The Four Engravings : between word and image

This essay is part of a volume which offers the first comprehensive study of the De Nola (Venice 1514), a hitherto underappreciated Latin text written by the Nolan humanist and physician Ambrogio Leone. Divided into three books and enriched by four engravings, De Nola is an extraordinary historical, chorographical and topographical treatise celebrating the city of Nola in the Kingdom of Naples. Its author was the Nolan physician and humanist Ambrogio Leone, who dedicated the work to Enrico Orsini count of Nola, while its publisher was Joannes Rubeus, or Giovanni Rosso from Vercelli. The volume would mark an important advance in European humanistic and antiquarian debates. Leone’s description of a seemingly minor urban centre in the peninsula is an innovative and ground-breaking work of Renaissance scholarship. Several decades after Biondo Flavio’s studies of Rome and Italy had appeared in print, De Nola marked a shift in antiquarian publications, and opened the way to a new approach to the description of cities. Its fame was enduring, reaching beyond the borders of the Italian peninsula to the main centres of Renaissance European culture. Despite its profound originality and its early and widespread circulation, De Nola has remained at the margins of Renaissance studies. The chapter written by Fulvio Lenzo discusses the four engravings, which help to make Leone’s book an early sixteenth century masterpiece of humanist literature. His analysis of the engravings clarifies the important role played by Leone himself in planning and drawing the illustrations, and reduces the role of the Venetian painter and engraver Girolamo Mocetto to little more than an executor of Leone’s ideas. Leone relied, at a first level, on a massive use of written sources relating to a wide range of disciplines. He appears as a reader (and certainly also an owner) of manuscripts and above all of printed editions, like those published by his friend Aldo and composed in Greek characters with the support of Grifo’s renewed Greek typeset; but also as a tireless ‘devourer’ of mathematical and geometrical treatises, like Luca Pacioli’s edition of Euclid. He certainly consulted (or even possibly possessed) illustrated books like the famous Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, or the 1511 edition of Ptolemy’s geographical work (edited by another émigré from the Kingdom of Naples, namely Bernardo Silvano of Eboli), or architectural treatises like Fra Giocondo’s edition of Vitruvius, all printing products which displayed an impressive iconic apparatus; but he also studied a deliberately aniconic book as Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, a real bestseller at the time, where mental images were created by the power of words. Ambrogio Leone considered his book not only a medium for the publication of his text, but also a valuable art object, in which renewed illustrations play a relevant role.