I have been trying to track down more versions of the Latin quatrains, including other ms. editions of Robertet, to see how different they are. Douglas in her critical edition dissertation (
https://www.proquest.com/openview/965da ... 366&diss=y) lists a few we have not yet considered. Unfortunately, in her quotations of the Latin quatrains in her footnotes, she does not indicate the variations but treats them all as if they said the same, which we know they did not, at least in small details, many not explainable as scribal errors. Not only that, her version of them in 1961 is not precisely the same as another recently published version, at the end of a 1989 article by Guy Delmarcel ("Text and lmage: Some Notes on the Tituli of Flemish 'Triumphs of Petrarch", in JStor): he has "sulcor" where she has "fulcor" in the quatrain about Time - both are attested in various mss., as well as, in some mss., a completely different word, "conculcor". I will give specifics later in the post.
Using the search term "latin" in her OCR-d text, I find the following, for mss. with the Latin quatrains
(1) Her J2 (p. 12), which she says was copied by "Ja. Robertet" (p. 14), probably the grandson Jean-Jacques, son of Francois. This is BnF Fr. 1717, 85r-87v. These pages are available on Gallica,
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b ... 20Robertet. (As can readily be verified, this is not 12148.) I also found them in color on Gallica, but I can't manage to retrace my steps. She says (p. 12) that the latest poems in this collection are "Clément Marot's
Dixain de mai, dated 1527, ”le roy estant au bois de Vincennes**, and his
Deploration of Florimond Robertet which cannot be earlier than 1527."
(2) Her F, BnF Fr. 12490, 118r, and on 66r the quatrain for Love in the hand of Francois, who died around 1530. She thinks it was done in 1514, the time of the last datable poem (p. 16). This, too, is in Gallica, at
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b ... m.r=VILLON.
(3) Her G, BnF A 10262, 61r-63v (p. 19), 16th century, which for the Trionfi poems there is the notation "Autres dietz pour mectre en paincture ou tapisserie" (Others said for putting in painting or tapestry). I can't locate this online. She says it has poems dating from 1530 and late 1531 (p. 18), and that it is similar in content and writing to her J mss. (BnF 1717 and two others).
(4) Her H, BnF Fr. 24461, the main ms. that we know, and her preferred source,
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8426260f/f6.item. She says that it is very difficult to date this ms.:
The earliest date of any value is indicated on f°. 141r°. Charles de Bourbon is here represented in a drawing and in a poem, at the Battle of Agnadel, 1509. (p. 24).
And no later than 1525, she adds. A complication is that there is a tapestry much like its Triumph of Death which Marillier and Digby (
Victoria and Albert Museum: The Tapestry Collection: Medieval and Renaissance, London 1980, pp. 39-40, n. 1) date to around 1490. I do not know if they justify this; my source is Thomas P. Campbell, "New evidence on 'Triumphs of Petrarch' tapestries in the early sixteenth century," Part I, 2004, p. 379, in Jstor), who merely cites it as though with approval. She allows that the ms. may be a copy of an earlier one. Also, it is a collection of several smaller mss. all bound together, according to the description on Gallica. Some are in the hand of Francois Robertet, but not the Trionfi poems, which are in an earlier style. However this does not mean this section is earlier, because the same hand appears later in the ms. than some of Francois's. As I have said before, it seems to me that the cliff on the Triumph of Death drawing is enough like that on the drawing of Hercules, which has Florimond Robertet's coat of arms on a tree next to Hercules, to suggest that they were contemporaneous. A comparison of Florimond to Hercules would not be apt before 1509, at that battle of Agnadello.
(5) Her H1, Arsenal ms. 5066, 1v-8r, at
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b ... 0fr%205066. This is a copy of H - but not to be neglected on that account, because there are minor changes. For example, for the second word in the quatrain for Time, the original, 24461 (at left), has "fulcor" (I think there is a very faint horizontal line bisecting the vertical) and the copy, 5066 (at right), has "sulcor" (as "s" was written then). It appears the copyist didn't notice the horizontal line.
And in later mss., the copyist of 12490 (Francois Robertet?) has "fulcor", while that for 1717 (Jean-Jacques Robertet) has "sulcor."
