NOTES ON THE 1503 EDITIONOF PETRARCH

DENNIS E. RHODES

T H E first collected edition of Petrarch's Latin works to appear in Italy was printed atVenice by Simon de Luere for the publisher Andrea Torresano de Asula with twocolophons dated respectively 27 March and 17 June 1501. There is no comment to bemade on this edition, except to say that it includes the Bucolicum carmen about whichthere is much more to say when dealing with the next edition, which was completed on15 July 1503 by Simon Bevilaqua, likewise at Venice. This edition of 1503, with 524leaves in'all, collates as follows: -h-^A-K^L^M-ZSAA^BB^CC^ aa-dd^; C'^; a z &»74 i-yog"^; A-E^. These last thirty leaves, A E^, have caused the bibliographers muchconfusion in the past, as they contain the Bucolicum carmen with its own separate title-page, unlike the 1501 edition, where it has no title-page to itself. In the 1503 editionthis title reads: 'Bucolicum carmen in duodecim eglogas distinctum cum comentoBeneuenuti Imolensis viri Clarissimi.' The colophon reads: 'Petrarchae laureati poetaesub bucolico carmine recollectionis sub uiro uenerando Magistro Beneuenuto de ymolaRecollectc foeliciter cxpliciunt : per me Marcum horigono de Venet'. Annis. d. nostriIesu christi: currentibus. M.ccccxvi: Die. yii. Iulii. FINIS.'

The fact that this part is sometimes found separately in libraries has caused confusfon.It has been taken to be an incunable,' and the mysterious name of Marcus Horigono hasbeen thought to be that of an otherwise unrecorded printer. The date 7 July 1416 hasbeen interpreted variously as a misprint for 1496, 1503, 1506, or 1516. Isaac was deceived,^the British Museum was deceived in its Short-title Catalogue of Italian Books,^ and asenior cataloguer of the British Museum was deceived when he wrote a pencil note inthe book itself: 'The text-type of the Bucolicum carmen at the end is that found in quiresI-L, O-S, Y, AA in the body of the book, so that the whole was evidently printed at thesame time. Horigono was probably the printer who collaborated with Bevilaqua.' Butthe Bucolicum carmen is covered by the general title-page, where it is mentioned at theend of the table of contents, with a space between it and the previous item, as though theprinter had added it as an afterthought. Therefore the Bucolicum carmen is not a separatebook, and was printed, like the rest of the volume, by Bevilaqua in 1503. The obviousinference is that Marcus Horigono was the Venetian scribe of the original manuscript,which he finished copying on 15 July 1416. It is not unknown to find early printerscopying a scribe's colophon and retaining the original date.

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Those who were not deceived included Goldschmidr* and Norton.^ For inGoldschmidt's Sale Catalogue no.96 of 1951 we find: 'The Bucolic Eclogues with thecommentary of Benvenuto da Imola occupy the last 30 leaves of the volume with aseparate titlepage and a subscription of their own, "expliciunt per me Marcum Horigono. . . 1416. This is undoubtedly the subscription of the manuscript that served as theprinter s copy and Brunet IV. 565 is mistaken in suggesting it must be a printer's errorfor 1496 or 1506. The note by Isaac, Index to the Early Printed Books in the BritishMuseum IL no. 12654 making this Horigono a printer is entirely misconceived.' ThenNorton in 1958 likewise concluded that Horigono must have been a scribe.

It is particularly unfortunate that the British Museum catalogues have fallen into theold traps. It is indeed difficult to lay once and for all the old ghost of Marcus Horigonothe 'printer'. Michele Feo, publishing an article in 1967,^ is right in remarking that'questa stampa ha costituito un vero rompicapo per i bibliografi', but he is wrong incalling the date 1416 absurd. It is not absurd; it is correct. The rest of Feo's note is inorder until he says 'Forse tutta l'opera fu pubblicata a fascicoli separati costituenti partiorganiche'. This is not the case, and it was not normal for printers to issue works inparts at that time unless they specifically said so in differently dated colophons. Feocould not have asked himself whether there was any further evidence for the existenceof Horigono as a printer: there is none. He refers to the note of Goff, but this leaves thequestion entirely open."̂ I was hoping that the name of Marcus Horigono might by nowhave been found in the colophon of some extant manuscript, but apparently it has not.

