To Florence belongs the praise of being first in this field as well

as the other. Her inhabitants were not able to attach to their city

Francesco Petrarca, who was not only the greatest poet, but the

greatest connoisseur and most passionate worshipper of antiquity in

his time; but his spirit seems to have remained with them. At a time

when in general the sciences were strictly separated from literature,

properly speaking, they were here united in many cases in a harmonious

whole. Lapo da Castiglionchio and Luigi Marsigli, in the latter part

of the fourteenth century, were brilliant examples of this.[326] The

first, a scion of a noble family, united to the most thorough knowledge

of the law, especially the canon-law, extensive scientific learning,

which was of great use to him in learned intercourse and literary work,

as well as in his commissions from the State. After having seen his

house burnt to the ground in the anarchy of 1378 and himself sentenced

to exile, his misfortunes procured him an honourable reception in

Rome, where he became senator, and played an important part under

Pope Urban VI. With Luigi Marsigli begins the illustrious series of

men who did not limit their usefulness to their own achievements, but

formed a centre of learning for their contemporaries, especially the

younger ones, which was most fruitful in results. Having entered the

order of the Augustinians when young, he was sent to Padua to complete

his studies, where Petrarca looked forward for him with the brightest

hope, and encouraged him to cultivate science as well as theology,

since it formed, as he said, the proper complement to this study. How

he entered into the ideas of his renowned countryman is shown by the

extensive knowledge he attained of Latin literature and most branches

of learning, according to the testimony of his contemporaries, many of

whom owed to him their first encouragement and guidance. His monk’s

cell at Sto. Spirito was a place of meeting for all who had any share

in intellectual attainments. The Republic was accustomed to seek his

counsel in numbers of difficult questions, especially during the

Great Schism which gave the State authorities so much trouble, and on

his death on August 21, 1394, it was determined to honour him by a

monument.[327] His collection he bequeathed to the convent in which he

had spent the greatest part of his life.

Luigi Marsigli was teacher of theology at the Florentine university,

the fortunes of which often varied, but which from the middle of the

fourteenth century till near the end of the fifteenth exercised a

powerful influence on the revival of scientific life. The first idea

of the foundation of a university, _studio pubblico_, seems to have

arisen in 1321.[328] Thirteen years later we find Cino da Pistoja,

the celebrated poet, as teacher of law; but it was in the late autumn

of 1348 that the institute was really founded, full ten years after

Pisa had given new provocation to the jealousy of the Florentines by

a revolution in her own college.[329] Matteo Villani, who begins his

chronicle with the year just mentioned, observes that the Government,

being satisfied of the extinction of the great pestilence, had intended

thereby to attract new inhabitants, to increase their fame and glory,

and afford the citizens an opportunity of gaining knowledge and skill.

Eight of the most illustrious citizens were chosen as superintendents

of the new institute, and a site selected between the cathedral square

and that of the Signoria, which, as already mentioned, is now occupied

by the Collegium Eugenianum. Among the superintendents we find Tommaso

Corsini, Jacopo degli Alberti, Bindo Altoviti, Giovanni de’ Medici, men

of illustrious names, and the first of whom, the teacher of law, had

already made himself of use in various embassies and public offices,

for at all times we meet with a combination of official activity and

learning which was profitable in both ways.

