Gianfrancesco Corradino dall’Aglio and Two Manuscripts of Catullus That He Did Not Invent

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Abstract A new edition of the poems of Catullus was published in 1738 in Venice by a young scholar named Gianfrancesco Corradino dall’Aglio. The title and preface promised a revolutionary edition that would surpass all its predecessors and restore the authentic text of Catullus with the help of an excellent early manuscript discovered in Rome. Corradino dall’Aglio’s grandiose claims attracted criticism and he soon came to be accused of having invented his manuscript sources. This article shows that the accusations go back to a misunderstanding by Scipione Maffei, who accused the editor in 1749 of having invented a liber Maffei. In fact the references to that manuscript stem from Achilles Statius’ commentary of 1566. More recently, that manuscript has been identified by Berthold Ullman with BAV, Ott. lat. 1829, that is, the famous codex Romanus of Catullus. But from the late eighteenth century onwards, the accusations of fraud directed against Corradino dall’Aglio centered on the Roman manuscript that is mentioned in his title and preface. This article shows that that manuscript cannot be identified with any surviving manuscript of Catullus, but due to several factors there is no reason to believe that it was invented by Corradino dall’Aglio. The article closes with an examination of the editorial practice of the young scholar, who turns out to have been a conservative editor of Catullus: he often advocated the reading of the manuscripts against the conjectures of earlier editors.