Original scientific paper

Aloysius Cervinus Ragvsinus: The Veronese Verses

Vladimir Rezar ; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

Abstract

The article presents a long-hidden jewel of Dubrovnik early-humanist poetry, one of those works the existence and contents of which has been mainly the subject of speculation. A small cycle of Latin poems of a markedly amorous tone was composed by Aloysius Ceruinus Ragusinus, better known as Ludouicus Ceruarius Tubero (Ludovik Crijević Tuberon, 1458–1527), author of the notable prose work Commentariorum de temporibus suis libri undecim.
Referred to are four poems, comprising 136 lines; the first, in hexameters, laments the death of the nightingale of the Ragusan poet Ioannes Gotius (Ivan Gučetić); the second, in Sapphic stanzas, praises the poet’s beloved Asteris; the third in elegiac couplets describes the dramatic collapse of their love, while the final epigram addressed to the Veronese humanist Jacopo Maffei to some extent explains the Veronese provenance of the verses. The existence of the poems found was first referred to in 1972 in a lexicon entry written by Miroslav Pantić, identifying them as part of a lost Verona manuscript from the Saibante collection. The information that the manuscript had gone from Verona was however inaccurate: although the local catalogue had described it back in 1892, it took more than a century to establish that the codex containing the verses of Ceruinus has been ever since kept in the civic library in Verona (ms. 1366). The miscellany with about three hundred Latin epigrams, mostly written by Veronese humanists, was compiled at the end of the 15th century, while the composing of the Ceruinus’ verses can be placed approximately to about 1480.
Ceruinus’ poems proved him to be a talented author who was well versed in classical Latin poetry. The author’s reading had clearly included not only poets of the Golden but those of the Silver Age as well. The influence of the elegists, particularly of Ovid, is pervasive, but it would seem that Ceruinus endeavoured in particular to weave into his verses poetic elements of the best known Verona poet of all times, Gaius Valerius Catullus. Similarly, as far as early imperial authors are concerned, Ceruinus seems to had been well acquainted with Martialis’ poetry. However, a poet from that period who had a particularly intriguing influence on the final form of the first three poems is Publius Papinius Statius, particularly in his Silvae collection, which until the 1470s was not well known among the humanists even in Italy. The first commented edition of this collection was edited in 1475 by Domizio Calderini (Domitius Calderinus Veronensis), a philologist who, apart from this, was among the first to publish comments on Martial and Ovid, and whose literary fame in the second half of the fifteenth century exceeded the borders of his native Verona. With the information that the addressee of the last Ceruinus’ poem was a prominent humanist of Verona and that the emphatic reminiscences of Catullus and Statius in the poetic cycle generate with their intertextual potential an identifiable reference to Verona, the whole of the Ceruinus’ collection gives the impression of belonging in the Veronese cultural context.
The paper has therefore attempted to throw light on the context that lay behind the specific stylization of this poetic cycle. An essential preliminary for this was to show that Ceruinus’ biography as currently understood, which refers to his many years of education in Paris, is completely inaccurate. Subsequently we attempted to indicate where, then, Ceruinus might so early on have become acquainted with a work like Statius’ Silvae, which at that time was only starting to circulate in the humanist world. After it turned out that there were no indicators at all of Ceruinus having been a student in Verona or Naples – milieus that were particularly interested in classical poets whose influence can be identified in Ceruinus’ poems – or in any other foreign renaissance cultural centre, the focus shifted to Dubrovnik itself and the intellectual climate of the end of the 1570s.
Analysis eventually confirmed that at least two Ragusans had before the end of the 1570s become well acquainted with Statius’ Silvae. In addition to Ceruinus there was his older fellow citizen and perhaps his patron, the forementioned Latin poet Ioannes Gotius. Reconstructed segments of the rapid reception of Silvae in Dubrovnik reveal its most plausible source, the Italian humanist Tideo Acciarini, a proven admirer of Statius’ collection and Ragusan teacher in the period 1477 to 1480. At the same moment, Gotius’ business activity in Verona, as well as appearance of his Latin epitaph among other laments on death of Domizio Calderini in another Veronese miscellany, could possibly explain Ceruinus’ contact with the humanist circle there, and then of the finding of his poems precisely in Verona. In other words, everything would suggest that Gotius, a poet with an already established reputation and one connected with the humanists of Verona, opened the doors to the Veronese cultural elite for his young Ragusan protégé.

Keywords

Aloysius Ceruinus Ragusinus; Latin love poetry; ms. 1366 (Biblioteca Civica di Verona); Tideo Acciarini; Ioannes Gotius Ragusinus; Domizio Calderini; Statius’ Silvae

Hrčak ID:

304312

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/304312

Publication date:

15.6.2023.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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