M. Fassino - Abstract

MS Vaticanus Urbinas gr. 112 [Urb.112] is one of the two codices of Isocrates owned by Federico da Montefeltro (the other is the well-known MS Vaticanus Urbinas gr. 111 [G]). It belongs to the numerous group of apographs of MS Vaticanus gr. 65 [L].

Urb.112, written by Johannes Scutariotes, a prolific scribe operating in fifteenth-century Florence, has been considered so far a twin of MS Vaticanus Palatinus gr. 187 [Pal.187], written by the same scribe for Giannozzo Manetti (†1459). More extensive collations suggest now that Pal.187 derives from Urb.112 through a lost intermediate copy, contaminated with variant readings from another source. Consequently, the date of Urb.112 must be traced back to the forties and fifties of the fifteenth century. This codex, therefore, was not commissioned directly by Federico, but purchased on the Florentine book market, as shown also by the illuminated decoration, which lacks his usual coat of arms.

The same relationship emerges also for the Isocrates MSS Parisinus gr. 2930 and Cremonensis 160: the latter, written by Isidore of Kiev, derives from the former through a lost and contaminated intermediate copy.

Then, some general criteria are proposed to establish whether two given MSS are not simply twins, but linked by this peculiar stemmatic relationship.

At the end, it is shown that Urb.112 is not the Greek model of the Latin translation of Isocrates’ Helen by Martinus Phileticus, as believed so far. Instead, the analysis of variant readings reveals that the model is to be found among the so-called ‘humanistic’ branch of the second family of Isocrates MSS (Parisinus gr. 2932, Laurentianus Plut. 58.5 and its copy Toletanus 101-13, Salmantinus 279).