Studies on Latin literature from the Quattrocento have long constituted a cen-tral area of research in the field of Neo-Latin studies, not least because of theimpressive flowering of learned humanism in certain major city-states such asFlorence during this period. Florence is indeed the locus of Christoph Pieper’slearned and useful monograph, which undertakes to define the place ofCristoforo Landino’s collection of elegies, entitled ‘Xandra’, within the con-text both of an enduring elegiac tradition that reaches back to Latin Antiquityand of the extraordinarily wealthy and complex literary culture of fifteenth-century Italy, with particular attention to Medici Florence. This contributionis all the more welcome that, despite Landino’s undisputed status as a majorhumanist figure, his Xandra has yet to receive the sustained attention of his-torical or literary criticism. Though Alessandro Perosa’s excellent 1939 criticaledition served as veritable clarion call to students of the Renaissance, no sin-gle monograph had been devoted to Landino’s work as a poet. ChristophPieper’s published thesis thus offers a distinguished first attempt at fillingthis void. The book is divided into five major sections, and includes also apreface (pp. V-VI), an introduction (p. IX-XX) and a bibliography of both pri-mary and secondary sources (pp. 326-331 and 332-356, respectively).

Pieper’s first chapter, entitled “Renaissancelyrik zwischen Literarizitätund Historizität” (pp. 1-20), exposes the theoretical underpinnings of hiswork. It first juxtaposes the ancient poetic theory of textual imitation (imitatio)as it was received by fifteenth-century Humanists with the principle of “in-tertextuality” which was developed by French literary thinkers working outof the structuralist and post-structuralist movements in the 1960’s and 1970’s.He underscores the importance of Barthes’ famous account of the “death ofthe author”, according to which the author-figure has become little more thanan expendable mythology, since the central element of any reading experi-

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International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 18, No. 4, December 2011, pp. 669-675.

Christoph Pieper, Elegos redolere Vergiliosque sapere. Cristoforo Landino’s ‘Xandra’zwischen Liebe und Gesellschaft, Noctes Neolatinae. Neo-Latin Texts and Stud-ies 8 (Hildesheim/Zurich/ New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2008), XX + 356pp.

DOI 10.1007/s12138-011-0299-3

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ence is the text itself. Pieper then adduces R. Schoeck’s critical examination ofthe “intertextuality” concept as a critical tool in Renaissance studies, quotingthis author’s useful reminder of the difference between a “text” and a “work”as well as his central argument that an appreciation of the context in which aliterary work was composed remains a necessary condition to any truly com-prehensive reading of it. Such a seemingly-obvious position reflects not onlythe context of literary criticism in which it was brought to bear, but also thegeneral unease amongst literary historians faced with the thorny problem ofconsidering at once the author’s individuality and the cultural norms of histime. This counterpoint allows Pieper to introduce the principal theoreticalmodel informing his analysis of Landino’s poetry. Stephen Greenblatt’s much-cited study, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, of 1980, constitutes one of the most in-fluential examinations in recent criticism of the social, cultural andinstitutional place of the author in the context of Renaissance European soci-eties. Following the reflections of Michel Foucault on the intimate, binding re-lationship of language and power in the public sphere, Greenblatt posited thatliterary figures of the early modern period discovered in the techniques of po-etic representation a source of immense public authority. Hence language –even poetic language – played an essential role in the development of powerstructure and relations, most notably in the aristocratic society of the court.This contribution to the so-called “new historicist” line of critical thinkingsupposes that texts and contexts, belonging as they do to a many-layered tra-dition which is itself textual in its transmission, are to be interpreted on thesame terms, that is, as a system of interlocking codes.

Having thus determined the need for a thoroughgoing analysis whichwould consider Landino’s famous collection of elegiac and other minor versein the social context of its genesis, Pieper sets out, in the book’s second chap-ter (‘Die Ausgangslage – Landino im Florenz der 1450er Jahre’, pp. 21-62), todescribe in biographical terms Landino’s rise to prominence in 1450’s Flo-rence. His analysis focuses most notably on the perceived “crisis” that besetFlorentine cultural life in the early part of the decade. Following Arthur Field’saccount of the origins of the Platonic Academy, he notes that the 1440’s hadbeen marked by the disappearance of many of the city’s foremost humanists.For various reasons, such as death, ambition and exile, by mid-century mensuch as Bruni, Filelfo, Manetti, Traversari and Niccolo Niccoli were no longerpresent to animate Florentine intellectual and cultural life. In April 1453, thedeath of Carlo Marsuppini, occupant of the prestigious chair in Latin andGreek at the Studio fiorentino, left a gaping hole in this society and invited thepressing question of his replacement, a nomination which was seen as hold-ing considerable symbolic importance. Such notable Florentines as DonatoAcciaiuoli and Alamanno Rinuccini perceived this moment as a critical junc-ture in the city’s history and lobbied for the nomination of a major humanistto the chair, one whose stature should be commensurate with the unsurpassedreputation of the Republic as a centre of learning. Celebrated men of letters,such as the irascible and controversial Francesco Filelfo, and the learned Greekscholar Johannes Argyropoulos, were suggested as viable candidates for theposition, and much political jockeying ensued as the supporters of possiblesuccessors to Marsuppini were considered. Finally, after much deliberationand strategizing, the chair was separated and reapportioned into its Latin and

