(PDF) Things Left Unsaid

UNFINISHED RENAISSANCES Things Left Unsaid Shane Butler, Johns Hopkins University PROBA BLY NOT H ING AN GELO POLIZIA NO W ROTE has more often been quoted than this: “Non exprimis, inquit aliquis, Ciceronem. Quid tum? Non enim sum Cicero! Me tamen (ut opinor) exprimo” (Someone says to me, “You don’t express Cicero.” So what? I’m not Cicero! All the same, as I see it, I express my- self ).1 These sixteen words comprise roughly one-half hundredth of a percent of Poliziano’s published Latin and Greek works, and one suspects that their author would be dismayed to ﬁnd his vast, rich oeuvre—and his brief but extraordinary life—so often reduced to a single epigram.2 And yet, there it is: abrupt, arresting, remarkable. One way or another, one cannot really reckon with Poliziano without reckoning with his most famous dictum, and this is especially true for the reader Contact Shane Butler at Johns Hopkins University (

[email protected]

). While an early, partial version of this essay was ﬁrst presented at the former Villa Spelman in Flor- ence in 2004, the full version was completed for a conference (at UCLA in 2007) and intended Fest- schrift in honor of Virginia Brown and James Hankins. The untimely death of the former eventually scuttled the planned book, and the essay, set aside for the sake of other tasks, has since overreached even the Horatian “ninth year.” I have revised it lightly for its delayed publication, with apologies for any bibliography I have missed from the period since my initial research. I would like to retain the essay’s original dedication, with gratitude to both and in fondest memory of one who left us far too soon. For their generous comments and suggestions, I would like to thank the two reviewers for the journal: David Quint and another, anonymous reader. Additional thanks are owed to Michael Rocke, both for help with the illustration and for many conversations over the years about Poliziano and his friends. All translations in this essay are my own. 1. Angelo Poliziano, Letters 8.16.2, which will appear in vol. 2, in the course of preparation, of my edition and translation of the Letters for the I Tatti Renaissance Library; the ﬁrst volume is Angelo Poliziano, Letters, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Shane Butler (Cambridge, MA, 2006). All existing editions of this letter descend from the posthumous Aldine of Poliziano’s collected Latin and Greek works, Omnia opera Angeli Politiani et alia quaedam lectu digna (Venice, 1498), but two manuscript copies (one partial), with variants, are preserved in Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Capp. 235, fols. 108r–v, fols. 119v–120r. Other texts with translations of the same letter in its entirety: JoAnn Della- Neva, ed., Ciceronian Controversies, trans. Brian Duvick (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 2–5; Peter Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 46–47; Eugenio Garin, ed., Prosatori latini del Quattrocento (Milan, 1952), 902–4. 2. I base this calculation on a rough line and page count of the edition of Sébastien Gryphe, Angeli Politiani opera (Lyon, 1545–50). I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 21, number 2. © 2018 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2018/2102-0002$10.00 245 This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 246 | I TA T T I ST U D I E S IN TH E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA N C E FALL 2018 (or translator) of his Latin Letters, including, but not limited to, the one in which these words were ﬁrst delivered to an unsuspecting Paolo Cortesi. Poliziano’s were ﬁghting words, aimed not at Cortesi alone, and their punch was felt throughout humanist circles in Italy and beyond. In context—a withering rejection of Cortesi’s gift of his own epistolary collection in the style of Cicero— the jibe does not seem to need much explanation; indeed, that is part of what makes it so devastating.3 Nevertheless, the translator pauses a moment before me exprimo, searching for an accurate rendering that avoids the thoroughly mod- ern freight of “I express myself.” Our self-expression comes, we seem to imagine, from deep within, a precious liquor extracted by a hidden and sometimes painful turning of the screw. We ﬁnd something like this in many Renaissance writers, but to put things mildly, it is not our most immediate impression of Poliziano. He may indeed take Cortesi, Bartolomeo Scala, and others to task as superﬁcial “apes” of Cicero, but with this famous insult (from the same letter to Cortesi) Poliziano him- self is aping a letter of the late-antique writer Sidonius Apollinaris.4 Poliziano’s self-expression seems to come not so much from deep inward looking as from ever-wider reading, for his writing, unlike that of the Ciceronians, is a bricolage of pieces from every corner and cavity of antiquity’s vast ruin. Indeed, in this last regard, Poliziano seems rather less modern than Modernist (think of Eliot or Pound), or even postmodern. “Quid tum?”—the question Poliziano partly answers with me exprimo—was, coincidentally, the personal motto of Leon Battista Alberti, that visionary architect who often has been thought to mean by the phrase (attached on his emblem to a 3. The present article largely will not address the Ciceronian controversy itself, on which there al- ready exists a vast bibliography, from which one might select the following studies in English: Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imita- tion in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford, 1995), with a chapter speciﬁcally on “The Dispute Between Poliziano and Cortesi” (187–227), and with references to earlier discussions; Christopher S. Celenza, “End Game: Humanist Latin in the Late Fifteenth Century,” in Latinitas Perennis, vol. 2: Appropriation and Latin Literature, ed. Wim Verbaal, Yanick Maes, and Jan Papy (Leiden, 2009), 201–44; and DellaNeva, Ciceronian Controversies, vi–xxxv. The classic account is Remigio Sabbadini, Storia del ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterarie nell’età della rinascenza (Turin, 1885). 4. Poliziano, Letters 8.16.1–2: “Non enim probare soles (ut accepi) nisi qui liniamenta Ciceronis efﬁngat. Mihi vero longe honestior tauri facies, aut item leonis, quam simiae videtur, quae tamen homini similior est.” Here and in the me exprimo that soon follows, Poliziano is refashioning Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistulae 1.1.2, discussing the inﬂuence of the epistolary style of Cicero, whom a well- known “ape of the orators” (oratorum simia) imperfectly “expressed” (expressit). Scholars tend to miss this important source, distracted instead by Cicero, De oratore 2.69, and by Filippo Villani’s descrip- tion of Coluccio Salutati as a scimia di Cicerone (meant, however, as a compliment!), on which see Sabbadini, Storia, 11. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 247 winged eye) something like “Okay, what’s next?”5 In Poliziano, however, “quid tum?” simply means “so what?” Far from peering into the future, the whole decla- ration (“quid tum . . . me exprimo”) comes from a man so determined to look back that he made that famous backward glancer Orpheus into a kind of personal obses- sion. It is true that no ancient author actually uses the phrase me exprimo; indeed, Poliziano may have been the ﬁrst person to write “I express myself ” in any lan- guage.6 But already the fact that he did so in Latin seems to have prevented many moderns—and most early modernists—from taking his precocity very seriously. Dante, though he preceded Poliziano by two centuries, gets far more respect as a harbinger of modernity, in part, of course, because he had the foresight to ﬁnd him- self (“mi ritrovai”) in the vernacular. Naturally, the Latinist is skeptical of these last simpliﬁcations. But the transla- tor’s dilemma is genuine. In truth, the exact meaning of me exprimo is only a pass- ing problem: a much more serious one is posed by what the phrase suggests about everything that surrounds it in the Aldine corpus. Whatever he means by me, Poliziano tells us explicitly that he is in the business of expressing it, and whatever the author expresses, it is the translator’s job, surely, to try to render. But how to go about Englishing page after page of Politianus ipse? About to resume the task of doing just that, after a regrettably long hiatus, I offer here some thoughts on a question that cannot really be taken up in the narrow conﬁnes of my edition and translation of the Letters for the I Tatti Renaissance Library (ITRL). The fol- lowing six notes aim to provide a series of differently angled perspectives on the relationship between saying and selfhood in Poliziano and, more broadly, in his world. We shall return to his me exprimo at the end. We begin, however, not with Poliziano, but with the man sometimes thought to have been his polar opposite. *** Perhaps a dozen authentic poems, give or take a few, survive from the pen of the quattrocento’s most notorious anti-poet, Girolamo Savonarola, who called the ars poetica the “inﬁma scientiarum” (lowest body of knowledge) and urged its practitioners to ﬁnd something better to do.7 Most of these appear in a remarkable 5. For more on what Alberti may or may not have intended by the phrase, see the legendary ex- change between David Marsh and Ingrid Rowland, “So What?,” New York Review of Books 42, no. 1 (January 12, 1995). 6. I hesitate to be more categorical, since to do so would be to risk easy contradiction by a more systematic search than I have undertaken. Still, Poliziano deserves full credit for making the phrase stick. 7. Girolamo Savonarola, Scritti ﬁlosoﬁci, ed. Giancarlo Garfagnini and Eugenio Garin, vol. 1 (Rome, 1982), 271. