Venice
alone published, from 1490 to 1500, thirteen editions containing text
and commentary by "The Great Four," as they were called. The famous
Aldine editions began to appear in 1501. Besides Venice, Florence, and
Rome, Ferrara came early to be a brilliant center of Horatian study,
Lionel d'Este and the Guarini preparing the way for the more
distinguished, if less scholastic, discipleship of Ariosto and Tasso.
Naples and the South displayed little activity.
Roughly speaking, the later fifteenth century was the age of manuscript
recovery, commentary, and publication; the sixteenth, the century of
translation, imitation, and ambitious attempt to rival the ancients on
their own ground; the seventeenth and eighteenth, the centuries of
critical erudition, with many commentaries and versions and much
discussion of the theory of translation; and the nineteenth, the century
of scientific revision and reconstruction. In the last movement, Italy
had comparatively small part. Among her translators during these
centuries must be mentioned Ludovico Dolce, whose excellent rendering of
the _Satires_ and _Epistles_ was a product of the early sixteenth;
Scipione Ponsa, whose faithful _Ars Poetica_ in _ottava rima_ appeared
in the first half of the seventeenth; the advocate Borgianelli, whose
brilliant version of Horace entire belongs to the second half; and the
Venetian Abriani, whose complete _Odes_ in the original meters, the
first achievement of the kind, was a not unsuccessful performance which
has taken its place among Horatian curiosities.
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