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Text and Context in Giovanni Vespucci's Preface to His

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Text and Context in Giovanni Vespucci's Preface to His Chapter 21 Text and Context in Giovanni Vespucci’s Preface to His School Translation of Sallust’s Catiline (1490) Gerard González Germain 1 Translating Sallust into the Vernacular as a School Exercise? MS Bigazzi 296 at the Biblioteca Moreniana of Florence contains an exception- al document in the history of Florentine Renaissance education:1 a fair copy of a school exercise produced by a twelve-year-old student, Giovanni Vespucci. The school exercise consisted of a vernacular translation of the complete text of Sallust’s Coniuratio Catilinae. A Latin preface dedicated the translation to Giovanni’s father, Guidantonio Vespucci, and was signed in Florence on 10 November 1490. What makes this episode so extraordinary is that it simply falls outside the schoolroom practice of the Italian Renaissance. After elementary school (where students learned to read), secondary teaching was aimed at teaching pupils to write in Latin; this was accomplished by means of grammar text- books and school-level readings of the Latin classics.2 The vernacular language had certainly entered the Italian classroom as early as the thirteenth century: it was used to gloss the meaning of Latin words, as well as to facilitate stu- dents’ understanding of grammatical theory.3 Translation exercises (known as themata) were also in practice from the fourteenth century onward: these consisted of sentences, short fragments or even whole letters written in the vernacular which had to be translated into Latin; they served as exercises for mastering Latin grammar in the first stage of secondary education, and later 1 Florence, Biblioteca Moreniana, MS Bigazzi 296. See Angelo Maria Bandini, Vita e lettere di Amerigo Vespucci, ed. Gustavo Uzielli (Firenze, 1898), 8–9 (with transcription of the preface); Armando Verde, Lo studio fiorentino 1473–1503. Ricerche e documenti (Pistoia, 1977), vol. 3/1, 506; Patricia Osmond, Robert Ulery, “Sallustius Crispus, Gaius”, in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, ed. Virginia Brown (Washington D.C., 2003), vol. 8, 183–326, there 198. 2 Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2001); Silvia Rizzo, Ricerche sul latino umanistico (Roma, 2002), 125–217; Robert Black, Education and Society in Florentine Tuscany. Teachers, Pupils and Schools, c. 1250–1500 (Leiden, 2007), 121–62. 3 Black, Humanism (see above, n. 2), 106–16, 275–81. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004361553_022 290 González Germain on for practicing stylistics and rhetoric.4 Despite the ever-growing impor- tance of vernacular in the educational system, one thing remained unchanged throughout the Renaissance: translations of classical texts into the vernacular were never part of the school curriculum. Giovanni Vespucci’s translation is also unusual for other reasons. The study of Sallust’s entire work already seems quite advanced for a twelve-year old, but the preface – written in a highly rhetorical Latin – would have gone beyond most children’s abilities. Equally uncommon is the production of a fair copy of a school exercise, simply because it lacked any didactic purpose. To shed more light on this unique episode in Renaissance Italian education and try to explain the context in which it took place, we will first turn our at- tention to the actors who were involved in it, after which we will focus on the content of the preface itself. 2 Giovanni, Guidantonio, Agostino and Bartolomeo Vespucci The student responsible for the translation was Giovanni di Guidantonio Vespucci. Still a little studied figure, Giovanni is mainly known for having owned several paintings of Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo in his Florentine palace in Via dei Servi. In addition, he is remembered for his political role in the restoration of the Medici family in Florence in 1512, and as a member of the entourage of Dukes Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici in the following years.5 In the Florentine Libri delle Età his date of birth is given as 13 December 1476,6 but the baptismal records show that in fact he was born two years later, on 9 December 1478:7 he was therefore a month short of his 12th birthday when he wrote his school translation. Giovanni’s father – and the dedicatee of the preface – was Guidantonio Vespucci (1436–1501), a doctor of law and a prominent politician of the last quarter of the Quattrocento. From 1478, he headed many Florentine em- bassies, and twice he was elected gonfaloniere di giustizia (1487 and 1498).8 4 Black, Humanism (see above, n. 2), 111–6; Rizzo, Ricerche (see above, n. 2), 136–41. 5 Bandini, Vita (see above, n. 1), 7–9 and 76; Verde, Lo studio (see above, n. 1), 506; Alessandro Cecchi, Botticelli (Milano, 2005), 342 and 365; Dennis Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo. Visions Beautiful and Strange (New Haven-London, 2006), 100–6 and 309 n. 145. 6 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Tratte 80, fol. 136r. 7 Archivio dell’Opera del Duomo di Firenze, Registri battesimali 4, fol. 240v. 8 Bandini, Vita (see above, n. 1), 7 and 75–6; Lauro Martines, Lawyers and Statecraft in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1968), ad indicem; Violetta de Angelis, “Marsilio Ficino .
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