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Home , Giannozzo Manetti, Poggio Bracciolini, Vespasiano da Bisticci

CRITICISM OF BIBLICAL HUMANISTS IN ITALY

John Monfasani

Despite Lorenzo Valla’s originality and the image sometimes given of his New Testament scholarship as especially transgressive,1 one can argue that the pivotal fi gure in quattrocento biblical studies was (1447–55).2 Not only did Nicholas call Valla to Rome, inte- grate him into the Curial establishment, receive his dedication of the Collatio Novi Testamenti, and recommend the work to others in the papal court,3 he also was a great friend and protector of ,

1 See, e.g., Anna Morisi, “La fi lologia neotestamentaria di Lorenzo Valla,” Nuova rivista storica 48 (1964), 35–49; Jacques Chomarat, “Les Annotations de Valla, celles d’ et la grammaire,” in Olivier Fatio and Pierr Fraenkel, eds., Histoire de l’exégèse au XVIe siècle: Textes du colloque internationale tenu a Genève en 1976 (Geneva, 1978), pp. 202–28; and Salvatore I. Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia (, 1972), pp. 277–403, who stresses Valla’s criticism of Thomas Aquinas and his polemic with . 2 As Ursula Jaitner-Hahner, Humanismus in Umbrien und Rom: Lilius Tifernas, Kanzler und Gelehrter des Quattrocento, 1 (Baden-Baden, 1993), p. 745, n. 21, points out, in his biographical profi le of Nicholas V, Vespasiano da Bisticci specifi cally called attention to the pope’s devotion to Bible study: “et la Bibia tutta aveva a mente a suo proposito l’alegava. Feciongli questi testi della Scrittura Sancta grandissimo onore nel suo pon- tifi cato.” Quotation from Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, ed. Aulo Greco, 1 (Florence, 1970–76), 39. 3 See Nicholas of Cusa’s letter to Valla in 1450 asking for a copy of the Collatio after Pope Nicholas V had yielded to him (remisit) his own copy to look at; Lorenzo Valla, Epistole, ed. Ottavio Besomi and Mariangela Regoliosi (Padua, 1984), pp. 350–51, no. 47a. Riccardo Fubini, L’Umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici: Origini rinascimentali, critica moderna (Milan, 2001), pp. 116 and 182, takes the position that Nicholas V blocked Valla’s publication of the Collatio and then, in 1453, transferred his hopes for biblical scholarship to Giannozzo Manetti, but I do not see the evidence for such a scenario. In his polemic with Valla in 1452–53, Poggio Bracciolini, a papal secretary in the know about goings-on at the Curia, asserted that Valla had not published the Collatio for fear of being burned as a heretic; Poggio Bracciolini, Opera Omnia, 1, ed. Riccardo Fubini (Turin, 1964–69), p. 231. But he did not even hint, as he surely would have liked to, at any papal veto. In response, Valla explained that he was too occupied with other projects to publish the Collatio at the moment and quoted the letter of Cusanus cited above to prove how much Cusanus and Nicholas V thought of him (“quid etiam papa de me sentiat”); Lorenzo Valla, Opera Omnia, 1 (Turin, 1962), pp. 339–40. Furthermore, Valla nowhere ever suggested that he wished to translate the Bible, and he demon- strably continued to work on the Collatio in the last years of Nicholas V’s pontifi cate. In essence, Fubini revived the rumor reported by Pierre Cousturier in his De Tralatione 16 john monfasani who shares Valla’s fame as biblical humanist in the quattrocento.4 Furthermore, Nicholas encouraged translations of Greek patristic biblical commentaries, such as ’s translations of John Chrysostom’s sermons on Matthew, Cyril of Alexandria’s com- mentary on John,5 and Gregory of Nyssa’s Vita Moysi,6 as well as Lilius Tifernas’s translation of pseudo-John Chrysostom’s homilies on Job.7 In addition, Nicholas was the founder of the modern , which contained a rich collection of Greek bibles and Greek patristic commentaries,8 though the famous Codex Vaticanus of the Bible (Vat. Gr. 1209) seems to have entered the Vatican sometime between his pontifi cate and the inventory of 1481.9 It is conceivable but thus far not demonstrable that Lorenzo Valla used Vatican manuscripts in the revision of his Collatio Novi Testamenti once he transferred from to Rome in 1448.10

Bibliae et Novarum Reprobatione Interpretationum of 1525 and rebuked by Erasmus in his Apologia adversus Debacchationes Petri Sutoris: “Laurentius, inquiet [Cousturier], non vertit totum Testamentum Novum, sed hoc moliens cohibitus est auctoritate Pontifi cis.” See Erasmus, Opera Omnia, ed. Jean Leclerc, 9 (Leiden, 1703–06), pp. 752–53; also Sebastiano Garofalo, “Gli umanisti italiani del secolo XV e la Bibbia,” Biblica 27 (1946), 338–75, and in La Bibbia e il Concilio di Trento: Conferenze tenute al Pontifi cio Istituto Biblico nel quarto centenario del Concilio di Trento (Rome, 1947), pp. 38–75, at p. 53/353, n. 6. 4 See Giannozzo Manetti, De Vita ac Gestis Nicolai Quinti Summi Pontifi cis, ed. and tr. Anna Modigliani (Rome, 2005), p. 66, where in describing Nicholas’s support of humanist translations, Manetti mentions his own Adversus Iudeos et Gentes and then says: “Nova deinde quedam utriusque et veteris et novi testamenti . . . in latinam linguam traductio non iniuria mentem irrepserat.” 5 Note that George did not translate Cyril’s commentary on Leviticus as asserted by Charles Stinger, and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversai (1386–1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian (Albany, NY, 1977), p. 157. 6 See John Monfasani, ed., Collectanea Trapezuntiana: Texts, Documents, and Bibliographies of George of Trebizond (Binghamton, NY, 1984), pp. 715–17, 727–44. For Nicholas V’s interest in the Fathers, see the surveys of Massimo Miglio, “Niccolo V umanista di Cristo,” and Concetta Bianca, “Il pontifi cato di Niccolò e i Padri della Chiesa,” in Sebastiano Gentile, ed., Umanesimo e padri della Chiesa: manoscritti e incunabili di testi patristici da Francesco Petrarca al primo Cinquecento (Rome, 1977), pp. 77–83 and 85–92 respectively. 7 Jaitner-Hahner, Humanismus, 1, 314–31. 8 See Robert Devreesse, Le Fonds grec de la bibliothèque Vatican des origines à Paul V (Vati- can City, 1968), pp. 11–43, for Nicholas’s Greek manuscripts. He owned a respectable number of New Testament texts with and without commentaries (see nos. 101–10, 139–45 on pp. 19–22), but only the Psalms, Job, Isaiah, Numbers, and Kings from the Old Testament (nos. 133–38, 146–50 on pp. 21–23). Nicholas had no specifi cally identifi ed Hebrew collection. 9 Devreesse, Fonds grec, p. 73, suggests that no. 649 of the 1475 inventory might be the Codex Vaticanus, but, p. 82, fi rst confi dently identifi es the Vaticanus only in the 1481 inventory, where it appears as no. 3. 10 Valla clearly consulted more Greek manuscripts once he moved to Rome, but identifying them is a dubious proposition; see Jerry Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