La raccolta canonica delle "Epistole". (Reviews).

Francesco Barbaro, Epistolario II. La raccolta canonica delle "Epistole." Ed. Claudio Griggio. (Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento. Carteggi umanistici.) Florence: Olschki, 1999. liv + 807 pp. IL 190,000. ISBN 88-222-4789-2.

The subtitle indicates well the scope of this edition: Volume II contains the canonical collection of Francesco Barbaro's "Familiar" letters as found in Vaticanus latinus 5911, which he had compiled in the winter of 1452-53. This was to be followed by the collection of the letters of his later years, compiled in 1456-60, now San Daniele del Friuli, Biblioteca Guarneriana, Guarn. 28, which will presumably be edited in Volume III. In dividing his two canonical letter-books into Epistulae Familiares and Seniles, Barbaro was, of course, imitating the division and method adopted nearly a century earlier by Francesco Petrarca, who was, in turn, following Cicero's grouping of his Epistulae ad Familiares in a single collection. Like his contemporary Poggio Bracciolini, Barbaro's selection of his letters for presentation in several canonical collections allowed the Venetian humanist to engage in some "Renaissance self-fashioning." Though the letters are usually presented in chronological order, the texts of some of th e earlier letters have been omitted from the canonical collection, permitting Barbaro to present his own interests and the responses of his correspondents in just the right light. The editor Claudio Griggio has wisely respected the integrity of the Renaissance letter-book, treating such collections as "works of art" that made paramount the author's own intention in the selection and original editing of his letters.

Griggio's excellent edition follows the well-developed editorial principles which have long guided the series Carteggi umanistici, sponsored by the Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento under the general editorship of Eugenio Garin. In his preface, Griggio provides a census of the nearly 250 codices that contain letters to or from Barbaro, each with its own siglum denoting city and library where the manuscript is housed. The seventy-five printed texts (stampe) containing Barbaro letters are arranged in chronological order from 1471 to 1999, each identified by a capital S with number superscript. Thus, readers of Volume II have ready access to sigla used in the edition, though they will also wish to consult the descriptions of these manuscripts and printed versions given at length in Volume I on the manuscript tradition of the Epistolario published in 1991. In the preface are a listing of the few manuscripts discovered and printed editions published in the nineties and a note on the formation of the can onical collections, with a table modestly called "diagramma evolutivo," which depicts Griggio's dynamic interpretation of the formation of precanonical collections that were later divided into two families. Under "criteri di edizione" Griggio discusses issues of orthography, punctuation, particular usages of certain copyists, and Barbaro's autograph annotations of several codices. For each letter of the nearly 800-page edition of the "Francisci Barbari Epistolarum liber" Griggio provides a headnote listing the sigla with folio or page numbers of all manuscript witnesses and printed versions, and three sets of critical apparatus keyed to the line numbers assigned to each letter. One set notes all textual variants, another identifies the rare classical and patristic quotations found in the text, while a third notes marginal notations, mainly in Barbaro's own hand from Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. XIII 72 (= 4109). Thus, each letter is collated with manuscript witnesses and printed texts and annot ated for variants, quotations and authorial interventions.

Some statistics may help to convey the scope, contents and importance of the volume. In this first volume of the two canonical collections, Barbaro included 390 letters written between 1414 and 1451, addressed to or received from some 160 different correspondents. Of these letters, the vast majority (345) were written by Barbaro himself. There are thirty-eight letters sent to him from twenty-three friends and acquaintances, while seven letters were neither written by nor addressed to Francesco Barbara, who no doubt included them because their bearing on his career and works. These include Pier Paolo Vergerio's defense, written in 1417, of Barbaro's youthful De re uxoria, a letter from Francesco's son Zaccaria to Ermolao Barbaro the Elder on the situation in Brescia at the beginning of the famous siege, and a letter from Milan calling for the surrender of Brescia at the height of the siege in the late winter of 1439, with Barbaro's reply on behalf of the people of Brescia.

The range of Francesco Barbaro's principal correspondents reflects his pre-eminent position in the first generation of the core group of Venetian patrician humanists identified by Margaret King in her standard Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (1986). Those exchanging at least five letters with Barbara include Ermolao Barbaro the Elder, Zaccaria Barbaro, Ludovico Foscarini, Leonardo Giustinian, Lauro Quirini, Pietro Tomasi, Ludovico Cardinal Trevisan, Zaccaria Trevisan the Younger, and Daniel Vitturi. King excluded from the core group only two Venetian nobles who were among Barbara's major correspondents with eleven letters each: Francesco Cardinal Condulmer and Ermolao Dona. Barbara's main non-Venetian correspondents include several of the major figures of Quattrocento Italy: Flavio Biondo, Poggio Bracciolini, Guarino of Verona, Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici, and Pope Nicholas V.

Though the texts stretch from Barbaro's famous discussion of the translation of classical Greek texts addressed to Lorenzo de' Monaco in 1415 to a letter of recommendation for ecclesiastical appointment from 1451, the bulk of the letters fall into two groups. Some 103 letters treat aspects of the defense of Brescia directed by Barbaro during the siege by Milanese troops in 1437 to late 1441. A second group of 125 letters were written during the three years from the summer of 1446 to the autumn of 1449 when Barbara served a Luogotenente in Friuli and a savio grande during the crisis occasioned by the death of Filippo Maria Visconti, the creation of Ambrosian Republic, and the rise of Francesco Sforza to power. Here Francesco Barbaro proved a cautious statesman, his attitude perhaps tempered by the horrors of the siege of Brescia. Against further ambitions in Lombardy during the succession crisis in the duchy of Milan, Barbaro consistently counseled moderation, insisting on no aspirations to Venetian dominion w est of the Adda River.

More than any humanist letter-book, Barbaro's is the record of the career and values of a major Venetian diplomat, soldier, statesman and cultural leader. Thus, Claudio Griggio's superb edition should become an essential tool not only for the study of early Italian humanism, but also for all students of the history of Venice in the first half of the Quattrocento.