166 research outputs found
Greek Epigrams of Damianus Benessa
Get PDFU arhivu Franjevačkog samostana Male braće u Dubrovniku pod signaturnim brojem 78 pohranjena je autografna, dosad neobjavljena rukopisna zbirka pjesama latinista Damjana Beneše (1476–1539). Oko 8000 latinskih stihova »gradi« tri knjige epigrama, knjigu ekloga, dvije knjige lirskih pjesama, knjigu satira i nešto nerazvrstanih pjesama, uglavnom prepjeva. Naglašeno humanističkoj impostaciji ovog pjesničkog pothvata, koji u formalno-stilskom pogledu počiva na poetskim modelima iz klasične antike, ton daje i sedam Benešinih latinskih prepjeva grčkih epigrama iz zbirke Anthologia Palatina, prepjev podulje elegije Grgura Nazijanskog te napose devet autorskih epigrama skladanih na grčkom. Ovo potonje, Benešina pjesnička produkcija na drugom jezičnom mediju humanizma, svojevrsni je unicum među sačuvanim zbirkama hrvatskih humanističkih pjesnika i zbog toga je osobito važno za hrvatsku književnu i kulturnu povijest. Ipak, te pjesme – koje je još početkom 19. st., zbog teške čitljivosti i slabe razumljivosti, vrlo loše ocijenio skriptor Vatikanske biblioteke Girolamo Amati, a stoljeće kasnije javnosti tek ugrubo predstavio Benešin proučavatelj Đuro Körbler – do danas nisu bile ni prepisane, a kamoli detaljnije sadržajno, stilski i gramatički proučene. Članak stoga donosi rezultate upravo te osnovne, dosad izostale filološke obrade Benešina grčkog pjesništva.Damianus Benessa (1476-1539), a Latin poet of Dubrovnik, is generally considered to be one of the most versatile representatives of Humanism on the east coast of the Adriatic in the early 16th century. Remembered mostly by his voluminous Christian epic De morte Christi, composed in some 8500 Latin hexameters which happened to be published from the autograph only in 2006, Benessa is the author of another surviving manuscript which contains his smaller scale poetry: this very manuscript totals some 8000 Latin verses distributed in three books of epigrams, a book of eclogues, two books of lyric poetry and a book of satires. The apparent humanistic concept of this poetic venture, based on the generic models of classical antiquity, has been even more emphasized by Benessa’s seven Latin renditions of Greek epigrams belonging to the Anthologia Planudea and especially by nine original epigrams that he composed in ancient Greek. This particular segment of Benessa’s oeuvre, a total of 30 elegiac couplets written in the second linguistic medium of Humanism, is a unicum among the surviving works of Croatian humanist poets and therefore has an undisputed importance for Croatian literary and cultural history. However, Benessa's Greek poems, along with the most of aforementioned Latin poems from the same manuscript, remained almost completely unexplored up to our age, due to poor readability as well as to questionable comprehensibility and literary value. This paper presents the results of the basic philological analysis of Benessa’s poetic production in Greek, and tries to explain its origin in the context of contemporary Greek poetry in Italy
A Greek Elegy by the Zagreb Canon and Humanist Georg Wyrffel
Get PDFRad predstavlja dosad neproučenu rukopisnu prigodnicu zagrebačkog kanonika Georga Wyrffela sastavljenu na starogrčkom, kojom je popratio pobjedu hrvatskih snaga pod vodstvom bana Jurja Draškovića u bitci protiv Turaka na rijeci Glini. Budući da kontekstualizacija ovog neuobičajenog pjesničkog pothvata izravno ovisi o točnoj identifikaciji osobe koja ju je sastavila, rad također ispravlja netočne stare i donosi nove biografske podatke o Georgu Wyrffelu.Georgius Wyrffel (also Vurffel, Wyrffelius, Vurffelius, Virffelius; Ulm, ca 1535 – Eisenstadt, ca 1585) was a doctor of theology and a humanist. The existing biographical entries on him are incomplete, or, to be more precise, confusingly refer to two different persons of the same name who were simultaneously active in both Germany and Croatia. The first mention of Wyrffell’s name can be found in the register of Ingolstadt University from 1552; after that, at the beginning of the 1560s his name appears as the scribe of Greek manuscripts kept in the Fugger family collection in Augsburg (e.g. the Dionysiaka of Nonnus copied in 1561, Vindob. phil. gr. 52). Although he came from a Protestant background, he started his ecclesiastical career as a Catholic priest in Croatia. Bishop Juraj Drašković brought him from the Tridentine Council to Zagreb, where he served from 1563 until 1573 as a canon and the head of the newly established school of the Chapter of Zagreb, and as a personal secretary to the bishop of Zagreb. During that period he was laurelled as a Latin poet in Vienna in 1568 and studied in Rome at the Collegium Germanicum, collaborating closely with Cardinal Sirleto, the renowned Hellenist. He then returned to Germany, and from 1574 he was a counsellor of the Bavarian Duke Albert V and the librarian in charge of the Greek manuscripts in his court library in Munich. Finally, he spent the last few years of his life as a parish priest in Eisenstadt, Austria.
