Lives of the Popes.

Lives of the Popes, vol. 1: Antiquity. By Bartolomeo Platina. Ed. and trans. by Anthony F. D'Elia. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 30. xxxii + 328 pp. Essays and Dialogues. By Bartolomeo Scala. Trans. by Renee Neu Watkins. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 31. xviii + 314 pp. History of Venice, vol. 2: Books V-VIII. By Pietro Bembo. Ed. and trans. by Robert W. Ulery, Jr. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 32. xii + 407 pp. Writings on Church and Reform. By Nicholas of Cusa. Trans. by Thomas B. Izbicki. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 33. xx + 663 pp. Commentaries on Plato, vol. 1: Phaedrus and Ion. By Marsilio Ficino. Ed. and trans. by Michael J. B. Allen. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 34. lx + 269 pp. Poems. By Cristoforo Landino. Trans. by Mary P. Chatfield. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 35. xxvi + 398 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. $29.95 each. Those who have followed the fortunes of The I Tatti Renaissance Library since its relatively recent inception have noticed by now that the pace of publication has picked up: the 2008 harvest, under review here, totals six volumes. Somewhat arbitrarily, perhaps, these six books can be divided into two very different projects: three that are part of multi-volume presentations of long works, and three that serve as collections of smaller works into composite volumes.

Of the first group, Robert W Ulery's volume is the second of three that cover the history of Venice from 1487 to 1513. An official history of the city, the History of Venice covers both internal politics and external affairs, especially conflicts with the other European states and with the Turks in the East. The author, Pietro Bembo (14701547), a Venetian nobleman and cardinal, was a celebrated stylist in Latin and Italian (versions of the history exist in both languages), fostering Ciceronianism in the former and the Tuscan dialect in the latter. The current volume covers the years 1499 to 1509. The other two volumes in this group initiate the series of which they are a part. Bartolomeo Platina (1421-1481), the author of the Lives of the Popes, lived a life that took an unusual number of unexpected turns, including a stint as a mercenary and two different periods of torture in Castel Sant'Angelo mixed in with study under Vittorino da Feltre and John Argyropoulos, membership in Pomponio Leto's Roman Academy, and positions as papal abbreviator and prefect of the Vatican Library. The Lives of the Popes, a major work of humanist historiography, is worthy of its flamboyant author. In some senses an apology for the Papacy, the book firmly anchors the birth of the church in pagan Rome, where its early saints are regularly compared to the corrupt clergy of Platina's day, to the disadvantage of the latter, especially Paul II, the pope who had imprisoned and tortured Platina. The book was very popular, going through twenty-five printings before the mid-seventeenth century and being translated into the major western European languages, yet it ended up on the index and was finally republished in censored form. The third volume in this group is a different sort of animal. In principle a revision of texts published over twenty-five years ago, this book offers several works of great importance in the history of western thought whose textual status and reception are unusually complex. Their author, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), is justly famous as the man whose Latin translations of the dialogues of Plato in 1484 played a major role in the Renaissance revival of that author. The Phaedrus, with its discussion of such key themes as love and rhetoric and its use of famous metaphors like the chariot of the soul, is one of the most important of Plato's dialogues, providing an additional justification for republication (along with the fact that the original has long been out of print). Since the 1496 edition in which it appeared in this form, "the Phaedrus commentary" has meant the documents printed here: a general title, an argument divided into three chapters from the 1484 edition, a postscript for these three chapters, eight new chapters, a postscript, a new title, and fifty-three summae of varying lengths. In this form, as Allen put it, the Phaedrus commentary "remained in cartoon" (xxxv), a sketch for a tapestry that was never fully woven. Added to this volume is Ficino's introduction to the Ion, a dialogue on poetic inspiration whose popularity was also great.

The other three volumes under review represent in some sense a collection of smaller works. Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498) is perhaps better known for his Platonizing commentaries on Virgil and Dante (he was Ficino's teacher), but he also wrote the Xandra, a collection of Latin poetry that has attracted significant scholarly interest of late (see Christoph Pieper, Elegos redolere Vergiliosque sapere: Cristoforo Laandinos 'Xandra' zwischen Liebe und Gesellschaft (Hildesheim: Olms, 2008)). These three books of Latin poems focus primarily on his love, Alessandra, but they also chronicle his life, friendships, interest, and growing political awareness from his late adolescence to his middle thirties. Chatfield's volume also contains an earlier redaction of Book 1 and some miscellaneous poems by Landino. Bartolomeo Scala (1430-1497) lived and worked in these same circles, competing unsuccessfully with Landino for a chair at the university but attaining greater success in politics, rising through a series of offices to become first chancellor of Florence. His writings reflect this environment, drawing on manuscripts in Cosimo de' Medici's library like Lucretius's De rerum natura and on the Platonic material that Ficino was working on. His fables and dialogue on law were known and admired, but his most important work was his Defense against the Detractors of Florence, which plays a part in the development of modern republican theory. The final volume contains writings on religion by Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464), who is best known for his The Catholic Concordance, which is not presented here. His shorter works include pieces connected with the Council of Basel, a series of works in which he emerged as a champion of the pope, a group of more metaphysical speculations on matters of faith and doctrine, and several final calls for reform. (Craig Kallendorf, Texas A&M University)

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Author:	Kallendorf, Craig
Publication:	Seventeenth-Century News
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	Sep 22, 2009
Words:	1031
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