The Poetics of Patronage: Poetry as Self-Advancement in Giannantonio Campano by Susanna de Beer (review)

Literary patronage in the Quattrocento and early Cinquecento in Italy has been greatly neglected in comparison with that of the visual arts. There are several reasons for this. Literary patronage tends to involve writers in celebration of their patron and opens them to charges of flattery or adulation, modes that give rise to wariness, at the least. Equally important is the greater difficulty of access and creating a tradition of reading. Works of visual art have not only been widely available longer but they have a longer history of interpretation. Most of the important literary works of this period are in Latin, and many have not been reprinted since the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries. Often the lesser works that form their context have never been printed.

For a pioneering treatment of literary patronage in the Quattrocento, it would be hard to choose a better figure than Giannantonio Campano (1429–1477). Now regarded as the most important Latin poet of the Roman Quattrocento, he was a humanist whose ambitious pursuit of a career saw him writing for a series of important supporters, or hoped-for supporters, presented in five ‘case studies’. First, and discussed in Chapter 1, was Pope Pius II Piccolimini, himself a humanist writer and poet. Campano wooed Pius with his poems and was rewarded with positions as Bishop of Crotone in 1462 and Teramo in 1463, as well as a recognised position in the pope’s entourage, which did him service after Pius’s death.

Chapter 2 focuses on Campano’s relationship with Giacome degli Ammanati, whom Pius made Cardinal in 1461. Ammanati initially was asked to help Campano in his approach to Pius. He admitted Campano to his court and his library and recommended him to his next influential patron, Cardinal Pietro Riario, nephew of the new pope, Sixtus IV. The poetry for Riario and Campano’s fortunes and misfortunes under Sixtus are discussed in Chapter 3. Riario died and Ammanati encouraged Campano to try his luck in the court at Naples, with King Ferrante I and his son Duke Alfonso (Chapter 4). Campano had hoped to return to his native Campania, but he failed to win a position with the Neapolitan court. The last supporter to be discussed, but not a new one, is Federico da Montefeltro of Urbino. From 1472, Campano had helped Federico built up his library, and it came to hold four manuscripts comprising Campano’s Opera omnia(Chapter 5).

Campano is an ideal subject not just for the wealth of interest these various attachments provide. The corpus of his poetic œuvre is sizeable but manageable, and most of his poems are ‘occasional’ with named addressees. His life is well documented in his letters (like his poems, last printed in 1707, and in facsimile reprint 1969) and this allows the role of individual poems to be teased out in considerable detail. As Susanna de Beer shows, his knowledge of classical poetry was considerable, as befitted a university teacher (he was appointed Professor of Rhetoric at Perugia in 1455) and member of the ‘Academies’ of Pomponio Leto and Cardinal Bessarion in Rome in the late 1460s.

This book makes two important contributions. The first is philological and relegated to Appendices I and II: a path-breaking analysis of the textual transmission of Campano’s poetry, with interesting remarks on the circulation of the different, overlapping, collections. Appendix III consists of a critical edition of the poems discussed in the volume, necessary because the early printed editions are unreliable, and also because it is important to be able to read the poems discussed in full. There are no translations here, but all extracts quoted in the case studies are translated. The translations are generally helpful but occasionally suffer from the fact that the author is not using her native tongue. [End...