A small part of his literary work - a few hundred verses mostly in Latin but also in Greek dedicated to German, Italian and Croatian patrons - was published during his life, while the rest of it is preserved in manuscripts down to the present day. Among a large number of humanistic Latin poetic treatments of Christian-Muslim conflicts on the battlefield, the poem presented here is a unique Croatian example of a »turcomachia« written in Ancient Greek. It represents a little-known battle between Turkish and Croatian troops on the river Glina in the vicinity of Zagreb in the August of 1573, in which Count Juraj Drašković, a humanist and Wyrffel’s patron, led the Croatian troops to victory. Despite a number of orthographical and morphological errors, the poem consists of a plethora of Homeric stylistic reminiscences, suggesting that the author had a thorough classical philological education and that he was an accomplished writer of Greek verses. This comes as no surprise since his only printed Greek epigram (in Cicero’s De officiis, 1569) proves that he received his education in Ancient Greek from the famous German Hellenist Hieronymus Wolf
The Odes of Damianus Benessa: Introductory Considerations about the Metrical Organisation
Get PDFZbirka oda Damjana Beneše (1476-1539) koja sadrži trideset i šest tematski raznolikih pjesama osobita je po tomu što je pjesnik tih gotovo dvije tisuće stihova »zauzdao« čak petnaestorima različitim versifikacijskim modelima. To su poglavito oni koje upotrebljava Horacije, ali i neki Katulovi, i to od uobičajenih i očekivanih asklepijadskih, odnosno alkejske i safičke strofe, preko nešto rjeđe alkmanske ili arhiloške, sve do onih »egzotičnih«, hiponakteja, kombinacije glikoneja i ferekrateja, pa čak i galijamba. Na primjeru potonjega članak pokušava ponuditi objašnjenje odnosa metra i sadržaja unutar zbirke: rezultat upozorava da veza između odabranog versifikacijskog modela i pripadajućeg mu sadržaja nije slučajna, da intertekstualnost koja je uvjetuje nije uvijek lako uočljiva te, napokon, da Benešin pjesnički dijalog s antikom, pa onda i pjesništvo mu u cjelini, nije moguće u potpunosti protumačiti bez njegove usporedbe sa suvremenim talijanskim humanističkim stvaralaštvom.The poetry of Damianus Benessa (1476-1539) became quite recently accessible to the general reading public in its full extent, after the printed publication of his second autograph codex, which contains minor poetic works brought together under the title Poemata. The poems of this manuscript – there are 185 of them, comprising something fewer than eight thousand lines – were classified by the author himself, in terms of their contents, style and meter, into a number of separate units. He put those of a pastoral mood and composed in hexameters into the book of eclogues (Bucholicon liber / Aeglogae); a book of satires (Sermonum liber / Satyrae) consisting of hexameters in colloquial style and a tone in principle critical; a large number, diverse in contents, but linked mainly by the form of the elegiac couplet were distributed in three books of epigrams (Epigrammatum libri tres). Finally, the poet put thirty six poems that were diverse in contents but close to each other by being composed in meters traditionally considered lyrical into the remaining two books of his manuscript, calling the poems odes (Carminum lyricorum libri duo / Odae).
The fairly wide range of topics of this collection, which put under a common title the author’s views on life and poetry, his sorrow for the death of loved ones, as well as the celebration of Christ, and inducements to Christian rulers to make joint resistance to the menace of the Ottomans, a plaint over the schism within the Catholic Church, and a sound censure of the want of Christian solidarity, is not in itself a problem, for the humanist tradition actually made the formal element – the use of Horatian meters – the crucial generic determinant of lyrical poetry. What is, however, striking and exceptional in this collection of odes, not only within the framework of humanist poetry on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, is that Benessa »reined in« these almost two thousand lines with as many as fifteen different models of versification, on the whole those used by Horace, but some that we can find in Catullus, in a range from the usual and expected Asclepiadean or Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas, the somewhat rarer Alcmanian and Archilochian, to the very exotic, the Hipponactean stanza, combinations of Glyconic and Pherecratean and finally even Galliambics. Such a diversity of versification is not shown even by the poetry of the most highly praised local humanist master of verse, Benessa’s teacher, Aelius Lampridius Cervinus, and it is not typical even of the poetry of Italian humanism.
