Martini 1781

History

For more than a century, Antonio Martini’s translation was one of the principal Catholic Bibles in Italian. It was published in Turin between 1769 and 1781 and remained in wide use in Italian Catholicism until the twentieth century, when new translations appeared, among them Alberto Vaccari’s, published between 1943 and 1958, and that of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), published in 1971. Vaccari’s was, according to the Treccani, the first Catholic translation into Italian made from the original languages since the invention of printing.

Martini was born in Prato, in Tuscany, on 20 April 1720. He studied at the Cicognini college there and took a degree in letters at Pisa in 1748. In 1751 King Charles Emmanuel III put him at the head of the congregation of twelve priests who served the basilica of Superga, above Turin. The two encyclopedias that tell his life do not tell the start of the translation the same way. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, it was Cardinal Vittorio Amedeo delle Lanze who urged him to take it on, knowing that Pope Benedict XIV wanted a good Bible in contemporary Tuscan; the work proved too much alongside his duties at Superga, and Martini gave up the post, accepting a state councillorship and a pension from the king. The death of Benedict XIV in 1758, by the same account, discouraged him, but he carried on. According to the Enciclopedia Italiana, Martini stayed at Superga until 1765, when, at the same cardinal’s invitation, he set about the translation. The New Testament was published between 1769 and 1771, and the Old Testament between 1776 and 1781. The edition set the Latin and the Italian side by side, with numerous notes that draw widely on the Fathers of the Church.

Martini did not follow the same method throughout. In the New Testament he took the Greek text then in circulation as his base, departing from it in places in favor of the Vulgate. In the Old Testament he translated from the Vulgate, but went back to the Hebrew now and then, with the help of a Jewish scholar. The sources disagree on who that was: the Catholic Encyclopedia names a rabbi Terni, the Enciclopedia Italiana a Florentine rabbi named Levi.

On 17 March 1778, while the Old Testament was still coming out, Pius VI wrote Martini the brief that later editions print among their opening pages. At a time when “so great a flood of books” was attacking the Catholic religion, the pope wrote, Martini did very well to judge that the faithful should be strongly encouraged to read Scripture, for the Scriptures are “the richest fountains, which ought to be open to everyone” (fontes uberrimi, qui cuique patere debent). Pius VI also approved of Martini’s having accompanied the translation with notes drawn from the Fathers of the Church, meant to keep away the danger of abuse, and declared that the work did not depart from the rules of the Congregation of the Index or from the constitution Benedict XIV had issued on the matter. He adds that he had had the honor of once belonging to Benedict XIV’s household and of having him as a master of ecclesiastical learning.

In 1781 Martini was raised to the archbishopric of Florence. A third authorized edition of his translation came from the archbishop’s press in Florence between 1782 and 1792. Martini died in Florence on 31 December 1809. The best-known of the later editions is the two-volume folio illustrated by Gustave Doré and published by Treves in Milan in 1869 and 1870.

Curiosities

Where the Vulgate has supersubstantialem in the Lord’s Prayer, and the Douay-Rheims and Straubinger follow it with “supersubstantial” and “supersubstancial”, Martini writes “Dacci oggi il nostro pane per sostentamento”, give us today our bread for sustenance (Matthew 6:11). In Luke 11:3, where the Latin has quotidianum, he writes “quotidiano”, daily, as the Vulgate and the Douay-Rheims do.

When Moses comes down from Sinai with the tablets of the law, the Vulgate says his face was cornuta, horned, and the Douay-Rheims duly writes “his face was horned”. That Latin reading is why Michelangelo’s Moses is traditionally shown with horns. The Hebrew uses a verb derived from the word for horn, which can be understood as sending out rays or shining, and Martini writes that Moses’s face “era tutta splendente”, was all shining (Exodus 34:29). In a note he says that here he followed the Apostle, the Septuagint, the Chaldean and the Syriac, and that the Hebrew and the Vulgate are to be understood the same way: their horns stand for the great majesty that shone in Moses’s face.

The psalms follow the Vulgate’s numbering: the shepherd psalm is 22, “Il Signore mi governa, e niuna cosa a me mancherà”, the Lord rules me, and I shall want for nothing, as in the Latin Dominus regit me (Psalm 23:1). Within a psalm, though, the transcription this site imports does not count the verses the way the other Vulgate editions do. It prints a psalm’s title and its first verse under one number, so where the Latin gives the title a verse of its own, the Italian column runs one verse behind. In Psalm 42, which the Vulgate numbers 41, the hart longing for the springs of water opens verse 1 in Martini and verse 2 in the Latin (Psalm 42:1-2). In these psalms the difference comes from how the titles are numbered, not from any difference in what Martini translated.

Sources

• La sacra Bibbia, tradotta da monsignore Antonio Martini (digital edition) — archive.org, the transcription this site imports
• La Sacra Bibbia secondo la Volgata tradotta in lingua italiana da Antonio Martini, Florence, Passigli, 1841 — archive.org, a scan of the printed edition, with Pius VI’s brief in Latin and Italian and Martini’s note on Exodus 34:29
• Antonio Martini — Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), on Cardinal delle Lanze, the Superga years, the pension, rabbi Terni and the Florence edition of 1782-92
• Martini, Antonio — Enciclopedia Italiana, on the dates of birth and death, the studies at Pisa, Superga from 1751 to 1765, the Greek and Hebrew texts, rabbi Levi and the appointment to Florence
• Bibbia: la diffusione — Treccani, Cristiani d’Italia, on the Turin and Florence editions, the Doré edition and Vaccari’s translation
• Bible translations into Italian — Wikipedia, on the publication dates and the parallel Latin and Italian columns