ILLUSTRATED from the in the NEWBERRY LIBRARY By
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4° S 5999)-Zz YZANflNE ELEHEffS IN HUMANISTIC SC1W1 ILLUSTRATED FROM THE AYLVS GELL}vS OF.1445' IN THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY By STANLEY MORI SON Fellow of the Newberry Library CHICAGO, I LLI NOI S Written, Composed and Printed at THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY 1952 S, F trncnl. t , /'t".t pMit., e554' c emn,., fänl- ýr rt, i,! ra, e, 'r'u ret, r lnbl. trl: t , ielirrt , N on tluer cýj"qni uänerro inc. týn, »int' lembnm Ä ý i! em, li, b, g, r. li brich-L4 ti+rre' rrmif, C. trcý:, llarrn in pr. ccef+l'prm, o r:, rr luea, l : ., tsm . AVLýGELý. If NocrvM ATTICARVM CiBL-R,. ". r" ... EýtµIVSc: }CPtýC. trceP. Xf. FELFc-t1%"Rý., ýo ortýert[ uoutbuli" rrr7. c"' iatLt:c: des: e; t mttlr, cluF' %up, wrpdLtntr, dcý; etitf nomtiulr, dc' rta trionc ,u lege 4's: 'ucrf+: C p:tcrrm. t, stý+c:! .mtccinsm! mn1rA .r ansnmt. t citcs (ýolir.t ('rnr. cArttttlttrn ý, - , in IAfVS hyraniil'qnAs orsnonc gr-,ec. t drrrbK! compoille: r. 4ý. rn: i :, rrr 'ppr.:: l7crrn. tiý . 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IfMA Folio 135 of the Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae The Newberry Library It is of great intereit to watch a script develop- ing, to see it pass under this or that influence and to it from hesitation transition. .see emerge a state of or In its perfected form a_script may be an object of admiration; it does not necessarily become an object of curiosity. The several stages in the earlyhistory of the so-called "Carolingian" minuscule have long occupied the attention of scholars because they are difficult to relate. Problems of a similar order arise in connexion with the revival in humanist circles of the. "Carolingian" minuscule which took effect in the fifteenth The formal humanistic - century. and cursive hands were necessarily slow in achieving recognition. In this stage they exhibit great variation in detail, according to the character of the "Carolingian" ex- emplar before the transcriber. In the next stage a set of norms is to be seen emerging; and, in the final stage, the hands may be seen reaching their highest point of development after the invention of printing. Hence any Italian manuscript signed and dated before the introduction of printing into Italy in 1465, is im- portant. Only partial lists of such manuscripts have been made, and no comprehensive collection of dated facsimiles exists. Both are needed before any serious account can be given of the calligraphical revolution that provided the Western countries with the alphabet they use today in all their books and newspapers. In the meantime we are grateful to Sig. de Marinis for the rich collection of plates in La Biblioteca Napoletana dei Rei d'Aragona (Milan, 1947,3 vols. published), though the dated exhibits here shown are mostly after 1465. What the study requires is a list with commentary, of dated mss. of the period from, say, 1365 to 1465, to have written in the several centres that can be shown permanently influenced the development of schools Page 2 of writing. There is a list of 28 Florentine mss. written 1408-1465 in S. Morison, "Early Humanistic Script" The Library (Transactions of the Biblio- graphical Society, London, Series 4) XXIV (1943) pp. 26-29; and J. P. Elder, "Clues for dating Florentine Humanistic MSS" in Studies in Philology (Chapel Hill, N. C. ) XLIV, 1947, pp. 127-139, provides a list of 25 dated mss. written by Antonio di Mario from 1419 to 1453; 14 by Gherardo di Giovanni del Ciriago, dated between 1450-1472; 20 by Antonio Sinibaldi, dated between 1461-1491. These three scribes exemplify the stages in the growth of the script, and Elder sums up at pp. 130-136 the main divisions of its career as transitional humanistic (1375-1425), the middle per- iod (1425-1465), and the perfected style (1465-1490). In the course of his article Elder asks the question "Whether Morison is correct in assigning so much credit for this change to the Florentine humanists? " This is a pertinent question which, however, it would be rash to answer before the necessary dated manu- scripts have been assembled and studied. Meanwhile it may be of