The question arises then as to what exactly the nature of this extreme metrical variety is. Is the connection among the meters and the pertaining contents of the given poems arbitrary only and present more or less just to show off the author’s skill in versification? Or is there in the background some deeper intertextuality, which conditions the combination of meter and content and makes it explicable? Along the same lines is the issue of whether the uncommonly large number of meters used is the direct consequence of Benessa’s fascination with the ancient models, Horace and Catullus, or whether he was motivated indirectly, by the influence of the lyrical cycles of humanist literary revivalists, Giovanni Pontano (1426-1503), Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and Michele Marullo Tarcaniota (1453-1500).
Taking as an example an analysis of a poem in Galliambic meter, the paper offers a model for the interpretation of the relation between meter and content in Benessa’s lyrical collection. The outcome shows that the connection between the selected versification model and its content is not accidental, and that the intertextuality that conditions it is not always easy to spot and finally that Benessa’s poetic dialogue with antiquity, and so his poetry as a whole, cannot fully be explained without comparing it with contemporary Italian humanist work
The Benessa Edition of Silius Italicus’ Epic: the overall framework
Get PDFEditio princeps najdužeg rimskog epa, Punica Silija Italika u 17 knjiga i više od 12000 heksametara, tiskana je u Rimu 1471, a do polovine 16. st. širom europskih humanističkih centara pojavit će se još petnaestak izdanja. Za prvo tiskano u octavo formatu, ono lyonsko iz 1514, zaslužan je dubrovački trgovac i latinski pjesnik Damjan Beneša (1476-1539). Zbog malog broja primjeraka i činjenice da se ubraja među tiskarske krivotvorine znamenitih aldina, ovo se izdanje danas spominje uglavnom kao vrijedan tipografski artefakt. Manje je pritom poznato da je Beneša osim novog formata i tiskarskog sloga čitateljima ponudio i emendiran latinski tekst, na koji će se priređivači Silijeva epa sve do modernih izdanja pozivati kao na jedan od najboljih. Članak pokušava ukazati upravo na mjesto Benešina filološkog pothvata u tradiciji priređivanja teksta Silijeva epa, te istovremeno pojašnjava okolnosti u kojima je lyonsko izdanje uopće nastalo, upotpunjujući tako postojeću sliku o Beneši kao svestranu humanistu.The editio princeps of the longest Roman epic, Punica, by Silius Italicus, in 17 books and more than 12,000 hexameters, was printed in Rome in 1471. By the middle of the 16th century it would appear throughout the centres of European humanism in fifteen more editions. Responsible for the first printing in octavo format in Lyons in 1514 was Dubrovnik merchant and Latinist poet Damjan Beneša / Damianus Benessa (1476-1539). Because of the small number of copies printed and because it is among the celebrated Aldine printing forgeries, this edition is mentioned today on the whole as a valuable typographic artefact. It is less well known that Benessa, apart from a new format and typeface, offered the readers an emended Latin text, which editors all the way down to modern times would refer to as one of the best. The article endeavours to indicate the place of Benessa’s philological undertaking in the tradition of editing the text of Silius’ epic, and at the same time to throw light on the circumstances in which the Lyonnese edition came into being in the first place, thus supplementing the existing picture of Benessa as an all-round humanist
The Epyllion Topographia Divi Hieronymi Sacelli of Gilberto Grineo (edition, translation and commentary)
Get PDFČlanak donosi kontekstualni i filološki okvir nastanka epilija Topographia divi Hieronymi sacelli talijanskog humanista i trogirskog učitelja Gilberta Grinea, kao i njegovo prvo cjelovito izdanje, hrvatski prijevod u metru i komentar teksta nužan za tumačenje složene pjesničke slike koju je Grineo sastavio u 172 heksametra.An interesting insight into the cultural scenes of Trogir and Split at the waning of the 15th century is provided by the Latin poems that during their stay in Dalma¬tia the Italian humanist Gilberto Grineo, rector scholarum in Trogir (1496-1499), and his son Marcantonio dedicated to members of the local intellectual elite. In a comprehensive study made in the middle of the last century, the Italian philologist Baccio Ziliotto drew attention to the Trieste manuscript R. P. 2-53 in which these poems are contained. He took, for scholars of the national cultural history in this country, with his pioneering ploughing through the occasionally hardly legible manuscript of almost 160 folios, a crucial first step, placing in the focus of his interest a segment of the poetic correspondence with addressees from Split and Trogir, including some of the leading names of the humanist scene of the time. But even Ziliotto failed to notice that behind the longest poem in the collection, Gilberto’s 172 hexameter-long Virgilian epyllion Topographia divi Hieronymi sacelli (about 1497) there was a unique description of the pilgrimage of the lea¬ders of the commune of Trogir to the shrine of St Jerome on Marjan Hill, a site that was at that time closely connected with the spiritual formation of the most celebrated Croatian humanist inheritor of the ideas of St Jerome, Marko Marulić. In the context of the fact that precisely at that time, the ending of the 15th century, the veneration of St Jerome in Dalmatia experienced a powerful surge, one more literary elaboration of the motif of St Jerome does not amount to anything very remarkable. However, this uncommon poetic vision, devised as an encomium on Venetian rule in Trogir, is picked out from conventional examples of the occasional poetry in this area by it being Jerome himself that is transmitting to the pilgrims prophetic revelations about the forthcoming glorious battles with the Ottomans. It becomes an authentic testimony to the Dalmatian perception at the turn of the 15th century of St Jerome not only as a cultural patron but as a prime protector of the nation to whom recourse was made in the face of the Turkish menace.
