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Overview
Originally published in 1989.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691608525 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1007 |
| Pages: | 394 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Carlo Sigonio
The Changing World of the Late Renaissance
By William McCuaig
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05558-9
CHAPTER 1
LIFE OF CARLO SIGONIO
Modena and Venice
Carlo Sigone (later Sigonio) was born in Modena to Nicolò Maria Sigone (d. 1550), a wool merchant, at an unknown date in 1522 or 1523. He died in Modena on 27 August 1584 and thus lived a little more than sixty years. In 1536 the Cretan scholar Francesco Porto began to lecture in Modena, receiving a salary from the commune, on Greek language and literature. Sigonio was among his students. He was instructed as well in the private school of Ludovico Del Monte, where Antonio Bendinelli of Lucca functioned as an assistant master when Del Monte was absent. Finally, Sigonio participated, together with other young men of aptitude, in classes or discussions held by Ludovico Castelvetro, a man considered to be the leading representative of intellectual life in the Emilian city. Modena was a center of religious tension resulting from the movement for the reform of the church from at least 1530, and the instruction in Greek given there by Francesco Porto was part of the program of the group known as the Accademia to hostile critics such as the citizen chronicler Tommasino De' Bianchi Lancilotti, a group which also led the attack on established ecclesiastical institutions.
The early association of Carlo Sigonio with Ludovico Castelvetro is mentioned in a posthumous life of Castelvetro written by a nephew, in which it is recorded that Castelvetro lectured in his own home and in that of Giovanni Grillenzone on Greek and Latin authors, and that his auditors included Sigonio, "who later showed little gratitude to his preceptor," but the rupture between Sigonio and Castelvetro occurred only later, when Sigonio was in his thirties. The great anatomist Gabriele Falloppia was a coeval and lifelong friend of Sigonio. The influence of the citizen intelligentsia of Modena on the formation of the young scholar may best be grasped, however, through reading the testimony for the life of a man, the force of whose acts and personality were sufficient to guarantee his posthumous memory in the city despite the fact that he did not publish or write, the physician Giovanni Grillenzone. In a letter of 3 July 1542 to Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, written as the crisis of religious dissent in Modena was nearing its climax, Grillenzone reviewed his own role in fostering letters in Modena, and gave his construction (not disinterested) of the alleged relation there between Greek learning and heterodoxy. The first teacher of Greek in Modena, a native of Crotone, had taught at a fixed hour in the house of the Grillenzone family. Popular incomprehension and resentment at this innovation had affixed the derisive term Accademia to those who gathered there. When Francesco Porto had come to Modena he had resided with Grillenzone. His foreign nationality had augmented popular suspicion, and when a few of those who had studied with him turned to the private study of the Greek Bible, the threat this had posed to the clerical, and especially Dominican monopoly on the knowledge and interpretation of this text had caused an entire section of the Modenese letterati to be branded as Lutheran. Ludovico Castelvetro's posthumous memorial of Giovanni Grillenzone, written in exile, relates substantially the same history.
Sigonio left Modena to begin the study of philosophy and medicine at Bologna, apparently in 1538, and his earliest surviving letter, written on 17 November of that year to Del Monte, glorifies his own strength in disputation and expresses a strong distaste for the life of pedantry. At Bologna he heard the lectures of Romola Amaseo in humanity (Latin literature and ancient history). After three years in Bologna, Sigonio studied for a year in Pavia, where he heard lectures by the philosopher and physician Andrea Camuzio. He never obtained a doctorate from any university, but this was not unusual.
There is no information about Sigonio's life between 1542 and 1545; it must be assumed that he lived for most of this period in Modena and that he continued to study Greek and Latin literature. He may have thought of becoming a courtier, for in 1545 he was employed as a secretary in the household of Cardinal Marino Grimani, patriarch of Aquileia. When, late in 1545, Francesco Porto had to leave Modena for Ferrara (and eventually Geneva), Sigonio was summoned to replace him as communal lecturer in Greek. He gave lectures from January 1546 in two series, one for beginners, the other for advanced students, and in September 1547 he began to lecture on humanity as an additional course. At the end of 1548 Sigonio took on the role of tutor to Fulvio Rangone, son of the late Count Claudio Rangone and of the Countess Lucrezia Pico Rangone. The facts about his reluctant assumption of this post are narrated in Lancilotti's chronicle and thence in Muratori and Tiraboschi, but they receive a richer context in the pages of the recent edition of the Morone trial. Lucrezia Pico had had in her house for years one of the leaders of the heretical movement in Modena, Girolamo Teggia, as a tutor to her child. On the death of Girolamo Teggia in 1548 she convinced Sigonio to replace this locally notorious figure, and he did so for at least the two years of life which remained to Lucrezia Pico. By employing the irreproachable Sigonio in the place of Teggia in 1548 she probably obtained, in addition to an excellent instructor in Greek and Latin, some measure of reassurance against suspicion of heterodoxy. The writer Girolamo Muzio, in effect an agent of religious control, had already warned Lucrezia Pico in 1545, in an epistle later published, against the domestic danger of "the enemy in your household."
