BMCR 2009.07.48: De Keyser on Pieper, Elegos redolere Vergiliosque sapere: Cristoforo Landinos 'Xandra' zwischen Liebe und Gesellschaft. Noctes Neolatinae Bd. 8

Christoph Pieper, Elegos redolere Vergiliosque sapere: Cristoforo
Landinos "Xandra" zwischen Liebe und Gesellschaft. Noctes Neolatinae Bd.
8.  Hildesheim:  Olms, 2008.  Pp. xx, 356.  ISBN 9783487135946.  EUR 88.00.

Reviewed by Jeroen De Keyser, Hogeschool Gent / KU Leuven
([email protected]; [email protected])
Word count:  2383 words
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This study is a slightly revised version of Pieper's PhD dissertation
as it was presented at Bonn University in 2007. The author discusses
Cristoforo Landino's (1424-1498) 'Xandra', the first neolatin elegy
collection, as a milestone in the development of Quattrocento Latin
poetry. Landino effectively combined the tradition of the Augustan love
elegy with panegyrics of his hometown Florence and its ruling family,
the Medici, and by means of this fashioning of Florence and his own
self-fashioning, Landino "negotiated" his own career as a poet and as a
professor at the Studio Fiorentino, the university of Florence.

The book's title has been taken from Giovanni Marrasio's 'Angelinetum',
a quote that is symptomatic for a question that was very alive in the
Florence of the 1450's: how elegiac poetry was to be squared with the
ruling generic norm and literary values. The pivotal point in Pieper's
study is Landino's nomination as a professor at the Studio Fiorentino
and the role his 'Xandra', a collection of lyric poetry in three books,
played in Landino's self-representation or fashioning (it will be clear
by now that Greenblatt's New Historicism and its theoretic presentation
are quite present in this book).

In his Vorbemerkungen, Pieper sets out a clear-cut plan for his
research: he wants to combine textual analysis with an intertextual
approach, analyzing the 'Xandra' as an aspect of both Florentine
fashioning and Landino's self-fashioning. It's not in his intentions to
produce a detailed analysis of every single poem, but he wants to study
the 'Xandra' (in its second redaction, from 1458) as a whole. He
rightly points out that Landino the poet, unlike Landino the
(Neo-Platonic) philosopher and Landino the (Virgil) scholar, has been
practically ignored in modern scholarship and gives a short overview of
the few existing studies (by Cardini, De Nichilo, Charlet, Murgatroyd,
Tonelli).

The first chapter (Renaissancelyrik zwischen Literarizitaet und
Historizitaet, pp. 1-20) outlines the theoretic foundation Pieper is
basing his work on. An overview of the development of intertextuality
(Kristeva/, Barthes, Schoeck all pass by) leads to crediting
Greenblatt's New Historicism for ending intertextuality's exegetical
aporia and offering a more fruitful approach. This may all seem too
obvious to some, but as Pieper rightly points out, Landino's love
elegies still suffer from being read as mere autobiographical writings,
without distinguishing between the author and his literary persona,
whereas the scholarship on the Roman elegy (Ovid's role in the 'Amores'
as poeta v. amator, e.g.) might have shown the way.

The second chapter (Die Ausgangslage -- Landino im Florenz der 1450er
Jahren, pp. 21-62) gives a synthesis of Landino's early life, and
describes the crisis at the Studio in the middle of the century. After
the return to power of Cosimo de' Medici, many first rate humanists had
indeed left the city, and after Bruni (1444) and Marsuppini (1453)
died, the vacant chair in poetry and rhetoric needed to be filled.
Several factions pushed their candidates: Rinuccini and his followers
advocated the return of Francesco Filelfo, who had had to leave the
city because of his fierce criticism of Cosimo, while others supported
the Byzantine Johannes Argyropoulos. Enter Landino. His Greek was poor,
and even as a philosopher his record was meager, but he had the support
of Poggio Bracciolini and the Medici. In his poetry he had fashioned
himself as the most loyal pupil and natural heir of Marsuppini, and
with his dedication of the 'Xandra' collection to the bibliophile Piero
de' Medici, a member of the ruling family, he secured the appointment.

The third chapter (Die 'Xandra' und ihre Vorlauefer -- Liebe und
Dichtung, pp. 63) inquires into the question of elegy as a genre and
its implications for Landino's poetics: Landino was indeed, together
with Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, one of the the first poets to publish a
collection of several books of miscellaneous poetry, and the only one
who consistently politicized his lyric efforts.[[1]] Landino joined in
with the 'apostolic succession' (E. Fantham) of Augustan poets singing
their servitium amoris in elegiac distichs. He wove the ancient
tradition into contemporary culture, rewriting and thereby modernizing
the antique genre. In his course on Horace's "Ars poetica" at the
Studio in 1464, Landino adhered to Horace's views on the elegiac genre,
but in his own poetry, he departed from the original content of elegy,
under the influence of Antonio Beccadelli's obscene 'Hermaphroditus'
and Giovanni Marrasio's 'Angelinetum'.  The former showed Landino the
way, by dealing with the most ordinary subjects in an ingenious
literary way and by dedicating his collection to Cosimo de' Medici; the
latter was more of a genre conscious and theory oriented poet, and he
explored and supplied possible new themes for elegiac poetry. Marrasio,
however, did not always actualize such themes in his own writings.
Another model for Landino was Enea Silvio Piccolomini's 'Cinthia'.
Piccolomini, in fact, had already attempted a synthesis of Beccadelli's
epigrammatic and Marrasio's 'pre-elegiac' collection. From Piccolomini
Landino also derives the stronger Virgilian influence, although
Piccolomini's major source of inspiration was Propertius.

