Revisione strutturale come tecnica economica: Le due redazioni della raccolta poetica di Manilio Cabacio Rallo dal codice Berlin, Hamilton 561 all’editio princeps napoletana del 1520 (Iuveniles ingenii lusus)

Manilius Cabacius Rallus ranks among those learned Greeks who fled the dissolution of the Eastern Roman Empire after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, to settle in Italy. This essay analyses how the poet rearranged previous works for rededication, and how Rallus refashioned himself as an author within a new dedicatory context. It thus reveals how Rallus was able to renew his image as a poet and intellect with a very small compositional effort due to the demands of new circumstances and new literary tastes. Discounting his alleged edition of Collectanea priscorum verborum Pompei Festi (Rome, 1475), Manilius Cabacius Rallus is known to through a slim corpus of elegant and cultured poetry, which amounts to a total of sixty Latin compositions in various meters, handed down in two independent witnesses: a deluxe manuscript now preserved in the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, (Hamiltonianus 561; designated by the letter B), dedicated in all probability by Rallus himself to Cardinal Galeotto Franciotti Della Rovere; and a printed edition with the title Iuueniles ingenii lusus (Naples, Pasquet de Sallo, 15 December 1520; designated by the letter n) dedicated to Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. In the latter Rallus not only praised the culture, the political wisdom and the generosity of his patron, but also presented an image of himself as an intellectual refuting his earlier erotic poetry as the sins of the youth. The Berlin collection contains fifty-six poems, of which fifty-three, albeit arranged in a different order, are found in the Neapolitan printed edition. The latter consists of fifty-seven poems including four not found in the Berlin codex. Careful analysis and comparison of these two witnesses reveals two distinct and different criteria for the order and arrangement of these collections. The Berlin codex seems conceived as two distinct parts, each of which is prefaced by an introductory poem. The first part contains forty-nine short poems in a variety of meters on a variety of subjects which alternate from passionate love to invective, from friendship to intimacy or exhortation, from courtly life to the topic of death (B, to fols 3r–23v); while the second part, more serious in tone, contains seven long elegiacs in the manner of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid (B, fols 24r–40r). An analysis of the two sections suggests that the manuscript is juxtaposing two different poetic cores: the first of which characterized by a sensual, “Catullan” epigrammatic flavour character; while the second is more serious and intellectual in inspiration. Fifteen years later (1520), when Rallus intended to pay tribute to his new patron Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, he revised the structure of this collection by re-presenting the contents in a different order so as to present a radically different image of himself, and one that was more in keeping his maturity. The elegiacs that formed the second part of the Berlin Codex (B, fols 24r–40r) obtained here prominence after the dedicatory epistle to his new patron, Reuerendissimo et illustrissimo Domino meo, Iulio, Cardinali Medice, et Vicecancell(ario), Manilius Cabacius Rallus. Foregrounding this group, Rallus also included two recent poems celebrating his Medici patron and his cousin. The first group of lighter poems from the Berlin codex are now relegated to the second section of the printed edition in virtually the same order. To complete the new collection the poet added two new poems to the Neapolitan edition, which are not present in the Berlin collection. The first (n, fol. Iiv–Iiir), addressed to his Greek friend Janus Lascaris, entitled Iano Lascaro doctissimo ode monocolos; the second (n, fol. Iiiv), entitled Laus Heluetiorum which may have been composed to celebrate the bravery of Swiss soldiers in the victorious battle of Novara (6 June 1513) between the confederates and the French army of Louis XII. From the title of the printed edition, Iuueniles ingenii lusus, and certain comments in the dedicatory epistle to Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, it seems that the aged prelate was keen to refute the image of himself as a frivolous follower of the Catullus in favour of a talented and fine elegiac poet. This probably followed a trend that had been increasingly developing since the end of the fifteenth century in humanist collections which tended to gradually remove attention from light, Catullan epigrams to the more cultured and erudite elegiac model. However, by the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century the literary taste had changed radically under the impulses of the nascent classicism and incipient atmosphere of the Protestant Reformation. Poetry was consolidating itself in increasingly stereotyped forms and far from the fresh experimentation of the fifteenth century. Rallus too, had become a different person, who perhaps was a little ashamed of his youthful excesses, even if these were only literary. No wonder then that while reviewing his own poetry, Rallus had not only edited the composition by cutting the text here and there, but he had also implemented a real reversal of the whole structure. By doing so, he sought to overshadow the poems that he had come to regard from the literary point of view, as the sins from his youth. On the other hand, by placing in the foreground those he retained most worthy to represent his personality and his current status in a society that had also changed profoundly his tastes from the time of his earlier poetic effort.