In addition, in the fourth line of the quatrain for Fame, "sit" is crossed out and replaced with "scit" (24461 on left, 5066, with the correction, on right):
Similarly, "abidunt" in the original of the quatrain for Eternity (last word of the third line) was reproduced faithfully in the copy, but then someone crossed out the "d" and wrote the correct letter "b" below it:
(6) Her T1 and T2, Arsenal Fr. 5065 and BnF Fr. 12424,
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b ... 8s/f6.item (2r, 80r, and 130r) and
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9063616t/f2.item (3r, 137r but hard to read). She says (p. 52):
The two manuscripts, which date from the reign of Louis XII, (1) are the two volumes of an anonymous French prose translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi, (2) and contain both Latin and french texts.
___________
1. See V. Massena and B. Muntz, Petrarque, ses etudes d ’art, son influence sur les artistes, p .236.
2. See G. Bertoni, Per la Fortuna dei Trionfi del Petrarca in Francia, Modena, 1904, pp. 51, 55.
Louis XII reigned from 1498 to 1515. Both of her references are online in archive.org. On the next page she adds:
The first volume, T1, has on f.° A v°. the arms of Jean de Daillon, Count of Lude,(1) for whom the two manuscripts must have been executed.
________________
1. Cf. Martin, Catalogue des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de l ’Arsenal, no. 5065.
The Jean de Daillon she is referring to died in 1557 and became count in 1545, she says. He was born sometime after 1491, when his parents married, I learn on the internet. He would have been the eldest boy. About the Trionfi verses she says:
Tl contains the first three Triumphs, T2 the last three; the Triumphs are preceded in each case by the four-lined latin verse used by Jean Robertet as a basis for his Triumphes and by a French rondeau, all anonymous in the manuscripts. Of these [start 53] the first and last are by François Robertet.
I have verified that the two rondeux, for the triumphs of Love and Eternity, are written by Francois: the words in 5065/12424 correspond almost precisely to those given to Francois by Douglas for these two triumphs. I am not sure that the corresponding French poems for the other triumphs count as rondeux: they are all huitains plus a concluding line separated from the others.
Bertoni (p. 20) says that the translation of Petrarch found in that ms is that by Georges de la Forge, first "published" in 1514. Franco Simone (
The French Renaissance: medieval tradition and Italian Influence in shaping the Renaissance in France,1969, p. 236) makes it clear that this was the printed edition, not in manuscript - so likely a date before then for the ms.
(7) The versions by Molinet, which Douglas mentions only briefly, noting their similarity to Robertet's. They are in the edition of Noel Dupire,
https://archive.org/details/LesFaictzEt ... 1/mode/2up, with the ms. containing only Love and Chastity at
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b ... 9/f39.item (references from Ross). She says:
Jean Molinet used them [Robertet's Latin verses and French translations] for his adaptation of the Trionfi in verses of six lines; a comparison of the text of Jean Robertet's first verses in latin and French, with that of Molinet will amply illustrate the use of an identical sequence.
She then cites Robertet's Latin and French with Molinet's French for Love. She does not quote Molinet's Latin, which in fact differs from Robertet's in two words - "neptunis" rather than "nettunis" and "manent" at the end rather than "durant." In both regards Molinet conforms to the Modena text rather than Robertet (I have already quoted them together). Other quatrains have more differences.
One poem often attributed to Molinet,
En regardant la beaulté de Venus..., a long poem incorporating numerous Greco/Roman mythological figures, she thinks is actually by Robertet, because the style is more like his and the references, some found only in Petrarch or Boccaccio, are more typical of him. In one manuscript the last five lines of the poem are missing. These, she suggests, might in fact have been written by Molinet (p. 100):
In view of Molinet’s habit of re-writing existing works (notably the Roman de la Rose ) with the addition of a moral, it is perhaps possible that he in fact did this in the present case, and that the last verse, which contains the moral, is his.
This point about re-writing existing works might explain a couple of his quatrains, a few of whose lines vary widely from the corresponding lines elsewhere. Molinet lived 1435-1507 in Brussels, compared to Jean Robertet, who died in 1502-3 and lived primarily in central France.
(8) Another poet who used the Latin quatrains and composed his own verses on them, she says (p. 260-1), was Simon Bourgoyn, BnF ms. fr. 12423, Arsenal ms.fr. 6480 I find this ms at
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b ... x/f11.item. The verses are on 2r, 30r, 38r, 51v, 73r, and 80r. The accompanying illustrations are the page before, or can be found separately at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cate ... ais_12423). Simone dates the ms. to around 1530 (the year on p. 218, the ms. on p. 244).
