Beschreibung:

Ovid, Metamorphoses, in Latin verse, bifolium from a decorated manuscript on palimpsest parchment [Italy, fifteenth century] Bifolium reused on a binding of Legge Generale Dell’ Armi (Florence, 1640), single column, 33 lines (from book IX, the section of the text on Ancient Troy) in a humanist hand with secretarial influence, many interlinear and marginal additions (one in margin noting the nature of the Centaur as “semi homo et semi aequs”), initial letters set off in margin in medieval fashion for verse and touched in red, on parchment reclaimed from a fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century document, reused at right angles to avoid the earlier (and mostly erased) script distracting the later reader, some stains and torn edges from reuse in binding, else fair and presentable condition, each leaf 200 by 140 mm. This is from an appealing scholar’s copy of Ovid’s work, on parchment inexpensively recovered from documents, and with many textual variants recorded. Its survival on a Florentine printed pamphlet most probably suggests an origin in that city, among the vibrant humanist milieu which surrounded the Medici court there. The Metamorphoses (or ‘transformations’) by the Classical Roman poet Ovid (or Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BC.-17/18 AD.) stands as one of the seminal works of Western literature. It recounts the time from the Creation to the death of Julius Caesar (the year before the poet’s birth), and draws together two hundred and fifty myths into fifteen books of Latin verse. It was composed in dactylic hexameter, the metre of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as the Aenied. While many other Classical works all but died away during the Middle Ages, this one did not. Despite condemnation by the Church as a ‘dangerously pagan work’ and censure by Augustine and Jerome, it was the sole source for most of the writers of the West of their knowledge of Greek and Roman myth.