Raphaële Mouren

The role of Florentine Families in the Editions of Piero Vettori*

communication présentée dans le pannel Family affairs: Kinship and Society in Renaissance Italy
The Renaissance Society of America annual meeting
Chicago, 3 avril 2008

In mid-16^th-century, publishing a book generally required team work, the intervention of various people at different levels. In the case of Greek and Latin authors, the steps between the preparation of an edition and the end of the printing process are especially numerous:

First, the search for ancient manuscripts, unknown texts or manuscripts, especially of manuscripts giving the best tradition of the text that the humanist wants to publish, as well as the consultation of previous editions.

Then, the editor – the scientific editor, the philologist – has to find a way to consult these manuscripts; the best way is of course to arrange for a loan. Otherwise, the humanist has to find a reliable person who will copy the text for him or will make collations and verifications on specific parts of the text.

A further step involves the preparation of the text, that is, a copy which is used by the humanist to prepare his own edition; and, when the final text is ready, a readable copy has to be made for the typesetter.

As for the printing process, finding a printer willing to publish a text in Greek was not a snap. Contrary to publishing in Latin, printing Greek books was hardly profitable. It took a long time to sell them, years as we can see from books resold with a new title-page after more than 40 years! Another problem is the fonts: the printer needed to have two or three different sizes of a font at his disposal. He had to buy them, or have them created for him. All of this is very expensive. So, it is not surprising that we have various examples of powerful princes or churchmen acting to help publishing Greek books, by giving money, lending a font, or organizing the publishing venture.

I will provide several examples of the various kinds of assistance received by the Florentine humanist Piero Vettori (1499-1585), editor of greek and latin texts and professor at the Florentine Studio from 1536 to 1584.
He lived in Florence, a small city in the 16^th century. It was an oligarchy in all spheres. The small number of families that counted had real political power, but also frequently a cultural role. Moreoever, these families are often interrelated: marriage alliances or residence in the same gonfalone or parrish. For example, the Vettori family was linked to the Capponi family. The marriage links were of course crucial: for example, the mother of Piero Vettori was a member of Giacomini Tebalducci’s family. That means that he was part of the family of Antonio Giacomini Tebalducci, a major official for the Republic, who was commissario in Arezzo and commissario del campo. This name was very important for the family: remember that Antonio Giacomini Tebalducci had played an important role in the war between Florence and Pisa from 1494 and 1508; he was celebrated by duke Cosimo I, and became an important symbolic figure of the granducato : he is present on the affreschi representing the war that we can still see in the sala grande of the Palazzo vecchio¹. Antonio Giacomini was also celebrated by various biographies in the 16^th century².

Other important links are work-related. Florence was a city of merchants and bankers. But another kind of connection was particularly important : that of exact contemporaries, the men from these families who were born in the same year, who attended the same lessons year after year at the studio – the university was in Pisa, but some courses were also given in Florence, and the listeners, on Latin rhetoric and philosophy, on Latin and Greek languages, were always the same. Young oligarchical Florentines, members of the church, usually including the archbishop of Florence, attended the lessons at the Studio. These cultivated Florentines were passionately interested in the cultural heritage, in reading and understanding the classics, and they know each other very well. Only a few of them become real humanists, philologists, historians or poets. These men became merchants, bankers or diplomats for the granducato, members of the church and the Roman curia. Usually, they were not scholars but, after their years as students, they remained deeply committed to the classics, as they themselves noted ; they would set aside time for the pursuit of such activities.

Using the correspondance and the preliminary letters of the books edited by Piero Vettori, I will present examples of the important role that some florentine families played in the publishing process. I will concentrate on Florentine families such as the Mei, the Del Nero, the Del Bene, the Dei, but especially the most important and powerfull families of the city, and the greatest ennemies of Cosimo I, the Gaddi, the Salviati, the Ridolfi… Some of these families were installed in France as bankers or merchants. Other were in Rome. Rome was the place where manuscripts were to be found, but also money and sometimes, employment.

FINDING A MANUSCRIPT

SALVIATI

There existed several major private collections of manuscripts. Among them were the cardinalate libraries used by Vettori on several occasions : the Farnese library, but also the Gaddi’s, the Ridolfi’s, the Salviati’s… Usually, the owner himself agreed to loan the manuscript. But there were also other difficulties that occasionally required the intervention of friends, as we will see.

