Polemiche e filologia ai primordi della stampa: le 'Observationes ' di Domizio Calderini (review)

168 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) active in this last period of brilliant work were perhaps the most tangibly successful, obtaining commissions from the powerful and the wealthy. Most of the manuscripts produced came from only two workshops and with the death of Le Roy there appear to have been no illuminators left in the city, although in France work continued in other centres until at least the middle of the century. Burin provides us with a detailed catalogue of 136 manuscripts coming out of the city over the 50 years covered, recording provenance, codicological and palaeographic material, as well as details about the textual and illuminated and decorative material. She also includes bibliographies for each manuscript. In addition there are two appendices that include some of the liturgical characteristics of manuscripts for Lyon usage and a list of works commissioned by two major patrons, Guichard de Rovedis and Pierre Sala. The detailed catalogue is also followed by a generous set of photographs. This is a very useful collection of information, but it is also a frustrating one. This is not any fault of the author, for she has provided us with a tool which scholars interested in this moment of transition will find invaluable. The range of works tackled by these artists, from books of hours and devotional texts to histories and love poetry, and the inevitable range of imagery such a mixture produces, begs for further contemplation and discussion. Similarly this liminal moment, with the inevitable pressures placed on artists who had to adapt to the changing times, is one that perhaps resonates more now for us in a similar time of transition, and is one that raises intriguing questions that could be explored further. Burin has set out the field for us in a convenient and accessible form, and it is to be hoped that she, or someone else, will explore this material further. Judith Collard Art History and Theory University of Otago Campanelli, Maurizio, Polemiche e filologia ai primordi della stampa: le ‘Observationes’ di Domizio Calderini (Sussidi eruditi 54), Rome, Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2001; paper; pp. xvi, 308; 4 b/w illustrations; RRP EUR38.50; ISBN 888711482X. In 1475, three years before his premature death, Domizio Calderini included as the last item in a multiple printed volume – containing primarily his commentary on Statius’ Silvae – a specimen of a new work which was to be called– Reviews 169 Parergon 20.2 (2003) Observationes. In its brevity and variety this was very different from anything he had previously published. In earlier publications he had promised this work, or various predecessors of it, to his readers, but it was probably not completed before his death. In any case nothing more survives. To form the subject and heart of this fascinating book there remain fifteen disparate ‘chapters’, some extremely brief, each focusing on a particular philological problem. In solving these problems Calderini displays his repertoire of ‘modern’ philological techniques, that is, new parallels from Latin sources, Greek evidence, and old manuscripts. What Campanelli says of the last chapter of Observationes can be extended to the whole work: ‘Esso è infatti un piccolo compendio del metodo di esegesi e critica testuale che guidava il lavoro di Calderini’ (p. 245). It is, however, the great merit of this book to have shown how much more there is to Observationes than that. Campanelli has used Observationes not only as a way into Calderini’s philological method (of which he gives a sympathetic and judicious appraisal, see esp. pp. 49-72), but also as a key to a crucial period of Italian classical scholarship, that which coincides with the advent of printing. This period Campanelli wonderfully describes as having ‘un peculiare fascino, capace di distinguerla da ogni altra epoca, precedente e successiva, degli studi classici…un fascino simile a quello di una corsa all’oro, o, se si preferisce, di un “far west” ’ (p. ix). For anyone interested in the intellectual history of Italy in the later fifteenth century the first part of this book is compulsory reading. It traces the history of the conception of Observationes from Calderini’s first published commentary (Martial, 1474) and his war with Niccolò Perotti, through the...