Greek halves, with Argyropoulos named to the latter in 1455. A less presti-gious, local candidate, Cristoforo Landino, was later named to the chair ofLatin rhetoric and poetics. Here, Pieper is at some pains to show thatLandino’s election to the Latin chair was in large part the result of his owncareful manipulations. Quoting from the humanist’s correspondence withPiero de Medici who played an influential role in Florentine cultural life,Pieper adduces evidence to suggest that Landino deliberately set out to por-tray himself as Marsuppini’s natural intellectual descendant and even as hisfavoured successor. It would appear that this technique of subtle persuasionconstitutes the first element in an extensive practice of ambitious and finely-tuned “self-fashioning”.

The middle chapter in this book addresses the topic of Landino’s imme-diate, fifteenth-century predecessors in the art of Latin elegiac poetry. Hav-ing established a certain amount of textual evidence for the idea of “self-fashioning” as a guiding principle in the early moments of the humanist’s Flo-rentine career, Pieper now sets the stage for the insertion of this particularmode of court rhetoric within the generic bounds of elegy. In order to accom-plish this, he adduces three Quattrocento authors of love elegy, elder contem-poraries of Landino, and through successive accounts of their worksconstructs a general portrait of the state of the poetic genre in the first half ofthe fifteenth century. This presentation is in itself a most valuable contributionto the study of Renaissance poetics, insofar as it manages to capture some ofthe particular tendencies of the humanist renewal of an ancient form. Succes-sive sub-chapters on three major Latin poets of the period, Giovanni Marras-sio, Antonio Beccadelli (“Panormita”) and Enea Silvio Piccolomini, bring fortha common preoccupation at once with elegiac form and with the codified, an-cient commonplaces of Roman love elegy. Each of these poets exhibits a cer-tain knowledge of generic love motifs as they appear, with significant var-iations, in Propertius and Ovid. Nevertheless, they each reveal a concern withthe imitation of the elegiac code itself that significantly outweighs the ardourof the actual love plaint.

Following the lead of recent work by Natascia Tonelli and others, Pieperhere adds to the mix a lengthy consideration of Petrarch’s role in the trans-mission and near-contemporary accommodation of elegiac topoï. The adapta-tion of ancient motifs inherited from pre-Christian authors, to a modernsensibility marked by traditional Christian moral themes, constitutes accord-ing to Pieper’s suggestion a crucial step forward in the ultimate renewal ofthe elegiac genre. It also establishes, in keeping with the rhetorical norms ofancient elegy, a remarkable forum of poetic self-representation. The final partof this third chapter examines Landino’s use of these two major elegiac influ-ences, namely those of Quattrocento Latin poets and Petrarch, in an analysisof the opening poems of each of the two principal forms of the Xandra. Par-ticular attention is paid here to the moment at which Love’s irrepressible forcesubjugates the speaking poetic subject, for this moment encapsulates at oncethe power of Cupid and of the woman’s beauty, and the essential moral pos-ture of the poet-lover. This development, compelling as it is, tends to presentLandino as the definitive figure in the gradual coming-together of the ancientelegiac, mediaeval pastoral and petrarchan strands, creating a new, compos-ite, modern voice for elegy. Although close readings of individual pieces do

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sustain this demonstration nicely in Pieper’s work, the overall picture hetraces would have benefited from a consideration of Pierre Laurens’ classicthesis on the complex relationship of petrarchan and petrarchist motifs to theconsiderable Quattrocento corpus of neo-Latin epigram.1 What shines forthhere is the establishment of fifteenth-century Latin love elegy as a privilegedlocus showcasing the expression of what clearly resembles a modern, almostCartesian, subjectivity. Yet Laurens’ compelling suggestion, that the ongoingtradition of petrarchist poetry into the early sixteenth century is as much in-debted to Latin epigram as it influences it – even in its apparent “petrarchist”manifestations —, might have lent some essential nuance to an historical re-construction which, though certainly valid on many points, assumes perhapstoo quickly the inherent subjective distinction of the individual poet’s “voice”.