One of these was the collection of cardinal Giovanni Salviati. The Salviati family was one of the greatest families of Florence. Giovanni Salviati was the grandson of Lorenzo de Medici, the nephew of pope Leo X, the cousin of Clement VII and the uncle of the future Grand Duke Cosimo I. The Salviati, Ridolfi and Gaddi cardinals were allies of cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici against Alessandro, duke of Florence in 1530 after the fall of the Republic. Under the Grand Duke Cosimo I, their families were the most powerful and the richests of the Florentine fuorusciti ; the cardinal Salviati remains a francophile, hostile towards the Grand Duke. He is best known today as the protector of the painter Francesco Salviati, who took his name. It is in the library of Salviati that Vettori found a 11^th-century manuscript with some very rare scholia of Homer³. A copy was made for him, that he in turn annotated ; this copy is now, with his library, in Munich (BSB cod. gr. 16).

GADDI

Among those who could help Vettori were the Gaddi brothers. Dean of the Apostolic curia, Giovanni Gaddi was the brother of cardinal Niccolò Gaddi, friend of the cardinals Ridolfi and Salviati⁴. Giovanni Gaddi enjoyed the company of the learned, his commensali : Francesco Marsuppini, Niccolò Ardinghelli, il Thilesio, il Cursio. He was close tied to Annibal Caro, Benedetto Varchi (another exiled Florentine friend of Vettori), Pietro Aretino and others⁵. Gaddi was a friend of Vettori, though the two mostly communicated through the Florentine Donato Giannotti⁶. In Rome after the fall of the last Florentine Republic, Giannotti played a central role in the various kinds of assistance that Vettori received from Rome from the Gaddi, from cardinals Marcello Cervini and Guglielmo Sirleto.

For one of the earliest of Vettori’s editions, the Posteriores castigationes in epistolas quas vocant familiares, Giovanni Gaddi lent him no less than five manuscripts from his own collection, sent to Florence by Giannotti. This book was a real Florentine project : it was a response to attacks on Vettori by Paolo Manuzio. Vettori was assisted by the first secretary and first counsellor of Cosimo I, Francesco Campana. In Rome, assistants did work for him on the text in the house of cardinal Gaddi. Giannotti, but also Lodovico da Fano, studied the five manuscripts of the Epistolae owned by Gaddi and found a variant that Manuzio claimed in his edition didn’t exist in the manuscripts. So Giannotti wrote to Vettori : « Tanto io credo che noi vi daremo occasione di confermare qualcosa con l’autorità di più testi »⁷. What was, for Manuzio, a conjecture, a correctio ope ingenii, was in fact a manuscript variant, a correctio ope codicii. And this was specially important for Vettori who, all his life, disapproved of the use of conjectures. His Roman friends also found on the manuscript the title of the Ciceronian letters – there was a discussion on the subject -, restored by Vettori in his first edition, published in Venice in 1536, with a slight difference⁸.

Vettori sent his Posteriores castigationes to Rome to be read carefully before being submitted to the printer : the readers were Giannotti and Gaddi himself. Gaddi read the book and advised Vettori to add more annotations but also to cut others that were too polemical or uninteresting<⁹.When Lodovico da Fano, with an surprising excess of enthousiasm, asked Manuzio himself to publish Vettori’s replies to his own edition, Gaddi wrote to Vettori that he was against this odd idea¹⁰.

Vettori dedicated the book to Campana, overruling the advice of Giannotti to send it to Gaddi, who was really fond of him, who was a powerful member of the Curia and a friend of numerous scholars. Monsignore Gaddi would have been very grateful for such a gesture¹¹.Nevertheless, Vettori decided to dedicate the book to Campana in Florence. Selected 3 years before by Cosimo I as professor, such a choice did make sense, as it would have been unthinkable to dedicate this book to an anti-Medicean Florentine exile, even if the citizen links helped him a lot for this and other books.

