Pietro Odo da Montopoli e la Biblioteca di Niccolo V, con osservazioni sul 'De orthographia' di Tortelli.

Gemma Donati. Pietro Odo da Montopoli e la Biblioteca di Niccolo V, con osservazioni sul 'De orthographia' di Tortelli.

(Inedita, Saggi 21). Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 2000. 217 pp. index. n.p. ISBN: 88-85913-36-9.

Like Abraham Mendelssohn, son of a famous father and father of a famous son but himself a bit of a blur, Pietro Odo has hitherto been chiefly known as the successor of Lorenzo Valla at the Studio of Rome and predecessor (and teacher) there of Pomponio Leto. Gemma Donati has rescued his philological attainments from the shadows, or rather from the scratchy remains of his marginalia in Vatican manuscripts, though the poems for which he was best known in his lifetime were published or republished some thirty years ago.

The scattered testimonia on his life are brought together in an opening biographical section. He was born at Montopoli in the Sabine country, near the old abbey of Farfa, some time in the period 1420-25 (whence his Latin name, Petrus Odus Montopolitanus). Little is known of his education, but he was certainly himself educating boys at the Roman local (rionali) schools by the time of the papacy of Nicholas V (1447-55); one of his poems depicts a school day of teaching grammar, poetry, and letter-writing. About 1450 he became a professor at the Studio, in which post he was confirmed -- with a better salary -- by a bull of Pius II in 1458. Donati casts doubt on the accepted tradition (initiated by Pomponio, it seems) that he actually succeeded to Valla's chair of eloquence at the Studio, since he must long have been a colleague alongside him by the time of the latter's death in 1457. Despite their common interest in grammar and other aspects of "eloquence," there is scant evidence of their being acquainted, thou gh Odo was close to Valla's great friend Giovanni Tortelli and to other humanists such as Flavio Biondo and Pier Candido Decembrio. He died young in 1463, though not as a suicide as some have suggested. His letters and some of his poems suggest that Odo was a born complainer. Pius II hints at mental instability.

The meat of the book lies in close examination of Odo's manuscripts, those he made for himself and those he corrected -- it is here revealed -- for incorporation in the library of Nicholas V, the first founder of the Vatican Library. In one case, the poems of Claudian, the papal manuscript was a direct copy of an older manuscript owned by Odo, both of them being annotated by him. His handwriting, the system of graphic signs he used, the differing grades of his marginal or interlinear interventions are analyzed, sometimes at length. His notes may be divided into notabilia and brief indications of the argument; explanations of the poetic texts in hand, including identifications of persons and places and so on; and notes of a purely philological character.

These last attract Donati's most concentrated attention. Along the way she restores to this umanista dimenticato a number of conjectures generally credited to later scholars which in her view show "good powers of divination" as being reasonable, even ingenious, paleographically possible, and metrically acceptable. As with pretty well all humanists before Politian, it is not always easy to distinguish in his work between the fruit of collation and conjectural emendation. She makes the point (as a pupil of Silvia Rizzo would) that collation for Odo and the humanists at large was a part of emendation and that it is unhistorical to seek a scrupulous recensio of the witnesses at this primitive stage of textual criticism. All we can ask is what they asked of themselves: is this the most accurate text possible with the materials available to me? This was specially important in manuscripts, such as the deluxe two-volume Ovid, that were destined for the papal library -- though undeclared, collation of different witnes ses demonstrably played a larger part in the constitution of texts for Nicholas V than in manuscripts for Odo's own use. All in all, though his suggested readings do not always hit the mark, those that do greatly outweigh the "inutili."

The last part of the book deals with Donati's finding Odo's hand in annotations of Tortelli's autograph Orthographia, Vat. lat. 1478, the work that made him famous. The same qualities of caution in emendation and a sense of responsibility towards the text are just as evident here as before. Donati draws these strands together in a brief synthesis of Tortelli's role in the "co-founding" of the Vatican Library, his friend Odo's part as reviser and corrector of works destined for it, and (the fundamental impulse) Nicholas V's overriding concern for the accuracy of the texts in his new library.

Donati sometimes, one feels, protests too much on behalf of a rather middling sort of humanist -- no Valla he, nor even a Leto -- and the physical presentation of the book could certainly have been improved (the plates, too few in truth, are not keyed to the text, the sigla of the MSS considered are tucked away [17] without mention of what the texts are, etc.). But this is very sound and solid work, and one hopes that Gemma Donati will continue this sort of investigation, perhaps on more rewarding material.