Culture and Self-Representation in the Este Court: Ercole
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CULTURE AND SELF-REPRESENTATION IN THE ESTE COURT: ERCOLE STROZZI’S FUNERAL ELEGY OF ELEONORA OF ARAGON, A TEXT, TRANSLATION, AND COMMENTARY Dean Marcel Cassella, B.A., B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS December 2010 APPROVED: Laura Stern, Major Professor Guy Chet, Committee Member Christopher Fuhrmann, Committee Member Craig Kallendorf, Committee Member Steven Forde, Committee Member Richard McCaslin, Chair of the Department of History James D. Meernik, Acting Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Cassella, Dean Marcel. Culture and self-representation in the Este court: Ercole Strozzi’s funeral elegy of Eleonora of Aragon, a text, translation, and commentary. Doctor of Philosophy (History), December 2010, 206 pp., references, 138 titles. This dissertation presents a previously unedited text by one of the most distinguished— yet neglected—Latin writers of the Italian Renaissance, Ercole Strozzi (1471–1508), a poet and administrator in the court of Ferrara. Under the Este Dukes, Ferrara became a major center of literary and artistic patronage. The Latin literary output of the court, however, has received insufficient scholarly scrutiny. The text is a verse funeral elegy of Eleonora of Aragon (1450–1493), the first Duchess of Ferrara. Eleonora was a remarkable woman whose talents and indefatigable efforts on behalf of her husband, her children, and her state, won her accolades both at home and abroad. She also served as a prototype for the remarkable careers of her two daughters, Isabella d’Este, and Beatrice d’Este, who are celebrated for their erudition and patronage of arts and letters. The text is a mirror of the Estense court and reveals to us how its members no doubt saw themselves, at the very peak of its temporal power and the height of its prestige as a center of cultural creativity. It is also important for the striking portrait it presents of Eleonora. Ercole Strozzi chose to call his poem an epicedium, an ancient minor literary genre that had received attention in the two decades prior to its composition, due to the discovery and printing of the silver age Roman poet Statius, whose text includes several epicedia. Strozzi deftly adapts and transcends both his ancient and contemporary models (especially Poliziano), and in the process, creates a new Latin literary genre, the Renaissance epicedium. It is a fine poem, full of both erudition and creativity, and as such is the first fruits of what would be Ercole Strozzi’s illustrious poetic career. The work is genuinely worthy of study on both esthetic and historical grounds. Copyright 2010 by Dean Marcel Cassella ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I give sincere and heartfelt thanks to the following: Laura Stern, optima magistrorum, for her steadfast encouragement and dedication to me and to all of her graduate students; Craig Kallendorf for his generosity in lending his time and encouragement, especially since it was entirely discretionary; Christopher Fuhrmann for his keen editing eye, and for being a genuine friend in the academy; and to the other members of my committee, Guy Chet and Steven Forde. Mention must also be made of Dana F. Sutton, who first proposed neo-Latin and the Strozzi as a viable area of research. He was right. Special thanks are also in order for Jeanette Randolph whose generous support literally made my archival training and research in Italy possible; and for Adrian Lewis who, in his tenure as chair of the department of history, helped fund additional research in Italy when it was needed most. My wife, Sonja, provided the greatest—and most steadfast—support of all. Thanks must also go to UNT’s department of history, which has provided the means of making this work a reality. The staff members at the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea in Ferrara, and at the Biblioteca Estense in Modena proved to be especially knowledgeable, helpful and courteous. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………….iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS……………………………………………………………………v Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….....1 Scope, Aims, and Background Ancient Funeral Oratory and its Fifteenth-Century Successors Ancient Verse Funeral Elegy and its Fifteenth-Century Successors The Rediscovery of Statius’ Silvae in the Fifteenth Century Commemorative Literature on the Death of Eleonora Dating of Ep.Hel. Style The Manuscript 2. SYNOPSIS OF THE EPICEDIUM……………………………………………………….27 3. THE TEXT………………………………………………………………………………...30 4. TRANSLATION…………………………………………………………………………..56 5. COMMENTARY……………………………………………………………………….....81 APPENDIX A: THE TEXT OF GUARINO BATTISTA’S FUNEBRIS ORATIO IN EXCELLENTISSIMAM REGINAM ELEANORAM ARAGONIAM…………147 APPENDIX B: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON THE LIFE AND WORKS OF ERCOLE STROZZI……………………………………………...161 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………...…………198 iv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviations for classical texts are those found in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd Edition. Eds. