On Agriculture and On Farming

Furthermore, individual words were often written in the margins by the hand of the same Politian, by which he partly indicated briefly the arguments of the matters being discussed, and partly wished to note words that were ancient or in some way worthy of record. In these, he used now ink, now red paint. There are few, however, which—because they refer to the same writing as the excerpts of the Marcian codex—might be doubted as to whether they were taken from the margins of the manuscript book. The writing of the rest is different from the excerpts of both codices, and it seems Politian wrote some things before he used the manuscripts, and added others later. Finally, he also added some conjectures, written in the same red paint he had used in collating the more recent codex. Although he distinguished these conjectures from the readings of the codex by the sign 'c' placed before them, he did not separate them entirely accurately. But since he had used that other codex with the intention of emending the corrupt writing of the ancient codex if possible, and at the same time—as it seems—of adding anything he himself had found by conjecture, he did not consistently signify what he himself had conjectured and what he had found in the manuscript book. He made mention of the same Marcian codex in his Miscellanea, ch. 35: "For what even those considered most emended codices have in the verses of the Ephemerides (Varro, R. R. I 48), this I find in a copy of venerable antiquity from the public library of the Medici family thus: In Euhemeri libris uersis."

Gesnerus possessed the excerpts of both codices described by Henricus Brenkmannus at the time when Politian’s book was in Florence, and he received them into his own edition. He wrote in the preface (p. XX) that the book itself was then in the library of the Grand Duke of Etruria, which seems inaccurate. For Bandinius, who placed this edition of the writers on agriculture among the authors collated by Politian with manuscripts, in his Ragionamento istorico sopra le collazioni delle Florentine pandette fatte da Angelo Poliziano (Livorno 1762, p. 67), saw the book in the library of the noble Ricasoli family. The family’s heraldic emblem is still found expressed in bronze on the inside of the cover. From the inheritance of the Ricasoli, Buturlinus the Russian, while purchasing books in Florence in 1818, acquired this one also for a given price along with other books of the same family. Regarding this matter, a receipt of money written by the agent of the Ricasoli is prefixed to the book itself, behind the family emblem I mentioned. Afterwards,