Virgil's Birthday
Giordani, Igino
VIRGIL'S BIRTHDAY By IGINO GIORDANI AT THE beginning of this year—the bimillenary of Virgil's ¦**• birth—an Italian publisher (Hoepli) presented the Pope with a copy of the heliotypic...
...The manuscript, widely known as Virgilius Petrarchae, is preserved in the Pontifical Ambrosian Library, in Milan, where it was studied closely by Achille Ratti, while he was librarian there...
...Monks copied and recopied the poems on parchment, delicately illuminating the manuscripts...
...There are in existence old LatinGerman vocabularies drawn up exclusively from the Virgilian glosses...
...Even as the poet of the Roman empire, Virgil glorified a shelter for a universal community working in peace and ruled by a lofty and noble law...
...The book contains 540 pages and it is partly illuminated...
...Jan d'Outremere represented him as a kind of Rudolph Valentino, with whom women fell in love even without seeing him...
...He believed with the popular voice, that Virgil had built the walls of Naples and had placed thereon a palladium which would serve to protect the city...
...It was Monsignor Ratti who first interpreted there an inscription which had appeared enigmatic to many scholars and which reveals the destiny of the precious manuscript after Petrarch's death until Cardinal Borromeo acquired it for his Ambrosian Library...
...It is called Augusteus, and it belongs partly to the Vatican Library and partly to the Preussische Staatsbibliothek, Berlin...
...Wulff, Pierre de Nolhac, of the French Academy, and Sabbadini are among the many scholars who gave close study to the worn pages...
...He saw in Naples other objects left by Virgil: a bronze horse, which healed sick horses, and a bronze archer, which protected this city from the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius...
...R. Seymour Conway attempted to demonstrate in 1926 that Virgil was born near Brescia, but he cannot be regarded as having proved his point...
...To his surprise he attained the coveted place through his vernacular verses...
...At that time, besides being considered the wisest man of antiquity (Macrobius had judged him omniscient, even infallible), Virgil was thought of as a powerful magician...
...Thus the Virgilian poems, adjusted to the mediaeval mind, continued to occupy a place of importance equal to that which they had occupied among pagans...
...From this grave there issued a luxuriant growth of mediaeval legends, showing how deeply the pure Virgilian soul had penetrated into the popular conscience...
...A magic power was attributed to its stones, and it was said that lightning and earthquake and storms would follow any attempt to move them...
...But Virgil as Roland, desired to remain single...
...There are two splendid miniatures by Simone Martini on the title-page...
...But, as the legends grew among the people, the study of Virgil progressed among scholars in the middle-ages...
...It is also related that a laurel tree was planted near there by Petrarch to replace one which had disappeared previously...
...The minnesinger Heinric von Veldeke composed an Eneit, and Benoit de Saint-More the Roman de Troie, and the Roman d'Eneas, with materials taken from Aeneid...
...The principal Italian festivities will be at Andes (Pietole-Virgilio) not far from Mantua, where the poet was born...
...Conrad learned that Virgil's body was kept in a castle surrounded by the sea, and that a tempest would arise if an attempt were made to move the bones...
...So in the masterpiece of Italian poetry, a Christian genius met a pagan genius on the spiritual and intellectual ground of the highest ideals of the life, and associated him in a work of philosophical wisdom, artistic beauty and religious atonement...
...From the seventh century on Virgil's poems were explained in the monastic schools and were annotated in Celtic, AngloSaxon and high German...
...Also Faust, while wandering with the devil, approached with reverence this grave, as Marlowe described it: "There san we learned Maro's golden tombe the way he cut an English mile in length thorough a roch of dtone, in one night's space...
...VIRGIL'S BIRTHDAY By IGINO GIORDANI AT THE beginning of this year—the bimillenary of Virgil's ¦**• birth—an Italian publisher (Hoepli) presented the Pope with a copy of the heliotypic reproduction of an old manuscript of Virgil's works: a manuscript which belonged to Francis Petrarch and contains marginal notes in Petrarch's handwriting...
...This interesting matter has been thoroughly dealt with by Comparetti in his work, Virgil in the Middle-Ages, while Zabughin has studied the fortunes of the poets in Italian Renaissance...
...He saw in Virgil not only the singer of the Roman empire and the wise and gentle man who knew everything, but also the embodiment of human reason...