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth. Oxford University Press, 1996. The only exception is my preference for the form Virg. instead of Verg. BAV Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana BCAF Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea Ferrara BEM Biblioteca Estense Modena BNMV Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Venezia AS Mantova Archivio di Stato, Mantova AS Modena Archivio di Stato, Modena AS Ferrara Archivio di Stato, Ferrara AS Firenze Archivio di Stato, Firenze DBI Alberto Maria Ghisaberti, ed. Dizionario biografico degli italiani. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960 – . DF Bernardino Zambotti. Diario ferrese dall’anno 1476 sino al 1504, ed. Giuseppe Pardi, RIS 24/7 (1934). BNP Hubert Canick, et al., eds. Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopedia of the Ancient World. Brill: Leiden, 2002 – 2010. RIS Ludovico Antonio Muratori. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores a anno Aerae Christianae quingentesimum . 25 vols. Milano: Typogaphica Societatis Palatinae, 1723 – 1751. 2nd edition, G. Carducci, et al., eds. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1900 – 1975. v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Scope, Aims, and Background This dissertation concerns a previously unedited work by Ercole Strozzi (1471–1508), a distinguished poet and administrator in the court of Ferrara. The court was ruled by Duke Ercole I d’Este, a condottiere (mercenary general), whose family was in firm control of the city for about two hundred years. Ercole I presided over one of the most sophisticated and celebrated states of the Italian Renaissance. In 1473, he married Eleonora of Aragon (1450–1493), Princess of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Eleonora was a remarkable woman whose talents and indefatigable efforts on behalf of her husband, her children, and her state, won her accolades both at home and abroad. When she passed away in September, 1493, there was an outpouring of grief from all walks of society, and especially from the circle of humanists who served in her court. Ercole Strozzi’s contribution to the large body of literary works which commemorate her passing away has gone almost completely unnoticed over the last half millennium. It is a type of verse funeral elegy titled: Excellentissimae reginae Helionorae Aragoniae ad invictissimum Herculem Estensem per Herculem Strozam epicedium “Epicedium of the Most Excellent Queen Eleonora of Aragon For The Most Unconquerable Ercole Estense, by Ercole Strozzi.” This dissertation serves a number of related purposes. First, it is self-evidently an exercise in Renaissance philology. As such, it presents a previously unedited text by one of the 1 most distinguished (yet neglected) Latin poets of the Italian Renaissance, Ercole Strozzi. This 1 “Come mai,” writes Francesco Giombini, “ai giorni nostri, si conosce così poco la pur pregevole produzione dello Strozzi? Manca perfino un’ edizione critica, e non ve ne sono certo altre in commercio, mentre gli scaffali abbondano di opera ben più trascurabili.” (Giombino, 2000, 135) Neither has there been much in the way of proper historical research on Strozzi since the respectable but defective monographs of Monteforte (1899) and Wirtz (1905). The present work is my first step in rectifying the critical edition problem. I also intend to write a proper historical monograph on Ercole Strozzi in the future. 1 Epicedium Heleonorae (hereafter “Ep.Hel.”) is a cultural product that falls right at the peak of a great period of Latin literary creativity, defined by John Sparrow as beginning in the last three decades of the fifteenth century, 2 and by Christopher Celenza as ending in 1525, when Pietro Bembo published the first edition of his Prose della vulgar lingua. Bembo’s treatise had the effect of creating a canon for vernacular prose literature, and subsequently (unintentionally?) had a dampening effect on further production of major literary works in Latin.3 As Celenza has put it, all the speculation about the value of Renaissance Latin literature for a full and mature understanding of the Western historical and cultural experience “will be useless within a generation or two unless we attend to the source problem and its wider implications.”4 Due largely to the prejudices of nineteenth-century scholars, who lived at the great period of nation state building, neo-Latin never developed a natural caretaker the way classical and medieval Latin did.5 Of late, there have been some grounds for optimism. The comparative neglect of Quattro- and Cinquecento-Latin writers since the nineteenth century is gradually giving way to an unprecedented level of publishing activity on Renaissance Latin texts, best symbolized by Harvard’s I Tatti Renaissance Library, the brain child of James Hankins, one of the most 2 Sparrow, 1960, 409. 3 Celenza, 2004, 145. 4 Celenza, 2004, xviii–xix. The “source problem” is the inacessiblity of Renaissance sources to modern students and scholars. 5 Celenza, 2004, xii–xiii. A half century ago, John Sparrow speculated that “it seems probable that Latin scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic, when it has done all that can be done for classical texts, will turn its attention to Renaissance poets.” (Sparrow, 1960, 357n.1) Unfortunately, the profession of classical philology has continued to turn in on itself. Classicists scarcely show a token interest in a Latin world beyond A.D.