GUARINO VERONESE

Four autographed letters by Guarino Veronese are exhibited here. Two of them are preserved in the State Archives of Verona (Ospedale dei Santi Iacopo e Lazzaro alla Tomba, fasc. 1767, currently deposited in the Directorate's safe) and are both addressed to Damiano dal Borgo (or Borghi), a Veronese notary and correspondent of Isotta Nogarola. The first is from October 1424 and dated from Pergine Valsugana, where Guarino had taken refuge to escape the plague. The second, much later, was sent from Ferrara on 18 June 1453, and mainly concerns economic issues. Of the two remaining ones, the first, donated to the Library in 1903 by Antonio Maria Cartolari, is a commendation to the notary and chancellor of the municipality of Verona Bartolomeo Recalchi (Auricalco), to whom Guarino entrusted the learned and famous rhymer Leonardo Giustinian who was about to arrive on a visit to Verona; the second, already preserved in the State Archives of Verona (Ancient Archive of the Municipality, reg. 182), is addressed to the council of the Twelve of Verona (August 1449) and testifies to a first attempt to have Guarino return to Verona as a public tutor . The attempt was repeated three years later, promising a salary increase from 150 to 200 ducats and seemed to be successful, but the Duke of Ferrara Borso, who succeeded Leonello, managed to keep him thanks to an advantageous economic counter-proposal (February 1452) and Guarino thus remained in Ferrara. A fifth letter, not autograph and exhibited here, is preserved, among other things, in a manuscript of the Statutes of the Municipality of Verona owned and annotated in the mid-fifteenth century by the jurist Bartolomeo Cipolla (Verona, Biblioteca Civica, ms. 2009). Guarino sent it from Ferrara, on 19 October 1450, to the chancellor of Verona Silvestro Lando, successor of Recalchi and his ancient disciple. The letter accompanies the long and very erudite Proem to the Statutes signed by Lando himself and praises its richness and eloquence. Finally, Bartolomeo Verità's medley conserved in the Donisi-Piomarta collection of the State Archives of Verona is exhibited. Bartolomeo and his brother Giacomo were Guarino's disciples in Verona. To testify to his relationship with the master, a handful of letters are preserved that Guarino addressed to them from his home in Castelrotto in Valpolicella, in 1419. The zibaldone collects texts of different genres (Senecan extracts, a life of Paul of Thebes, family memories, etc. ). Among them also some letters from Guarino himself, such as the consolatory letter to the mayor of Verona Francesco Pisani for the death of his daughter Bianca, dated from Verona, in the month of September 1422, or the congratulatory letter to Francesco Foscari for his election as doge of Venice (April 1423).

Guarino Veronese's fame is linked above all to his didactic activity, aimed at teaching Latin and also Greek, the study of which resumed in the West at the end of the 14th century. At the beginning of his career Guarino had a private Latin school in Verona. After a period spent in Constantinople, during which he learned Greek in contact with the Byzantines Emanuele and Giovanni Chrysoloras, he returned to Italy in 1409. From this moment on, the humanist continuously practiced teaching in both private and public settings, moving from city to city: Florence, Padua, then Venice in the years 1414-1419. He later returned to his native Verona, where the municipality managed to retain him as a public teacher of rhetoric for a decade, despite other cities having invited him to move, enticing him with the offer of a generous salary. An important testimony in this sense is dated to 1425, displayed as the first document in display case 3: on 10 January, a resolution of the Council confirmed Guarino's public conduct for another five years, specifying that he was required «a multiis aliis communitatibus ... cum magnis salariis" ("from many other cities ... upon the offer of a large salary"). Starting from 1429 Gaurino moved to Ferrara, where he was first tutor to Leonello d'Este, then in charge of public teaching at the Studium (i.e. the University) of the Este city. With Guarino, illustrious humanists, not only Italian, but also foreign (French, English, German), were trained in Ferrara, attracted by the fame of the Veronese master. Some instruments for teaching Latin that he created during the years spent in Venice in the second decade of the fifteenth century remain as evidence of Guarino's didactic commitment. Among these, the most famous is represented by the Regulae grammaticales. It is an agile manual of Latin grammar focused above all on syntax, and accompanied by numerous examples translated into a vernacular often characterized in the Venetian sense. The work had immense and long-lasting success: around forty manuscripts are known, as many editions printed by the year 1500 and numerous re-editions - often heavily reworked - published in the 16th century. Four copies are on display here, distributed between cases 3 and 4. The first three are printed editions, published respectively in Verona in 1487 and 1547, and in Venice by 1539. The fourth copy is instead a manuscript, preserved at the Civic Library with signature 3066. It can be dated to the late 15th or early 16th century; it is paper, decorated, equipped with an unidentified coat of arms, and bears a note of ownership of an «Antonio Giuliano Veneto». In the editions and in the manuscript on display, other didactic materials of Guarini origin are often added to the text of the Regulae grammaticales, such as for example the short treatise De diptonghis (“On diphthongs”), or the so-called Carmina differentialia: a series of 291 easily memorized hexameters , in which, on the basis of similar medieval works, Guarino illustrates the semantic or morphological differentiae of apparently similar, or even identical, terms.

