Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
Prospectivo melanese depictore
Antiquarie prospetiche romane [Ancient perspective of Rome]
Edited by Giovanni Agosti and Dante Isella
Fondazione Pietro Bembo - Ugo Guanda, 2004
Isbn 88-8246-796-1
[1] Text of the strip :
"In
a year close to the end of the Fifteenth century [note of the editor: the
editors speak of a time lag between the summer of 1496 and that of 1497, cf. p.
XIII], a Milanese painter friend of Leonardo, then hosted by Ludovico il Moro
in Milan, sent him a small poem in triplets of four hundred verses. The aim was
to urge him to go south, to Rome, the biggest centre of antiquity. The author describes
the testimony of a glorious past: sculptures recently come to light, visible in
public or in private collections; famous monuments, and ruins. But he also
describes the most extraordinary novelties of the day: the paintings that were
being discovered in the crevices, or "caves"
of past archaeological layers (called, with a fashionable term , "grottesche" ) or the tomb of Sixtus IV by Pollaiuolo in St. Peter's
Basilica. Sometimes he seems to indulge to his own personal fantasy or to folk
tales collected in place; however, he has well wide open eyes and participates,
curious, of the widespread enthusiasm for the rediscovery of classicism. The
Prospective (so called for his involvement in the problems of perspective, then
much debated in Lombardy) is not a writer by profession, and much less a complete
poet, à la page with the new pro-Tuscan culture that is emerging in the courts
of the Po Valley; though his verses have the charm typical of "barbarian”
products, especially in the hispid catalogues which he so much likes, modelled
on certain passages of Dante, or in the persisted description of stones and
precious materials. The Antiquarie prospetiche romane , which by their
rediscovery in the years of the Unification of Italy had been attributed to one
or the other painter (with a shortlist of a dozen candidates from Bramante to
Bramantino, from the De Predis to Zenale) are destined for the moment (until
the emergence of new documents ) to remain misleadingly
acephalous. But their fatherhood is just one of the many questions they are raising
to us: the year in which they were written and the one in which they were
printed, probably in Rome (only two copies are known); and as main question, their
comprehension, because the lesson that they offer is often difficult
understanding (being not devoid of errors attributable to the author or the
printer).
Republished
in 1876 by Gilberto Govi , in a "memory" of the Lincei , the poem has
since then been the focus of a plurality of interests on the part of
archaeologists, historians of antiquity and the arts, biblio-technicians , etc... (as also reflected by the rich history of his fortune here outlined in detail
and the vast critical literature surveyed in the bibliography) . But it seems the
very mysteriousness of the text has exacerbated – especially in our times - an
increasing attention as a tantalizing puzzle. Various interpretative proposals
derived from it, some so outlandish to remember the Mattoidi by
Carlo Dossi (another Lombard , a lover of antiques, and immerged into the Roman
Byzantium ).
The critical and commented edition that now
sees the light in the Biblioteca di Scrittori Italiani by the Bembo
Foundation, accompanied by an Album of one hundred and twenty
illustrative tables , gives the reader the result of a non-ordinary collaboration
between two different skills , philology and art history, signed by Giovanni
Agosti and Dante Isella .
Giovanni Agosti teaches History of Modern
Art at the State University of Milan. He wrote, among other, Bambaia e il
classicismo lombardo (Torino 1990) and Disegni del Rinascimento in Valpadana
(Florence 2001). For many years he has worked on a book about Andrea Mantegna
and its weight in the history of Italy.
Dante
Isella, critic and philologist, taught at Pavia and at the ETH Zurich.
Lomazzo, Varese, Maggi, Lemene, Parini, Porta, Manzoni, Dossi, Tessa,
Gadda, Fenoglio, Montale, Sereni are the authors to whom he dedicated
critical editions and / or comments: I Lombardi in rivolta, Le carte mescolate,
L’idillio di Meulan e Carlo Porta the main titles he published. After
fifty years of work, a collection of his essays is in progress.
[2]
To be precise (and referring right now to the exceptional Chronicle signed by
Giovanni Agosti) the Antiquarie were rediscovered in 1870 by Ferdinand
Gregorovius, who often referred to their verses in the seventh volume of his
monumental Geschichte der Stadt Rom in Mitteralter (History of the Rome town in
middle-age). Gregorovius refers to a manuscript of the medical humanist
Hartmann Schedel, who transcribed the entire poem in 1504 (technically the
manuscript is a description of the original). The manuscript is preserved at
the Bayerische Staatsbibliotheck of Munich ( ms mark. Clm 716, sheets 68-74).
The first full transcript of a recent age is that of Gilberto Govi who in 1876
published it in the Proceedings of the Academy of the Lincei . Science
historian and scholar of Leonardo’s world, Govi
had come across with a copy of the Antiquarian three years before, as director
of the Library Casanatense, and had become immediately attracted by the initial dedication to Leonardo.
After the publication by Govi, the text "is used by members of different
research traditions that soon began to ignore each other . The poem in fact
attracts the interest of several communities: the Leonardo scholars, art
historians, archaeologists, surveyors of Rome, historians of the book and
illustration, literary historians ... and, now, historians of collecting"(p.
xxxvii ). The approach of each of them remains partial. It is at the end of
the century that a second copy of the poem is discovered, identical to the
first one; the copy is tracked in the library of the painter and bibliophile
Charles Fairfax Murray, and is now kept at the Fondazione Cini. It should be
noted, however, that a few months before the current edition "a ‘critical
edition’ of the text appeared in the Annals of the Scuola
Normale Superiore of Pisa, [note of the editor: by Anna Anguissola and Francesco P. Villani], which
circumvents its literal understanding " (Agosti writes on this at pp..
LXXXII - LXXXIII of his essay).
[3] From reading the essays of Isella and especially
of Giovanni Agosti it becomes clear that neither want to say too much on the question
of authorship. If they were forced, they would say the name of Bartolomeo
Suardi, called the Bramantino. And yet the elements currently available for
study are not conclusive , which is why, for example, is not to be rejected the
hypothesis of Bernard Zenale (pp. LXXV - LXXVI ) and even that, much more
recent, of Ambrogio De Predis (p. LXXXVII ). Absolutely to be rejected (and
with arguments - even methodological - in our opinion convincing ), the
candidacy of Bramante, who for decades has also had illustrious supporters ,
against which the tones used are not always devoid of polemical accents .
[4]
The work was reviewed on 8 January 2005 by Marco Carminati in Sole 24 Ore and by
Cesare Segre in the Corriere della Sera .on March 27, 2005.
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