That it was prohibited under heavy fines to resort to foreign

universities, is a proof of municipal exclusiveness increased by

hatred of their neighbours. Pope Clement VI., who indeed needed

the Florentines, was more liberal-minded than they, and granted

from Avignon on May 31, 1349, the privileges of Bologna to the new

university. At first they seem to have cherished the hope of gaining

Petrarca for the university; and when, in order to win him over, they

redeemed his confiscated paternal inheritance (a tardy restitution),

Boccaccio was sent to him at Padua. The matter remained without any

favourable result, probably on account of the disinclination of the

celebrated man to bind himself to permanent residence there, although

the customs of university life at that time, which allowed the

teachers to withdraw after a short interval, would still have left a

wide scope for his wandering propensities. The first period did not

fulfil the hopes which had been entertained. The plan seems to have

met with many opponents; while even the payment of the subvention of

2,500 gold florins seems to have fallen very hard on the city, then

in its first contests with the Visconti and the mercenaries. The

school revived in the autumn of 1357. Lapo da Castiglionchio gave

lectures there then, and three years later we meet with the first Greek

teacher, the Calabrian Leonzio Pilato, who had been drawn thither

from Venice by Boccaccio and remained three years. In 1364, Piero

Corsini, Tommaso’s son, and Bishop of Florence, obtained from the

Emperor Charles IV. imperial privileges for the school. The residence

of the most celebrated legal teacher of his time, Baldo of Perugia,

was but a short one. In 1368 the number of the teachers amounted to

seventeen. The disturbances leading to the mob-rule of 1378 seem to

have resulted in closing the university anew. Among those who taught

after it had been re-opened in 1385 was Francesco Zabarella of Padua,

subsequently Bishop of Florence and cardinal, an influential member of

the Council of Constance. About the same time Pier Paolo Vergerio, of

Capo d’Istria, then a young man, but afterwards renowned as a legal

scholar and humanist, lectured on dialectics. Two years later the

school received its statutes under the name of _Ordinamenta Studii

Florentini_, from an assembly of superintendents, professors, and

students in the Benedictine abbey. In 1397, Florence gained two men who

powerfully contributed to the revival of classical literature. The one

was Giovanni Malpaghini of Ravenna, who had been Petrarca’s companion

for fifteen years, and who taught the Latin language and literature for

many years with great success; the other, Manuel Chrysoloras, with whom

a branch of classical knowledge hitherto neglected began to develop

with great vigour.

The study of the Greek language and literature began at Florence with

Manuel Chrysoloras, and through her and Venice, always intimately

connected with the Levant, it spread over the rest of Italy. Petrarca

and Boccaccio had rather followed the Greek authors with a longing

gaze than been able to appropriate them; and though the poet of

the ‘Decameron’ transplanted, as he boasted, the Homeric poetry to

his native land, yet several decades passed after his death before

these isolated endeavours gained any real influence. Leonzio Pilato’s

activity was but transitory. Manuel Chrysoloras, who had originally

come to Italy on a diplomatic mission for John Paleologus, the

oppressed Emperor of the East, laid the foundation of the earnest

and successful studies which, as it were, opened a new world to the

West. For it was these studies which led to the living fountain of

Hellenic intellect men of mature age as well as aspiring youths, who

had hitherto only moved within the beaten track of the university

instruction of that time, and the still narrow circle of classical

literature. The fate of Greek writings is essentially different from

that of the Latin. The dark ages passed over the East also. Even

before the end of the Western Empire Greece was heavily visited, its

people mixed with foreign elements, its language corrupted, and much

of its great literature lost. But when Rome relapsed into barbarism,

Constantinople remained the centre of an ancient but decaying

civilisation which was never thoroughly extinguished.

Manuel Chrysoloras, who publicly taught in Rome, Venice, Milan, and

Padua, found the most fertile soil for his teaching in Florence,

whither he was summoned towards the end of 1396 at the suggestion of

Messer Palla Strozzi. It was he who undertook to satisfy the desires

awakened by Petrarca and Boccaccio by a thorough knowledge of his

mother-tongue, and by an introduction to the works of the great classic

authors and fathers of the Church, which he gave to eager scholars.

By his Greek grammar, the ‘Erotemata,’ as the title names it, first

printed at Venice in 1486, and introduced by Reuchlin, during the

latter years of his life, at the Tübingen University, he prepared the

way in the West for a scientific treatment of the language. When,

accompanied by Demetrius Cydonius, he arrived at Venice on his second

Italian journey, with the intention of giving lectures on the language

and literature of his native country, two Tuscans, the Florentine

Roberto de’ Rossi, and Jacopo Angelo of Scarperia in Mugello, repaired

thither to enrol themselves among his students. The latter then himself

visited the East. Coluccio Salutati, who still belonged entirely to the

school of the times of Petrarca, but who felt strongly the strivings

of the new spirit, wrote at that time to Demetrius:[330]—‘Still more

than at your greeting do I rejoice at the favour of heaven shown to us

in your arrival. When the study of Greek was, so to say, extinct among

us, you and Manuel have appeared like light in the darkness. God has

led you to Latium. By receiving and instructing Roberto so kindly, you

have inspired many with a desire to know Greek, and I already see in

spirit what a crowd of eager students of Hellenic literature will have

gathered together in a few years. Happy I, if happiness be yet reserved

for a man at my age (to-morrow I complete my sixty-fifth year), if I

am yet able to see the fountain-head, the source of all the knowledge

of Latium! Who knows if I be not destined, like Cato, to obtain a

knowledge of Greek literature in my old age, and unite the fruits of

this study to my native learning!’