...The author of the Georgics and the singer of Mireio both loved country life, and the coincidence of the anniversary celebrations has led many recent commentators to sing new praises to thing pastoraL They call to mind a more pacific, a happier, a finer world, cultivated by Virgil and foreshadowed in a kind of messianic vision in that poet's fourth ecologue, where he expressed the hope that a new golden era of a peaceful world would be brought about by a child, who was shortly to be born...
...The mediaeval poet relieved Virgil to the purest intellectual light, "full of love," "and a love for a true good," from the transfiguration operated by the turbid admiration of his age...
...Adventures of a similar kind were related in the popular romance, Les Faits Merveilleux de Virgille, translated into many languages, even into Icelandic...
...As such, Dante took Virgil as guide and teacher in his travel through the first and second kingdom beyond death...
...Conrad continued to believe the legend after he himself had conquered the city, attributing his success to a crack in the glass of the palladium...
...The method used in allegorical interpretation of the Bible was employed in interpreting the poems as Christian truth, shadowed by mythological fables...
...Shortly after a branch had been sent to Frederick the Great, of Prussia, the second tree died away and a third was planted by the French poet Casimir Delavigne...
...The centenary of Mistral, the Provencal poet, is being celer brated simultaneously with the centenary of Virgil...
...According to these legends the soul of the poet protected the city by means of a strange series of miracles...
...and The XIII (!) Bukes of Eneados of the famose poete Virgill were "traslatet into Scottish metir bi Mayster Douglas Gawin" since 1553...
...Dante knew all the Aeneid by heart...
...Much is being written about Virgil this year, and throughout the world celebrations are being held...
...Monsignor Ratti, now Pope Pius XI, wrote several essays on the manuscript, and in the work now presented to him these essays are included...
...Up to the end of the fifteenth century, the celebration of the Mass of Saint Paul at Mantua included the singing of verses in which it was related that the Apostle had cried out above the grave of Virgil: "How I should have changed you, if I had only met you in your lifetime, oh greatest of poets...
...An old tradition places the tomb in some Roman ruins at the foot of the Neapolitan hill of Posillipo...
...But the poet who expressed most vigorously the mediaeval admiration for Virgil was Dante...
...John of Salisbury thought that beyond the veil of the verse was to be found the centre of philosophical truth...
...Napoleon carried the manuscript to Paris, but it was returned twenty years later...
...at Rome, where he led a pure and pious life during a period of widespread corruption and agnosticism and at Naples, where he was buried (19 B.C...
...Among the many English versions, let us remember the abstract made from French by W. Caxton and printed at Westminster in 1490, and the two complete versions of the seventeenth century by John Ogilby and John Dryden...
...John of Salisbury, in his twelfth-century Polycraticus, related that a certain Ludwig, with a view to extracting magically Virgil's universal science, took away the poet's bones—but not his wisdom...
...By Sabbadini, a reproduction of another Virgilian manuscript has been published especially for the bimillenary celebrations...
...Conrad of Querfurt, chancelor of Emperor Henry VI, related in a letter the many wonderful things he had heard at Naples...
...And I have seen the place, and have had the experience," added the chancelor...
...The Bucolics were interpreted as a symbol of the contemplative life, the Georgics of the sensual life and the Aeneid of the active life...
...The Vatican Library possesses other famous Virgilian manuscripts, one of which goes back to the second or third century...
...and pored over it with "a long study and a great love," taking from it "the beautiful style that had given honor" to him...
...On the first page there is a declaration in Petrarch's handwriting of the real existence of Madonna Laura, the Provencal woman to whom his best sonnets and odes are dedicated...
...Since the poet's Fourth Eclogue was considered as a prophecy of the Christ, Virgil was painted in some churches alongside of David and the Sybils...
...Suffice it to say that even German poets declared the magician Kinschor had descended from Virgil...
...An Irish translation, known under the title Imtheachta Aeniasa, was made before 1400 A.D...
...And Aeneid was early translated into the vernacular languages...
...This Italian poet carried Virgil's poems wherever he went and studied them deeply, because he hoped to win his place in the literary hall of fame through an epic poem, Africa, modeled on Virgil's Aeneid...
Vol. 12 • June 1930 • No. 8