It is precisely this subjective affirmation of the poetic speaker – the poetic‘I’ – that constitutes the topic of Pieper’s fourth chapter (‘Modellierung desDichter–Ichs’, pp. 118-192). After a review of some humanist theories of poeticinspiration closely associated with Florentine intellectual circles, the authorexamines Landino’s own position on this essential topic. Beginning with arapid overview of Boccacio’s theory of poetry in the fourteenth book of the Ge-nealogia deorum gentilium, he traces the development of the celebrated doctrineof ‘poetic fury’ (furor poeticus) through the contributions of Marrasio, Ficinoand Poliziano. Marrasio’s place in this prestigious concatenation is assuredprincipally by his correspondence with Leonardo Bruni and its direct echoesin the prefatory elegy of the Angelinetum. Pieper situates Bruni’s (very brief)description of poetic fury at the very heart of a burgeoning literary movementin fifteenth-century Florentine culture. Of course, this claim carries a signifi-cant, implied advantage for the author’s thesis, insofar as it discovers the the-oretical impulse of Quattrocento Latin love elegy in the remarks of the city’sgreat humanist chancellor. The neo-platonic theory of poetic fury is hence pre-sented as intimately associated with the convictions of the author of the His-toria Florentini populi. Yet Pieper is surely overstating (or simplifying) the caseslightly when he declares that “der florentinischer Staatskanzler kann somitmit einigem Recht als Initiator einer neuen Epoche der Dichtung angesehenwerden, sozusagen als Apollo der humanistischer Lyra” (p. 129). Later refer-ences to Bruni’s iconic status in the intellectual and public life of the Floren-tine Republic seek, with some success, to solidify the case for the centralpertinence of “civic humanism” to Landino’s poetic inspiration and produc-tion. Certainly the humanist’s position as professor of Latin and of literaturein the Studio makes this a natural and attractive suggestion. Yet the author’scontinuous attempts to foreground the Florentine academic context in the gen-esis of Landino’s oeuvre do not always succeed in drawing a convincing link.When Pieper notes, for example, that Johannes Argyropoulos’ inaugural lec-ture as professor of Greek rhetoric and philosophy explicitly invokes the par-ticular Florentine interest in Aristotle’s ethical philosophy as established by hisdistinguished predecessors Bruni and Marsuppini (p. 146), it does not follow

672 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / December 2011

1. P. Laurens, L’abeille dans l’ambre : célébration de l’épigramme de l’époque alexandrineà la fin de la Renaissance, Collection d’études anciennes 59 (Paris : Les Belles Let-tres, 1989).

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from this (correct) observation that Bruni’s rapidly-drawn characterisation ofpoetic fury resides at the heart of the tradition thus described. In fact, thedemonstration seems to point up a contrary set of circumstances, in which thepreoccupation with Aristotelian ethics introduces the significant likelihoodthat competing rhetorical notions of representation and poetic inventionwould have tempered the importance of the neo-platonic theory of furor poet-icus.

Pieper’s reply to this obvious difficulty is to suggest that Landino’s tastefor philosophical Platonism is intimately linked with his political allegiance tothe house of Medici. His implicit rivalry with Argyropoulos reflects at once theideological divide between the Aristotelian tradition and the more recent, bur-geoning Florentine Platonism, as well as that which separates the Medici fromtheir political opponents. This fundamental assumption forms the basis of themonograph’s fifth and final chapter, “Die Xandra als Teil des florentinischenMachtdiskurses” (pp. 193-309). According to Pieper, Platonism manifests itselfmost conspicuously in Landino’s elegiac poetry when it appears in the guiseof Petrarchan imitation, which would have been perceived by Landino as asignificant link in the great chain of Plato’s most distinguished epigones. It isthus through the narrow door of the Quattrocento Latin reception of Petrar-chan idealism that a kind of literary Platonism comes to inhabit the subjec-tive world of love elegy, a considerable innovation which greatly alters thehorizons of that ancient poetic genre. In the space that he devotes to actualpoetic analysis, Pieper convincingly demonstrates that Landino’s use of bothPetrarchan and Virgilian materials and motifs does indeed contribute to theaccommodation of the elegiac genre to a late-mediaeval, Florentine sensibil-ity.