Piero also asked Giannotti to search for other manuscripts for him and, in the Gaddi’s library, Giannotti found « three quite old manuscripts of Cicero’s Discourses, that may well be good, even tough they are incomplete ». Again, the manuscripts were at Vettori’s disposal and were to be sent to him if he asked¹².Two more months later, Giannotti wrote to Vettori that he had found no other manuscripts¹³. After the death of Gaddi, Giannotti informed Vettori in 1544 that his collection contained a manuscript of the Nicomachean Ethics, which Vettori was working on at the time. Giannotti believed that, with the help of Niccolò Ardinghelli, it would be possible to obtain the manuscript from Luigi Gaddi¹⁴.The Florentine Ardinghelli, born in 1502, was a close friend of Gaddi and remained all his life a friend of Piero Vettori.

In 1537, Vettori spent a few weeks in Rome, looking for employment : beginning in 1536, he was invited by Giovanni Gaddi, and Ardinghelli gave him living quarters. On several occasions, Ardinghelli helped him to locate manuscripts and printed books.

Niccolò RIDOLFI

Again, it’s with the help of Giannotti that Vettori had knowledge of what manuscripts were in another rich library, perhaps the richest cardinalate library at the time, belonging to cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, which would eventually become the core of the Greek manuscript collections in France.
In 1536, in preparing his first book, the Cicero, Vettori requested manuscripts from this extraordinary collection : but it turned out that cardinal Ridolfi owned only Greek manuscripts¹⁵.
In 1541, after the death ot Francesco Verini, teacher and friend of Piero, Ridolfi asked for his help : he wanted a copy of the Verini’s comments on Aristotle, or else propose to his descendants to purchase the original manuscript¹⁶.
Vettori borrowed a manuscript of the Nicomachean Ethics from the cardinal in 1545, while preparing his own edition of the text¹⁷.He uses it in this edition and thanked the cardinal in the dedicatory epistle¹⁸.But in the spring of 1546, when Vettori wanted to see the manuscript of this text, it was'nt available : the cardinal was away from Rome, the boxes of the manuscripts were in storage, and they won’t be available until his return, as Giannotti wrote to Vettori¹⁹.
Vettori also made use of one of the most famous manuscripts in this collection, now Parisinus graecus 1741, containing Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric, and even more important, the De elocutione of Demetrius Phalereus. Vettori would edit the three of them, all of them being all very important to him – in fact, he published the Demetrius 3 times, in 1542, 52 and 62.

Bartolomeo CAVALCANTI

Vettori also found manuscripts in less powerfull hands : Bartolomeo Cavalcanti owned an important manuscript that Vettori used for his first book, in 1536, the edition of the opera omnia of Cicero. Bartolomeo or Baccio Cavalcanti, born in 1503, was a friend of Vettori, 4 years his senior. Like Vettori, he took part in the Florentine republic, and both of them pronounced a speech before the militia. He is known as the author of an Italian Rettorica. Like many others, he was a fuorisciti, and he left the city in 1537 after the murder of Alessandro de’ Medici. In 1544, he was briefly ambassador for King Francis the First in Florence, with his patron Ippolito d’Este. His sister, Lucrezia Cavalcanti, held an important position at the French Court, and she married Albizzo Del Bene, a member of a powerful Florentine family in France, as we will see.
Cavalcanti was the former owner of Laurentianus 49, 18, coming from the library of Coluccio Salutati, via Niccolò Niccoli, Leonardo and Donato Bruni, Donato Acciaioli, Agnolo Poliziano²⁰and finally an ignobilis grammaticus, from whom Cavalcanti bought it. Cavalcanti gave it to Vettori, who offered it to the Medicean Library at the time of its opening in 1571²¹.

