Lettere (1444–1479) (review)

Iacopo Ammannati Piccolomini. Lettere (1444-1479). Edited by Paolo Cherubini. 3 vols. [Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato, Fonti XXV.] (Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Ufficio centrale per i beni archivistici. 1997. Pp. vi, 494; vi, 495-1401; vi, 1403-2408; 16 plates of manuscripts between pp. 202 and 203.)

Whereas the methodical calendaring and editing of papal letters has long been a component of modern scholarship, the correspondence of cardinals has received nothing like this attention for the simple reason that such cardinalitial collections hardly existed before the sixteenth century. Paolo Cherubini has now given us in three massive volumes containing 987 letters and a great mass of ancillary material the first critical edition of the earliest known large-scale collection of correspondence by a cardinal since Peter Damiani in the eleventh century.

The humanist Iacopo Ammannati (1422-1479) was a favorite of Pope Pius II (1458-1464), so much so that Pius not only gave him his own family name of Piccolomini but also raised him to the cardinalate in 1461. The death of Pius three years later deprived Ammannati of his main source of influence. But Ammannati had never ceased to be a literary man. Renaissance humanists had made the letter one of their favorite forms of publication, and in the years preceding his death Ammannati had clearly been preparing with the aid of his secretary, Iacopo Gherardi, an edition of his correspondence. Gherardi continued this labor after Ammannati's death, diligently collecting from wherever he could the letters of his former patron. Strange to say, however, the edition of Ammannati's letters that appeared at Milan in 1506 and that heretofore has been the source of our knowledge of Ammannati's correspondence was completely unauthorized. Gherardi had apparently entrusted his manuscript text to the printer Alessandro Minuziano years earlier but continually put off publication. Finally, an exasperated Minuziano took matters into his own hands and printed the work with a false preface. This edition had 694 letters. Cherubini has added nearly another 300 letters and, by searching out manuscript copies, substantially corrected and/or found earlier undoctored versions of many of the previously known letters.

Ammannati wrote as a cardinal all but the first fifteen of the 987 letters edited by Cherubini. Ammannati's patron, Pope Pius II, also left a letter collection, but he was a cardinal for only two years. So all but a relatively small number of his extant letters date from either before he was a cardinal or after he became pope. With Ammannati we have a documentary source extending over nearly eighteen years of the normal correspondence of a Renaissance cardinal. We see Ammannati giving banal orders to his staff, acting solicitously toward his chief secular patrons (the Sforza Dukes of Milan and the Medici family in Florence), diligently taking care of his own institutional and individual clients, anxiously and continually seeking for himself benefices and the profits of these benefices, maintaining contact with allies and friends inside and outside the Curia, and, when the spirit moved him, composing epistolary treatises meant for immediate publication rather than for private communication. If one prescinds from his support of a crusade against the Turks, what is missing from this correspondence is any serious spiritual or theological dimension apart from stray passages here and there. Ammannati gave no scandal by his private life. But he was a careerist, and it shows.

On the other hand, for anyone interested in the Renaissance papacy and Curia and in Quattrocento humanism and intellectual life in general, Ammannati's correspondence is an invaluable resource. In his lengthy introduction, Cherubini tries to give a complete description of all of Ammannati's benefices; he collects all that is known of the members of Ammannati's cardinalitial familia (he can identify 114 individuals); and at the appropriate chronological points in the edition he inventories the letters Ammannati received rather than sent. Consequently, Cherubini's 131 pages of indices constitute a...