The article gives a contextual and philological framework for the origin of the epyllion. The research draws attention not only to the undoubted historical motif in its background but also to a new dating for Grineo’s birth (1435), gives a more precise determination of his employment in Dalmatia (Trogir, 1496-1499) and provides reasons for the hypothesis that manuscript R. P. 2-53 was mostly written by Gilberto Grineo in his own hand. The introductory study is accompanied by a complete edition of the epyllion, a Croatian metrical translation and a commen¬tary on the text necessary for an interpretation of the complex poetic image that Grineo left for his readers
Pisma Damjana Beneše europskim vladarima
Get PDFPjesnički opus dubrovačkog humanista Damjana Beneše (1476.-1539.) obilježava naglašena zainteresiranost za onodobna europska politička i vjerska previranja, odnosno nastojanje da upozori na važnost kršćanskog jedinstva u dramatičnim okolnostima turskih osvajanja u prvoj polovici 16. stoljeća. Njegovu zauzetost za to pitanje potvrđuju i donedavno nepoznata pisma koja je na tu temu 1534. godine uputio europskim prvacima, Ferdinandu I., Karlu V. i Franji I. Članak donosi njihov sadržaj, na latinskom i u hrvatskom prijevodu, te ih uvodno pokušava staviti u kontekst cjelokupna Benešina humanističkog angažmana
A new name in Dubrovnik Humanism: Michael Caelius Gradius
Get PDFEpigrami i ode humanista Damjana Beneše (1476-1539) onaj su segment njegova pjesničkog opusa iz kojeg se otvara najbolja perspektiva na književnu pozornicu onodobnog Dubrovnika i njegov osobni intelektualni univerzum. Slika koju pritom grade imena osoba kojima je Beneša svojim pjesničkim pohvalama odavao priznanje uglavnom je podudarna s konvencionalnom slikom književnopovijesnog kanona humanističkog Dubrovnika. I dok bi u svezi s Benešinim stihovima upućenima poznatim dubrovačkim humanistima jedino neočekivano bilo to da ih među njegovim epigramima i odama slučajno nema, podatak o postojanju čak šest Benešinih pjesama posvećenih izvjesnom Celiju i njegovu književnom radu začuđuje jer ne pronalazi baš nikakvo uporište u književnopovijesnim podatcima o akterima dubrovačkog humanizma na početku 16. st. Potonja je pak činjenica utoliko neobičnija jer je Celije u Benešinim epigramima i odama predstavljen kao njegov pjesnički uzor te nahvaljen kao upućen poznavatelj i tumač starine, koji humanistički svijet zadužuje prijevodima grčkih tekstova na latinski. Ipak, premda je jednom uspio »proletjeti ispod radara« dubrovačke književne historiografije, svojim je humanističkim angažmanom Celije ostavio za sobom dovoljno tragova koji omogućuju da mu se danas napokon utvrdi pravi identitet, atribuiraju djela i osigura davno zasluženo mjesto u kulturnoj povijesti Grada.The epigrams and odes of the humanist Damjan Beneša (Damianus Benessa, 1476-1539) are the segment of his poetic oeuvre that affords the best prospect onto the literary stage of the Dubrovnik of his time as well as onto his personal intellectual universe. The picture that is constructed by the names of persons whom Beneša honoured with his poetical encomia correlates well with the conventional image of the literary historical canon of humanist Dubrovnik. And while the only unexpected thing in connection with Beneša’s verses addressed to well-known Dubrovnik humanists would be if they were by chance not found in his epigrams and odes, the fact that there are as many as six Beneša poems dedicated to a certain Caelius and his literary work is quite remarkable because it is not backed up by anything in the literary history data about the figures involved in Dubrovnik humanism in the early 16th century.