The two redactions of the 'Xandra', as Pieper proves, are to be
considered two independent literary works with different goals and
emphases. While in the first redaction Florence was almost absent and
Love was the undeniable leading figure (as in Piccolomini and the early
Propertius), in the second, more complex redaction, the aemulatio
Vergilii surfaces together with the intention of diverting the work
from erotic poetry to patriotic elegy. This happens by means of a
skilful interweaving of the antique, medieval (Petrarch) and humanistic
traditions.

The fourth chapter (Modelliering des Dichter-Ichs, pp. 118-192) raises
the question of the role of the poet in humanist culture. An important
aspect of humanist poetry is, indeed, the author's concern with his
work's function, its legitimization of the profession and its
positioning of the poetry in the canon of the genre. Pieper discusses
the vision on poetic inspiration (the fervor concept in Boccaccio's
'Genealogia deorum gentilium' and the furor poeticus in Marrasio's
'Angelinetum') and the explicit, neo-platonic 'poetology' of Ficino and
Poliziano. Landino's own program, with his first courses at the studio,
was much indebted to Ficino's thinking in his letter 'De divino
furore': in his 'Prolusione dantesca', Landino sticks closely to
Ficino's letter, and echoes the vision that the furor poeticus brings
man closer to God. With his choice of Cicero as the subject of his
first course on philosophy, on the other hand, Landino mainly sought to
distance himself from Argyropoulos (who had been teaching Aristotle and
didn't have a high regard for Cicero), with whom Landino not only
contrasted on an intellectual, but also on a political level, being
himself a convinced supporter of the Medici. This chapter also explores
the captatio benevolentiae in the dedication of the 'Xandra', the
influence of Petrarch, and the concept of inspiration, taking as case
studies the poems I, 24 and 25.

The fifth and final chapter (Die 'Xandra' als Teil des florentinischen
Machtsdiskurses, pp. 193-309) focuses on a hot topic in fifteenth
century Italy: the question of which city was the most important
cultural centre and, therefore, the true heir to the legacy of ancient
Rome. The actual city of Rome, one would think -- but things weren't
that simple. The idea that Quattrocento Florence, not Rome itself, was
to be considered the real successor of ancient Rome wasn't that absurd,
Leonardo Bruni had argued: in the end, 'Rome' would never have come
into being without Etruria, i.e. Tuscany, and so, in a way, the
handover to Florence was like a homecoming. Bruni's provocative
position of course met with a harsh reaction in Rome: Valla and Biondo
rejected it fiercely; after the return of the Curia to the Eternal City
in 1443, the Rome of pope Nicolas V became a magnet for intellectuals.
Florence was definitely over the hill by then, in terms of cultural
leadership, no matter how strongly Landino would argue the opposite in
his poems, extolling the city and its rulers, the Medici. This twist
even inspired him to abandon, in the transition from the second to the
third book of the 'Xandra', elegiac Propertius for Virgil: the poet who
once worshipped his own, egoistic love for a girl now worships his
patria, in a language which significantly echoes the Aeneid. Landino
now presents Piero de' Medici as the Augustus of the new cultural
center of the world. Pieper illustrates this by analyzing poems II, 29
and 30, which he sees as the poetic program or manifesto for Book III.
Landino mirrors Bruni's reliance on the concept of the translatio
studii, with the relevant difference that Bruni, in the tradition of
civic humanism, had defended republican libertas, while Landino argues,
with his parallel between Augustus and Piero, that a Medici principate
is the best way for Florence to revive ancient Roman culture and
especially literature. In the third book, the farewell to the love
elegy is completed, and panegyrics take the lead. The central topic is
the peace that the Florentine regime is bringing, and the tone is that
of epic. The recusatio of the 'Propertius Florentinus' from love elegy
in II, 23 is modeled explicitly after Propertius (III, 9), who had made
the same switch from mere love poetry to a more epic, political
inspiration. An analysis of the 'war cycle' poems III, 4-6 and of the
epitaphs (for Marsuppini, Dante and Petrarch) in the same book brings
Pieper to the conclusion that Landino fashioned himself as a novus
vates in the tradition of the great poets of the past (Horace, Virgil
and Propertius, Dante and Petrarch). By means of their intertextually
incorporated works, Landino himself became a part of an uninterrupted
chain of poets and a worthy bearer of the literary tradition of elegy.

