Leggere Aristotele al Concilio: note sul Marc. gr. 205 e i suoi copisti

The Council of Florence was not only an occasion of religious debate but also a crucial moment in the transmission of the Greek classics from the Byzantine East to the Italian Renaissance. In this paper I will describe the manuscript Venice, Marc. gr. 205 (Aristotle, Physics and Metaphysics) with special reference to its four scribes: cardinal Bessarion, the so-called “Anonymus 40 Harlfinger”, John Eugenicus and George Dysipatos Galesiotes. I argue that, while the core of the manuscript was copied in Constantinople in the early ’30s of the 15th century, the additions by Bessarion and the anonymous scribe should be dated to about 1440-1450. In order to reconstruct the whereabouts of the manuscript, I have collected and fine-tuned the biographical data concerning Anonymus 40, Eugenicus, and Galesiotes, and I have tried to interpret it in the light of the manuscript transmission of the Aristotelean treatises transmitted in the Marcian codex.