The article reveals that Beneša is referring to a highly original Miho Gradić, son of Marin, and known as Caelius. To date he has been completely unknown and for unexplained reasons utterly forgotten. Miho was most probably born after 1465, certainly before 1472, and died on the island of Šipan in 1527, probably from the plague, for it was raging in the Dubrovnik area at that time. He acquired an outstanding education in Florence as pupil of the famed Demetrios Chalkokondyles (1423-1511), the editor of the first printed edition of the Iliad and the Odyssey in 1488. Ilija Crijević (Aelius Lampridius Cervinus) was correct in sensing that Caelius would be an ornament to his homeland. Giovanni Bembo mentioned his Latin translations of the orations of Demosthenes, which still have to be found, while in Berlin there is a manuscript of his translation of the Anabasis of Xenophon. This is the oldest of any of the preserved Latin versions of Anabasis, since two older manuscript translations have been lost, and the first printed edition derives from 1533. Finally, as Bembo and Beneša testify, Caelius did not only do translations but also wrote Latin verse; however, of the volume, content and fate of this body of work, for the moment, alas, there is nothing at all to be said
Ludovik Crijević Tubero: Humanist and Historiographer from Dubrovnik
Get PDFKao prvi opširniji osvrt na Tuberona na hrvatskom jeziku, ovaj rad donosi pregled kako starih, tako i novih spoznaja o njegovu životu i historiografskom radu. Pritom je posebna pažnja posvećena analizi nastanka pojedinih izdanja Tuberonovih Komentara, odnosno problemu rukopisa iz Marciane, za koji autor članka pokušava dokazati kako je riječ o Tuberonovu autografu. Napokon, budući da je riječ o humanističkom ostvarenju, kroz stoljeća hvaljenu zbog uglađenosti latinskog jezika kojim je pisano, završni dio donosi analizu Tuberonova izraza kroz usporedbu s jezikom antičkih autora na koje se ugleda.Sixteenth-century Ragusan historiographer Ludovik Crijević Tubero (Aloysius of Ludovicus Cervarius Tubero) wrote the history Commentaria de temporibus suis, a most insightful account of the events that took place in the southeast of Europe during the period from the death of King Matthias Corvinus (1490) to the election of Pope Hadrian VI (1522). Tubero’s history has served as an authoritative source over the centuries, his Commentaries being referred to by numerous authors. The history was reprinted in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Dubrovnik. Curiously, the autograph of Commentaries has been considered lost to this date, although there is every reason to believe that the manuscript kept at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice is none other than the original draft of Tubero’s work. In support of this claim are a number of interventions in the text concerning style and content, as well as correct readings of specific parts of the text that are corrupted in other manuscripts and printed editions. Tubero’s history is a magnificent achievement of both Croatian and European humanistic Latin idiom. In terms of the work’s content, Commentaria represents a qualitative step forward in the writing of medieval chronicles, annals, and records of similar nature, for it paved the way for critical historiography, whose beginnings in Croatia are marked by the publication in 1666 of Ivan Lučić’s (Johannes Lucius) De regno Dalmatiae et Croatiae. On the other hand, the elegance with which Tubero expresses himself in Latin makes him the ideal humanist: he attained as trustworthy an emulation of classical Latin as possible. This Ragusan Sallust, as he was often called, lent himself easily not only to Sallustian idiomatic reminiscences, but also to those of Livius, Caesar, Tacitus, and Curtius, only to prove that he exploited the classical literary idiom far beyond the epithet attributed to him
New accession to CroALa in 2018: Damjan Beneša, Poemata
No full textThanks to the masterly efforts of Vlado Rezar, and supported by the research project TeMrežaH (Textual Networks of Early Modern Croatia, PI Lahorka Plejić Poje), the lesser poems of Damjan Beneša (excluding the epic De morte Christi, which Rezar had edited in 2006) appeared in print last year, published by the Književni krug Split, as the first title of its series Kritička izdanja (Critical editions). We have used the Christmas holidays to reformat Rezar's XML edition, prepared with the Class..
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