School of Arts and Sciences Review Winter 2014 | Page 24

Research & Publications

Mulryan publishes translation
of first Italian mythographer

D

r. John Mulryan has spent
decades translating books
that are centuries old, never
knowing in the tedium of
such meticulous work whether anyone
would care to publish the culmination
of his labor.
Ultimately, his painstaking efforts were
rewarded, first with the 1,024-page
English translation of Natale Conti’s
“Mythologiae” in 2006, the most important mythography published during
the Renaissance; and again last year
with the publication of the 485-page
translation of Vincenzo Cartari’s “Images of the Gods of the Ancients,” the
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first mythography written in Italian.
But while the accomplishments certainly serve as a source of pride, the
greatest satisfaction Mulryan derives is
hearing from others how important his
works are to them.
“People have stopped me in parking
lots to tell me, ‘Thank God you did this.
I don’t know how I would have ever
gotten my dissertation done,’” said
Mulryan, who retired in 2011 after 45
years as an English professor at St.
Bonaventure. “One of the book’s consultants, who recommended that it be
published, was an art historian from
Cleveland, and he wanted this book
published very soon because he needed
it for two of his graduate students.”
More than 25 years ago, Mulryan paid
$100 for a 1608 edition of Cartari’s
“Images of the Gods of the Ancients,”
a copper-plate book worth 30 times as
much today. But the real price Mulryan
paid was the untold hours spent translating Cartari’s work.
During gaps in his 30-plus years of research on the Conti book with co-author Steve Brown, longtime classics
professor at St. Bonaventure, Mulryan

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School of Arts and Sciences Review

would switch his brain from
Latin translation to Italian and
work on the Cartari project.
“Images of the Gods” was
the first mythography — “a
work that gives you the summary of a myth and then tells
you what it means,” Mulryan
explained — to be written in
Italian.
“By writing this in Italian, he
made the mythological tradition available to women for
the very first time because
women were not educated in
Latin,” said Mulryan, who’s
also a renowned expert on
English poet John Milton.
“Fifty-one percent of the population couldn’t read about
mythology before this.”
Unlike the treatises of the
other Italian mythographers
such as Boccaccio, Conti and
Giraldi, Cartari’s work was profusely illustrated with captioned images of the pagan
gods, and composed in the Italian vernacular. The systematic integration of
text and image constituted, at the time,
an original approach to the classical
myths.
“Cartari’s main contribution is that
he’s the first pictorial, imagistic mythographer,” Mulryan said. “His iconographical, symbolic interpretation of the
images of the pagan gods as they were
represented in antiquity and discussed
by Renaissance antiquarians proved to
be an enormously popular approach to
pagan myth.”
Mulryan’s translation, published by the
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), includes 23
images scanned directly from his 405year-old copper-plate book. (He also
owns a woodcut edition of Cartari’s
“Images,” but the copper-plate version
provided higher quality images.)

“There are a lot of copyright fees involved in illustrations, so I hit on the
idea of lending them my book so there
would be no copyright fees,” he said.
“Don’t forget, the book is more than
400 years old. Who was going to object? The book was mine, so they just
needed my permission to reproduce
them.”
Mulryan’s book is the first complete
English translation of Cartari’s Italian
text, and the only annotated translation
of the “Images” in any language.
Cartari knew that his work would be
valuable even as he was producing it,
Mulryan said.
“Just look at what the original title
page says: ‘An extremely useful work
for historians, poets, painters, sculptors,
and professors of polite literature,’”
Mulr X[