FINDING A PRINTER

DEL BENE

The Florentine Del Bene family was a family of bankers and letterati, but some of its members occupied positions of considerable importance in France. In 1503, Niccolò Del Bene was appointed Master of the Royal Household [maître d’hôtel ordinaire] to King Louis XII. We find numerous letters from various members of the family in the carteggio of Vettori. Niccolò’s son, Bartolomeo, married a Buonaccorsi from the family of the Italian Treasurer of France. He himself was a poet and wrote various books and assumed various positions at Court. In 1562, he was in charge at the French court in Blois. Vettori sent him a copy of the funeral oration he had given on the death of Duchess Eleonor of Toledo, former wife of Cosimo I, to be passed on to the Chancellor de France, Michel de l'Hospital. He also asked him to speak to the Chancellor of France about the possibility of getting Homer’s scholia published.
In the 1540s, cardinal Marcello Cervini, in Rome, have had great difficulty in publishing some of these scholia. Bartolomeo Del Bene related his meeting to Vettori : he gave the book to the chancellor, who appeared grateful, and conversed with him about this project. The chancellor was quite interested, and expressed a strong interest in seeing the scholia printed ; Del Bene was to propose the book to the parisian editor Vascosan. However, Del Bene doubted that this could be done right then, because the period was not favourable : in fact, Del Bene’s letter of was sent from Blois the 7^th of March 1562 : but the 1^st of March was the massacre de Wassy, where the duke of Guise killed 37 protestants : the first of the six wars of religion was about to begin²². The book was never printed in Paris or elsewhere, but the work of Vettori on the text was not entirely lost : his friend Johann Chessel (Caselius), when he was in Florence in 1565, copied some variants from this manuscript, and later gave the notes to his student, Conrad Horn, who used them in his edition of Homer²³.

FOLLOWING THE PRINTING

The humanist is in need of assistance especially when he is not in the same place as the printer. This was often the case for Vettori, even if most of his books were published in Florence : for instance, books for lessons to be given by Vettori at the Studio were printed in the summer, when Vettori was out of the city at his Tuscan estate of San Casciano, Val di Pesa.
For Vettori’s first book of, the four-volume Cicero printed by the Giunta in Venice, the assitant was his teacher, Francesco Verini. In Lyon, for the three following books, the edition and the explicationes on Cato and Varro, and the Posteriores castigationes on the Ciceronian letters, Rinieri Dei and his brother Lionardo, both members of a family of Florentine bankers, served as go-betweens. In Florence, it was the nephew of Rinieri Dei, Pierino Dei. Pierino also used to copy texs for Vettori, when he was 70 and more : the copies were used by Vettori in giving lessons, and were eay to read even for his old eyes. Others copies used to prepare an edition, or to be sent to the typesetter, were made by various members of the Vettori family : his son Jacopo, his two grandsons Francesco and Piero.

Bartolomeo Barbadori sought manuscripts for him and made copies, with his friend Girolamo Mei, to prepare the editions of the Electra of Euripides and the tragedies of Aeschylus.
Rinieri Dei sent printed books from France to Vettori, for exemple the Terentius of Gouveia, as did the bishop of Glandèves, Ugolino Martinelli. Martinelli stopped in at the print shops, for example, the royal printer Morel in Paris (were he met the Regis Professor and royal printer Adrien Turnèbe²⁴), but also in Lyon, and bought books that he thought would be of use to Vettori : an edition of the Poetics, two editions of Lucretius²⁵, the Adversaria of Turnèbe²⁶,  Horace and others²⁷,as Vettori wrote to another well-known Florentine, Antonio Benivieni²⁷.Giannotti, of course, sent books from Rome, for example an epidictic speech of Marc-Antoine Muret²⁹.

And so it goes : in the 4,000 letters to Vettori than can be examined at the British Library, there exist numerous other examples of how faithful the dispersed Florentine friends, exiles or not, were to Piero Vettori.

Conclusion

These few examples demonstrate the importance of Vettori’s Florentine connections. Piero Vettori, who took part in the Florentine Republic in 1527, went away for a few months in 1530 but returned to the city a year later. In 1537, when Cosimo I became the head of Florence, he immediately asked Vettori to become a professor at the Studio. Hesitating, Vettori spent a few weeks looking around Rome to find a job, but he came back to Florence and became, for the next 40 years, professor, orator, senator and above all editor, in particular of the rare manuscripts of the private Medicean library. Nevertheless, this definitive choice did not change his close relationship with the Florentines who were hostile to Cosimo, the fuorusciti, who were never to return to Florence. For years, they spent time and money helping him work on and publish his renowned Greek and Latin editions.