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 248 | I T ATT I STUDIE S I N T HE I T ALIAN R E NAIS SA N C E FALL 2018 autograph collection of Savonarolan texts now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.8 On the inside face of the front cover of that manuscript appears an unti- tled poem that begins “Omnipotente Idio,” copied out by Savonarola himself in the early 1480s with striking calligraphic care.9 One struggles a bit to reconcile the boldness and elegance of the poem’s appear- ance on the page with the prosaic moralizing of the Apologeticus de ratione poeticae artis, written in 1491 and published the year after.10 Indeed, it is at ﬁrst tempting to regard this and other poems, if not as a secret vice, nor even as a youthful indis- cretion, then at least as a private pleasure that the very public preacher of the 1490s would have hesitated to acknowledge. And yet, beginning in 1492, a number of the poems, including the Omnipotente Idio, were printed and, indeed, repeatedly re- printed in Florence, presumably with Savonarola’s at least tacit consent.11 On close inspection it turns out that, though the broad sweep of the Apologeticus rejects the utility even of religious poetry, what Savonarola means by “poetry” is emphatically formal. Regardless of its subject matter, poetry is perilous when made of dactyls and spondees, of “Tullian and Vergilian” words, of “Vergilian and Ovidian” verses, complaints not applicable ad litteram to poetry in the vernacular.12 Not all Latin poetry is bad—Savonarola makes a pointed exception of the verses of “our proph- ets,” that is, those of the Vulgate Old Testament, separated morally and formally from the pagan poets by an “inﬁnite distance”—but most if not all bad poetry is in Latin.13 On precisely this score, however, the Omnipotente Idio sheds unexpected light on the most basic instincts of the same quattrocento poets with whom Savonarola thought he had nothing in common. Generically speaking, the text is a lauda, a kind of devotional poem, often sung, that usually either expresses a prayer or ven- triloquizies the divine. The form is sometimes called popular but could be less so, especially in the quattrocento; indeed, remarkable similarities have been noticed 8. Giulio Cattin, Il primo Savonarola: Poesie e prediche autografe dal codice Borromeo (Florence, 1973), which renders partially obsolete the edizione nazionale: Girolamo Savonarola, Poesie, ed. Mario Martelli (Rome, 1968). 9. For simplicity’s sake, I shall follow the modernized orthography of the edition of Martelli (Sa- vonarola, Poesie, 31). A diplomatic transcription of the autograph is in Cattin, Il primo Savonarola, 207, with a reproduction of the manuscript text in plate 2. 10. The work nominally was in response to Ugolino Verino’s dedication to Savonarola of his own poem De christianae religionis ac vitae monasticae felicitate. 11. The Omnipotente Idio with other poems is reprinted several times as an appendix to the Op- eretta dell’amore di Gesù. 12. Savonarola, Scritti ﬁlosoﬁci, 249, 253, 256, 269. 13. “Inter versus enim poetarum gentilium et prophetarum nostrorum inﬁnita distantia est.” Ibid., 253. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 249 between the surviving laude of Savonarola and those of Lorenzo de’ Medici.14 The poem begins as follows: Omnipotente Idio Tu sai quel che bisogna al mio lavoro e qual è il mio desio. Io non ti chiedo scettro né tesoro, Come quel cieco avaro, Né che città o castel per me si strua Ma sol, Signor mio caro, . . . [Omnipotent God, you know what is required for my work and what kind is my desire. I ask of you neither scepter nor treasure, as did that blind miser, nor that city or castle be built for me, but only, my dear Lord, . . .] So far, so good, as the poem builds to a climax in more than one sense, inasmuch as the poem has an unmistakably erotic tone, set in motion by the strong word desio (desire) and intensiﬁed by the repeated negations—not this, nor that, nor that—that defer the poem’s meaning to its last line. But for that ﬁnal resolution, Savonarola does something we have no reason to expect, by switching to Latin: “Vulnera cor meum caritate tua” (Wound my heart with your love). Note that Sa- vonarola does not even pretend that the ﬁnal line depends syntactically on the Ital- ian above, retrospectively imagined in Latin, for this would require (ut) vulneres, or at least vulnerare. Rather, precisely at the point at which Savonarola invokes the image of a wound, a gap opens in the coherence of the text. Why? It scarcely will do to imagine that this prophet of vernacular piety here reverts to Latin as the natural vehicle of prayer. Even for Savonarola, however, Latin remained the language of scripture. And indeed, the Christian image of the wound of love is inevitably redolent of some of the most passionate language of the Song of Songs: Vulnerasti cor meum soror mea sponsa vulnerasti cor meum in uno oculorum tuorum et in uno crine colli tui. 14. Mario Martelli, “La politica culturale dell’ultimo Lorenzo,” Il Ponte 36 (1980): 1046–49; cf. Pat- rick Macey, “The Lauda and the Cult of Savonarola,” Renaissance Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1992): 477. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 250 | I TAT TI STUDIE S I N T HE ITA LIAN RENAISSANCE FALL 2018 Quam pulchrae sunt mammae tuae soror mea sponsa pulchriora ubera tua vino . . .15 [You have wounded my heart, my sister my wife, you have wounded my heart on one of your eyes and on one hair of your neck. How beautiful are your breasts, my sister my wife, your nipples more beautiful than wine . . .] The passage inspired rapturous commentary on the “wound of love” by the third- century exegete Origen,16 who in turn inﬂuenced the highly eroticized spirituality of Bernard of Clairvaux, who in turn inspired Savonarola, not least in his own in- complete series of sermons on the Song of Songs.17 Of course, the image of the heart wounded by love has had other traditions, including that associated with Cupid, who appears in Latin in this guise as early as Plautus: “sagitta Cupido cor meum transﬁxit” (Cupid has pierced my heart with his arrow).18 The image is frequent in the amorous works of Ovid—for example, “Amor . . . mea vulnerat arcu pectora” (Love wounds my breast with his bow),19 or “haeserunt tenues in corde sagittae / et possessa ferus pectora versat Amor” (del- icate darts have stuck in my heart, and savage Love needles the breast he has claimed)20—whence it exerted enduring inﬂuence on love poetry of the classical tradition. But especially for the Renaissance, the true locus classicus for the wound of love was found in the prologue of the De rerum natura, where Lucretius re- minds Venus how Mars “has often thrown himself into your lap, utterly overcome by the eternal wound of love” (in gremium qui saepe tuum se / reiicit aeterno devic- tus vulnere amoris).21 This is part of the passage that inspired Angelo Poliziano’s de- scription of the same scene in the Stanze per la giostra, which may, in turn, have in- ﬂuenced Botticelli’s famous painting, now in the National Gallery in London, of Venus reclining with a decidedly devictus Mars.22 15. Song of Songs 4:9–10. 16. Origen, Commentarium in Canticum canticorum, Sources Chrétiennes 375, ed. Luc Brésard and Henri Crouzel (Paris, 1991), prol. 2.17. 17. Girolamo Savonarola, Sermoni sopra il principio della Cantica, ed. Silvia Cantelli Berarducci (Rome, 1996); on pages 220–37, the editor discusses the determinative inﬂuence of Bernard’s Sermones in Cantica canticorum. 18. Plautus, Persa 25. 19. Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.21. 20. Ovid, Amores 1.2.7. 21. Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.34. 22. Poliziano, Stanze 122. Italian text with English translation by David Quint, The “Stanze” of An- gelo Poliziano (University Park, PA, 1993), who notes (viii) the Botticelli connection and provides a This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 251 None of this, however, is an especially good reason to begin speaking of Savo- narola the Lucretian—or even, heaven forbid, the Epicurean. As a matter of fact, Savonarola would appear to avoid any confusion about the tradition to which his imagery belongs by borrowing his language from a speciﬁc, recognizable source, indeed, from a source that often lurks behind the imagery of other laude: the Con- fessions of Augustine. Savonarola takes his ﬁnale almost word for word from the beginning of a sentence in the ninth book: “Sagittaveras tu cor nostrum caritate tua et gestabamus verba tua transﬁxa visceribus” (You have pierced our heart with your love, and we wear your words stuck deep in our ﬂesh).23 Nevertheless, in his substitution of vulnerare (to wound) for Augustine’s sagittare (to shoot arrows), Savonarola betrays an anxiety of wider inﬂuence that even the authority of Augus- tine is insufﬁcient to dispel. For Savonarola must say vulnera instead of sagitta for the same reason that Augustine must say caritate instead of amore, though of course this is not Augustine’s choice, nor even really a Latin choice, but goes back at least to Paul, trying to keep Christian love (agapê, generally translated into Latin as caritas, which becomes “charity” in the King James Version) from sounding too much like erôs, that is, “erotic love,” for which Latin uses amor. Augustine—the same Augustine, let us not forget, who tells us in the Confessions that he was ﬁrst led to a life of virtue not by Christ but by Cicero—potentially undoes the Pauline precision of agapê/caritas by inadvertently reintroducing the ﬁgure of Eros/Amor, who, for some readers at least, enters the image on the wings of sagittaveras, bow in hand.24 With vulnera Savonarola would seem to take Augustine, and thereby himself, safely back to the Song of Songs, separated from the slings and arrows of the pagan poets by, we have been told, an “inﬁnite distance.” “The love of God has opened our eyes,” writes Savonarola in the Apologeticus, “so that, with the woods behind us (relictis silvis), we taste the sweet fruits of the orchards of the Church.”25 The context makes it clear that the silvae are the “woods” as the classical tradition’s enduring metaphor for the reading and making of poetry; Savonarola surely here takes aim above all at Poliziano, author of didac- tic poems about classical poetry and poetics which he called Silvae, after the Silvae bibliography (104) on the general question of the poet’s inﬂuence on the painter (ﬁrst posed by Aby Warburg), to which add Stanley Meltzoff, Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola: Theologica Poetica and Painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano (Florence, 1987). 23. Augustine, Confessions 9.2.3. 24. In fairness, Augustine himself must have had in mind biblical passages (and his own discussions thereof ) that invoke the arrow; for the relevant comparanda see Augustine, Confessions, text and com- mentary by James J. O’Donnell (Oxford, 1992), consulted in the electronic edition at http://www.stoa .org/hippo/ (note on the sagittaveras of 9.2.3), to which add Isaiah 49:2. 25. Savonarola, Scritti ﬁlosoﬁci, 245; cf. 257. