Friday 7 October 2011

More Warscher Codex

Thanks to those of you who replied to Sera's query about the Warscher Codex! Anne Laidlaw also emailed me a detailed reply which I copy here along with documents she provided (you have to click on the images to make them bigger):
For copies of Tatiana Warscher, you should try the Duke University Library, which, under the auspices of Prof. Lawrence Richardson jr, has the "complete" set that Mrs. Warscher made for Prof. Rostovzeff and, when he died, for Prof. Bradford Welles for Yale University.  In the 1950s they were kept in the Yale Classics Dept.., but after the Diaspora of Yale Classics faculty in the early 1960s, the Warscher Codices went with Prof. Richardson to Duke on permanent loan, where to the best of my knowledge they still are.  In Dobbins and Foss (Routledge 2007), in my article on "Mining the early published sources," n. 10 re p. 622 I mention their history.  What I omitted was my survey of where the various versions are (as of 1980).  I published the locations with which volumes had which houses in Laidlaw, The First Style in Pompeii (Giorgio Bretschneider 1985) pp. 10-11, and am attaching PDF copies of that list here.  There are also a few copies I stumbled across in the archaeological library of the Univ. of Cincinatti, and there may well be others floating about, since every copy is a unique paste-up job with variants: the Yale copy of the C. del Fauno, for instance (now at Duke) is dated 1949, while the only other version that I could find is in the Swedish Institute in Rome, dated 1946. 

The other place to look would be at the Getty Research Institute in the Halsted B. Vander Poel Campanian Collection, Accession no. 2002.M.16, kept in over 200 boxes in the Special Collections.  That is a morass to search through though you can try online (start with Getty Institute Research Library).  Vander Poel supported Mrs. Warscher the last few years of her life, and became her student (he was a wealthy amateur living in Rome in the 1950s-90s).  Since he had no training in research or ancient studies, but DID have a lot of enthusiasm and also the money to support it, he hired various young scholars -- the most important was probably Laurentino Garcia y Garcia, much of whose research is in that collection anonymously -- and gave them research projects (probably originally suggested to him earlier by Mrs. Warscher), many of which eventually came out as parts of Van der Poel's CTP (Corpus Topographicum Pompeianum), which was privately published but given both to major Classical Research Libraries in the US and Rome and also to scholars he knew who were working in Pompeii at that time.

Anne Laidlaw
Fellow-by-Courtesy, Johns Hopkins University


2 comments:

John Muccigrosso said...

I'm now curious about the copyright status of both of these works.

Sera Baker said...

Thanks very much to everyone who contributed their knowledge about the Warsher Codex. It has made things much clearer. I'm just sad I'm too far away from Rome or America to search the records!

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