Carlo Sigonio's first publication was an anonymous translation of speeches of Demosthenes, printed in Modena in perhaps 1548 or 1549, and publicly attacked by Antonio Bendinelli, now master in his own right of the school founded by Ludovico Del Monte, and Sigonio's rival. Sigonio defended his translation under the name of the Modenese Saulo Ronchi, evidently his student or friend. The subsequent facts about this rivalry, or two versions of them, emerged twenty years later in invectives published against Sigonio by Bendinelli; at the bottom of it was a competition to attract students, the best of whom were stolen from him, according to Bendinelli, by Sigonio. At some point Sigonio or Bendinelli (it is impossible now to know which) decided to write a biography of Scipio Aemilianus and the other immediately set about the same task. Whoever had legitimate priority, Bendinelli published his life of Scipio first in early 1549, effectively forcing the suppression of Sigonio's.
The wider world beyond Modena was not alarmed by these ripostes. But if in one sense their theater was only the piazza of the Emilian city, in another it was the humanist profession generally in north-central Italy. This profession was represented illustriously at mid-century by Egnazio, Romola Amaseo, Lazzaro Bonamico, Pier Vettori, Sebastiano Corradi, Paolo Manuzio, and Francesco Robortello; and by a swarm of minor letterati such as Sigonio and Bendinelli, struggling to ascend. Egnazio retired in 1549 from a twenty-nine-year tenure of the chair of humanity in the Scuola di San Marco in Venice. Like Romola Amaseo, holder of the chair in Bologna from 1524, with some wavering, until 1544, and Lazzaro Bonamico, at Padua from 1530 to 1552, Egnazio is known for excellence as a teacher rather than as author of philological or historical works of outstanding importance. Pier Vettori's international reputation commenced with the publication of the four-volume Giuntine Cicero of 1534–37. He held the chair in Florence from 1539, and in 1548 published his edition with commentary of Aristotle's Rhetoric. Sebastiano Corradi of Reggio Emilia had been a student of Egnazio, and was active in Reggio as a schoolmaster and municipal lecturer (1529–45) before assuming his major chair at Bologna (1545–56). He published commentaries on the works of Cicero, and two separate versions, both entitled Quaestura (1537, 1555) of a dialogue dealing with historical and literary problems in Cicero's life and career. Paolo Manuzio (1512–74), the son and heir of Aldo Manuzio, was an independent scholar and publisher rather than a university teacher; as Sigonio's first Venetian publisher and colleague in Roman studies, he will be mentioned throughout the present work. Francesco Robortello issued from Friuli to study under Amaseo at Bologna, then taught at Lucca (1537–43), Pisa (1543–49), and Venice as successor to Egnazio (1549–52). The year of his emergence was 1548, when Torrentino at Florence published a miscellany of treatises, including De nominibus Romanorum and, separately, the edition with commentary of Aristotle's Poetics, which helped to inaugurate the vogue for that work.
Carlo Sigonio was by nature one who worked alone. Young and unknown in Modena in the 1540s, driven by ambition to make his mark as a scholarly writer, encouraged by local intellectual circles, he conceived an ambitious project: the compilation of a complete Magistratus reipublicae Romanae. There is no evidence that this was other than a spontaneous inspiration, for Sigonio did not apparently have the sort of continuing direction and encouragement from a senior humanist given, for instance, by Egnazio to Sebastiano Corradi. But he was spurred by the knowledge that large fragments of an Augustan inscription which had originally recorded, as well as the reigns of the seven kings of Rome, all the senior annual magistracies of the Roman republic, had been discovered in 1546 and 1547 in Rome, and relocated on the Capitol. Another newly available set of sources for Roman history was the Greek texts of Greek historians writing under Roman rule. When in 1549 a transcription of the Fasti Capitolini was published by Bartolomeo Marliani, Sigonio saw that the material he had accumulated from the literary sources gave him the opportunity to publish a restored version of them — a new complete list of the kings, and the republican consuls, consular tribunes, censors, dictators, and cavalry commanders, with the triumphs they had celebrated, from the foundation of Rome to the end of the republic. His original plan for a work that would have included the lesser magistrates as well — praetors, aediles, quaestors, tribunes of the plebs — was therefore abandoned, but it is worth emphasizing the audacity of the idea, especially conceived as it was at a distance from any metropolis by an unknown young scholar.