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 252 | I TA T T I ST U D I E S IN TH E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA N C E FALL 2018 of Statius.26 But in the Omnipotente Idio, does Savonarola really escape the woods? We may well ask why he chose to take the risk, switching to a language about which it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that every word had the poten- tial to evoke a literary tradition then some seventeen centuries long, and counting. The answer surely lies there in the question: Savonarola turns to Latin precisely because of the risk entailed. And the reason for this is to be found in the logic of the poem itself. In that ﬁnal line, Savonarola gives in to two things that are greater than himself, beyond his control. One, of course, is God’s love, but the other is Latin poetry, in the tangled woods of which he risks losing his meaning. Here, at the very moment at which he commands (vulnera, the imperative) his own pas- sivity before the divine, he trades his authorial agency for the ineffable will of tra- dition. Savonarola’s switch to Latin, in other words, is like a trapdoor that snaps sud- denly open, precipitating a brief free fall through the metaphorical realms he urged other poets to avoid. He himself, of course, expects ﬁnally to be caught— by the loving arms of the very God whom he has introduced, in his opening lines, as a sort of ideal reader who will “know” the real “kind” of his “desire.” The divine reader, in other words, will understand that this is Savonarola, not Lucretius, and will interpret accordingly. But what of other readers—what, indeed, of Savonarola himself ? We ourselves have seen Cupid here, and the poet’s substitution of vulnera for Augustine’s (and Plautus’s) sagitta suggests that he has too. Indeed, the reader who knows something of love in Latin ﬁnds here not just the end of a poem but also a kind of ﬁnale to a long crescendo in the language of love in all its forms, profane to sacred. Perhaps Savonarola even means to offer a deﬁnitive triumph of the latter over the former, thus redeeming this long tradition from its pagan and erotic roots. The danger remains, however, that he will be understood not on the basis of what he says but on that of what he does not say. For one need only read sagitta for vulnera and amore for caritate to hear words addressed not by a pious friar to his loving God, but by Mars to the Goddess of Love. Little wonder that Savonarola brings this brief experiment with Latin verse to so rapid a close, never to repeat it. We return now to a man who, for better or for worse, knew no such limits. In the same Latin in which Savonarola risked losing sight of God, Poliziano was already ﬁnding, instead, endless opportunities for a somewhat different kind of reﬂection. 26. Verino too, however, produced Silvae, albeit on religious themes. See Francesco Bausi, “Ugolino Verino, Savonarola e la poesia religiosa tra quattro e cinquecento,” in Studi Savonaroliani: Verso il V centenario, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence, 1996), 129–30. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 253 *** From late 1479 to the summer of 1480, during a short but painful period of estrangement from his patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Poliziano visited various cities in Italy, eventually making his way to Venice in the company of his constant friend and companion, Pico della Mirandola. He tells us rather less than we would like about what happened there; what we know comes largely from wistful asides in later letters to and from the lifelong friends made by both during what clearly was a very intense month or two.27 The most famous of those friends was the great Ermolao Barbaro, but also among them was Girolamo Donà (or Donato), a poet, humanist, and politically active Venetian patrician, author or recipient of seven letters in the posthumously published collection of Poliziano’s Latin correspon- dence.28 Letters 2.10, written by Poliziano to Donà from Florence in 1485, combines an especially smooth stylistic ﬁnish with some intriguing glimpses between the lines. Let us begin with the former and with ﬁve ways in which the letter is exemplary of broader tendencies in the collection: 1. Poliziano revised the letter for publication, as is clear from two manuscripts that preserve what clearly is an earlier version.29 Here—as is often the case throughout the collection—his changes comprised fairly minor linguistic and stylistic pentimenti designed to enhance, however subtly, the letter’s literary polish. Thus, in the letter’s ﬁrst sentence, a fairly dull “facis” (you make) that seems to have been in the original letter as sent has been sharpened into a live- lier “affers” (you proffer). 2. The original occasion for the letter was not a single, simple exchange be- tween two people but, rather, a complex network of writers and readers. In this case, Donà had ﬁrst written Pico della Mirandola; Pico had then shown Donà’s letter to his dear friend Poliziano; and this had prompted Poliziano’s “reply” to Donà, which he quietly assumes will also be shown to Barbaro. 3. The most pressing subject of the exchange is Poliziano’s own genius, specif- ically the accomplishment of his Rusticus, which had led Donà to praise him 27. Evidence for Poliziano’s activities in Venice is collected by Giovanni Battista Picotti, Ricerche umanistiche (Florence, 1955), 59–64. For thoughts on the period’s impact on Poliziano’s language and thought, see Vittore Branca, Poliziano e l’umanesimo della parola (Turin, 1983), 12–18. 28. For a résumé of Donà’s life, including the brilliant political and oratorical career which, when he met Poliziano, was still entirely ahead of him (as it still largely was when they began corresponding), see Paola Riga’s entry for him in the Dizionario biograﬁco degli italiani (Rome, 1960–), 40:741–53. 29. Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ms. Ricc. 974, fols. 39v–40r; and Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ms. Capp. 235, fols. 129v–130v. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 254 | I T ATT I STUDIE S I N T HE I T ALIAN R E NAIS SA N C E FALL 2018 as a “splendor aetatis nostrae” (radiance of our age) in his original letter to Pico, conveniently included, just before our letter, in the collection. 4. Apart from this, the letter has very little to offer in the way of concrete con- tent. It is mostly ﬁlled, instead, with lavish embroidery of epistolary pleas- antries and commonplaces and with a sprawling elaboration of Poliziano’s obligatory protest that he does not merit Donà’s high praise. Here’s an espe- cially tedious example: And so, if you love me, as I know you do, then you surely can no lon- ger doubt that I love you back. For love, they say, costs nothing more than—itself. Nevertheless, though I in turn love you loving me, I do not in the same way reciprocally praise you praising me. My reason? In repaying favors, one must maintain observance of that law of He- siod, according to which you should give back in equal measure, or even, if you can, in more abundant measure. But since you, given the wealth of expression you have, since you, I say, a man in possession of that genius and that learning of yours, have heaped upon me, a single insigniﬁcant person from the crowd, so much praise—a whole barn- full, as they say—how can I measure back even just an equal amount, to say nothing of something extra, from the yield of my barren and uncultivated soil, unless, in spite of it all, I reﬂect your words and send them ﬂowing back to you, like Echo?30 5. In lieu of content in an ordinary sense, this letter, like much of what Poliziano wrote, offers a rich weave of citations, allusions, and even ﬁner borrowings and intertexts, down to the level of the single, rare words with which Poli- ziano often confounded his critics, all of it stitched together with Poliziano’s consummate skill as a Latin stylist. It is this last, familiar characteristic of Poliziano’s prose that most repays closer scrutiny here. On inspection, the classical embroidery of this particular text reveals itself to be even denser and more luxurious than is usual for Poliziano. In the brief notes of my ITRL edition, I note nods to Cicero, Horace, Catullus, Phaedrus, Per- sius, Homer, Hesiod, Plautus, Ovid, Plato, and Seneca. But an idea of how much more one could say is given by an edition of most of the letters published in the early sixteenth century by Josse Bade, better known by his Latin name, Badius 30. Poliziano, Letters 2.10.2. As David Quint has pointed out to me, Poliziano’s endless professions of modesty in the Letters are themselves a distinctly Ciceronian touch. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 255 Ascensius, with limited notes by himself and extensive notes by François Dubois (Sylvius), almost entirely concerned with identifying the classical sources of Poli- ziano’s language and imagery. For this letter, their combined commentary—in a smaller typeface, printed alongside and, eventually, following the text—is roughly four times as long as the letter itself (ﬁg. 1). This even higher-than-average density of classical echoes is made even more striking by Poliziano’s appeal, throughout the letter, to antiquity’s most powerful ﬁgures for imitation, from the magnet of Plato’s Ion, to the divine “enthusiasm” of the Phaedrus (and thus implicitly to its later discussion of erotic emulation), to artistic possession by the Muses, to Icarus and his ill-fated effort to follow and outdo, to Echo herself, in the passage we already have seen. Certainly there is no anxiety of inﬂuence here, leading us to wonder once again how Poliziano can imag- ine that such borrowed, patchwork robes could dress—or express—a self. More than simple Narcissism leads Poliziano to put his classical ﬁnery on such conspicuous display. Throughout his writing and like most other humanists, Poliziano is, at the simplest level, playing a kind of game of encryption and deci- pherment. Fail to break the code and you fail to take full pleasure in the text; suc- ceed and you know that you are no outsider to the world of learning. A letter, in this regard, presents a very special prize, for the mere fact that Poliziano has sent Donà such a dense bundle presupposes—and makes plain to Donà and to anyone else who might see the letter—that the great Poliziano expects him to be able to unpack its meaning. This is already clear from Poliziano’s frequent recourse to Greek in the letter, which assumes that Donà knew Greek, as indeed, like many Venetian humanists, he did. (Donà was, in point of fact, a translator of Aristotle.) But a wink and nod to Donà’s erudition is potentially there in every other classical reference too, all of which ratify Donà’s citizenship (indeed, his elite status) in the “Republic of the Learned” (Res publica lit[t]eratorum) over which Poliziano liked to see himself as presiding. One does sometimes wonder, however, whether even a very erudite reader could discern with any ease all that Poliziano packed into prose like this. A good example comes in a complex knot of references in the letter’s ﬁrst paragraph: “. . . nisi forte ita me ludit illa poetarum (quod Horatius inquit) amabilis insania ut nunquam congrediar mecum, nunquam de tergo in pectus manticam revocem” (. . . unless by chance, to use Horace’s words, that “gentle madness” of the poets so “makes sport of me” that I never come to grips with myself and never return the knapsack from my back to my chest).31 The classical sources lurking behind this 31. Ibid. 2.10.1. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Figure 1. Angelo Poliziano, Omnium Angeli Politiani operum (quae quidem extare nouimus) tomus prior, ed. Josse Bade (Paris, 1519), fol. 17v, containing the end of Letters 2.10 and the surrounding com- mentary of François Dubois. From a copy in the Biblioteca Berenson, Villa I Tatti, Florence. Image courtesy of the Biblioteca Berenson. Color version available as an online enhancement. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 257 single sentence include Catullus, Persius, and a half-dozen passages in Horace, the only author cited by name; explaining how they work together to complete Poliziano’s meaning requires a miniature essay in my ITRL notes, which aim to be as brief as possible: P. mingles numerous sources here. The quotation is of Horace, Odes 3.4.5–6 (me ludit amabilis / insania), though P. possibly is also thinking of the same author’s leuis insania at Epistulae 2.1.118. The image of the poet deluded about his own talent, however, comes not from these passages, though it is frequent in Horace (see Epistulae 2.2.105ff., and the Ars Poetica generally); P.’s most conspicuous source is instead Catullus 22 (on the bad poet Suffenus, see Pico’s letter to P., 1.3), which ends with the Aesopian image of the knapsack (man- tica; see Phaedrus 4.10), likewise deployed by Horace, Satires 2.3.299, and again by Persius, Satires 4.24, though neither is referring speciﬁcally to poets. The same poem by Persius is, in turn, a possible inspiration for P.’s general theme of self-knowledge, continued from the previous sentence (mecum congrediar perhaps paraphrases in sese . . . descendere of line 23).32 Assuming that Poliziano expected an ideal reader to recover these sources (a ques- tion to which we shall return in a moment), we must somehow account for the fact that he clearly saw his craft as lying not only in making such references but in hon- ing them down to the minimum visiblity necessary. A brief digression into another letter will help us to see him at work doing just that as he prepared the Letters for publication. Letters 1.3 employs the same image, ultimately from Aesop, of a man who cannot see the faults he carries on his back. The allusion in the original letter as sent reads as follows: “Ne sim, ut inquit ille, Suffenus timeam. Nimirum omnes fallimur, nec videmus manticam quae in tergo est” (I worry that I am being, as you-know-who says, a Suffenus. For “we all are de- ceived, of course,” and “we do not see the knapsack we carry on our own backs”).33 The pronoun ille, which here, as often in the Letters, I have somewhat overtrans- lated as “you-know-who,” is already cagey: the point, of course, is that the educated recipient scarcely needs to have the source explicitly named. That source is a poem by Catullus, satirizing a contemporary poet named Suffenus; the poem ends with the summation from which the original letter quotes: nimirum idem omnes fallimur, neque est quisquam quem non in aliqua re videre Suffenum 32. Poliziano, Letters, 1:334. 33. Poliziano, Letters 1.3.1. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 258 | I TAT TI STUDIE S I N T HE IT ALIAN R ENA IS SANCE FALL 2018 possis. suus cuique attributus est error; sed non videmus manticae quod in tergo est.34 [We all, of course, make the same mistake. Nor is there anyone you won’t catch being a Suffenus in one way or another. To each of us is assigned his lot of faults to bear, but we don’t see the part of the knapsack we carry on our backs.] When, however, he revised the letter for publication, Poliziano eliminated the en- tire Catullan quotation, leaving just the name of its target: “metuam tamen ne sim, ut inquit ille, Suffenus” (I still worry that I am being, as you-know-who-says, a Suffenus). Why the omission? Part of the motivation must lie in the allusive game itself: paring down the allusion makes it harder to recognize and thus renders the reader’s success in doing so that much more triumphant and signiﬁcant. This can probably be related, however, to a more general economy of style: the name of Suffenus is enough to make the connection and, thus, the point. In either case, what is perhaps most remarkable about the change is the fact that it comes in a letter that Poliziano did not himself write: Letters 1.3 is a letter Poliziano received from Pico della Mirandola, along with erotic poems in Greek that the latter had written in his youth and that he later would burn. This is not the only instance in the collection in which Poliziano thought his friends—and especially his dearest friend Pico—needed help expressing themselves. And this included adherence to unwritten rules about precisely how and to what extent, especially in his own writ- ing, a ubiquitous ancient substratum was to be visible through the surface of his page. But to go deeper, we take an abrupt detour through a sordid crime story. *** One spring evening in 1464, a certain Benedetto, who was a man of some sta- tion in the Tuscan hill town where he made his home, took a walk after dinner. Passing through one of the city gates, in the company of a certain Tommaso, he made his way toward “quoddam palaczettum,” that is, a small but not entirely hum- ble house, which belonged to relatives. We learn what happened along the steep descent from contemporary local court records, written, as the phrase just quoted already suggests, in thickly macaronic Latin. From the dark there emerged a cer- tain Paolo, “armatus una partisgiana ferri et una claverina et una cultella,” in other words, armed to the teeth, the record using precise but hard-to-translate language for particular kinds of spear and javelin, along with a knife. Paolo made for 34. Catullus, Poems 22.18–20. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 259 Benedetto, shouting—the record leaves his words in the vernacular—“Hai traditore, colto ti ci ò, questa volta tu non la camperai” (Ah, traitor, I’ve got you now, and this time you won’t get away). “Seeing and hearing which,” the record continues, returning to Latin, “the aforementioned sir Benedetto attempted to ﬂee” (quod videns et audiens dictus dominus Benedictus cepit fugere). When Tommaso tried to come between them, Paolo repeatedly stabbed him, riddling his “entire cloak and skirt” with holes, whereupon Tommaso fell to the ground, exclaiming (again the record switches to the vernacular) “Oimé, tu m’ai morto” (Alas, you’ve killed me). Benedetto meanwhile had made his way to a nearby barley ﬁeld, where Paolo caught up with him and stabbed him with his spear, piercing him all the way through. Watching the spear go in, Benedetto took hold of it “as best he could” and tried to ﬁght off a second, deadly stroke. “Seeing which,” Paolo unsheathed the knife on his hip and stabbed Benedetto in the left hand, “cum maxima sangui- nis effusione” (with a very great ﬂow of blood). Discarding the knife, he then wrenched the spear from Benedetto’s bloody hands and stabbed him on the right side of his chest, in the front and out the back, “cum maxima sanguinis effusione.” Not yet content, Paolo took the spear and plunged it into Benedetto’s head, crack- ing his skull and penetrating his brain, “cum maxima sanguinis effusione.” Still not content, Paolo split Benedetto’s nose and the rest of his face in two, carving down to his tongue. The records here perversely repeat Benedetto’s name even as they describe the destruction of anything still resembling a person: “He wounded the aforementioned sir Benedetto with the aforementioned partisgiana, making one additional cruel and dishonorable wound to the face of the aforementioned sir Benedetto, with the splitting of the nose and face of the aforementioned sir Benedetto, all the way down to the tongue of the aforementioned sir Benedetto” (dictum dominum Benedictum vulneravit cum dicta partisgiana uno alio crudeli et inhonesto vulnere super facie dicti domini Benedicti, cum scisura nasi et faciei dicti domini Benedicti usque ad linguam dicti domini Benedicti). Only then did Paolo sink his weapon into Benedetto’s throat, piercing his esophagus, “cum magna sanguinis effusione.” The change here from maxima to magna is scarcely accidental. Indeed, it seems incredible that Benedetto by this point had any blood left at all.35 This corpse would have nothing to do with the history of Latin literature were it not for the fact that the aforementioned Benedetto was the father of a boy, then ten 35. My summary is based on the publication of Montepulciano, Archivio Storico Comunale, Atti del Potestà, A, I, 8, by Giovanni Cecchini, L’Assassinio del padre del Poliziano (Siena, 1954), reprinted from Bulletino Senese di Storia Patria 60 (1953). Cf. Isidoro Del Lungo, “La Patria e gli antenati d’Angelo Poliziano,” Archivio storico italiano 9, no. 1 (1870): 9–44. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 260 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S I N TH E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA N C E FALL 2018 years old, who would soon be sent from Montepulciano, the scene of this horriﬁc crime, to Florence. There he would become one of the brightest stars of the Flor- entine Renaissance and would write, inter alia, the letter with which we began. The story of the murder of Poliziano’s father offers a bit of a reality check: however artiﬁcial his writing might seem, Poliziano’s life had been, from an early age, real enough. Throughout his career he would show a persistent interest in ancient mythology’s most famous victims of bodily dismemberment, from Orpheus, torn to pieces by angry Maenads, protagonist of his play Orfeo and subject of the pref- ace to his ﬁrst Silva, to Hippolytus, subject of the opening image of his ﬁnal, un- ﬁnished work of antiquarian scholarship and textual criticism, the second install- ment of the Miscellanea. In his beautiful essay on the substance of Poliziano’s style, Thomas Greene rightly sees these disiecta membra as metaphors for the “op- position between creativity and violence” that makes the poet-philologist a de- fender of “culture in its perennial struggle against time the destroyer” and “time the mutilator,” one who “repairs patiently, endlessly, the immense mangled cadaver of the past.”36 But to Greene’s picture of Poliziano’s horror fragmenti as the fruit of the “historical solitude” with which he contemplated his “estrangement” from the “remote text” of the distant past, the Montepulciano court records add the less re- mote memories of a childhood shattered by violence and mutilation that were any- thing but metaphorical.37 It is difﬁcult not to ﬁnd, in the genuine horror they pro- duce, a glimpse, however ﬂeeting or reductive, of what may have driven Poliziano to a lifetime of putting pieces back together. But let us set aside these deeper thoughts to consider how the same records un- expectedly illuminate a famous aspect of Poliziano’s literary style. To describe the sensibilities that characterize Poliziano’s copious output in both Latin prose and poetry, no single word is used more often, including by Poliziano himself, than varietas. The classic deﬁnition comes from Cicero: “[Varietas] proprie quidem in disparibus coloribus dicitur, sed transfertur in multa disparia: varium poema, varia oratio, varii mores, varia fortuna, voluptas etiam varia dici solet . . .” (“Va- riety” is properly used regarding different colors, but it is extended to refer to many different things: a varied poem, a varied speech, varied habits, varied for- tune—even pleasure is customarily said to be varied . . .).38 For Poliziano, as for many in the Renaissance, the pursuit of varietas was closely linked to a theory of imitation most famously expressed in Seneca’s metaphor of the reader-writer as 36. