Note 92 — PIERO DI COSIMO DE’ MEDICI

Codex 2723. A far smaller volume in modern wooden binding. The title-page is: Rime del Poliziano, di Lorenzo de’ Medici, di Dante e d’altri. The famous letter begins on page 71 (really 142, as only the right-hand page is numbered) and above it is written in a different and more modern hand in red ink, Epistola di M. Angelo Poliziano al S. Federigo insieme con raccolto volgare mandatogli dal Magco. Lorenzo. The same scribe has written the names of the various poets in the margin of the letter where they are mentioned in red ink. The Life of Dante by Boccaccio and many of the poems that are in the Palatina Codex are wanting. At page 78 (i.e. 156) the handwriting changes, and at the end of the volume is inserted a Latin autograph letter from Poliziano to Philippu Beroaldus. In 1814 the Abbate Vincenzo Nannucci and Luigi Ciampolini published a collection of Poliziano’s poems and at the end printed Lorenzo’s letter, attributing it to Poliziano. They were evidently misled by the anonymous annotator of this codex. The attribution to Poliziano is absurd, as he was then barely fourteen years of age, and only knew Lorenzo in 1470, when he sent him a translation of part of the Iliad (see p. 157).