Guarino, it has been said, was also a teacher of Greek. The celebrity of his teaching meant that the most popular Greek grammar (and written in Greek!) in Italian Humanism has long been attributed to him. This is the so-called Compendium of the Erotemata, that is, a reduction of the grammar written for the use of Western students by Emanuele Crisolora, who had been Guarino's Greek teacher. In reality, authoritative research has shown that the Compendium was most likely the result of a 'seminar collaboration' between the Veronese pupil and his Byzantine master at the time of his apprenticeship in Constantinople. The fact remains that the Compendium was the reference grammar adopted by Guarino in his teaching practice. On display, in display case 5, two examples of the Compendium are displayed: the 1334 paper manuscript, dating back to the second half of the 15th century, reports an anonymous commented Latin version of the Compendium, with the Greek expressed in the form of headwords within the text, to allow the reader to trace the commented passage of the Greek original. The other example is a print edition from 1509, published in Ferrara by the printer Giovanni Mazzocchi and edited by the Belluno humanist Ponticus Virunio, who also added a biography of Chrysoloras to the Greek text of the commentary (very unreliable in terms of the historical data provided). and a commentary in Latin. Guarino's commitment to Greek studies did not end with teaching. He contributed to the dissemination of Greek culture in Italy (and, more widely, in Europe) also through an intense translation activity into Latin. His translations of Lucian, Herodotus, Plutarch, Saint Basil, Isocrates, Strabo are known. A manuscript copy (marked 758) containing the Latin version of the Plutarchean Lives of Lysander and Sulla Silla is displayed in display case 5. The version was set up in 1435 and dedicated to Leonello d'Este, on the occasion of his marriage to Margherita Gonzaga. The manuscript is parchment and has gold initials decorated with 'white girari' (white shoots: a typical decoration of manuscripts of the humanistic age). The second example in the display case is a printed edition of the translation of Strabo's Geography, dated 1510. Guarino began the translation in 1453, on behalf of Pope Nicholas V, and concluded it after the pontiff's death, in 1458, dedicating it to the Venetian Jacopo Antonio Marcello. An exceptional piece of evidence of Strabon's translation is preserved: Guarino's working autograph, now in Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Canon. Lat. 301.