NOTES

* Je remercie William Kemp qui a relu et corrigé ce texte.
1. Voir la mise au point sur cette discussion par Henk Th. Van Veen, « 'Republicanism', not 'triumphalism' : on the political message of Cosimo I's Sala grande », Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 37, 1993, p. 475-480 ; sur la possibilité de la présence de Giacomini pendant cet épisode de la guerre, du même « Antonio Giacomini : un commissario republicano nel Salone dei Cinquecento », Prospettiva, 25, 1981, p. 50-56 (rééd. dans id., Letteratura artistica e arte di corte nella Firenze granducale, Florence, 1986, avec « Cosimo I e il suo messagio militare nel Salone dei Cinquecento », Prospettiva, 27, 1981, p. 86-90 ; « Ulteriori considerazioni su alcuni personaggi negli affreschi del Salone dei Cinquecento », Prospettiva, 31, 1982, p. 82-85). Si Giacomini n'est pas cité par Guicciardini dans le récit de la guerre de Pise, il est considéré par Machiavel comme responsable de la victoire ( « Antonio Giacomini… » p. 52). Tout au long du XVI^e siècle, on trouve de nombreux échos de l’admiration encore suscitée par A. Giacomini : V. Bramanti, dans Jacopo Nardi, Vita di Antonio Giacomini, éd. et comm. Vanni Bramanti, Bergamo, Moretti & Vitalli, 1990 (Scrivere le vite, 1) p. 19-22 et notes.
2. La biographie écrite par Jacopo Nardi (mort en 1552) ne fut publiée qu'en 1597, mais circulait sans doute déjà (rééd. Jacopo Nardi, Vita di Antonio Giacomini, op. cit.). La préface de la biographie publiée en 1570 par Jacopo Pitti, Vita di Antonio Giacomini, laisse penser qu'elle avait été demandée par Côme I^er, à qui le texte est dédié (ibid. p. 53) (éd. C. Monzani, « Iacopo Pitti, Vita di Antonio Giacomini Tebalducci », Archivio storico italiano, 4, 2, 1853, p. 99 sqq. Arnaldo D’Addario cite la mise en valeur de Giacomini par Machiavel dans ses nature degli uomini Fiorentini : « (…) Era, privato, sanza parte e sanza ambizione alcuna ; quando publico, era solo desideroso della gloria della città e laude sua (…) ; e così Antonio, incognito prima e oscuro, acquistò reputazione in quella città dove tutti li altri clari e reputati cittadini la avevano perduta » (A. D’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma a Firenze, Roma [s.l.], [tipografia Giuntina, Firenze], 1972 (Ministero dell’Interno, Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato, 77), p. 41.
3. Aujourd’hui BL, Burney 86 (T). Ce manuscrit a été attribuée à la bibliothèque Salviati par Jean Irigoin, cité par Annaclara Cataldi Palau, « La biblioteca del Cardinal Giovanni Salviati : alcuni nuovi manoscritti greci in biblioteche diverse della Vaticana », Scriptorium, 49, 1995, p. 60-95 (p. 81 et n. 103).
4. D. Giannotti à P. Vettori, 11 septembre 1540, Donato Giannotti, Lettere italiane, éd. Furio Diaz, Milan, Marzorati, 1974 (Scrittori italiani, sezione storica e politica), lettre 43 ; 30 septembre 1540, ibid., lettre 45.
5. Voir l’article de Vanna Arrighi, DBI, vol. 51, ad uocem.
6. Voir la lettre de Giovanni Gaddi à P. Vettori, Rome, 29 janvier 1536, BL, Add. Ms 10277, f. 22 ; Ruberto Rophia à P. Vettori, Rome, 24 octobre 1536, BL, Add. Ms 10277, f. 220, renouvelle de la part du cardinal une invitation à venir le trouver à Rome « 4 o 6 mesi o quel piu o manco che bene vi venisse ».
7. Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 30 septembre 1540, éd. Diaz p. 61-62. La citation donnée par Giannotti, « nimirum ex Epicteto », se trouve dans les Lettres familières, 3, 10, 6.