To these eight I add (9) the quatrains that appear on extant tapestries. I have found examples for all except Love online, with enough detail to read the Latin quatrains. Four are at either Hampton Court or the Victoria and Albert, both in London, and one, for Eternity, in Barcelona. Essling and Munz say that the ones in London are based on BnF 5066 (p. 207, n. 4). That contention is dubious. The problem is that the Latin quatrain for Death in the tapestry doesn't matach that of 5066. The tapestry (and their transcription of it) has "Esse" as the first word of the last line (below, in the middle of the second line).
But BnF 5066 has "Ecce" (below left, start of third line). Of all the manuscript versions, allowing for minor scribal errors, only one has the same wording for the Latin quatrains on the tapestries, and that is BnF Fr. 1717 (below right.
1717 is the ms. that Douglas thinks was done by the grandson and dates to c. 1528. Meanwhile, the tapestries have the years 1507 and either 1510 or 1520 woven into their fabric. Trapp says the year is 1510; Campbell ("New evidence," Part II, pp. 506-7, In JStor) appeals to circumstantial evidence in favor of 1520. The 1507 would be the date of the cartoon. For the evidence (having to do with figures in the Triumph of Fame being Wolsey and Henry VIII), see his article. If the ms. was from 1528, then of course it couldn't be the source for the tapestry: they would have had a common source, as yet undiscovered.
Massena (aka Essling) and Munz helpfully transcribe the inscriptions on pp. 207-210 of the book cited, although they are readable enough in the online photos. Curiously, on p. 210 they read "fulcor" in the Time quatrain for what looks like, in the photos, "sulcor" (first line, second word below). Perhaps I just don't understand medieval script conventions.
Of course there are more tapestries in other museums, but I can't find any with intact Latin inscriptions.
It is now a matter of noting the differences among them. My hope was that it would be possible to draw some conclusions about the ultimate source or at least how many Italian sources were used, since we know of one already, in Modena, with the date 1447 on one of its pages. I do not know if either of these goals is possible.
So I will go through them one by one, first giving the Modena quatrain as transcribed by Ross and then the variations on it seen in the various French sources.
Amor quatuor capitula [i.e., Love, one chapter]
Ecce Coronati telo sternuntur amoris.
Cum Iove neptunus cum Iove pluto subit.
Lora voluptati reges imponite sceptra
Immoderata ruunt et moderata manent.
manent (stay): Molinet, 1717.
durant (endure) in place of
manent: 24461, 14290, 5066
vigant (prosper) in place of manent: 5065/12424, 12423.
neptunus is
nettunus in 24461, the first t possibly made into a c in 5066.
Pudicita capitulum unum [i.e., Chastity one chapter]
Arma pudicicie superando cupidinis arcum,
Hic dominum calcant, et sua tela premunt.
Nec pingui Cipro, nec molli floribus Yda,
In Cerere et Theti suppeditatur amor.
tela (weapons): Molinet, 5065/12424, and 12423.
membra (limbs) instead of
tela: 24461, 5066, 14290, 1717, and the tapestry.
Molinet's last two lines are not like anyone else's, although they do have the word
ciprigenam, which is related to
Cipro (Cyprus).
Mors tria capitula
Celibis abscidunt nervos et fila sorores,
Nec durat fragili vita pudica solo.
Sanior et longa poterit valitudine celebs
Esse, heu tandem singula morte cadunt.
Esse sed heu (To be but alas]: 12490, tapestry (although Essing and Munz report a comma after
sed)
Esse, sed heu (To be, but alas): Molinet, 1717
Ecce sed heu (Behold but alas): 24461, 5066, 12423
Ecce heu (Behold alas): 5065/12424
[Note added Nov. 20: I had left out Molinet from the list; I now have added him, plus the "heu" that I had left out in three of the lines.]
Fama tria capitula
Omnia mors mordet, sed mortem fama triumphat.
Cetera mordentem, sub pede fama premit,
Egregium facinus post mortem suscitat ipsam
Nec scit Letheos limpida fama lacus.
limpida (clear): Molinet, 5065/12424
inclita (illustrious) instead of
limpida: 24461, 5066, 12490, 1717, 12423, tapestry
sit instead of
scit: 24461 and original of 5066, corrected to
scit in a non-scribal hand
Tempus capitulum unum
Tempore conculcor quantumlibet inclita fama
Me extingunt quamvis tempora sera piam
Quid prodest vixisse diu, cum fortiter evo.
