Marco Petoletti

This essay analyses the inscriptions, in prose and in verse, on the Pace of Chiavenna, both in the golden cover and in the enamel medallions.

A Latin verse inscription (inc. «Marcellina tuos cum vita resolveret artus») was written for the tomb of Marcellina, sister of the bishop of Milan St. Ambrose. The original stone, placed on the burial in the Milanese basilica martyrum at the time of bishop Simplicianus (397-401), has been lost. The epigram, however, is transmitted by two medieval manuscripts (9th and 11th century), and by the Collectanea of Andrea Alciato (1492-1550), who modified several details of the text for the sake of improving it, in keeping with his humanist taste. The manuscript tradition of the poem is investigated and a critical edition with translation and commentary is provided.

Three humanistic manuscripts from the family library of Duke Visconti di Modrone have been deposited at the Università Cattolica del S. Cuore, where they now are with the family’s archives. The main series of the Archives concern the family’s business and factories (19th and 20th Centuries); other series are older and include a collection of late medieval documents. The codices now given in deposit were studied by important Italian scholars in the 19th and early 20th Century. They are: MS Visconti di Modrone 1, a Petrarch manuscript, dated 1399, followed by a humanistic miscellany; MS Visconti di Modrone 2, a collection of Chancery letters from the Visconti milieu (Milan, early 15th Century); MS Visconti di Modrone 3, a nice 15th-Century copy of Gasparino Barzizza’s Epistole ad exercitationem accommodate in its original blind-stamped leather binding.

The rich collection of documents preserved in Milan, Archivio Capitolare della Basilica di S. Ambrogio, includes a number of loose leaves from codices. Three of these fragments are here described. The oldest one, Perg. sec. XI n° 126c, is a four-leave item, written in caroline minuscule with raethian influences probably in Northern Italy, in the 9th Century, circa med. or third quarter. The text is a fragment of the rare Collectio Quesnelliana, a canonical collection composed in Rome, 4th-5th century, and attested in 8th-9th-century manuscripts from France and Germany. An updated list of the MSS containing the Collectio Quesnelliana is given.

Nel 1308 un incendio, che devastò la basilica di S. Giovanni in Laterano, fu descritto in quartine ritmiche da un anonimo poeta, presente a Roma. Oggetto del Rithmus, qui edito, è soprattutto la celebrazione delle reliquie, custodite nella chiesa, che scamparono alle fiamme.

Tra la fine del XIV secolo e l'inizio del XIV l'Italia settentrionale fu attraversata da un fermento culturale che vide impegnati alcuni laici, notai, giudici, cancellieri a ricercare e studiare testi di autori classici, di cui spesso si era perduta memoria. Gli antichi manoscritti, custoditi nelle arche delle biblioteche capitolari e in monasteri periferici, vennero di nuovo trascritti e attentamente studiati. Queste prime indagini diedero frutti eccellenti e prepararono il terreno per le avventure filologiche di Francesco Petrarca. Figura chiave di questa età fu Benzo d'Alessandria, attivo nell'Italia settentrionale nei primi tre decenni del Trecento, a Milano, a Como e soprattutto a Verona. Egli riversò la sua cultura, eccezionalmente vasta, in una ponderosa compilazione storico-enciclopedica, in ventiquattro libri, elaborata intorno al 1320, conservata, almeno in parte, in un unico manoscritto.