8. Le ou les manuscrits de Gaddi portaient le titre suivant : M. T. Ciceroni Ep. Familiarium liber primus ad Lentulum et reliquos (Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 2 octobre 1540, éd. Diaz p. 62-63). Voir R. Mouren, « Sébastien Gryphe et Piero Vettori : de la querelle des Lettres familières aux agronomes latins », dans Quid novi ? Sébastien Gryphe à l’occasion du 450^e anniversaire de sa mort, actes du colloque, sous la direction de Raphaële Mouren, Villeurbanne, Presses de l’Enssib, 2008, p. 287-339.
9. Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 23 octobre 1540, éd. Diaz p. 67-68.
10. Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 8 janvier 1541, éd. Diaz p. 73-74 : « ma a m. Giovanni Gaddi non pare che in tal caso vi debbiate impacciare con Paulo ».
11. « Il far mentione di alcuno litterato o d’altro è stato et sarà bene : perché tutti questi cortigiani hanno un poco di vanità nella testa. Il Molza [ne] ha manco che gli altri, et manco anchora m. Lodovico ; pure egli ha havuto caro che gli habbiate fatto quella suonata in queste nuove annotationi. Sarà bene necesssario facciate honorata mentione di M. Giovanni Gaddi et ne harete occasione dalli suoi testi, come vedrete. Et certo egli merita per tutti i rispetti, et specialmente per l’affettione che mostra di portarvi. Ma io voglio dire più oltre. Se voi non havessi destinato ad altri la dedicatione di queste nuove annotationi, certo io vi consiglierei che le dirizzassi a lui. Egli è huomo di quelle qualità che sapete, è stimato assai in questa Corte et ha concorso di litterati et è poi tanto dell’amico quanto di se stesso, et non gli potresti fare il maggior piacere di questo ; di modo che io fo giudicio che non potresti fare acquisto con questo dono di persona che ve ne havesse maggiore obligatione et ve ne havesse a volere tanto bene, quanto vorrebbe egli : che certo potresti dire d’havere qua uno che vi harebbe in luogo di buon fratello » : Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 30 septembre 1540, BL, Add. Ms 10267, f. 90, éd. Ridolfi Roth, lettre 8.
12. Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 5 octobre 1540, éd. Diaz, p. 63-64.
13. Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 11 décembre 1540, éd. Diaz, p. 71.
14. Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Vicence, 4 mars 1544, éd. Diaz p. 105-106.
15. Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Comiano, 27 septembre 1536, BL, Add. Ms 10267, f. 65-66, éd. Giannotti 32 lettre 2. En 1540 encore Giannotti écrit à Piero que « il reverendissimo Ridolfi non ha libri latini » : Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 18 décembre 1540, éd. Diaz, p. 71. En réalité Ridolfi, d’après l’inventaire de ses manuscrits, possédait 120 manuscrits latins : Roberto Ridolfi, « La biblioteca del cardinale Niccolò Ridolfi », op. cit.
16. D. Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 29 déc. 1541, éd. Giannotti 32 p. 104. Cit. Lucinda Byatt, « Una suprema magnificenza » : Niccolò Ridolfi, a Florentine Cardinal in Sixteenth-Century Rome, thèse pour obtenir le diplôme de docteur de l’Institut universitaire européen, Florence, 1983, vol. 2 p. 173.
17. Lettres de Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, 4 mars, 25 septembre 1544, 7 septembre 1545, éd. Giannotti 32 p. 112-115. Cit. L. Byatt, op. cit., p. 173-174.
18. ᾽Αριστοτέλους ῾Ηθικῶν Νικομαχείων βιβλία δέκα, Aristotelis De moribus ad Nicomachum filium libri decem, Florentiæ, apud Junctas, 1547. Sur la bibliothèque de Niccolò Ridolfi voir Roberto Ridolfi, « La biblioteca del cardinal Niccolò Ridolfi, 1501-1550 », La Bibliofilia, 31, 1929, p. 173-193 ; G. Mercati, « Indici di manoscritti greci del Cardinale Ridolfi », Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, 30, 1910, p. 51-55 ; Henri Omont, « Un premier catalogue des manuscrits grecs du Cardinal Ridolfi », Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes, 49, 1888, p. 309-324 (310-312). P. L. Rose, « For the History of Codex A of Archimedes : Notes on the Estense, Carpi, and Ridolfi Libraries », Manuscripta, 21, 1977, p. 183 (cite l’inventaire de la bibliothèque conservé à la Cambridge University Library, Ms. Add. 565, f. 121-132v).
19. Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 15 mai 1546, éd. Giannotti 32 p. 118-119 : « Il Maiorano ha riscontrato i luoghi che m’havete mandati con un testo della Libreria Vaticana, molto buono, secondo che egli afferma, et ha trovato poca varietà ; et quella poca, che ha trovata, ha notata in su la nota de’ luoghi, come vedete. Il testo del cardinal non s’è potuto vedere, perché le casse de’ libri si sono messe nel luogo dove sogliono stare in absentia nostra et quivi staranno insino al ritorno nostro (…) ».
20. Comme l’indiquent plusieurs notes manuscrites portées sur l’ouvrage.
21. A. J. Hunt, « Three new incunables with marginalia by Politian », Rinascimento, 2e s., 24, 1984, p. 251-259.
22. « Detti l’oratione fatta nel mortorio della Duchessa al detto signor cancelliere che l’hebbe molto cara et mene ringratiò et prima gli havevo lungamente ragionato di Voi et del desiderio havevi di fare stampare quegli antichi commentari sopra Omero i quali e’ desiderebbe infinitamente che venissino in luce ma dubito che sin che questo regno sia pacificato non si truovi chi ci voglie attendere. Non lascierò per questo giunto ch’io sia a Parigi di parlarne al Vascosano et altri piu famosi et piu ricchi stampatori (…) » : Bartolomeo Del Bene à Piero Vettori, Blois, 7 mars 1562. BL, Add. Ms 10264, f. 16.
23. Scholia uetusta et oppido erudita in IXum librum Iliadis Homeri e msc nunc primum edita, où il raconte l’histoire dans sa préface. Cit. E. Maas, op. cit., p. IX-X.
24. Ugolino Martelli à Piero Vettori, [Paris ?], 12 mars 1556, BNCF, Nuov. Acq. 1165, p. 109-112.
25. Ugolino Martelli à Piero Vettori, Lyon, 28 juin 1566, BNCF, Nuov. Acq. 1165, p. 119-122. Antonio Benivieni à Piero Vettori, Padoue, 19 novembre 1566, BL, Add. Ms 10264, f. 83.
26. Ugolino Martelli à Piero Vettori, Lyon, 20 juillet 1565, BNCF, Nuov. Acq. 1165, p. 117-118.
27. Ugolino Martelli à Piero Vettori, Saint-Valery-sur-Somme, 22 août 1549, BNCF, Nuov. Acq. 1165, p. 75.
28. Ugolino Martelli, pendant ses séjours en France, a acheté de nombreux livres pour Piero Vettori. À l’occasion d’un séjour à Paris, en 1556, il va chez l’imprimeur Morel, « jeune homme savant et diligent » ; il trouve chez lui une Poétique pour Piero, et rencontre Adrien Turnèbe. Il trouve à Lyon le deuxième volume des Aduersaria de Turnèbe : apprenant que son ami avait déjà le premier volume, il achète pour lui le second. Aucun de ces deux ouvrages n’est conservé aujourd’hui dans la bibliothèque. En 1566, il envoyait un Lucrèce « fatto con molta diligenza per opera d’un certo Fiammingo Burano ». Antonio Benivieni, cinq mois plus tard, écrivait encore à Vettori pour lui annoncer que Martelli lui envoyait un Lucrèce, sans aucune précision qui permettrait d’identifier ce volume : toutefois, on peut envisager qu’il s’agissait d’un ouvrage récent (Martelli promettait aussi un « Varrone nuovo »), qui aurait disparu de la bibliothèque. Il en est de même pour un Horace « della più bella stampa », envoyé en 1549.
29. M. Antonii Mureti ad Pium IIII Pont. Max. oratio habita postridie Kal. Mai anno MDLX, Romae, apud Antonium Baldum impressorem cameralem, 1560). Donato Giannotti à Piero Vettori, Rome, 8 mai 1560 : D. Giannotti, Lettere a Piero Vettori (…), éd. C. Roth et R. Ridolfi, Florence, Callecchi, 1932, lettre 91 p. 133.