ABSTRACT
At the time of his political and literary debut Pontano forged his poetic identity in terms of adequation to the humanists and distinction from the Iberian poets employed at Alfonso’s court. A few years after the publication of the Ferrarese anthology, however, the tactics employed in the first version of Parthenopeus scored rather disappointing results among Pontano’s readers. In copying a selection of Pontano’s poems from the anthology crafted in Ferrara in 1451, for example, Paduan scribe Giovanni Bernardo dalle Valli accompanied these texts with a rubric that presents them simply as “Ioviani Pontani discipuli Panormitae ad vicinos pro custodia puellae.”1 As noted by Dionisotti, moreover, Hungarian scholar Janus Pannonius (1434-1472), after reading Pontano’s poetic exordium during his stay in Ferrara, composed an insulting epigram that paired, somewhat disparagingly, Pontano’s poems with those written by Neapolitan poet Porcellio Pandone, who was considered unanimously to be the worst among the poets included in the compilation.2 Briefly, judging from the response of his readers, Pontano had managed to create a distorted image of himself as completely subordinated to his mentor, and his poetry was perceived as confined within the occasional scope of its first publication. The opportunity to save face in the eyes of his contemporaries arrived in 1458, when Pannonius requested a new version of Pontano’s poems to his friend Giovanni Sagundino, a Venetian humanist based in Padua.3
