Stefano Benedetti. Itinerari di Cebete: Tradizione e ricezione della Tabula in Italia dal XV al XVIII secolo.

(Studi (e testi) italiani: Collana del Dipartimemo di italianistica e spettacolo, 13.) Italy: Bulzoni Editore, 2001. 406 pp. index. illus. 31 [euro]. ISBN: 88-8319-645-7.

The long and varied fortune of the Tabula Cebetis--a dramatic and enigmatic allegory of human life--can be considered the result of a reading mechanism, predisposed in the very structure of the work, that establishes with the historical reader "an open and interactive relation" (25). Benedetti reconstructs the stages and the routes of the complex itinerary of the Tabula in Italian culture from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century: the textual and linguistic rediscovery, the first translations from Greek into Latin, the interpretation of the work by humanists, the poetic versions and prose vulgarizations in academic circles and in those of the courtiers, and the cultural and literary assimilation from the Cinquecento to the literary rendition of Giambattista Vico. This is a very vast and demanding research project--conceived by its author as travel within the travel--which shows first and foremost how the fortune and different manifestations of the Tabula have always been strictly connected with its structural prerogatives; in particular, with its peculiar ability to interact with different readers and translators in different historical epochs, to stimulate everyone to read and to reproduce the extraordinary experience of Cebes with their own esthetic, cultural, and existential modalities. In the large introduction of the book, Benedetti examines some important preliminary questions regarding the attribution, the interpretation, the content, the linguistic form, the structure, and the composition technique of the Tabula, issues upon which different evaluations of the characteristics of the cultural-historical reception of the work depend.

Attributed to the Theban philosopher Cebes, Socrates' pupil and interlocutor in Plato's Phaedo, the Tabula was recognized, around the end of the nineteenth century, as an apocryphal and anonymous work, born in the eclectic circles of the philosophical schools of the first and second centuries A.D. It belongs to the genre of the narrated dialogue of the Socratic-Gnostic tradition and consists of an allegory of human life, which is represented as a travel in search of happiness. It is built around an ingenious fictio, capable of engaging the reader in a process of identification with the represented image and arousing strong visual, emotional, and intellectual involvement.

The manuscript of the Tabula's Greek text first circulated in the second half of the fifteenth century, in the Roman milieu of the revival of Greek culture promoted by Niccolo V and Cardinal Bessarione. The humanist Giano Lascaris might have had the major responsibility for the Greek text's first edition, which has been attributed to the Florentine press of Lorenzo d'Alopa around 1495-96. In 1497 the first Latin translation by the Paduan humanist Ludovico Odasi appeared in Bologna, included in a miscellany of texts edited by Filippo Beroaldo the Old and emphasizing the moral-pedagogical intent. With this edition of remarkable elegance and textual trustworthiness, the Tabula achieved its effective humanistic dissemination in Italy and in Europe. The didactic-linguistic intent prevails in the first Greek-Latin edition of the Tabula, published between 1501 and 1502 by Aldus Manutius. This edition, within a collection of grammatical and religious texts, received both the didactic functionality of the Greek first edition of Florence and the moral instance of the Beroaldian collection and benefited immediately from a vast European fortune. As probable author of this translation Benedetti suggests, with good reasons, the name of the monk Pietro Candido from Camaldoli, who as a Greek scholar was a long time collaborator of Manutius and an assiduous scholar of manuscripts for his library in the Monastery of the Angels in Florence. The lost translation by Candido, who had personally brought from Greece a Greek codex of the Tabula, responded to the highest requirements of the Aldine edition: a linguistic-grammatical education and a Christian moral formation. The first edition in the vernacular, by Francesco Angelo Coccio, printed by Marcolini in Venice in 1538, represents a historically significant moment in the itinerary of the Tabula: "the arcane figure of the pictor sapientiae was canonized by this time and its picta philosophia placed itself as a singular accessory phenomenon within that larger phenomenology of the ut pictura poesis, which ... shaped the theoretical debates, poetics, rhetorical, and figurative practices of an entire cultural horizon" (275). Nevertheless, Benedetti specifies that the debate on painting as poetry and philosophy represents too "decentralized" a background to be assumed as a cultural context for the Tabula. The work, indeed, questions "the theme of a philosophical doctrine sub specie picturae" and must therefore be contextualized in the opposite direction of the "expansion of the rhetorical and symbolical borders of the literary culture" (276). It remains, however, indubitable that the "iconism" of the Tabula constitutes in the Renaissance the "determining reason for the textual recovery and reading of this small work" (275). Its "primary quality of symbolic image ... binds our text to an imaginary of wisdom" more than to a philosophical school. In this sense I consider plausible Benedetti's proposal to let "the nucleus of the ut pictura poesis as it is conveyed by the Tabula ..." gravitate "in that iconism of Neoplatonic and Hermetic tradition that will have one of its more completed expressions in the fifth dialogue of the first part of the Eroici furori by Giordano Bruno" (277), but that had already found a fertile ground in Ficino's work.

This double constant of the Renaissance reception comes up again, with different cultural outcomes, in the Discorsi morali su la Tavola eli Cebete Tebano by Agostino Mascardi, published in 1627, to which Benedetti devotes ample analysis. In this work that "rising erudite attitude of the first half of the seventeenth century, when one could find in the Tabula a repertoire of concepts and doctrines capable of great philosophical-moral solicitation," finds complete expression (324). Nevertheless, the tendency in the Baroque age to revive the philosophical dimension of the Tabula did not come from the Italian Renaissance tradition--in which a figurative and literary valorization prevailed--but from the Transalpine culture that operated during the seventeenth century according to a solid exegetic praxis, a true "encyclopedic-doctrinaire canonization" of Cebes' work. In this context Benedetti considers Mascardi's Discorsi morali "the other focus of a vicissitude in reception, that, already expressed in the priority of a humanistic tradition soon extended to Europe, comes to know in this vast work perhaps the most significant circumstance of its entire Italian parable" (325-26).

Benedetti's research follows "Cebes' tortuous itineraries" with a security of method and complete critical mastery, between literary history and philology, iconology and iconography, and history and philosophy. The book represents a contribution of great value about a complex and greatly unexplored subject.

ALESSANDRO D'ALESSANDRO

Fiesole, Italy

TRANS. ANTONELLA DALLA TORRE

Graduate School, City University of New York