Alessandro Braccesi: Carminum Appendix (I)

This is a small appendix of elegiac poems by Alessandro Braccesi, the Florentine humanist who served in the chancery of the Florentine republic and wrote Latin verse in the circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici. The pieces are mostly love poems: in the first the poet asks when Hope and Faith, the companions of lovers, will die, and Cupid answers that they will perish while Love endures; in another the beloved Flora prays to the gods for a young man sick with fever; others praise a woman’s golden hair and bright eyes.

The poems show the conventional but fluent Ovidian and Tibullan elegy practised by Florentine humanists of the later fifteenth century, with personified abstractions and mythological ornament. As an appendix to Braccesi’s main collections, they fill out the picture of a working civil servant who wrote occasional and amatory verse alongside his official duties. They also show how closely such poets followed ancient models in theme and diction while adapting them to the social life of their own city. The text follows Alessandro Perosa’s 1943 edition of Braccesi’s poems.