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT, 1982), 160, 165, 168. 37. Ibid., 27, 169. 38. Cicero, De ﬁnibus 2.3.10. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 261 a bee who must go from ﬂower to ﬂower to gather nectar from which to make its honey.39 From his eventual position of authority as the leading humanist of Lorenzo’s court, Poliziano would famously argue, as we already have seen, that go- ing from ﬂower to ﬂower meant above all reading more than just Cicero.40 If we cannot know how Poliziano responded to the barbarity of his father’s murder, we can fairly safely guess what he would have thought of the barbarism of the record that we have just considered, had he ever read it. Beyond its vernac- ularisms, grammatical errors, and other infelicities, there is an almost parodic way in which this text, like many such legal documents, embodies a kind of antithesis to the ideal of varietas, from the repetition of “the aforementioned sir Benedetto” to, even more strikingly, the insistence on the phrase “cum maxima sanguinis effusione” again and again, quite literally ad nauseam, at least for readers with sen- sitive stomachs. The problem here is perhaps more than one of style. One cannot escape an additional sickening feeling that the superﬂuous repetition of this detail in the court record is somehow culturally linked to the superﬂuous repetition of violence on that bloody night. Probably we can say that the court clerk could no more escape the formulaic repetitiveness of his legalese than the citizens of Montepulciano could escape the cycle of violence to which Benedetto Ambrogini’s murder belonged. Indeed, we learn the details rehearsed thus far not from any trial for the murder of Benedetto but from the trial of the men who, in retribution, sub- sequently killed Paolo, mercilessly and repeatedly stabbing him, “cum maxima effusione sanguinis.” Violence, we might say, is the most predictable of traditions. *** As fate would have it, the young humanist Poliziano soon had occasion to set to words a scene of similar horror. Eyewitness to the assassination of Giuliano de’ Medici in the cathedral of Florence on April 26, 1478, and participant in his own small way in the chaotic efforts to save Giuliano’s brother Lorenzo from the same fate, Poliziano soon after published his ﬁrst printed work, the Coniurationis commentariolum, which narrates the episode and its immediate aftermath in rig- 39. Seneca, Moral Epistles 84.5, on which see G. W. Pigman, III, “Versions of Imitation in the Re- naissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1980): 1–32. 40. For more on Poliziano’s particular stake in varietas, see Ida Maïer, Ange Politien: La formation d’un poète humaniste (1469–1480) (Geneva, 1966), 203–15; Jean-Marc Mandosio, “La ‘docte variété’ chez Ange Politien,” in La ‘varietas’ à la Renaissance: Actes de la journée d’étude organisée par l’École nationale des chartes, Paris, 27 avril 2000, ed. Dominque de Courcelles (Paris, 2001), 33–41; Clare E. L. Guest, “Varietas, Poikilia and the Silva in Poliziano,” Hermathena 183 (2007): 9–48. More broadly, see William Fitzgerald, Variety: The Life of a Roman Concept (Chicago, 2016), with sporadic discussion of Poliziano and additional bibliography regarding both ancient and early modern varieties of varietas. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 262 | I T ATT I ST UDIES I N T HE IT ALIAN R ENAISSANCE FALL 2018 orously classical Latin. Poliziano’s choice of Sallust’s account of the conspiracy of Catiline as his model served two purposes. On the one hand, it lent historical grav- itas to the events and republican virtue to the Medici cause. At the same time, it represented a major public demonstration of Poliziano’s willingness and ability to follow ancient literary models other than Cicero. Indeed, in his choice of Sallust, Poliziano privileged a writer who, both stylistically and politically, could well be seen as the ﬁrst great anti-Ciceronian, especially given that, in Poliziano’s time, it was still thought that the invectives against Cicero that circulated under the name of Sallust were genuine. Sallust, however, is only Poliziano’s most persistent model; in his edition and commentary, Alessandro Perosa ﬁnds, in the course of the brief work, echoes of more than thirty-ﬁve ancient authors, to which may be added a few more.41 Let us consider the actual scene of Giuliano’s murder: Ibi primum peracta sacerdotis communicatione, signo dato, Bernardus Bandinus, Franciscus Pactius aliique ex coniuratis, orbe facto, Iulianum circumdant. Princeps Bandinus, ense per pectus adacto, iuvenem transver- berat. Ille moribundus aliquot passus fugitare, insequi illi. Iuvenis, deﬁciente spiritu, terrae concidit; iacentem Franciscus, repetito saepe ictu, pugione traiecit. Ita pium iuvenem neci dedunt. Qui Iulianum sequebatur famulus, terrore exanimatus, in latebras se turpiter coniecerat.42 [At that point, as soon as the priest had ﬁnished his communion, a signal was given, and Bernardo Bandini, Francesco de’ Pazzi, and others of the conspirators, having formed a circle, surrounded Giuliano. Bandini took the lead and pierced the youth, driving his sword straight through his chest. Giuliano, dying, was allowed to ﬂee a few steps away; they followed. The youth, as his breath gave out, fell to the ground; as he lay there, Franceso stabbed him with his dagger, thrusting again and again. Thus they delivered the pious youth to his death. The servant who had been in Giuliano’s train, breathless with terror, shamefully hid himself in the shadows.] The relative lack of connective words and the use of historical inﬁnitives is Sallus- tian. But “ense per pectus adacto” is taken from Ovid, “ferro per pectus adacto.”43 Likewise, “iuvenis deﬁciente spiritu terrae concidit” is a reworking of Apuleius, 41. Angelo Poliziano, Della congiura dei Pazzi (Coniurationis commentarium), ed. Alessandro Perosa (Padua, 1958). Cited henceforth by its usual title, Commentariolum, but with Perosa’s pagina- tion. 42. Ibid., 30–31. 43. Ovid, Metamorphoses 6.271–2: “Nam pater Amphion ferro per pectus adacto / ﬁnierat moriens pariter cum luce dolorem.” This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 263 “exanimatus adulescens ille terrae concidit.”44 Even the slave who runs and hides does so in language taken from Vergil.45 Later, Poliziano emerges from the sacristy where he and others had taken refuge with Lorenzo. Lorenzo himself has already been spirited away, surrounded by friends who successfully kept him from seeing his brother’s corpse. Poliziano, however, was not spared the sight: “Ego recta do- mum perrexi Iulianumque multis confectum vulneribus, multo cruore foedatum miserabiliter iacentem offendi. Ibi titubans et prae doloris magnitudine vix satis animi compos, a quibusdam amicis sublevatus domumque sum deductus” (I headed home by the most direct route and came upon Giuliano lying there pitifully, rid- dled with wounds, ﬁlthy with gore. As I stood there, swaying back and forth, scarcely in my own right mind as I faced the magnitude of my grief, I was kept from falling by a few of my friends and led away home).46 Even at this poignantly personal mo- ment in the text, Poliziano seems to borrow a phrase or two from Valerius Max- imus.47 Poliziano’s borrowings, though eclectic, are anything but random. Rather, they suggest that a deliberate program of reading was part of his working process here. The bits of Valerius, for example, are from his chapter on the vicissitudes of men’s fortunes and from pages on prodigies and dreams.48 The words Poliziano imports convey, by themselves, nothing of these contexts, which nevertheless make their way into the scene’s general feel, as Poliziano pauses in horriﬁed and dizzying rev- erie before Giuliano, brought low. Even more striking are the echoes of Ovid and Apuleius. The ﬁrst is from one of Ovid’s goriest and most pathetic episodes, as Apollo and Diana slaughter the children of Niobe, sending geysers of blood up from their pierced necks and fragments of lung ﬂying out of their backs. But, al- though Poliziano borrows his language from the passage’s description of violence (the words he uses actually describe the suicide of Niobe’s disconsolate husband), in his grief he surely was drawn to the myth by the sequel to the carnage, as Niobe, transformed into a rock from which a small fountain trickles, weeps and weeps for all eternity. Most striking of all is the borrowed language with which Poliziano de- scribes Giuliano falling to the ground, which at ﬁrst glance seems radically de- 44. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 9.37. 45. Vergil, Aeneid 10.657: “Huc sese trepida Aeneae fugientis imago / conicit in latebras . . .” 46. Poliziano, Commentariolum 37. 47. Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 1.7.2, “multis eum confectum vulneribus” (describing the prophetic dream of Caesar’s wife the night before his assassination; the echo of Caesar repeats at Commentariolum 58, where Poliziano reports the number of holes later found in Giuliano’s clothing, to which compare Mark Antony’s funeral oration as reported by Plutarch, Life of Antony 13.3), and 6.9.9, “miserabiliter iacentibus.” 