Studia Humanitatis: Essays in Honor of Salvatore Camporeale (review)

Salvatore Camporeale's sudden death on 17 December 2002 deprived the Renaissance scholarly community of a remarkable figure, one whose genial presence and astute intelligence proved inspiring to all who encountered him, whether on the printed page or in person. This reviewer first came in contact with Salvatore during the fall of 1972 as the author of a stunning study which had just appeared, Lorenzo Valla: Umanesimo e teologia (Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1972), a work that demonstrated how radical were the implications of Valla's turning to classical rhetoric rather than Aristotelian logic as the foundation for theological inquiry. After spending some weeks engrossed in the text, I happened to mention my enthusiasm to the then director of Villa I Tatti, Myron Gilmore, who arranged a luncheon visit, and a chance for me to spend a memorable afternoon there with Salvatore, strolling the gardens and discussing shared interests in humanist religious thought. Extraordinarily learned, Salvatorenonetheless wore his erudition lightly, attentively responding to and encouraging the tentative ideas of his young interlocutor.

Salvatore's intellectual curiosity and gentle probings were experiences shared by several generations of Renaissance scholars, whether at I Tatti, where he was a Research Associate beginning in 1976, or at Johns Hopkins, where he was an annual Visiting Professor from 1986. Indeed, the present volume grew out of a colloquium held at Johns Hopkins in March 2002 to honor his completing seventeen years of teaching there, along with the tributes of Cesare Vasoli and Michele Ciliberto delivered in Salvatore's honor at I Tatti in September 2002. Their remarks, plus the opening encomium of his fellow Dominican, William A. Wallace, provide an informative and engaging account of Salvatore's intellectual career, both as a Renaissance scholar and as a Dominican.

Salvatore's research centered on Valla as a religious thinker, so it is fitting that three of the fourteen scholarly papers published here engage Valla directly. The essays by Nancy Struever, Jean Dietz Moss, and Christopher Celenza each consider how Valla's rhetorical theology represented a radical critique of prevailing scholastic orthodoxy. Celenza, in particular, insightfully suggests that polemical argument was a persistent thread in all of Valla's writings, and that this culture of disputatio is both inherent in rhetorical discourse and also in Valla's persistent defense of libertas dicendi, "the freedom of speaking necessary to an intellectual life of integrity" (87).

Valla's longer term influence in Italian Renaissance culture surfaces in sometimes surprising ways. In a revealing discussion of Dosso Dossi's fresco cycle in the Magno Palazzo in Trent, dating from the 1530s, Giancarlo Fiorenza notes that Valla's translation of a body of Aesop's fables from Greek into Latin was the ultimate source for their subsequent dissemination in a vernacular version with woodcut illustrations, which in turn inspired much of Dosso's imagery. That Valla's famous exposé of the fraudulent nature of the Donation of Constantine did not consign it to historical oblivion receives further testimony in Pauline Moffit Watts's analysis of the maps in the Galleria delle Carte Geografiche created in the Vatican Palace for Pope Gregory XIII: the maps of Italy depict the lands purportedly given by Constantine to Pope Sylvester according to the "Donation."

Space limits more extensive consideration of the many stimulating essays included in this volume, which range from aspects of Dante and Boccaccio to Machiavelli and Ronsard. Of particular note is the place of religion and religious imagery in many of the papers, a fitting focus for a tribute to Camporeale. Religious themes appear in Christine Smith's suggestion that Alberti's Momus is a parody of the Apocalypse; in Walter Stephens's sketch of Annius of Viterbo's forged documents claiming Noah as the first Etruscan pontifex maximus; inMarjorie O'Rourke Boyle's claim that Machiavelli's portrayal of Moses as a model prince ignorantly distorts any...