. If collation led by Becichemo actually did take place there, it could have had wider cultural value: all persons present (not just the owners of the codices) would have witnessed then and there how philological methods were applied to the material preserved in their home town.

Keywords

Renaissance humanism; history of philology; textual variants; Ovid; Heroides; manuscripts; Dubrovnik; Venice; Brescia; Marino Becichemo

Hrčak ID:

321706

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/321706

Publication date:

25.10.2024.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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