Riflessioni ecdotiche sugli autografi di Michelangelo

[Autom. eng. transl.] The poems of Michelangelo, notoriously excluded in the sixteenth century from printed editions, survive (also for that reason) in large quantities through autographed materials, which have always been the object of the attention of readers, scholars and collectors. The philologist, on the other hand, knows that those autographs cannot constitute a univocal guide for the edition of the texts, and this (lacking the prints) for the significant presence of coeval copies for the most part authorized and set up in environments very close to the artist and with his support and collaboration. The striking case can be identified in the preparation (1546) of a collection of 89 rhymes by the artist, which still represents a controversial nucleus of the corpus under the ecdotic profile. On that occasion Michelangelo had entrusted the preparation and organization of that substantial group of rhymes to Luigi del Riccio and Donato Giannotti, in turn assisted by other scribes not better known. The outcome was a series of apografic re-scripts, two of which were revised and approved by the poet and therefore evaluable as idiographers. In the present as in the past, publishers found themselves in need of evaluating the greater or lesser "authoritativeness" of those copies, which meant clarifying the specific nature of a "collective" work based in many respects on a real authorial delegation. This paper intends to propose other analytical materials and some ecdotic reflections on the subject: first of all about the extension, caliber and authority of the work done by collaborators on Michelangelo's poetry; secondly on some problems of graphic rendering of the texts. At its foundation is, in our opinion, the peculiarity, and at the same time the limit, of the Michelangiolesco writing system, an essentially 'anti-humanistic' system in which, in spite of its indisputable charm and sometimes fetishistic attractions, the figure is evident amateurish. All this with the less overt corollary of Michelangelo's awareness of this, and of his need for continuous comfort and help in the most challenging moments of his poetry activity