In this lively and well-researched study, F. sets out to explore the Renaissance exegesis and imitation of Ovid as antiquarian. The Roman Academy and the influence of its central figure, Pomponio Leto (1428–98), provide the immediate context in which the development and publication of the rival commentaries on the Fasti by Paolo Marsi (1440–84) and Antonio Costanzi (1436–90) are presented. These works were frequently printed together in the early-sixteenth century.
F.'s opening survey of critical approaches includes more recent interest in Ovid's oblique resistance to Augustus’ ideological appropriation of the calendar, as well as addressing twelfth-century teaching and imitation. Humanists may well have drawn on the glosses of medieval scholars, some of whom had also sought to explain the poem's perceived incompleteness: the offending second half of a twelve-book poem burned by an Ovid recalled from relegation, or destroyed (from July and August onwards) by the Church for having assigned portents of Christ to Julius Caesar and Augustus. The latter promoted searches and even alleged sightings of the ‘severed’ half by Renaissance book-hunters.
Marsi's Fasti commentary (1482) was the first in print, whereas Costanzi presented his in manuscript to Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino in 1480, although he revised it over the decade for printed publication in 1489. F., who handles her selection of manuscript material adeptly, employs three manuscripts to epitomise fifteenth-century teaching of the poem (Vat. lat. 1595 [Pietro Odi], Ottob. lat. 1982 [associate of Leto] and Vat. lat. 3263 [Leto]), and compares their glosses in an appendix. Leto, whose interest in the Fasti had been cultivated by Odi, may have instilled a similar enthusiasm in Marsi before 1460. Like Leto's unpublished glosses, Antonio Volsco's extensive Fasti commentary also survives in manuscript, and figures in Marsi's calculated projection of learned friendships through which he asserted his superiority; Costanzi competed by acknowledging analogous debts to Guarino da Verona and Ciriaco d'Ancona. Throughout the volume F. elaborates a dense network of scholarly relations and rivalries in tracing the maturation of these commentaries.
F.'s outline of the development of commentary includes the productive Domizio Calderini, who seems to have at least embarked on the Fasti. His important place in the genre's transformation in this period, as well as Poliziano's, who lectured on the Fasti at the Florentine Studio in 1481–82, could have offered a deeper context in which to place Marsi's and Costanzi's achievements. Instead, F. extracts and concentrates material from their ‘exhaustive’ works to serve her antiquarian agenda, so that their broader philological and exegetical aspects remain far more slenderly represented. Moreover, Poliziano's concentration on particularly demanding exegetical problems, and the shift towards the separation of scholarship from civic life, are matters of potential significance in considering this ‘Roman’ antiquarianism and the Academy's rivalry with other centres of learning. The narrower, more empirical sense of antiquarianism offered by F. thus tends to preclude consideration of, for example, the degree to which a command of Greek could bring Callimachus into contact with the Fasti, or how figures like Volsco who, as F. notes, dropped the Fasti to concentrate on Propertius, understood the influence on Ovid's poem of that poet's aetiological elegies. F.'s account nevertheless raises intriguing questions about the degree to which some humanists, despite their mobility, identified themselves as ‘Roman’ as they exerted proprietorial claims over the poem's interpretation. The commentators’ debate over the identity of ‘Germanicus’ in Ovid's rededication of the Fasti upon Augustus’ death supplies F. with an opportunity to close Chapter 2 with a display of her deft gathering, co-ordination and interpretation of little-worked material.
Chapter 3 addresses the growth of Marsi's and Costanzi's commentaries through the 1470s and contrasts their authors’ relations with the Roman Academy and print culture. Among Marsi's many boasts was that it was the supply of books in Rome that allowed his rapid completion of his work. It seems ironic that it was printed in Venice, yet F.'s afterword complicates the picture by drawing out the pursuit of Roman heritage by his Venetian patron, Giorgio Cornaro. F. relates Costanzi's distance from Rome to the exclusive presentation of his commentary in manuscript. It remains unclear whether Costanzi's initial disdain for print was more rhetorical or expedient than that of his patron, who had printed texts copied by scribes, so a little more on Federico's ample library would have been welcome here. But F. captures well the humanists’ competitive self-presentation and precariousness as they strove to be first with emendations, fullest in explanation, and especially privileged in their personal contacts and textual resources. Yet if, as F. argues, the Fasti of this vates operosus taught everything and demanded commentary more than other ancient texts, why did it also elicit from these commentators several poetic prefaces? If this was a kind of imitatio blurring authorship with interpretation, could these poetic insertions have been compared to Poliziano's practice in his Silvae, poetic prolusions introducing his lecture courses? The strength of the volume lies rather in the detailed analysis of more local matters of interpretation, with F. building up a complex and involved narrative through a series of epicycles as her discussion orbits texts and authors. For example, the prickly exchange between Costanzi and Marsi over the meaning of spica Cilissa – Marsi insisted that it was Cilician spikenard rather than saffron – shows Marsi invoking his exotic travels and equally exclusive access to the manuscript of Barbaro's Latin version of Dioscorides in countering Costanzi, who could draw only on the standard Pliny.
The fourth and fifth chapters, on antiquarianism, explore first how the Fasti was read as a guide to ancient Rome by humanists keen, not merely to identify correctly the city's monuments and recover their significance, but to identify with the greatness of classical antiquity and its institutions. For Costanzi, the Fasti restored the original to the mind's eye. F. rightly draws attention to the influence of Flavio Biondo's paired Roma Instauratio (1446) and Roma Triumphans (1459), and holds up the diptych as Varronian in inspiration. But we arguably pass by Varro too quickly, where his influence on Ovid, as understood by these humanists and others, might have sharpened further how antiquarianism intersected with philology, aetiology and poetry. Chapter 5 presents Ludovico Lazzarelli's Fasti christianae religionis as an important later-fifteenth century response to Ovid's poem, here related to the Christian refounding of pagan Rome and thus both the Renaissance reassertion of imperium and the recovery of the moral purpose inherent in Augustan antiquarianism. Marsi interpolated at the cognate point in his commentary a shortened version (Genethliacon) of his own genealogical poem Natalis Romanus. F. convincingly substantiates her view of Marsi's interest in Rome's ‘birthday’ as obsessive (likewise his dogged assertion of the meaning of spica Cilissa). His energetic bending of the evidence in order to coincide, if only for 1483, the Palilia with the feast day of Victor, Fortunatus and Genesius (20th April), the patrons of the Roman Academy, attests his desire for Rome's restoration.
The interplay between chapters and their several subsections creates a sense of iterative progression in the story F. unfolds. The material excerpted from Costanzi's and Marsi's significant and under-studied works is distributed across almost all the chapters which, although leaving the reader some work of synoptic assessment, produces an absorbing thickness of texture. A throng of major and less well-known figures are given walk-on parts, and the translation of the generously quoted Latin through which the succession of detailed points is explored is generally accurate and readable. Thus a good deal is efficiently packed into this relatively short book. However, an earlier shift to its main concerns might have yielded an argument more sharply delineated and critically engaged with its assumptions. Nevertheless, as a work in English that is informed by important Italian scholarship on the Roman Academy and its most significant figures (perhaps more so than by the full range of recent work on Renaissance commentary), and for conveying the richness and complexity of the reception of the Fasti in this Roman setting, the volume is a persuasive and engaging study that should stimulate further activity in this rewarding interdisciplinary field.
