Francesco Alunno
Francesco Alunno , actually Francesco Del Bailo (* 1484 ? In Ferrara , † November 11, 1556 in Venice ), was an Italian calligrapher , lexicographer and grammarian .
life and work
Francesco Del Bailo came from the lower nobility of the city of Ferrara. On his mother's side, he was related to the poet and lawyer Giovanni Ronchegallo Ghioldi, who influenced his intellectual development and to whom he dedicated his first book, Osservazioni sopra il Petrarca . He took the name Alunno ( Latin: "musarum alumnus" = "muse student", "muse son"). He may have been ordained a priest, but he never showed any particular interest in religious matters.
Alunno taught in Udine , where he came into contact with Niccolò Liburnio , and from 1532 in Venice as a master of calligraphy . His calligraphic works were highly valued in his day.
A letter from the grammarist Girolamo Ruscelli shows that Alunno, Ludovico Dolce, Ruscelli and Pietro Aretino formed a kind of literary-publishing community in Venice. Alunno's second printed work, Ricchezze della lingua volgare sopra il Boccaccio (1543), a glossary on Boccaccio , was a great success. In the appendix it contains a short grammar Regolette particolari della volgar lingua , which shows the influence of Bembos and Accarisis .
His main work La fabrica del mondo (roughly “the construction of the world”) from 1548 is an early Italian dictionary . In addition to the vocabulary of the three classics Dante , Petrarca and Boccaccio, it also deals with the vocabulary of the younger poets Jacopo Sannazaro and Ludovico Ariosto and arranges them in a kind of cosmography in 10 books.
An overview of the content in tabular form is provided for illustration:
| book | Subgroups | pages | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Dio | "God" | Dio, ordine de primi capi di Dio, Maria, angeli, divini, patriarchi propheti, fede, Chiesa etc., fermezza etc. | 1r-9v |
| 2. | Cielo | "Sky" | Cielo; dei: Apollo (poeti, musica, stromenti musici), Eolo, Baccho, Plutone; dee: Fama, Fortuna, Minerva, Diana, Cerere, Giunone, Hebe; pianeti: Saturno (religione, vecchiezza, tempo, agricoltura, povertà, avaritia, prigione, pallidi), Giove (folgori, fulmini), Marte, Sole, Venere, Mercurio (ladri, geometria, scrittore, pittura, colori, scoltura, vasi di varie sorti, arte), Luna, Segni celesti | 10r-116v |
| 3. | Mondo | "World" | Asia, Europe, Africa; provincie, regioni, paesi; isoles; Città; Castelli; Ville; Luogo; Cosa | 117r-132v |
| 4th | Elementi | "Elements" | Fuoco, Aere (uccelli, uccelli notturni), Acqua (mare, nave, fiumi, ordine dei fiumi, paludi stagni et laghi, pesci), Terra (monti, metalli, pietre pretiose et altre, veleni, animali velenosi, alberi, herbe, fiori, frutti, infruttuosi, animali quadrupedi) | 132v-167v |
| 5. | Anima | "Soul" | 168r-179v | |
| 6th | Corpo | "Body" | capelli, tatting (sonno), orecchie, bocca, voce, faccia, capo, gola, spalle, mani, petto, piedi, persona | 179v – 203v |
| 7th | Huomo | "Human" | donna, habito, portamento, parentado, popolo, vita, principio, morte, fine | 203v-221r |
| 8th. | Quality | "Quality" | odore, sapore, comparative | 221v-229v |
| 9. | Quantità | "Quantity" | numero, peso, misura, grandezza, picciolezza, altezza, bassezza, lunghezza, cortezza, larghezza, strettezza | 229v-245v |
| 10. | inferno | "Hell" | nomi de diavoli, furie infernali, fiumi dell'inferno, animali notturni, puzza bruttura | 245v-249v |
Finally, Alunno devotes a separate section to the “particelle” (“particles”). Most extensive is the part entitled "Heaven", which includes the pagan gods. Not all words and their usage are supported by quotations from the named authors, but sometimes the lexicographer Alunno takes on responsibility, sometimes including regionalisms in lemmas and definitions. According to the commentary on the work in the digital archive Cinque secoli di dizionari of the Accademia della Crusca, the Fabrica del mondo as well as similar contemporary works whose titles refer to the whole “world” or a large collection ( World of words by John Florio , Tipocosmia by Alessandro Citolini , Piazza universale by Tommaso Garzoni ), offer the richest possible vocabulary and not just a smaller linguistically specified excerpt (here: Tuscan). One difficulty in organizing subject groups is to decide where a word is to be sorted into, as plants are divided into the sections "Ceres", "Earth" and "Taste".
