L'asino d'oro nel rinascimento: Dai volgarizzamenti alle raffigurazioni pittoriche. .

Mariantonietta Acocella. L'asino d'oro nel rinascimento: Dai volgarizzamenti alle raffigurazioni pittoriche.

(Memoria del tempo, 21.) Ravenna: A. Longo Editore, 2001. 223 Pp. index, append. illus. bibi. [euro]30.99. ISBN: 88-8063-286-8.

Two second-century classical texts captivated Renaissance readers, writers, and artists: the Greek Lucius, or the Ass, formerly attributed to Lucian of Samosata but now held to be of uncertain authorship, and the Roman Apuleius' Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. In Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these two works circulated widely in both manuscripts and printed editions and were known interchangeably as l'asino d'oro, since both recounted the tale of a man who, curious to experience the art of magic, was transformed into an ass and suffered at the hands of many before regaining his human form. Mariantonietta Acocella examines the fortunes and mutations of these narratives as they were translated into the vernacular, interpreted and adapted for a Christian public, and depicted in engravings, paintings, and fresco cycles.

Acocella begins by mapping the print history of both tales. Under the rule of Ercole I d'Este, Matteo Maria Boiardo translated Apuleius' Metamorp hoses into Italian while another scholar labored to render Lucian's collected works in the vernacular. The identity of the latter translator is uncertain, as the only extant manuscript, Varicano Chigiano L.VI.215 (VC), is anonymous. A few decades later, another citizen of Ferrara, the printer Niccolo Zoppino, published Italian translations of both the Latin and Greek versions of l'asino d'oro, Apulegio volgare (1518) and Luciano: De asino aureo vulgari (1523), under Boiardo's name. Although Boiardo was not known to read Greek, literary critics have long accepted him to be the translator of Lucian's tale, reasoning that he worked nor from the original text, but from Poggio Bracciolini's Latin translation. Through a sensitive and attentive comparative reading of the VG manuscript, Bracciolini's Latin, and the Greek original, Acocella argues persuasively that the 1523 Zoppino edition was translated directly from the Greek. She then reattributes this work to another member of Ercole I's court, the physician and humanist Niccolo da Lonigo, or Leoniceno. She musters a number of convincing arguments to support her thesis, including the fact that both the VC manuscript and the Zoppino edition follow Leoniceno's own prescriptions for translating from the Greek, and that when Zoppino published a second edition of Lucian's collected works (the first was anonymous), he credits Leoniceno as the translator. Although based on the VC manuscript, this edition mysteriously lacks the tale of the ass. Ultimately, Acocella must admit that the documents do not allow for a certain attribution. While Acocella's philological sleuthing is truly impressive, she unfortunately does not push beyond this endeavor to offer a plausible explanation for why Zoppino would be motivated to misartribure the translation to Boiardo or to seek to understand why the tale of the golden ass so fascinated the Este court.

In the extensively illustrated second chapter, Acocella examines the interplay of visual and verbal representations of l'asino d'oro, focusing on the tale of Cupid and Psyche, an embedded narrative in Apuleius' Metamorphoses that enjoyed an autonomous success. The extensive catalogue of literary texts, paintings, frescos, and engravings depicting Cupid and Psyche will undoubtedly prove useful to other scholars. While the discussion of Raphael's, and his students Giulio Romano's and Penn del Vagas, use of verbal descriptions as inspiration for their visual depictions of Psyche depends heavily on the scholarship of others, Acocella's detailed analysis of Vicenzo Tamagni's lesser known fresco cycle, Sala dell' asino d'oro in the Rocca de' Rossi in San Secondo near Palma, reveals that the artist based his work not on a literary text, but on the engravings in the 1519 Zoppino edition of Apulegio volgare.

The appendix contains Acocella's critical edition of Lucio o l'asino, based on the VC manuscript, and Luciano: De asino aureo vulgari (1523). As neither the manuscript nor the rare book is readily available, this appendix renders the work all the more attractive. Acocella's book, with the its numerous illustrations, lengthy bibliography, and extensive documentation will become an indispensable resource for scholars interested in furthering our understanding of the role of the tale of l'asino d'oro in Renaissance culture.