The problem was settled in German as long ago as 1844 by the mysterious 'Dr. Moser'whose own biography, along with an excellent summary of the present controversy,also in German, has been written by Dr. Amelung in 1970;^ but in English it needs tobe emphasized once and for all that Marcus Horigono was a scribe in 1416. Havingstated this, we must look at the colophon once more to see what it really means. As itstands, it is in untranslatable Latin, but we must obviously read 'recollectiones' for'recollectionis', and it becomes clear that the first 'sub' should be 'super' when we lookat the colophons of other manuscripts of Benvenuto da Imola, where the use of thedouble phrase 'recollectiones . . . recollectae' is regular. Let us compare the exampleof the manuscript of Lucan 'Expliciunt recollectiones super libro Lucani. Recollectesub reuerendo viro magistro Beneuenuto de Imola in ciuitate ferarie Anno dominiM^cccLxxviij', and the manuscript of Valerius Maximus in the Biblioteca Ambrosianawhich reads: 'Expliciunt Recolecte super opere Valerii Maximi ystoriographi facteBononie sub . . . Benvenuto de Imola . . . 1383.'^ We might even construe it to mean thatMarcus Horigono studied under Benvenuto da Imola, who died in 1390. Whatever thetruth of that, he was decidedly not a printer.

The two copies of the 1503 edition of Petrarch now in the British Library both haveinteresting provenances. One of them contains several times the note of ownership'Ioannis Bembi Veneti Vici Birij diui Canciani'. To two of these notes he has addedthe date when he was reading the volume: on sig. L6'̂ 'die 23 februarij Ioannes BembusVenetus uici Birij diui Canciani legebat', and on Mi"- '1535 m[en]se februario Ioannes

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Bembus . . . lcglebat]'. But whether this Giovanni Bembo is to be identified with thehistorian (1473-1545) who in 1502 edited the Annotationes of Sabellicus, or is anotherof the same name, cannot be proved. As for his address, we know from the celebrateddiaries of Marino Sanudo that the Contrada dei Birri was part of San Canciano, to thenorth of the Grand Canal and not far from the Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo; in factonce, in his diary for August 1532, Sanudo gives an address 'In Birri grando ne la contrade San Canzian'. The present church of S. Canciano in Venice dates only from about1700. We now know that in the first half of the sixteenth century the Bembo, one of theleading families of Venice, had a house in this same street.

The second copy of the 1503 Petrarch now in the British Library was bought inVenice and bound in Nuremberg in 1505, its owner being Antonius Kressen, doctor oflaws and provost of S.Lorenz in Nuremberg and Canon of Regensburg, who died in1513. At the beginning of the volume is inserted a life of Kressen by Christopher Scheurl,written in 1515, but printed apparently privately, and probably in Nuremberg after1600. Finally the book was bought at Nordlingen in 1855 for the well-known Milaneselawyer Michele Cavaleri, whose museum stamp is commonly found in early books. TheBritish Museum acquired the volume in 1898.

1 Hain-Copinger-Reichling 12829. Reichling be-heved that the book was printed in 1496.

2 Frank Isaac, An index to the early printed books inthe British Museum, pt. II. MDI-MD\X. Section II.Italy, etc. (London, 1938), pp. 41-2, no. 12654.

3 Short-title catalogue of books printed in Itaty . . .7^65 to 1600 now in the British Museum (London,1958), p. 502 and index p. 863.

4 E. P. Goldschmidt & Co., Catalogue 96 {London,1951), no. 92.

5 F. J. Norton, Italian printers 1501-1520 (London,

1958), P-130-6 Michele Feo, 'Per Pesegesi della III egloga del

Petrarca', Italia medtoevale e umanistica, x (Padova,1967)̂ 385-401'

7 F. R. Goff, Third census of incunabula in Americanlibraries (New York, 1964), p. 476, no. P370.

8 Dr. Moser, 'Die Fabel von der Presse des Markus

Horigono', Serapeum, no. 13, r5 July 1844,pp. 207-8; Peter Ameiung, 'Immanuel GottliebMoser (1790-1846): ein vergessener NachfolgerHains\ Essays in honour of Victor Scholderer{Mainz, 1970), pp. 45-64, especially at p. 51. Theproblem of Horigono has also been discussed atsome length by W. F. [i.e. Willard Fiske], A cata-logue of Petrarch books (privately printed, Ithaca,N.Y., 1882), pp. 20-1; and by A.Hortis, Catalogodelle opere dt Francesco Petrarca esistenti nellaPetrarchesca Rossettiana di Trieste [Trieste, 1874),pp.7, 8. Hortis merely thought that 1416 was amisprint.

9 Luigi Rossi-Case, Di Maestro Benvenuto da Imolacommentatore dantesco (Pergola, 1889), p. i42>where the date is wrongly quoted as 1516 insteadof 1416. For the other manuscript colophonsquoted by Rossi-Case, see pp. 143 and 146.