Classics Reissued: Cyriac of Ancona

Cyriac of Ancona:Life and Early TravelsEdited and Translated by:Charles MitchellEdward W. BodnarClive FossI Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2015An immense labor of scholarship and translation has here been rendered as light and bright as a flute of champagne in one of the latest additions to the I Tatti Renaissance Library of Harvard University Press. For years, the great Jesuit scholar Fr. Edward Bodnar privately worked on the writings Cyriac di Filippo de' Pizzicolli of Ancona (1391?-1452), an autodidact of awe-inspiring proportions, who taught himself Latin by reading Virgil and pioneered the whole concept of archeology as it's understood today. As Clive Foss puts it in his Introduction to this volume, Cyriac of Ancona: Life and Early Travels, “Financial success, good connections, and his revelations of the ancient world enabled Cyriac to enter the highest circles: he became a familiar of the king of Cyprus, the pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, the emperor of Byzantium, and even the Ottoman sultan. He urged all of them to preserve antiquities …”Bodnar's work on Cyriac's writings and letters gave us the previous I Tatti volume on this author, ten years ago, and now, in combination with the scholarship of the late Charles Mitchell and Foss himself, we get more of the lifelong engagement Bodnar (who died in 2011) enjoyed with this fascinating and somewhat enigmatic Renaissance man of letters.The bulk of this volume consists of a smart and quite lively translation of the Vita of Cyriac by his lifelong friend and fellow scholar Francesco Scalamonti, whose biographical sketch was perhaps originally intended only as an extended precis to form the basis of a full life by the much-younger Venetian aristocrat and scholar Lauro Quirini, who'd written to Cyriac himself at the height of his fame as a world traveller and antiquarian, proposing to write a biography and no doubt seeking research help. Cyriac had vital connections to Quirini's Venice, especially through his patron, Gabriele Condulmer, who later became Pope Eugenius IV – but alas, the scholar appears to have been a bit distracted. It was stalwart Scalamonti who stepped in to offer Quirini the assembled biographical data he needed, along with the passionate admiration of a close friend:

For who could choose a more splendid, refined, and happy subject to write about in these days than to hand down to posterity a record of the life and journeys of this singular figure? Cyriac is the only man in thirteen hundred years, since the time of the great Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy in the age of Hadrian, whose expansive nature and highborn temper gave him the courage to travel all over the world – through Greece, Asia, Egypt, and the Ionian and Aegean islands – to survey and investigate the sites and characteristics of its territories and provinces, its mountains, woodlands, springs and rivers, its seas, lakes and noblest cities and towns … as we have often heard him say himself, his indefatigable resolve, regardless of all discomforts, toils and sleepless nights the task involved, was to inspect and examine whatever ancient remains were to be seen in the world as far as the last rocky heights jutting into Ocean, to the island of Thule, and any other remote parts of the earth.

Cyriac had originally been inspired by encountering an arch in his native Ancona dedicated to the emperor Trajan and covered with inscriptions that seemed to young Cyriac to be disgracefully ignored even by scholars professing an interest in the ancient past. His subsequent tour of Rome itself in the company of Condulmer only served to strengthen this impression, and to create a life's passion, as Scalamonti writes:

It appeared to him, as he looked upon the great remains left behind by so noble a people, cast to the ground throughout the city, that the stones themselves afforded to modern spectators much more trustworthy information about their splendid history than was to be found in books. He accordingly resolved to see for himself and to record whatever other antiquities remained scattered about the world, so that he should not feel that the memorable monuments, which time and the carelessness of men had caused to fall into ruin, should entirely be lost to posterity.

Cyriac had become a rich man (mainly through the busy – and bristlingly unscrupulous – wheelings and dealings of a Genoese kingpin named Babilano Pallavinci) and used his funds to travel the known world in search of ruins and inscriptions and other antiquarian delights, and the sheer joyful muscularity of his intellect is obvious not only in the Vita of his friend but also in the half-dozen great letters and other writings included in this volume. The world of Italian Renaissance humanism could be a bare-knuckled place, and translations by Mitchell, Bodnar, and Foss capture that wonderfully (Cyriac's fellow humanist Poggio Bracciolini, for instance, referred to him as “this troublesome fly, more irritating than a mosquito – uneducated, tasteless, verbose … [a] two-legged donkey, slow-witted and disorganized” - and Poggio was a friend).Life and Early Travels makes a fine companion to the earlier I Tatti Cyriac entry, and together they do what all the best volumes in this priceless series do: bring into spirited, well-annotated English an entire intellectual world.