Читать книгу Exil und Heimatferne in der Literatur des Humanismus von Petrarca bis zum Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts - Группа авторов - Страница 11

David Marsh (Rutgers, New Brunswick)

In the violent and volatile politics of medieval and Renaissance Italy, exile was a common punitive measure employed by rulers and regimes. But in political terms, the most important exile in the Florentine Quattrocento was that of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1433, which led to his return the following year and the consolidation of Medici power that would dominate Tuscany for three centuries. Like other exiles in Western history, and like the numerous fuorusciti of the Italian peninsula, Cosimo’s experience of exclusion was reflected in various literary works that illuminated an individual’s banishment in the wider context of history.1

A central series of texts in the Quattrocento discussion of exile was provided by Plutarch’s lives of the ancient Greeks and Romans. In her magisterial study of the translations, translators, and dedicatees, Marianne Pade concludes:

In pre-Medicean Florence and Venice the humanists working on Plutarch were themselves, to some degree, designers of the ‘myths’ of their city. In the Florence of the Medici and later in papal Rome that was probably less the case, but for various reasons they still used classical Antiquity to support the political claims of self-representation of those in power. It was important for Cosimo de’ Medici to present himself as the republican statesman who had saved his country from great danger by freeing it from a tyrant’s rule. As Alison Brown has shown, the humanists cleverly supported that image by dedicating to him Lives whose eponymous heroes had freed their country from tyrants (Timoleon), rebuilt it after a disaster (Camillus), or, after saving it from great danger, had suffered exile and then returned (Themistocles).2

Indeed, Alison Brown’s classic study of Cosimo as Pater Patriae singles out three sources for this image: two letters addressed to the banker by Poggio Bracciolini, and the prefaces to Plutarchan lives by Antonio Pacini and Lapo da Castiglionchio. But she is most concerned with the image of Cosimo as the leading republican statesman, so that she mentions the theme of exile only in passing. As is well known, this classicizing adulation reached a highpoint thirty years later, when the Signoria posthumously awarded Cosimo the title Pater Patriae, “Father of the Country”, an honor once awarded to Cicero, which in 1465 Verrocchio carved on his burial slab in San Lorenzo.