48. The former later receives this general echo: “Ex hac tanta rerum commutatione saepe ego de humanae fortunae instabilitate sum admonitus . . .” (Poliziano, Commentariolum 62). This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 264 | I TA T T I ST U D I E S IN TH E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA N C E FALL 2018 tached from its original Apuleian context, in which nearly the same words appear in negation to describe not a mortally wounded man who falls to the ground but rather one whose body is so ﬁrmly pinned to the ground by a javelin that he re- mains suspended, still on his feet, an upright corpse.49 But the broader context re- veals the connection, for the Apuleian victim is one of three brothers attacked by a murderous enemy. So too, we are reminded, does the Niobe story commemorate a massacre of siblings. Our own ability, armed with lexica, thesauri, concordances, and internet search engines, to track down the echoes of classical literature in Poliziano and others, coupled with a healthy humility before the learning and prodigious memories of Renaissance humanists, often leads us to assume that such echoes were always meant to be heard and recognized, at least by an ideal reader—that is to say, a reader as learned as the writer himself. This is the game of encryption and deci- pherment we already have encountered in the Letters: a series of shibboleths that offer entry into the “Republic of the Learned” and its lofty temples of literary plea- sure. There can be no doubt that Poliziano sometimes—indeed, often—plays such games. But to take such a view of the classical sources we have just examined is to strain credulity. Poliziano’s borrowings here are simply too brief, too fragmentary, too transformed to have been recognizable except by sheer serendipity. If, on the other hand, we suppose that Poliziano was simply ﬁshing out uncustomary, but genuinely antique, combinations of Latin words, then we are left at something of a loss to explain why he limited himself to contexts so poignantly, but invisibly, connected to his theme. After all, if Poliziano, in quest of varietas, had set out to describe ﬁrst the murder and then the lifeless body of Giuliano by a bricolage of decontextualized fragments of violent Latinity, then surely he would have found abundant material more easily on any of ancient literature’s ubiquitous battle- ﬁelds, for example. Something more complicated must be at work here. The eclectic (and even anti-Ciceronian) classical sources behind the Com- mentariolum make it exemplary of Poliziano’s early progress along the path that would eventually bring him into frontal conﬂict with Cortesi and others and spark the rejoinder with which we began: “Me tamen (ut opinor) exprimo.” But once again, how can Poliziano say that he expresses himself ? Doesn’t he instead express Sallust, Ovid, Apuleius, Valerius Maximus, and so on? Where—and what—is “Poliziano” in this composite? In other words, if we are to take Poliziano’s preco- ciously modern avowal of “self-expression” on anything like our own terms, then 49. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 9.37: “Nec tamen peremptus ac prorsum exanimatus adulescens ille terrae concidit; nam telum transvectum atque ex maxima parte pone tergum elapsum soloque nisus violentia deﬁxum rigore librato suspenderat corpus.” This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 265 we might reasonably expect it to mean, among other things, that he has to some extent broken free from tradition. But varietas seems an insufﬁcient means to any such freedom; indeed, it looks rather more like a deeper entanglement. Poliziano does literally succeed in expressing himself in the Commentariolum, in that he is present in the narrative itself, nowhere more so than when he stands before Giuliano’s corpse, titubans, “swaying back and forth.” Perhaps it is no ac- cident that this is Cicero’s favorite word to describe the telltale hesitations of a man confronted with his own guilt. This is not to suggest, of course, that Poliziano was in any way complicit in or sympathetic to the plot. But perhaps titubans de- scribes not just grief but also a certain kind of ambivalence: at the center of his narrative, the author sways back and forth, as if unsure whether he is in this pic- ture or out of it, touched by its violence or unstained and extraneous, part of this story—or not. In fact, Poliziano the tottering narrator forms an almost literal pen- dant to the Apuleian source from which he earlier borrowed language to describe Giuliano’s fall. The grief that transﬁxes Poliziano barely allows him to stand; the javelin that transﬁxes the youth in Apuleius does not permit him to fall. This ex- quisite balance traces a remarkable moment of identiﬁcation between Poliziano and the dead Giuliano, but the symmetry is invisible to anyone who does not rec- ognize the borrowing from Apuleius and remember its context. As we already have said, that is unlikely to have included any of Poliziano’s early readers—except, of course, for Poliziano himself. And this indeed is where our material leads us: to the conclusion that, even in the midst of spectacular performances of his erudition, Poliziano is constructing meaning behind the scenes that he does not expect— or even especially want—his reader to see. We are now prepared to consider a ﬁnal peculiarity of the Commentariolum. Since Poliziano, few who have written about the Pazzi conspiracy and the subse- quent reprisals have failed to call the events “bloody.” Lauro Martines, in fact, has offered an account that makes “blood” part of its title and tries to position the ep- isode within a quattrocento that was hemorrhaging everywhere, from political murders to gruesome public executions to the self-ﬂagellation of penitents to graphic paintings of Christian martyrdom.50 Such impressions have their limits, of course, and over the violent course of human history it is usually risky to single out any particular age as being especially bloodthirsty. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that life in the quattrocento was scarcely less bloody than average, as the mur- der of Poliziano’s father makes all too emphatically clear, “cum maxima sanguinis effusione.” And it is in this regard that the very careful reader can notice a rather re- 50. Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici (London, 2003). This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 266 | I T ATT I STUDIE S I N T HE I T ALIAN R E NAIS SA N C E FALL 2018 markable omission in Poliziano’s often eyewitness narrative: nowhere does Poliziano himself use the word sanguis—not about Giuliano, nor about other casualties among the Medici entourage, nor about Lorenzo himself, whose wounds were sucked be- cause of fear that the conspirators’ blades were poisoned, nor about the ensuing slaughter of men implicated in the plot, many of whose bodies were subjected to gruesome humiliation and dismemberment, described in ghastly detail. Sanguis does appear once in the Commentariolum, but, signiﬁcantly, Poliziano is quoting. “I remember that I next entered the piazza,” writes Poliziano, who there ﬁnds peo- ple variously mocking the butchered bodies of the conspirators. He then gives a list of what he heard people in the crowd saying about the murder of Giuliano, and among these is the complaint that the church had been “deﬁled by human blood,” pollutum humano sanguine, that is, by blood other than Christ’s.51 Sanguis thus makes its unique appearance in a strange and superstitious phrase that is jarringly unlike anything that Poliziano himself would ever say; the complaint is thus itself one of the prodigies he confronts along the course of his surreal passeggiata. Poliziano’s avoidance of the word sanguis does not mean that the resulting nar- rative is not bloody. On the contrary, he describes the body of Giuliano, for exam- ple, as “multo cruore foedatum” (ﬁlthy with abundant gore)—cruor being, indeed, a far bloodier word than sanguis itself. Poliziano’s Commentariolum differs from the record of his father’s murder not by being less violent, but by being more var- ied. Nevertheless, by completely excluding from his palette the single term most essential to his subject matter, Poliziano achieves a kind of radical varietas fully visible only to himself—and to that surely unforeseen reader mechanical enough to search the text for that one word most in evidence in the Montepulciano tran- scripts, ﬁnding in its absence, perhaps, a kind of quiet freedom from the world’s bludgeoning monotony. *** We have begun to see how, in his silences, his omissions, his parings and prunings, his way of saying something only barely, Poliziano sometimes speaks “de profundis.” And with this nod to the title Oscar Wilde borrowed from the 129th Psalm for his letter from Reading Gaol to Alfred Douglas, we return to Poliziano’s letter to Donà and to questions not of violence, but of sex. The letter, as we have seen, is dense with classical references generally, but it is especially so with allusions to the literature of same-sex love. Poliziano borrows heavily from Socrates’s coy ﬂirtation with Phaedrus at the beginning of Plato’s dialogue, which, 51. Poliziano, Della congiura 47. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 267 of course, will go on to discuss the nature of (pederastic) love; he invokes Achilles and Patroclus, the precise age hierarchy of whose relationship would become the subject of a chapter of the Miscellanea; he cites a lost love poem of Alcaeus, poet of Lesbos, addressed to a boy; he offers a sly wink at Horace describing promiscu- ous passion for “a thousand girls, a thousand boys.” One could perhaps include the letter’s digressions on Narcissus and self-love. And in at least one instance, Poliziano redeploys an originally heterosexual erotic image in a same-sex context, describing Pico’s effect on him as like the sky’s rape, through rain, of the earth. Erotic, and speciﬁcally homoerotic, moments are, of course, in no short supply in classical literature, nor is Poliziano one to shy away from them generally. But their frequency in this letter does give the text a distinct sexual tension, surpassed in the collection only by the electric sadomasochism of Poliziano’s exchange with Pico about the latter’s erotic poems, sent to Poliziano with the request that the verses, personiﬁed as Cupids, be “spanked” and “skewered.”52 As that other letter makes clear, sexual passages need not “mean” sex; there they refer, ﬁrst and fore- most, to the correction of poetry. Nevertheless, the tone raises eyebrows, and it has often been assumed, for example, on the basis of such language and, more gener- ally, the intensity and duration of their friendship, that Poliziano and Pico (nine years younger and celebrated for his beauty) were lovers. Poliziano died at the age of forty—lovesick for a boy, claims Paolo Giovio, a half century later.53 William Roscoe, at the end of the eighteenth century, in his biography of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which offers de facto biographies of several of Lorenzo’s contemporaries, including Poliziano, devotes a dozen pages to refuting the report.54 “It is painful to reﬂect,” he opens, “on the propensity which has ap- peared in all ages to sully the most illustrious characters by the imputation of the most degrading crimes.” (It was all a misunderstanding, Roscoe will conclude, the result of a misread poem about the loss of Lorenzo.) Giovio and Roscoe are, in fact, only two of the most conspicuous contributors to a long conversation about the dead humanist’s sexuality that began shortly after his death and has continued to the present, brilliantly reconstructed by Alan Stewart as the opening (and un- expectedly Italian) chapter of his Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England.55 Stewart frames his discussion with three ﬂeeting winks at the 52. Poliziano, Letters 1.3.1. 