Perhaps somewhat less convincing is the contention that Landino’s po-etry is primarily an exercise in “Renaissance self-fashioning”. In fact, Pieper’srepeated attempts to link his excellent poetic readings to this theory seem inseveral places to be forcing the issue. Certainly Landino is an important ex-emplar of the professional humanist whose personal and political preoccu-pations manifest themselves at times, though rather obliquely, in his verse.That his writings in elegiac distichs open a new subjective horizon proper toQuattrocento elegy is nicely proven in this well-conceived and well-con-structed book, and constitutes in itself a significant contribution to the studyof fifteenth-century Humanist poetry. Greenblatt’s famous thesis, as it is rep-resented here, offers a framework that is doubtless too general in its scope toprovide any rigorous, organising conceptual guidance for Pieper’s workwhere we find it at its best, namely, in well-informed and clear-sighted read-ings of the poetic corpus. This slight weakness is at times apparent in therather jarring transitions from discussion of Florentine institutional politicsand public oratory, to finely-measured analyses of elegiac passages. It is nev-ertheless a minor shortcoming in a work of this calibre, and one which seemsto reflect the scholastic nature of the doctoral dissertation. It may be suggestedthat the more modest, literary notion of “persona”, as developed in both Clas-sical and Renaissance studies by scholars such as Martin Winkler and JeanLecointe, might be even more useful as a precise theoretical apparatus, de-spite the enduring seductions of Greenblatt’s thesis. In general, Pieper isstrongest in his honest confrontation with the primary sources, making the

674 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / December 2011

references to modernizing critical theory seem at times a bit extraneous, mostnotably in the initial chapters.

Finally, it should be mentioned that this presentation of Landino’s par-ticular situation as a writer of elegy in Medici Florence might have benefitedin its argumentation from a more skilfully-exhibited awareness of the inher-ent limits of such a hypothesis. Hence, for example, the long “excursus” inthe final chapter, on the references to Florence’s military campaign against theking of Naples, Alfonso of Aragon, would have been enhanced by at leastsome reference to parallel literary activity in the Mezzogiorno. Indeed, a hu-manist at the court of Alfonso, of similar status to that of Landino, GiovanniPontano, was himself experimenting with elegiac innovations during the1450’s.2 Pontano’s first important collection of “minor” verse – elegies, hen-decasyllables and a small number of lyrical odes – is the object of an out-standing, and much-neglected due to its small circulation, Italian monographpublished in Naples over a decade ago. Antonietta Iacono’s book on thesources of Pontano’s Parthenopeus sive amorum libri offers a description of na-tive Umbrian’s youthful collection of poems that is in many respects strik-ingly similar to Landino’s characterization of his own collection.3 Themiscellaneous gathering of different poetic genres, the poet’s expectation thathe will some day write “serious” – that is, epic – poetry, and the references tocivic life and court personalities, all mirror Landino’s practice. This collectionin two books, wherein the newcomer Pontano introduces himself to Neapoli-tan court society as a “Man of Naples” (Parthenopeus), also serves as a verita-ble sampling of the humanist’s talents with a view to obtaining a secureplacement. One principal difference, however, between the elegies of Landinoand Pontano is to be detected in the philosophical underpinnings of eachpoet’s work. An admirer of Aristotle, Pontano shows a taste for – and use of– both Greek and Latin prose, which is at once deeply learned and widely var-ied. His references to poetic inspiration are quite free of the neo-platonic ref-erences to poetic fury that one finds in Landino. In fact, it is reasonable tosuggest that Pontano’s poetic practice bears a close affinity to the Aristotelianpreoccupation with ethical reasoning that characterized Johannes Argy-ropoulos’ work in the Studio insofar as his teaching followed that Florentinetradition reaching back to Bruni. All of this may at once justify Pieper’s de-scription of Landino’s work and career in Florence, and suggest that the exis-tence of an alternative, south-Italian elegiac poetics in the Quattrocento meritsat least some bibliographical mention!

The foregoing remarks can only testify to the inherent interest ofChristoph Pieper’s excellent contribution to the study of neo-Latin human-ism and poetry. His monograph makes stimulating and informative readingfor any student or scholar passionate about the literature of the Quattrocento.Despite a few minor printing errors, the Georg Olms Verlag has done a nice

2. C. Dionisotti, « ‘Juvenilia’ di Pontano », Studi di Bibliografia e di storia in onore diTommaso de Marinis, t. II, (Verona : Stamperia Valdonega, 1964), pp. 181-206.

3. A. Iacono, Le fonti del Parthenopeus sive Amorum libri di Giovanni Gioviano Pontano,Pubblicazioni del Dipartimento di Filologia Classica dell’Università degli Studidi Napoli Federico II, vol. 16, 1999.

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4. Unfortunately, a spelling error appears in the very title on the book’s cover:“Christoforo Landino” instead of “Cristoforo Landino”! Other typographical er-rors include the following : p. XVI, line 20 “die Beobachtungen”; p. 4, note 16, line2, “plutôt”; p. 20, line 26 “ob es zwischen”; p. 50, line 9, “sehr sympatisch sei”; p.350, bibliographical entry O’Connor, Eugene, “… The typology of female sightsand smells …”.

job in the production of the volume.4 Finally, the reader of such a rich andthoughtful piece of writing may deplore the absence of an index.

John Nassichuk Department of French

The University of Western Ontario