Alessandro Daneloni. Poliziano e il testo dell' Institutio Oratoria.

(Percorsi dei Classici, 6.) Messina: Universita degli Studi di Messina, 2001. Pbk. 254 pp. index. 41.31 [euro]. ISBN: 88-87541-04-3.

Angelo Poliziano began his professorial in the fall of 1480 lecturing at the University of Florence on Statius' Silvae and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria. Nine years later, in 1489, he published his Miscellaneorum Centuria Prima, one of the great landmarks in the history of classical philology. Consequently, these first lectures of 1480-81 are prime evidence for our understanding of his development as a scholar. Lucia Cesarini Martinelli edited Poliziano's commentary on the Silvae in 1978. Alessandro Daneloni has now given us a detailed study of Poliziano's frequently dense autograph marginalia in his working copy of Quintilian (Milan: Antonio Zarotto, 1476; Hain 13648), which is today the incunable Banco rari 379 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale of Florence.

Daneloni says (8) that he is leaving for another occasion an analysis of the marginalia not dealing with the constitutio textus. So it is impossible to say on the basis of the evidence presented in the present book how much Poliziano approached Quintilian as a textbook on rhetoric as opposed to a text in need of philological dissection. But the present work does make clear that Poliziano gave a great deal of attention to establishing the correct text of Quintilian. Only manuscripti mutili of Quintilian circulated until Poggio Bracciolini discovered the complete text in a manuscript in the monastery of St. Gall during the Council of Basel, 1414-17. Poggio's sensational find allowed Lorenzo Valla some fifteen years later to scandalize the humanistic world by arguing for the superiority of Quintilian over Cicero as a teacher of Latin and rhetoric. Valla's Comparatio is lost, but his notes in his working copy of Quintilian, MS Lat. 7723 of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, were edited in 1996 by Lucia Cesarini Martinelli and Alessandro Perosa. So in working on the text of Quintilian, Poliziano was following in the steps of the most brilliant humanist scholar of the mid-Quattrocento.

Banco rari 379 shows Poliziano practicing in 1480-81, as Daneloni puts it (36, n. 2), an as yet metodologia poco rigorosa. He did not consistently identify the sources of his collation, and his use of different-colored inks seems to have been a matter of taste rather than a method of marking the readings of different manuscripts. Nor did he methodically collate his sources, but resorted to them severally or all together on different passages (see 127). Nonetheless, Banco rari 379 also shows Poliziano already well advanced in his approach to collation and bringing to bear his extraordinary erudition and feel for classical Latin.

Banco rari 379 contains the vulgar humanistic version of Quintilian with some unique characteristics. Poliziano worked on the text using an undetermined number of manuscripts, but he relied most of all on three. The manuscript that Poliziano called the codex antiquus Daneloni identifies as the tenth-century Laur. Plut. 46.7. The one Poliziano called the codex intercisus Daneloni proves is the ninth-century Ambros. F 111 sup., probably found in the library of the Florentine monastery of San Marco in Poliziano's day. The third, the codex domesticus or poggianus, Daneloni cannot identify with certainty but believes was an apograph of the celebrated exemplar Poggii, as Poliziano asserted, which had absorbed some fifteenth-century contamination. In short, Poliziano had successfully sought out an exceptional group of manuscripts against which to collate Banco rari 379.

Poliziano marked with cruces all the passages he judged suspect or corrupted. These he strove to heal by a combination of collatio and emendatio. What he determined depends on how one interprets an abbreviation read by different modern scholars as [c.sup.e] or c' or [c.sup.o] found both in his commentary on Statius and in his marginalia in Banco rari 379. Daneloni endorses the interpretation put forward by Alfred Klutz in 1911 and amply demonstrated in more recent times by Silvia Rizzo, namely, that the abbreviation stood for corrige. Therefore, the appearance of corrige in a set of marginalia means that Poliziano had decided upon a solution for the perceived corruption of the particular passage. The culmination of the book are the sixty-eight pages in small print (155-222) where Daneloni minutely analyzes the instances where Poliziano marked his marginalia with corrige. Daneloni pays close attention not only to the opinion of modern scholarship but also to the sometimes superior or similar solutions of Poliziano's younger contemporary Raffaele Regio in his Ducenta Problemata in totidem Institutionis Oratoriae Quintiliani Depravationes of 1491 and his Annotationes on Quintilian of 1493. Indeed, Daneloni thinks a case can be made that Regio had access indirectly, if not directly, to Poliziano's work in Banco rari 379 (182-83) The result is a richly informative study of Poliziano's thinking not only as he hit upon some brilliant insights but also as he wavered between solutions and as he sometimes missed opportunities when he had good data at hand. I do not have the expertise in the textual tradition of Quintilian to evaluate adequately Daneloni's analysis on that account, but I think it is safe to say that Daneloni has provided us with an immensely useful new work on Poliziano and the history of classical scholarship in the Renaissance.

JOHN MONFASANI

The University at Albany, State University of New York