Sigonio's debut therefore came in the spring of 1550, in the form of his Regum, consulum, dictatorum ac censorum Romanorum Fasti. At this point Sigonio expected to finish imminently a complete commentary on the Fasti, which would amount to a manual of Roman history. Its speedy appearance is announced on the title page of the Fasti of 1550, and the promise is reiterated in a brief sample of it which he appended to the consular list, De praenominibus Romanorum causis et usu. This, his first published treatise, contained criticism of Robortello's recent De nominibus Romanorum. The larger matrix of commentary, however, was postponed for refinement and ramification. Sigonio published nothing for five years, then produced the major works of the quinquennium 1555–1560, namely, the Livy edition with commentary, the second Fasti, and De nominibus Romanorum (all 1555), the third Fasti with complete commentary (1556), the fourth Fasti with revised commentary (1559), and the first two treatises De iure Romanorum (1560). The project conceived in Modena for an encyclopedic contribution to Roman studies was thus fulfilled.
The printer of the Fasti of 1550 was Antonio Gadaldini, a man who had participated in the movement of religious dissent in Modena. In October 1537 he had imported a suspect book, the Sommario delta sacra scrittura, into Modena, and his shop was for many years "the major source of the diff usion of heterodox texts in the Emilian city." In 1556 his shop was closed and he was incarcerated and interrogated in Rome in 1557, unable to return to Modena until 1559. But Sigonio's Fasti was not a scandalous work and his selection of Gadaldini to print it in 1550 was motivated by the fact that there was practically no other choice locally. Sigonio never sought engagement in religious or ecclesiastical questions: his confrontation with the Roman censors in the 1570s and 1580s was forced upon him. He kept allegiance all his life to the great cardinals (Marone, Bembo, Sadoleto) who had represented church reform and humanistic culture in the pre-Tridentine period, and after the council to those such as Gabriele Paleotti, who worked in Italy to effect its decrees through positive renovation rather than repression and exclusion. This allegiance was based on intellectual and personal sympathy and in specifically religious questions Sigonio was like them an unwavering Catholic. Nevertheless it was as a result of the impulse given to intellectual life in Modena by less orthodox men such as Castelvetro, Grillenzone, and other members of the Accademia that Carlo Sigonio, who had been their pupil, was able to launch a career of scholarship and rival Castelvetro as the greatest Modenese intellectual of the century.
When Sigonio returned from his university studies to Modena in the 1540s, he graduated from the position of pupil to one nearer parity of status with Castelvetro. However the years of his absence (1538–42) were those in which the confrontation between the Accademia and religious authority, ambiguously represented by Cardinal Giovanni Marone, bishop of Modena, took place. In 1543–45, years in which we know little of Sigonio's activities, the controversy rumbled on until it was silenced by a ducal edict from Ferrara in 1545 forbidding further discussion of religious questions. Shortly afterward Sigonio returned to Modena to resume his post as lecturer. There is no mention of him, not even the remotest allusion, in any account of the travails of the Accademia, and although his youth and intermittent absence could adequately explain his nonparticipation in this conflict of ideas and convictions, it is surely more correct to think of a deliberate refusal on his part to become involved.
Several items of literary testimony, each showing Sigonio in a relationship of amity with Castelvetro, survive from the late 1540s, the period of Sigonio's lectureship in Modena. The first is a Latin poem by Sigonio, Ad Ludovicum Castelvetrum, which is an appeal to Castelvetro to undertake with Sigonio a journey to Rome. Lines 42–49 reveal the admiration of Sigonio and Castelvetro for the cardinals of the Farnese era known as the "Spirituali," and incidentally permit an approximate dating of the poem. Sigonio names "the great Pole, offspring of kings," "Marone, famous for piety," and Bernardino Maffei as the members of the Sacred College whom Castelvetro will especially revere. Maffei was elevated in May 1549 and died in July 1553; Sigonio would have written the poem before leaving Modena, so its composition can be placed in the period 1549–52. The second item is a dialogue on the lingua volgare written by Lazzaro Fenucci of Sassuolo and published in Bologna in 1551, in which the principal speaker is Castelvetro. The setting is Castelvetro's house in Modena and the dramatic date is approximately 1548–50. Castelvefro reasons extensively about the grammar and phonetics of Tuscan; midway through his discourse Giovanni Grillenzone enters, and it is made clear that he alone of those present is Castelvetro's peer in learning and authority. The principal representative of the rising generation is "M. Carlo Sigoni Modenese, et ivi in Modena publico lettore dell' humane lettere, et nel vero giovene dottissimo, il che guari di tempo non sera, che li suoi scritti lo ci mostreranno." Castelvetro is made to amplif y this characterization, emphasizing Sigonio's "smisurato desiderio di piu conseguire."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Carlo Sigonio by William McCuaig. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. v
- Preface, pg. vii
- Abbreviations, pg. xiii
- Chapter One. Life of Carlo Sigonio, pg. 1
- Chapter Two. Roman Studies kn the Sixteenth Century Part One, pg. 96
- Chapter Three. Roman Studies in the Sixteenth Century Part Two, pg. 174
- Chapter Four. Sigonio Versus the Censors, pg. 251
- Chapter Five. Rewriting Cicero: The Consolatio of 1583, pg. 291
- Appendix. Letters on the Consolatio, pg. 327
- Bibliography, pg. 345
- Manuscripts, pg. 369
- Index, pg. 373