Luigi Orlandi. Andronikos Kallistos: A Byzantine Scholar and His Manuscripts in Italian Humanism

The Byzantine refugees who brought Greek learning to Italy in the fifteenth century have attracted much attention in recent years, especially in Italian scholarship. Amongst the most distinguished was Andronikos Kallistos, of whose life and work one of those scholars, Luigi Orlandi, gives in this monograph an extremely detailed account enriched by plentiful illustrations of manuscripts to support his arguments. It throws light not only on Kallistos himself but on numerous contemporaries.Although Kallistos was assigned by himself and many others to Constantinople, Orlandi offers reasons for believing the minority report that he came from Thessaloniki. Having next established what can be known about his life and his relations with such other learned men as his cousin Gazes, Filelfo, Bessarion, Palla Strozzi, Demetrios Chalkokondyles, Michael Apostoles, and Politian, on the way refuting or calling into question several received notions, he considers those manuscripts that are or may be associated with him; even though the work of Greek scribes in the last years of the Byzantine Empire is far harder to identify than that produced when they fled to Italy, he is able to list twenty-four books written by Kallistos before his departure westward, either in Constantinople or perhaps in Crete. He then turns to his subject's movements in Italy from 1453 to 1475, tracing his movements as a professional copyist and teacher in Rome, Florence, Bologna, and cities further north (but nowhere in the south), gaining more renown than wealth, before the journey to England from which he did not return.In the next chapter, the second longest in the book, Orlandi discusses the texts from or on which Kallistos worked as a scribe or a scholar, his relations with other copyists, and the development over time of his Greek script together with the scanty evidence for his Latin hand. Subsequent chapters survey the fate of his books in and after his lifetime, his activities as a teacher (his ill-paid position in the Florentine Academy is confirmed), and his philological achievements, in particular as a textual critic seeking out manuscripts for collation and making conjectures often of high quality, to which should be added his emendations in Vaticanus latinus 1532 to the Greek passages he inserted in Aulus Gellius. These chapters are followed by an extended catalog of manuscripts that Kallistos copied or annotated, plus two archival documents and a copy of an incunable. An appendix presents texts and translations of Kallistos' own prose, notably his polemic against Apostoles in defense of Gazes and his monody on the fall of Constantinople, and his verse, comprising one poem in Byzantine dodecasyllables and three in hexameters of whose versification the less said the better; on page 535 ἀλλ' οὐ τέθνηκεν, ϕίλος. νοῦς γὰρ οὔποτε θνήσκει might at least have been . . . οὐ γὰρ νοῦς ποτε. . . This line is not the only instance of his love for nominativus pro vocativo. The book ends with thirty color plates of Kallistos' handwriting and indexes of personal names, manuscripts, and watermarks.Orlandi's English, at large and in detail, is that of an Italophone: I note in particular the frequent use of "instead" for "by contrast" as if it were invece. This does not, however, explain errors of translation: page 385, l.3, μᾶλλον is overlooked (we need "Rather it is you who . . ."), l.6, ἀπεριμερίμνως is not "without commitment" but "thoughtlessly"; page 511, l.9, τὸ τοῦ Αἰσχίνου is not "the effects of Aeschines" but "the fate of Aeschines" overwhelmed by the superior rhetoric of an opponent. Faults of editing include: pages 104, notes 200 and 358, l.17, "Caldelli 2006" is cited twice but does not appear in the bibliography; page 321, l.6, Jonkers 1989 is not included in the bibliography; page 577, Díaz de Cerio Mercedes between Diels and Diller.I have noticed a few slips (not all Orlandi's own). On p. 1 at l.13 up, and p. 500, l.1, Παλλάντι is an error for Πάλλαντι (plate 9), as at p. 237 last line, is Πράντος for Πραντὸς (figure 5.14). On page 26, verum is a misreading of Veneris; the poetic trifles (rather than "jokes") should be entrusted to Venus' husband, namely, Vulcan, in other words, burned. The following word is not si but c, which needs emending to c̄ = cum. At p. 142, l.3 under the heading, χρόνια is a misreading of κρόνια; at page 143, l.5, τροϕονίου for τροϕωνίου, and l.7, et naturalis should be morali et naturali. At page 30, note 155, Κάνδακι and quondam must be Χάνδακι and quendam. These defects do not at all outweigh the great merits of Orlandi's work.