Antiquarian Voices: the Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid’s Fasti by Angela Fritsen (review)

Antiquarian Voices illuminates a crucial period in the formation of antiquarianism as a discipline. Through analysis of printed and manuscript commentaries along with notes on Ovid’s Fasti (the poem about the ancient Roman calendar) produced in the years of activity of Pomponio Leto’s Roman Academy, Angela Fritsen maps the intellectual and personal connections that shaped late fifteenth-century endeavors at reconstructing (and sometimes restoring) the culture of ancient Rome. Fritsen focuses on the humanists Paolo Marsi da Pescina (1440–1484, himself a member of Leto’s sodalitas) and Antonio Costanzi da Fano (1436–1490), authors of commentaries printed for the first time in 1482 and 1489, respectively. The result is a thorough study of a period bridging such founding figures as Flavio Biondo or Ciriaco d’Ancona with the institutionalization of antiquarianism in the mid sixteenth-century.

Fritsen’s emphasis on the form of the commentary is significantly productive, considering that the genre worked as one of the most common mediations between humanist scholars and the literary works of the classical past. The author reflects upon the conditions affecting the way commentaries existed and thrived, as she discusses questions related to the emergence of the printing press, the coexistence of old and new forms of dissemination of information, and the connections between scholarly practice and practical or political life. The book also evokes discussions on the locality of knowledge, mainly based on the claim advanced by Marsi, that Rome alone afforded appropriate conditions for the work of the antiquarian. This, in turn, casts light on the importance of Fritsen’s contribution to the present and ongoing effort to adequately weigh the momentous importance played by fifteenth-century Roman humanism in the general picture of Renaissance scholarship.

Chapter 1, “Reading Ovid’s Fasti” surveys both the medieval and present-day scholarly interest in the Fasti. After a survey of the renewed awareness of the poem among scholars in the wake of D. E. W. Wormell’s 1979 study, Fritsen brings us back to the medieval precedents of Marsi and Constanzi’s efforts. At the core of the chapter lies the reception of the Fasti by scholars such as Arnulf and William of Orléans in the twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Loire Valley (in what Ludwig Traube called Aetas Ovidiana). These commentators pointed to problems that would also preoccupy later scholars, such as the allegedly unfinished nature of the poem—since only six months of the calendar are extant. Fritsen shows that medieval scholars preceded the humanists in seeing the Fasti as a repository of ancient culture, but also as a place to learn about natural history and ethics. The Fasti, already at the root of the twelfth-century Mirabilia urbis Romae (a guide of the city for pilgrims), appears as a text that was destined to become crucial for any effort at reconstructing the past from a material, moral, political, or cultural viewpoint.

Chapter 2, “Fifteenth-Century Revival” introduces us to the careers of Marsi and Constanzi. Together with both of their commentaries, a series of codices containing notes on Ovid (mainly Vat. Lat. 1595, Vat. Lat. 1982, and Vat. Lat. 3263, of which a comparison is offered in Appendix II of the book) help Fritsen reconstruct intellectual ties around Pomponio Leto’s Roman Academy. Circles and connections appear as the result of a kind of constructedness fostered by the commentators themselves. Marsi draws for his work a place within a tradition of commentators of Ovid’s poem, in which he shows himself building upon Leto’s contribution (and therefore, writing under the ascendency of Leto’s professor Lorenzo Valla), while portraying Costanzi as a competitor. Commentators of the late fifteenth-century took up issues that were the object of debate since the days of Arnulf and William, such as the difficulty in deciding whether the dedicatee of the poem referred to as Germanicus is...