Colloquia Maruliana ..., Vol. 15 , 2006.
Original scientific paper
Prolegomena to the Rhetoric of Marulić’s Split Set
Neven Jovanović
Abstract
I am investigating the poetic texts in which Marko Marulić communicates with his friends from Split and environs. Marulić’s poems to friends very of ten have a didactic tone, encouraging his friends to go on with their work in literature; but how much success did Marulić have here? I attempt to provide an answer to this by collecting the remains of the scattered literary heritage of these friends of his; secondly by sketching the similarities and differences in side this corpus as established. The first part of the collection of Split literary communication consists of several poems by Marulić himself. In the edition Latin Verses (LV [LS in Croatian]edited by Bratislav Lučin and Darko Novaković, 2005) there are 13 such poems (LS 75-82, 84, 87, 88, 105, 149). They are addressed to the Split people the brothers Martinčić, Jeronim Papalić, the Alberti brothers, Toma Hranković, Nikola (probably Petraka), Frano Božićević Natalis, Šimun Selimbrić, and Jerolim Cipiko; then to the people from Hvar, Hanibal (probably Lucić) and Katarin (probably Gazarović). Some motifs turn up again and again: the young addressee is as mature as an old man; the relationship between classical antiquity and the literature of Marulić’s times; promise of future glory; Apollo and the Muses. But a schematic review of the contents of the poems shows that Marulić combined and arranged the motifs differently each time - just as it shows that there are some poems in which some of the motifs are missing (LS 77, to Jerolim Papalić, according to LS 75 and 76 to the Martinčić brothers). There are also poems in which discourses mix (for example, a combination of encomium to the poet with prayer, polemic or epitaph). The body of work being explored shows an irresistible tendency to expand. In the case of some authors, new works show up that could be added to the corpus for some reason or another - because of some similarities verbally or in motif or genre - although, according to the strict criteria of “Split literary communication”they would not really form part of this body of works. But I am not interested in defining a hard and fast framework for the given works; the corpus is a means to understanding, a set of texts from which interpretation can start. Thus in the further analysis I study several other Marulić poetic and prose works sent to concrete addressees and even, in one case, an addressee mentioned only by way of pseudonym (LS 125, “De Myrca puella”). Also, the corpus becomes thematically heterogeneous as soon as we turn to the works of the other members of the “Split Set”; that is, only an in significant number of extant works of Marulić’s friends could fit in to our initial outline, since only two of these friends have any considerable extant oeuvre: Frano Božićević Natalis (Split, 1469-1542) and Hanibal Lucić (Hvar, ca 1485-1553; wrote only in Croatian). Among the poems from the autograph manuscript collection of F. Božićević Natalis (FBN, edited M. Marković, 1958) we find 12 “social texts” (FBN 9, 11-12, 17, 44, 55, 63, 67, 70, 71, 73, and the epigram “Ad lectorem” in Marulić’s Dialogus de Hercule of 1524). Božićević of ten addresses his poems to the same people as Marulić, sings of the same events, uses the same motifs and procedures but always endeavours to be different from Marulić, in choice of words, fondness for ancient exempla, for similes for innumerableness, by choice of the genre of the love elegy (FBN 9), writing poems in the name of someone else (FBN 55, in the name of his brotherin law). The corpus of poems of the other members of the Marulić set comprises eight writers and 31 texts (the poems that have not been edited, or are more difficult to find today, are printed in the appendix to the current work). All the poems in this corpus belong to the genus demonstrativum; most common are epitaphs (11 out of 31), then poems on other literary works, and encomia to the living; three poems are religious. On two occasions several of Marulić’s friends celebrated poetically the same event: when Marulić himself died (1524) and greeting the Venetian headman of Split, Benedict de Mula (1549). Jerolim Martinčić has the most works extant, followed by Donat Paskvalić and Nikola Alberti. Although at first glance the corpus is not particularly impressive, careful reading will reveal interesting relationships. Thus the cycle of epitaphs in honour of Marulić comes acrossas a markedly coherent unit - the poems of the various authors correspond, motifs leap from text to text, and yet are each time elaborated in a different way. It is attractive to speculate that this similarity is deliberate, that the authors, grieving for their late friend and senior, wanted to demonstrate their community in their writing. Then we follow the external links of these poems - links with texts outside the corpus; not only diachronically (references to ancient literature) but also synchronically; not only links with other poems of Split poets, but connections with the texts of Humanist and Renaissance Italian Latinists. One exemplary synchronic link is the word game in the context of the epitaph - a procedure used by Marulić and by Božićević, and Jerolim Martinčić. Another is the similarity of motif, and of expression too, between Lucić’s Croatian epistles and Latin poems of the members of the Split circle - particularly of Jerolim Martinčić, the addressee of four of Lucić’s texts. Lucić’s third epistle to Martinčić (“Tve pisni kih će moć…”) acquires a new meaning when we notice its allusions to the common background of the two friends - to ancient literature as part of the common ground of their times (the epistle is in fact a challenge: since Martinčić, as he says, liked Lucić’s translation of Ovid’s epistle “Paris to Helen, Her. 16, then he could well translate the next poem from the collection Her. 17, Helen’s reply to Paris). The attitude of the Split poets to the poetic diction of their times is investigated with the help of the internet database “Poeti d’Italia in lingua latina”, which enables the search of a selection of works of 283 Latinists from the sphere of the Italian cultural influence, created between 1250 and 1550. A comparison of the Split corpus with the Italian reveals the outlines of a “standard poetic language”, a poetic langue of the period - an excellent example lies in the verbal correspondences that are rare in antiquity but common in the early modern period (like Marulić’sand Selimbrić’s hexameter clause pietate fideque) - as well as expressions and procedures in which the Split poets diverge from the fellow poets in Italy (e. g. , Paskvalić’s periphrasis silicis pondus for a gravestone). Such a search of the database, finally, brings us to poems like “Ad diuites” of Girolamo Balbi (Veniceca 1450 - Rome, after 1530), a poem that brings together motifs of several textsof members of the circle: of Marulić, Božičević and Paskvalić. This brief glance in to the literary communication in side Renaissance Split proves that Marulić and his less known peers competently used the standard poetic idiom of the two coasts of the Adriatic. At the same time, corpus research shows just how much this “corpus” is actually a fluid, uncertain, and volatile set; its alleged boundedness helps in as much as it gives us a point of departure. But I think that this fluidity, uncertainty, and volatility are far from being drawbacks; on the contrary, there is an important cognitive value in them. Also, the very research tools and procedures that we can deploy today assist us in coming to terms with this kind of volatility.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
2912
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2006.
Visits: 2.085 *