53. Paolo Giovio, Ritratti degli uomini illustri, ed. Carlo Caruso (Palermo, 1999), after the editio princeps of the Imagines clarorum virorum (Venice, 1546), 118: “Ferunt eum, ingenui adolescentis insano amore percitum, facile in laetalem morbum incidisse.” 54. William Roscoe, The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Called The Magniﬁcent (Philadelphia, 1803), 351–62; ﬁrst published in 1796 and often reprinted, though eventually in abridged form. 55. Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 3–37. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 268 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S IN TH E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA N C E FALL 2018 subject by John Addington Symonds in his monumental Renaissance in Italy, writ- ten alongside what would become one of the ﬁrst scholarly defenses of same-sex love in English, “A Problem in Greek Ethics,” ﬁrst “published” (in a limited edition of ten copies) in 1883,56 which attempts to reconstruct ancient pederasty on the basis, for example, of Plato’s Phaedrus and the various accounts of Achilles and Pa- troclus—both used by Poliziano, as we have just seen, to decorate his letter to Donà. Among the three passages in Renaissance considered by Stewart is a brief appreci- ation of Poliziano’s Greek verses, which would have deserved a place, Symonds suggests, among the pederastic poems of the Greek Anthology; this occasions an even briefer footnote on the accounts of his death.57 A shared connection to ancient homoerotic exempla is not, however, all that links Poliziano’s homosexuality to that of Symonds, Stewart argues. Rather, “it is in Poliziano’s speciﬁc place within the complex social structures of Quattrocento Florence, as much as in his homo- erotic verse, that we can ﬁnd his vulnerability both to contemporary accusations of sodomy and to later appropriations by gay criticism.”58 Stewart reconstructs that place largely on the basis of the humanist’s obscure falling out with Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice, which Symonds darkly blames on the presence of “many points in the great scholar’s character that justiﬁed her thinking him unﬁt to be the constant compan- ion of young men”59 but which Stewart attributes instead to the rivalry of two insider-outsiders, competing for power in the Magniﬁcent’s house. Stewart will follow this Florentine lesson forward through his English material, culminating in an investigation of the paradoxical meanings of the princely and secretarial “closet” in its English architectural sense: at once secret and central, no- tionally solitary but, in practice, often shared.60 He explicitly offers this as an ex- tended gloss on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark work of gay studies, The Epis- temology of the Closet, which argues that the history of homosexuality belongs also to the history of a formalism (my word, not theirs), that is, of a complex modu- lation between surface and depth, between “secrecy and exposure,” between saying and not saying, that is perhaps best exempliﬁed by—but which is hardly unique to— the gay closet.61 Sedgwick ﬁnds this mechanism throughout “the gender, sexual, and economic structures of heterosexist culture at large”; like Stewart, in other words, 56. John Addington Symonds, John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) and Homosexuality: A Crit- ical Edition of Sources, ed. Sean Brady (Basingstoke, 2012), 39–121. 57. John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, vol. 2: The Revival of Learning (London, 1877), 348. 58. Ibid., 3. 59. Ibid., 354. 60. Stewart, Close Readers, 161–87. 61. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 70–71. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 269 she grounds the closet as a literary force (the primary object of study of both) in socioeconomic and sociopolitical realities, insisting, however, also like Stewart, that these realities need not always be (homo)sexual, however much actual gay people (or their early modern prototypes) may have to bear the ultimate weight of the clos- et’s chain of signiﬁcance. We shall return to these questions in a moment. Stewart wrote without the beneﬁt of Michael Rocke’s Forbidden Friendships, which somewhat corrects his view of Poliziano’s sodomitical reputation as neces- sarily “scandalous” in late quattrocento Florence.62 It is true that Rocke uncovers records in Florentine archives of two accusations of sodomy against Poliziano, one made while he was alive, the other after his death.63 But Rocke also demonstrates that “in the later ﬁfteenth century, the majority of local males at least once during their lifetimes were ofﬁcially incriminated for engaging in homosexual relations.”64 Stewart concentrates instead on Savonarola’s instigation, at the height of his power, of a kind of antisodomite panic; better evidence of the normal state of affairs is to be had in the widely reported quip of an ofﬁcial in attendance at Savonarola’s execu- tion: “Thank God, now we can sodomize!”65 To be sure, sodomy was a crime, some- times brutally punished, but Rocke’s study of actual arrests by Florence’s notorious antisodomy police force, the “Ofﬁce of the Night,” provides more evidence of excep- tional tolerance (relative to other places) than it does of exceptional repression, which helps to explain, inter alia, why contemporary Germans used Florenzer as a euphemism for “sodomite.”66 To this relative permissiveness under the law may be added an analogous wink-and-nod attitude in Florentine rhetoric and humor. Without apology, for example, Bartolomeo Scala, chancellor of Florence, inserts a dirty four-line joke-poem about the etymology of adulescens into a letter to Poliziano, professor of rhetoric and poetry at the Florentine Studium, which the lat- ter, in turn, did not hesitate to include in his collected correspondence.67 Written from one Florenzer to another, this can hardly be read as the anxious secret code 62. Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Flor- ence (New York, 1996); “Scandalous”: Stewart, Close Readers, 9. 63. “E fra gli altri uno garzone che si chiama Duccio Mancino ne squittinò assai, e fra gli altri messer Agnolo da Montepulciano che chome e’ nominò lui intendo non ne volle più,” Archivio Guicciardini, Florence, Legazioni e Commissarie I, III (April 7, 1492). “Dixit quod dominus Angelus de Monte Politiano, preceptor Pieri de Medicis, ad presens mortu[u]s, una vice tamen ante quam decedetur sodomitavit ex parte post dictum Johannem,” UN 30, 78v (July 23, 1496). Both quoted here from Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 317–18. 64. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships, 5. 65. For the comment, its possible sources, and its spread, see ibid., 221, 325. 66. Ibid., 3. 67. Bartolomeo Scala, Humanist and Political Writings, ed. Alison Brown (Tempe, AZ, 1997), 170– 74; Poliziano, Letters 5.2.6. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 270 | I TA T T I ST U D I E S IN TH E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA N C E FALL 2018 of a sexual subculture. Humanist Florence, in other words, seems far from the world of Symonds’s privately circulated essay, which was likewise the world of Alfred Douglas’s “love that dare not speak its name” (the ﬁnal line of a poem he published in an Oxford student magazine) and of Wilde’s artful appeal to Plato, inter alios, when cross-examined in court as to Douglas’s meaning. Beyond the walls of Renaissance Florence, however, that distance shrinks somewhat. Over the Alps (and three decades later), Ascensius, commenting on the same letter from Scala to Poliziano, feels compelled to add this disclaimer: “cavillum autem satis argutum, sed Christiano homine indignum est, vel quod audiat, vel quod obiiciat” (a clever enough jibe, but unworthy for a Christian man either to hear or to deliver). Far closer to home, the great Roman humanist Pomponio Leto had been arrested in Venice in 1468 for sodomy, on the basis of erotic Latin poems written to his students.68 Venice, in fact, had seen a dramatic escalation over the course of the ﬁfteenth century in efforts to repress sodomy, sometimes with atrocious violence, carefully studied by Guido Ruggiero, who closes with a brief note on how such efforts paradoxically revealed and even shaped the very “subculture” they con- tinued to fail to silence.69 Poliziano’s Venetian friends could scarcely be unaware of this backdrop, which surely raised the stakes for a letter replete with emblems of an- cient pederasty, postmarked Florence. But we can hardly suppose that Poliziano him- self, who had brieﬂy lived with those friends in Venice and who would soon corre- spond with Leto in Rome, simply makes an indiscreet blunder. (Donà, certainly, responds with equally ﬂowery warmth—though without homoerotic allusiveness, we note, beyond the fact that he shapes a few lines of Theocritus, whose shepherds often pine for one another, into a brief encomium of Poliziano’s poetry, more dear to him than “blooms to bees.”70) Rather, both the conspicuousness and the circum- spection of Poliziano’s allusions make it clear that he knew not only his addressee, but also his address. In other words, in the face of Venetian repressiveness regarding sod- omy, Poliziano did not opt for discreet silence. Rather, he exploits the minimalist ap- proach to allusion that regularly made his stylistic polish impenetrable to anyone not in the know in order to deploy an even denser allusiveness than usual. On the one hand, this consolidation in the face of oppression (witnessed, as will often be the case, from partially outside) arguably marks the emergence of an early gay identity in (if not 68. On this, and Leto’s subsequent torture and imprisonment for an alleged plot against the pope by members of his Roman Academy, see Anthony F. D’Elia, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome (Cambridge, MA, 2009). 69. Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime, and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York, 1985), 109–68; on “subculture,” 144. 70. Poliziano, Letters 2.11.2. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 271 necessarily from) its proto-closet.71 At the same time, it reveals in Poliziano, regarding sexuality, a doubly historical consciousness, one that recognizes the importance not only of variation over time, which is why ancient exempla matter, but also of variation across space, which is why they especially matter when writing, not to a fellow Flor- entine, but to a Venetian. But what is most remarkable is the fact that all of this is grounded, ﬁrst and foremost, not in the architectural dynamics of any real “closet” (though one cannot help comparing the Renaissance studiolo72), nor in the only slightly metaphorical question of Poliziano’s “place” in the world or the Medici household but, rather, in the hidden depths and surface tension of his Latin style. Me exprimo: “I push myself—out.” *** At the risk of banalizing the extraordinary moment we have just contemplated, we turn, in this brief ﬁnal note, to some even broader implications of this nexus of humanist Latin, the secret, and the self. One could argue, of course, that such a trilogy was there from the beginning, already in Petrarch’s Secretum (De secreto conﬂictu curarum mearum), which he seems to have allowed no one but himself to read, and in which Augustine, his interlocutor, claims, “I have seen you silently complaining that things most clear in thought, indeed most easy for the mind to think, are the very things that neither pen nor tongue can adequately express [nec lingua nec calamus sufﬁcienter exprimeret].”73 Emboldened by Petrarchan prece- dent, let us borrow Poliziano’s me exprimo back from the history of homosexuality and use it to suggest a provisional place for humanist Latin “expression” in the philosophical history of the self. Gnôthi seauton, “Know thyself,” proclaimed the oracular temple of Apollo at Delphi, in gold letters, to all who entered, a message that would become emblem- atic of the thought of Socrates.74 Two millennia later, René Descartes would con- clude, “Je pense donc je suis” (only later translated into Latin as “Cogito ergo sum”).75 Poliziano, temporally closer to the latter but syntactically closer, via his reﬂexive pronoun, to the former, shares something crucial with both: Socratic 71. For a spirited defense of the relevance of the early modern (and earlier) “closet” to later gay identity, see David M. Robinson, Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 2006), esp. 3–83. 72. On which, see Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella D’Este (New Haven, CT, 2006), 29–57. 73. Petrarch, Secretum 2. 74. Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.24.1. 75. Descartes, Discourse on Method 4, and The Principles of Philosophy 1.7. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 272 | I T A T T I ST U D I E S IN TH E I T A L I A N R E N A I S SA N C E FALL 2018 self-knowledge, the Cartesian knowing self, and Poliziano’s self-expression are, all three, processes more than they are products. Like the French philosopher’s fa- mous lump of wax, brought increasingly closer to a ﬂame that changes all that can be sensed about it, though he knows it is the same wax,76 Poliziano’s page is only the end of a story that has unfolded in time and in space, a story fully known only to himself. And time and space are essential, I would suggest, to the questions of why Latin mattered to the humanists, and why the humanists matter, in turn, to the history of the self. Literary Latin, already in antiquity, came to imply, as a matter of course, an underlying stratigraphy through the famously intertextual practices of ancient authors. Beneath every text lay other texts; beneath these, others still. Time, of course, would burrow holes through this sediment, cratering the surface and weakening the foundation even of surviving texts, which were left, by the time they reached the Renaissance, with countless dead links, to mix a modern analogue into our metaphor. The humanists made this terrain, with all its surface and subterra- nean erosion, the basis of their own literary style. Some preferred to stand on rel- atively ﬁrm footing—surely this is part of what motivated the Ciceronians—while others ventured onto shakier ground. Poliziano dared more than most, even de- lighting in making direct reference to works that no longer existed, like that to the lost pederastic poetry of Alcaeus in the letter to Donà, which he knew only through a brief quotation by Cicero. The reference is not only “to the unspeak- able vice of the Greeks”77 but also to a possibly unrecoverable part of the Greek literary past, the “unspeakable” being only one particularly painful subset of all “that neither pen nor tongue can adequately express,” for whatever reason: want of sources, permission, words, or excess of pain, grief, desire—all of which we have seen above. It is sometimes assumed that the humanists thought—or at least hoped—that they or their successors would eventually unearth all of antiquity’s treasures, get- ting ﬁnally to the bottom of every last blind reference. An analogous assumption about the archeology of the early modern self has shaped the reading of Poliziano’s me exprimo, sure to disappoint anyone who expects the Letters to reveal the life of their author in any great detail: opportunities even for the shallow sort of excava- tion attempted in this article are rare. But Poliziano’s readers would do well to re- vise their view of his (and others’) scholarly optimism. As energetically as he worked to uncover and reassemble the past, and as loudly as he trumpeted his suc- 76. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 2. 77. E. M. Forster, Maurice (New York, 1971), 37–38, parodying Oxbridge classicists. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Things Left Unsaid | 273 cesses, Poliziano, in the end, seems drawn to antiquity precisely by the fact that it would always lie mostly buried, shattered, lost.78 For this, ﬁnally, is what makes antiquity like the me of me exprimo: not a self that has been laid bare, down to its foundations but, rather, a largely unexcavated ruin, the mottled surface of which may ﬁnally be more compelling than anything that lies below or stood before. “Renaissance self-fashioning,” to ape a famous phrase, is generally understood as the crafting of publicly facing surfaces: paradigmatically, the elegant but strate- gic “masks” (personae in Latin) worn by courtiers, such as Poliziano himself.79 Poliziano’s complexly surfaced self, however, reveals cracks in this very metaphor. Beneath ruined surfaces always lie other surfaces; beneath these, others still. In other words, there is no ﬁnal, irreducibly truthful depth to which such surfaces are opposed. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to conclude from this that even the most intimate self is fundamentally “superﬁcial.” Surface is not an impediment to truth or intimacy; on the contrary, it can be the very stuff of which both are made. Think of doubting Thomas, for example, feeling the holes in Christ’s body, or even of Savonarola, “wounded” in turn by God. Poliziano’s style, to be sure, is generally subtler, but it nonetheless aims to multiply the self ’s surfaces and their affordances. As we have seen, some of those affordances are so ﬂeeting as to seem best understood as private grapplings with what English aptly calls “feelings.” Elsewhere Poliziano reaches out—sometimes cautiously, as we have seen—toward intimates who may feel similarly about this or that. Beyond these close circles lie other readers, who, if they share the author’s feeling for lan- guage and letters, are welcomed with open arms. All of this, I would suggest, is what Poliziano thinks he has expressed, not just with style, but as style. His clear aim is to make his presence palpably felt, in and as words he does not so much use 78. On this point, and more generally on the complexity of the allusive webs Poliziano weaves, see David Quint, “Ascanius in Love: A Reconsideration of Poliziano’s Stanze,” in The Afterlife of Virgil, ed. Peter Mack and John North (London, 2017), 45–62. Quint unpacks Poliziano’s multiple sources with enviable dexterity, but his aim, as he explains, is to offer “a coherent reading of the poem, something which allows us to hear in it a constant, mournful undersong,” a lament for lost youth and innocence that “extends to the classical world itself, a world to which the humanist Poliziano knows that he can- not return, study and imitate it as he may” (49, 61). 79. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980; Chicago, 2005), which opens with a useful set of “governing principles,” including this one: “Self-fashioning is always, though not exclusively, in language” (9). As Greenblatt rather obliquely acknowledges (xiii), his own attention to the ﬁgure of “fashioning” (Latin, efﬁngere) the self in the Renaissance was antic- ipated by that of Thomas Greene, “The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature,” in The Disci- plines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson Jr. (New Haven, CT, 1968), 241–64. Greene’s examples include Pico della Mirandola and Erasmus, the former of whom, we might note, was Poliziano’s closest friend, while the latter was probably his closest reader. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 274 | I TAT TI STUDIE S I N T HE ITA LIAN RENAISSANCE FALL 2018 as inhabit. Metaphors of surface and depth, productive as they have been to parts of our analysis, ﬁnally collapse here: Poliziano’s style does not privilege the former; rather, it resolutely refuses to draw any neat distinction between the two. Such a style, of course, endlessly frustrates the impatient reader who instead wants to get to the bottom of things, and so wishes that the author would himself get to the point, full stop. But just as a self can never be expressed exhaustively, so too must the work of a more sensitive reader remain forever unﬁnished. For this better reader, Poliziano’s self is no enigma. Rather, it is forever surfacing, page af- ter page. This content downloaded from 130.160.124.004 on December 12, 2018 08:29:45 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).