use to draw attention to a small group of manuscripts's igned by the one scribe, dated between 1433 and 1445. The group consists of a Suetonius Vitae Duodecim Caesarum dated 1433 in the Grenville Kane collection at Princeton; another Suetonius in the McLean collec- tion at Cambridge, dated 1443; a Leonardo Bruni De Primo bello Punico in the Lewis Collection at the Free Library, Philadelphia, dated 1444. To these three recorded specimens it is now possible to add a fourth, hitherto unrecorded: an Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae in the Wing Collection at the Newberry Lib- rary, Chicago, dated 1445. All four manuscripts are signed, as well as dated, by the scribe: MILANUS BURRUS. None of the colophons, unfortunately, Page 3 includes a reference to the scribe's native city, or place of residence or work. Burrus makes no entry into Paolo d'Ancona and Erhard Aeschlimann's Dic- tionnaire. He mayor may not have been a professional though his script is certainly of professional quality, and he must have been highly esteemed to be employed on a book as elaborately decorated as the Kane Sue- tonlus. That he worked in Florence is improbable if onlybecause the Fitzwilliam Suetonius and the Phila- delphia Bruni bear the device of the ducal family of Visconti of Milan whose library was notably added to by Filippo Maria, the third duke. Miss Dorothy Miner, who has described the decorations in the Princeton and Philadelphia manuscripts, assigns them to the Lom- -bard School of illuminators, and it would be natural to thinkthat the scribe belonged to the same province. But this is a speculation upon which the evidence of the Chicago Aulus Gellius has some bearing. In the first place, while this manuscript is ornamented with decorated initial letters of some merit, it is obviouslynot intended for the library of any member of a ducal family, and does not appear to have been the possession of any notable collector or scholar. The book was formerly in the Bibliotheca Molza in Modena which was dispersed before 1939. The manu- script is not listed by'commentators: M. Hertz who edited the Berlin text in 1885, or C. Hosius of Leip- zig, who edited the Teubner text in 1903, or J. Rolfe of the University of Pennsylvania, whose English translation, made in 1927 for the Loeb Library, is the latest edition. They naturally mention the tran- script made by Niccolb dei Niccoli, later purchased by the great Magliarbecchi, and now in the National Library in Rome. So far as I know Niccoli's codex has not been reproduced in whole or in part. This needs to be done. Page 4 The facsimiles of Niccoli's autographs that we have are numerous enough, however, to permit- us to disregard any suggestion that his script set the style the for Chicago Aulus Gellius; or, it may be added, for the other three manuscripts signed by Milanus Burrus. Indeed, the calligraphical saliences of the whole group, it seems reasonable to say, do not point in the direction of Florence. The scribe is highly competent and well instructed. He writes, effortlessly, ahumanistic minuscule which is regularly and well formed, spaced and paragraphed. The scribe, indeed, may be judged to have achieved a high degree of excellence, especiallywhen it is borne in mind that he was in practice during the "middle period", as Elder would rightly describe it, of the humanistic revival of the "Carolingian" alphabet. Milanus Burrus had sound understanding of the canon- ical humanistic minuscule, He proves his knowledge of the humanistic canon by using the ligature d in fully-formed style. He also has NOd'1 VM. A proof that he was working in the early or middle period is the a which is almost single-bodied; g is a source of trouble to him, not because he is incompetent, but because the canonicity of g had not in his time been settled. There were two schools of thought about g in Florence during the Renaissance as there were in Burgundy during the "Carolingian" period. Milanus, like his predecessors, cannot make up his mind, at least in his two copies of Suetonius and in his Gellius, what to do with the lower bowl, and sometimes angular- izes the link connecting it with the upper bowl. Hence he uses g$$g. The substroke of h is, of course, rounded, i.