Abdidit in latebris, iam mea tempus edax.
conculcor: 5065/12424, 12423
fulcor instead of
conculcor: 24461, 12490
sulcor instead of
conculcor': 5066, 1717, tapestry
cum fortiter evo (with strongly (strength?) for a long time): 1717, tapestry
cum fortiter (no evo after): 12490
dum fortiter evo (although strongly for a long time): 5065/12424, 12423
confortiter evo (? for a long time) instead of
cum fortiter evo: 12461;
confortitur evo (made stronger for a long time): 5066
widely different in all four lines: Molinet (although he has the words
inclita fama in the first line,
extinguant in the 2nd line,
prodest in the 3rd, and he ends the 4th with
tempus edax).
Iudicium capitulum unum
Ipsa triumphali prestans regina tropheo,
De veteri palmam tempore leta gero.
Rex, Amor, atque [written atqz: MH, for which see previous post] pudor, mors, fama, et tempus abibunt.
Felices animas Regia nostra tenent.
felices animas (happy souls): 12423
celestes patram (heavenly father): 24461;
celestem patrum (heavenly father), tapestry
celeste patriam (heavenly country): 5066;
celestem patriam (heavenly country) 5066, 12490, 1717
atoz instead of atque: tapestry; Molinet has something like
atqz.
omits
abibunt: Molinet, tapestry; Molinet has
abnui" in one ms., according to his editor.
abidunt instead of
abibunt: 24461, 5066, but corrected in the latter to
abibunt in a non-scribal hand.
The quatrain is missing from ms.: 5065/12424 (?)
I suppose I should say something about the "vincits", etc. All the mss. except Modena have these "vincits" with one or more of the quatrains, before or after,
24461, below the quatrains: Amor vincit mundum, Pudicicia vincit amorem, Mors vincit pudiciciam, Fama vincit mortem, Tempus vincit famam, Eternitas omnia vincit omnia Superat
5066: same as 24461
5065/12424, above the quatrains: Pudicicia vincit amorem, Le triumphe de la mort, Fama vincit mortem, Tempus vincit famam. At the beginning and end of the ms: "Amor. vincit mundum, Pudicicia. vincit amorem, Mors. vincit pudiciciam, Fame. vincit mortem. Tempus. vincit. famam, Eternitas seu Divinitas. omnia. vincit.
1717, below the quatrains: Omnia vincit amor, Pudicicia vincit amorem, Mors vincit pudiciciam, Fama vincit mortem, Tempus vincit famam, Eternitas omnia vincit.
12490, in block letters above the quatrains: Primus de amor, de pudicicia Triumphus II, de morte triumphus III, triumphus IV de fama, tempus omnia vincit, triumphus VIimas (Ultimas?) de aeternite.
12423, in block letters on the page before the illustration, along with other phrases,(the quatrains are then after the illustrations): Donec optata veniat, Pudicitia vincit amorem, Mors vincit pudicitiam, Le Triumphe de Renommee, Le Triumphe Du Temps, Le Triumphe de le Divinite / Divinitas omnia vincit. On the page before the illustration of Amor: Amor vincit Mundum, Pudicicia vincit Amorem, Mors vincit Pudiciciam, Fama vincit Mortem, Tempus vincit Famam, Diuinitas seu Eternitas omnia vincit.
Tapestries: I could not find any "vincits" on the tapestries. On all the London ones except Fame, the top center words are too faded to read. That for Fame is mostly legible, and it isn't a vincit. I doubt if the others are either.
What is also of interest is how the Modena ms. states before each quatrain the name of the triumph plus how many chapters there are. This procedure is followed by BnF Fr. 12423 in French, with much the same wording as Modena's Latin: for example, for Love we read "Premier triumphe. Qui est Damour. Et contient quatre chappitres." Then in block letters the motto "DONEC OPTATA VENIET." There is nothing like this practice in any of the other mss. I have looked at.
So did Robertet have the Modena text before him, but change a word or two in each quatrain? Did the editors of 5065/12424 and/or 12423 have a different Italian version that was nearer to that of Modena, or was Robertet being creative? We can ask the same about Molinet, who diverges greatly from the rest: did he have a different manuscript, or was he being more creative? I incline toward the latter in both cases, but it is not certain and I would like to hear what others think.