In his study Pieper has collected an impressive number of both primary
and secondary sources, and he demonstrates a thorough command of his
research field. This first real comprehensive study of Landino's
poetry, Pieper's book is a must read for everybody interested in
neolatin literature and/or in the reception of Augustan elegy and
classical Latin poetry in general. My remarks, therefore, do not
concern the substance or persuasiveness of his discourse, but only the
framing of it.

At first sight, Pieper's indebtedness to New Historicism may seem
exaggerated, but it never prevents him from arriving at plausible
conclusions -- that is, unless one feels that Pieper's use of the
theory was so effective in "imposing a pattern on reality (...) that
the victim can no longer conceive it in different terms" (to quote a
citation Pieper himself reports, p. 58) that the present reviewer has
allowed himself to succumb to it.

The introductory chapter may seem typical of a PhD dissertation, laying
out theoretical foundations and summarizing the state of the art, but
precisely because of the combination of different approaches later on
in the book, and the wide range of possible readers (not all of them
familiar with all the periods, sources and methodologies covered), it
turns out to be a sound decision to have marked and investigated the
field so explicitly. Pieper indeed is in full control of traditional
Quellenforschung techniques as well as of modern literary theory. He is
also very well read in both classical and Quattrocento Latin
literature. His reading of Landino's poetry is extremely skilful. A
keen philologist, he incidentally corrects Perosa's classic edition in
several places (for example p. 175, n. 191; and 299, n. 306).

A less felicitous consequence, in my opinion, of the decision to
publish a hardly altered PhD dissertation is the inclination to lengthy
summaries of predecessors' publications, if only to dismiss them as
worthless (for example the treatment of Rombach on p. 184ff.), or the
exaggerated number of pages (pp. 198-228) dedicated to the question of
whether Rome or Florence was the real heir to ancient Rome, which could
have been dealt with more concisely, the more so as Pieper himself
points out (p. 198, n. 16) that the whole controversy wasn't really as
black-and-white as he may present it. In the same category goes the
tendency to present drawn out adaptations of secondary literature: the
story of the Studio controversy in chapter 2 comes now and then quite
close to a paraphrase of Arthur Field's seminal book on 'The Origins of
the Platonic Academy of Florence' (1988), alternating with long primary
source quotations and their translation.[[2]]

All this will be fine to convince a PhD jury of the seriousness of
one's bibliographical homework, but quite a lot of it might as well
have been weeded out of the book version of this thesis. As a matter of
fact, Pieper did not need all that borrowed stuffing  to produce an
excellent book, and he is indeed at his best, and most original, when
he is his own man, analyzing in a most convincing way Landino's poems,
and fitting his discussion with both the historical and literary
background needed for a thorough understanding of them. Besides, by a
fortunate coincidence, almost simultaneously with this monograph, the
'Xandra' was reissued with an English translation in Harvard's I Tatti
series. Hopefully both publications will benefit from each other's
presence to find a bigger audience.

Pieper's command of Latin sources as well as of the vast secondary
literature on Quattrocento Italy in Italian, English, German and French
is rare enough to be mentioned, as is his capacity for quoting all of
them flawlessly (I hardly noted any spelling mistakes and only a few
typos beyond plusto^t instead of pluto^t on p. 4) and translating the
Latin and (antique) Italian citations properly into German. It is to be
hoped Pieper's work will get the attention it deserves, although the
author could have furthered his case by translating at least the final
recapitulation in another major language. I also regret the most
unpleasant way of referring internally countless times with "Vgl. dazu
Kap. 3.1.2.2. meiner Arbeit" and the like, forcing the reader to get
back continuously to the Inhaltsverzeichnis: page numbers might have
done a better job. The absence of an index (nominum) doesn't help
either: I'm sure many scholars without a particular interest in
Landino's self-fashioning will find lots of interesting material in
this book, but they would have found it more easily (and in greater
number, I'm afraid) if only Pieper had decided to open up his treasury
by adding an index.


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Notes:


1.   Tito Vespasiano Strozzi's 'Eroticon libri' is dealt with in half a
page (p. 90), "given the lack of a reliable critical edition of his
text and because it's not always clear who may have influenced whom".
The first point is unfortunately true for more than one text discussed
at length in Quattrocento scholarship -- and the second point is worth
discussing more. Strozzi's collection was written probably between
Landino's two redactions of the 'Xandra', and went itself through
several redactions of which the precise stages are unclear, in the
absence of a critical edition and full study of the textual tradition.
After making this point, though, Pieper nevertheless quotes quite a few
of Strozzi's verses as a pendant to Landino's writings (e.g. pp. 154,
186, 187, 188, 272) without pronouncing himself on the possible
interdependence.

2.   A blind spot, though, seems Pieper's lack of knowledge of the
literature on Francesco Filelfo: while quoting repeatedly from
Filelfo's epistolarium, he seems to ignore the 1986 collection of
articles ('Francesco Filelfo nel quinto Centenario della morte') or any
other secondary literature on the man, and especially Silvia Fiaschi's
2005 edition of the first five books of Filelfo's 'Satyrae', a major
source on the Florentine period Pieper is discussing here.