With Alunno there is also the fact that three different, heterogeneous classification schemes overlap, although he pretends to use a uniform, hierarchical classification that depicts the “natural structure of the world”. The uppermost order in ten books, which descends from God through man to hell, corresponds to the traditional, still medieval, theological worldview. The book dedicated to heaven contains its own astrological order based on the ancient gods, and approaches to an Aristotelian-scientific order can be found, for example, in the books on elements and quantity. With this mixture, Alunno proves to be a typical representative of his time.
The work was published (more than?) Twelve times in the 16th century.
Works
- Le Ricchezze della lingua volgare sopra il Boccaccio , Venezia 1543, 1551, 1555, 1557, Milan 1962 (Glossary of the Dekameron , with short grammar) Google , Google , MDZ
- La Fabrica del mondo , Venice 1546–48 (Subject group dictionary in 10 books, 12 editions in the 16th century) MDZ = Google , 4th edition, Venice 1562 Google
literature
- Luigi Arrigoni: Francesco Alunno da Ferrara. Abbachista. Calligrafo. Filosofo. Gramatico. Matematico. Orators. Poeta del secolo XV. Ricerche storiche illustrate. Florence 1885.
- Gunnar Tancke: The Italian dictionaries from the beginning to the publication of the "Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca" (1612). Inventory and analysis . Tubingen 1984.
- Angela Piscini: Del Bailo, Francesco. In: Massimiliano Pavan (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 36: DeFornari – Della Fonte. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1988.
- Marc Wilhelm Küster: An orderly worldview. The tradition of alphabetical sorting from cuneiform to EDP. Tübingen 2006, pp. 419-444.
- Jean Balsamo: De Dante à Chiabrera. Poètes italiens dans la bibliothèque de la Fondation Barbier-Mueller , Geneva 2007, pp. 46–48.
- Nicolas Barker: The glory of the art of writing. The calligraphic work of Francesco Alunno of Ferrara . 2 volumes, Los Angeles 2009.
Web links
- Literature by and about Francesco Alunno in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
- Issues by Francesco Alunno in EDIT 16
- Treccani enciclopedia (Italian)
- Short biography and digital copies of some dictionaries (Italian)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Angela Piscini: Del Bailo, Francesco . 1988
- ↑ Angela Piscini: Del Bailo, Francesco . 1988; See letter from Pietro Aretino to Alunno, Venice, November 27, 1537.
- ↑ Angela Piscini: Del Bailo, Francesco . 1988; Cf. Francesco Alunno: La fabrica del mondo di M. Francesco Alunno da Ferrara. Nella quale si contengono tutte le voci di Dante, del Petrarca, del Boccaccio, & d'altri buoni autori, con la dichiaratione di quelle, & con le sue interpretationi Latine, con le quali si ponno scrivendo isprimere tutti i concetti dell'huomo di qualunque cosa creata. Venice 1548.
- ↑ Page references after the fourth (?) Edition, Venice 1562, see: Cinque secoli di dizionari (Accademia della Crusca) ( Memento of the original from April 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Cinque secoli di dizionari (Accademia della Crusca) ( Memento of the original from April 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Marc W. Küster: Ordered worldview. Tübingen 2006, p. 443 f.
- ↑ Marc W. Küster: Ordered worldview. Tübingen 2006, p. 444.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Alunno, Francesco |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Del Bailo, Francesco |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian calligrapher, lexicographer, Romanist, Italianist and grammarian |
| DATE OF BIRTH | uncertain: 1484 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Ferrara |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 11, 1556 |
| Place of death | Venice |