[APPENDIX III]

(Page [138])

GIOVANNI SANZI’S MS. CHRONICLE OF FEDERIGO DUKE OF URBINO

CONSIDERING the importance of Sanzi's Rhyming Chronicle of Duke Federigo to the literary history of Urbino, and the almost total neglect in which it has hitherto lain, we shall here describe with some minuteness the only copy of it known to exist. It is a large and thick folio volume, No. 1305 of the Ottoboniana MSS. in the Vatican Library, written on paper in a firm Italian hand of the fifteenth century, expressly for the Duke Guidobaldo I., to whom it is dedicated. Some passages have been interpolated on the margin, and others are altered by pasting a new version over the cancelled lines, in a character slightly different from that of the text, of which, being probably autograph, a [fac-simile] is given on the following page.[320]

[[Enlarge]]

The general title, supplied in a much later hand, runs thus:—"Historia della Guerra d'Italia nel tempo de' PP. Pio e Paolo II., del 1478, in versi di Gioṽ. Sati al Duca di Urbino"; but the Chronicle itself is thus headed, "Principio del opera composta da Giohanni Santi, pictore, nelaquale se contiene la vita e gesti de lo illustrissimo et invictissimo Principe Federico Feretrano, Duca di Urbino." A prose dedication occupies four pages, and is followed by a prologue of nine chapters in verse; the poem itself is divided into a hundred and four chapters, arranged in twenty-three books, the whole work consisting of about twenty-four thousand lines.[321] It may be not uninteresting to print the contents of these chapters, supplying the omitted titles of the two first.

LIBRO PRIMO.