The verse epitaphs in Paolo Giovio's Elogia virorum literis

In his villa on Lake Como, the Italian humanist Paolo Giovio (1483-1552), pioneer of modern museum work and museum education, collected portraits of famous literary figures, rulers and artists. Below the portraits were Latin parchments with obituaries composed by Giovio himself, frequently with fictitious verse epitaphs written by others. Giovio published these texts in the Elogia virorum literis illustrium (1546) and Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (1551), and prompted Giorgio Vasari to write the Vite de? più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (1550). The verses, neglected by research despite their great significance in literary history, reach the highest level of literary complexity in Giovio’s writers from the early modern period, simply because reference can be made to prominent role models from ancient Roman literature. In addition, there are inventive connections at the meta level, i.e. biographisms from the works of those portraited and motivic, linguistic, stylistic or metric reminiscences. The outstanding success of these epitaphs of writers is seen in the fact that in the Editio altera of Elogia virorum literis illustrium (1557) – and in all the other 16th century prints – there are numerous other examples by the Flemish philologist Johannes Latomus (1523-78).
The project applied for would like, for the first time, to research systematically the craft and context of the verse epitaphs of literary figures compiled by Giovio and Latomus. A first element would be to establish a relationship between the 370 short poems of the Editio altera (1557) and ancient and humanist role models by creating an online platform with a moderated Wiki function. Following the philological preparation and translation, the contentrelated, linguistic and formal topic, viz. the sepulchral topic and especially that related to deceased literary figures will be broken down in detail using intertextual and narratological questions. The open-access format with flexible hypertextuality provides new opportunities here for an interactive dialogue with specialist colleagues from institutional cooperation partners, and a reputation system and invitations to lectures provide an incentive to participate. The external reports and additions will be uploaded by the project staff after examining and adapting
them. The second project element focuses on (inter-)medial localization. A particular focus of the research will be on dialogue relationships arising between the poetic epitaphs, the preceding prose biographies and the implied portrait images, how several poems about the same person interact, and which reciprocal relationship the epitaphs have to different authors when the book of elogies – as intended by the two editors – is received completely and in the given order. An international conference including a conference volume and a Latin-German edition of all Elogia virorum literis illustrium (ed. 1557) with an introduction and explanations would complete the undertaking.