The Reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Italian Renaissance and Beyond by Bryan Brazeau;

Author:Bryan Brazeau;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350078956
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

7

Poetics in practice

How Orazio Lombardelli read his Homer

Sarah Van der Laan

How did Renaissance readers read the Odyssey? The question is harder to answer than it looks. The products of readings of Homer are everywhere: in treatises by philosophers and theologians and political thinkers, in literature and artwork of every genre, in emblem books and humanist compendia and in conduct manuals and operas. 1 But the readings of the Odyssey that underpin these varied uses of Homer’s poem remain obscure. The field of sixteenth-century poetics seems a logical place to look; among the myriad translations of and commentaries on Aristotle’s newly rediscovered Poetics, treatises on poetics, and polemics pitting Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso against Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, we might expect to find discussions of the Odyssey (Aristotle’s paradigmatic epic) and its use by contemporary Italian poets. But the treatises that emerged from Italian academies and universities suggest at first glance that the Odyssey, like the other classical epics, was read for little more than its plot – if it was read at all. It appears in these texts primarily as an authoritative classical source for choices that in Cinquecento poetics were subject to heated debate: a single hero; the (more or less) successful integration of episodes into a (more or less) unified plot; and a mixture of noble and common characters. Brief, uncritical references to this handful of examples recur ad infinitum throughout the century, conveying not critical engagement with the Homeric text but the rote deployment of a few well-known commonplaces. And the more the Odyssey is used to defend romances as heroic poems, the more unimpeachably epic it becomes. It is therefore neither a surprise nor a failing that the major studies of Renaissance poetics by Joel Spingarn and Bernard Weinberg do not seek to uncover Renaissance readings of the Odyssey or other classical texts. 2 The treatises themselves do not explicitly present such readings, and they give little indication that systematic – let alone interesting – readings lurk beneath their surfaces.

The newer disciplines of the histories of reading and of the book offer an alternative approach to Renaissance readings of the classics. Anthony Grafton’s work on Guillaume Budé’s copy of the Homeric poems reconstructs the sources of Budé’s knowledge of Homer and explores the variety of interpretive practices Budé employed to arrive at readings he could subsequently use in his own treatises. Christiane Deloince-Louette’s study of Jean de Sponde’s commentary on Homer carefully extracts a comprehensive reading of the Odyssey from a series of disjunctive comments and reconstructs the intellectual, political and cultural contexts of that reading. 3 Yet the material to reconstruct individual readings of Homer – especially those of less prominent figures – remains sparse, fragmentary and elusive. And the histories of reading and the book remain separate from the history of poetics; how these readings may have shaped their authors’ responses to modern poetry or poetic controversies remains mysterious.

Deep under London’s Kings Cross, the vaults of the British Library hold a volume that enables

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