At Guarino's death - which occurred in Ferrara in 1460 -, Verona was a cultural reality of primary importance in the national humanistic panorama. The "civilization of letters" that Guarino's teaching had helped to found perpetuated the teachings of the illustrious magister, first of all through the foundation of new schools by his own students. Among the schools of the Guarini tradition that have practiced erudition with the most success, that of Antonio Brognanigo should be remembered. In fact, at the school of Brognanigo, humanists were trained who would mark the history of the Italian fifteenth century, such as Domizio Calderini and Giovanni Antonio Panteo. Calderini, in particular, originally from Torri del Benaco, gravitated to Rome and Florence, actively taking part in the philological debate of the second half of the 15th century alongside famous humanists such as, among others, Pomponio Leto and Angelo Poliziano. Panteo, however, became secretary of Bishop Ermolao Barbaro the Elder and in turn founded a school attended by a large number of more or less well-known students, such as Virgilio Zavarise and Giacomo Conte Giuliari. In the book heritage of the Civic Library of Verona, precious testimonies of the humanistic cultural network that began with Guarino are preserved. There are, in fact, annotated manuscripts and incunabula which bear the signs of the erudite activity of the generations of humanists descended from the Veronese, and which tell of the passage through Verona of significant personalities of the second Italian fifteenth century, such as Marco Antonio Sabellico, who, on the occasion of the dedication to Giuliari of the Decades rerum Venetarum, expressed enthusiasm for the cultural ferment that he had found in Verona: note, in fact, the content of this dedication in the Inc. 1185. Antonio Partenio da Lazise, ​​a commentator on Catullus known to Poliziano, also operated in this milieu - a printed example of this commentary is represented by the Inc. 932 -, and Andrea Banda. The latter contributed, as a copyist, to the preparation of the ms. 2072 which transmits Panteo's treatise De thermis caldarianis, on the Bagni di Caldiero. The annotations, then, that Panteo himself wrote on an example of Poliziano's Miscellanea and on an example of Cornelio Vitelli's letter In defensionem Plinii et Domitii Calderini, i.e., respectively, the Inc. 805 and Inc. 101, demonstrate the humanist's strong interest in the philological events of his fellow disciple Calderini, at that time in conflict with the aforementioned Poliziano and with Giorgio Merula. In short, Guarino's cultural legacy made Veronese Humanism of the second half of the 15th century undoubtedly one of the most significant chapters in Veronese history.

The studies and essays on the life and works of Guarino Veronese take their first steps from the environments of eighteenth-nineteenth century scholarship often linked to the locations in which Guarino practiced his teaching activity, therefore Verona and Ferrara. After the information collected, invariably, in the Verona Illustrata by the Veronese Scipione Maffei (1731), we move on to the substantial biography of the Rovereto historian Carlo de' Rosmini (Life and discipline of Guarino Veronese and his disciples, Brescia 1805-1806) and then to robust reconstruction by the Ferrara historian Luigi Napoleone Cittadella (The Guarini. Ferrarese noble family originating from Verona, Bologna 1870). Cittadella also had the merit of exploring the Veronese archives, but above all it constituted a collection of original documents on the Guarinos and his descendants, in part coming from the archive of the Gualengo family of Ferrara, where they had arrived through marriage with the last descendant of Guarino, Ortensia, at the end of the 18th century. In 1872, also due to economic constraints, Cittadella proposed to the Municipality of Verona the purchase of part of this collection. Wished by Giovanni Battista Carlo Giuliari, librarian of the Capitolare Library of Verona, the proposal had to be accepted and this series of parchments found its way into the Ancient Veronese Archives annexed to the Civic Library, registered as the Guarini-Gualengo family fund, as illustrated by the correspondence with Giuliari preserved in Civic Library and exhibited here. With the creation of the State Archives section of Verona these documents were also deposited here and are today preserved in the new headquarters of the State Archives in the general warehouses in via Santa Teresa. Of these, the reproduction of the inventory of parchments, written by Cittadella, is displayed here. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was the classical philologist Remigio Sabbadini who gave Guarini studies a new and decisive boost. Guest of the Mazza college in Verona and student at the local seminary (the reproduction of a page from the 1865 school register is on display), Sabbadini studied the correspondence of the humanists for a long time to reconstruct the circulation of the manuscripts of the classics. This pushed him not only to trace a new and more accurate biography of Guarino and to describe his teaching method in detail (Vita di Guarino Veronese, Genoa 1891; The school and studies of Guarino Guarini Veronese, Catania 1896; reprinted in an anastatic edition in the collection Guariniana, Turin 1964) but also to engage in the monumental critical and commented edition of his epistolary (Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, I-III, Venice 1915-19). Both works are on display here. Taking advantage of Sabbadini's research, another philologist, Giulio Bertoni, was able to shed new light on the humanist's Ferrara teachings and on the manuscripts in his library, giving an account of it in the volume Guarino da Verona fra literati e courtesani a Ferrara (1429-1460) here exposed. The following decades brought new and significant additions to the epistolary and catalog of the humanist's works. Among the essays displayed here, noteworthy is the extract from the Giunte all'epistolario di Guarino Veronese by Luciano Capra and Cesare Colombo (1967), with an autograph dedication to another meritorious Veronese scholar of Guarino, Gian Paolo Marchi; the volume on Verona in the fifteenth century edited by Rino Avesani (1984); the Nuovi poems by Guarino Veronese edited by Donatella Manzoli (2000).