It is a characteristic feature in the history of the revival of classic

literature generally, and especially of Greek, in Italy, and above

all in Florence, that so many men and youths of the higher classes

devoted themselves to such studies. Classical literature was not a mere

ornament and secondary matter, nor was it restricted to schools and

convents or to the purposes of self-maintenance. It was used in the

palaces of the commonwealth as well as in ordinary business. To many

it was the companion for life in fortune and misfortune—a cheering

friend at home, a consoler in the gloomy days of exile. Florence can

boast of a whole series of statesmen who were intimately acquainted

with the Greek classics, whose works they translated in their leisure

hours. Among Chrysoloras’ scholars were men of the first families,

and many men who rose to the most important offices of State. Palla

Strozzi was himself one of them, and in his banishment he never ceased

to enjoy the fruits of his studies in earlier years. Roberto de’ Rossi

instructed a number of younger pupils. Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo, for

many years chancellor of the Republic, was among those who attained

the most thorough knowledge of Greek. In Florence they did not wait

till the fall of Constantinople scattered the ruins of the Grecian

world over Italy to become intimate with Greek literature, to attract

Greek teachers, and to purchase Greek literary treasures. Many went

to the East not only to collect manuscripts, coins, works of art, and

inscriptions, but also to study the language and literature in the

country itself. Even Pope Pius II., in the speech by which he announced

the plan of the crusade, testified that Constantinople had, till the

day of the conquest, proved itself the monument of antique wisdom, the

seat of science, and the stronghold of philosophy; the Italians had

only thought they could attain the palm of excellence when, as the

Romans did in Athens, they had pursued their studies in Constantinople,

whence so many excellent works of antiquity had come to the West, and

others were still to be expected. That the Byzantine school exercised

as much influence on Italian travellers as the later Athenian did on

the Romans is evident; the humanistic rhetoricians and philosophers

retained some habits of mind which profound and extensive study of

the great authors was not always able to overcome. But the good of a

wide diffusion of classical learning outweighed the disadvantages. The

rapidity of its dissemination in a short time was astonishing. The

Greek fathers assembled at the Florentine conference were not a little

surprised to find men among their native colleagues who knew far more

of Greek language and literature than they did.

Cosimo de’ Medici was in the prime of life when this great revolution

passed through its first stage. It was the epoch in which Greek

literature broke like a mighty wave over Italy, while the limits still

restricting Latin were broken through as with an enchanter’s rod. The

Council of Constance, which restored peace and unity to the Western

Church, opened also the libraries of German and French convents, in

which numerous treasures, especially of Roman literature, lay unread

and long forgotten. Poggio Bracciolini,[331] born at Terranuova, in

the Upper Arno valley, in 1380, was thirty-five years old when he

accompanied Pope John XXIII. to Constance. He was the most successful

discoverer the world has known in the field of literature, which he

has enriched in an undreamt-of manner. Nor was he merely a discoverer,

but also one who could turn these treasures to good account—learned,

skilful, acute, witty; a true child of his age in the literary quarrels

which often degenerated into mere janglings, in the slander, equivocal

wit and anecdotes, in the restlessness and disquiet which seemed

to have seized the humanistic class generally. The papal treasury,

to which he was attached all his life long without forfeiting his

attachment to his native land, appointed him her chancellor, when he

already numbered seventy-three years. Of no pre-eminent importance

as an historian and antiquarian, he had that lively feeling for the

grandeur and glory of the Roman epoch which had inspired Petrarca,

and in him it was united with a wider view and surer knowledge of the

monuments which had emerged from the mediæval world of fables. It was

Poggio above all who abolished the Rome of the Mirabilia. The literary

endeavours which began in St. Gall continued in operation during years

and decades, even into the time of Leo X., and extended over Germany

and France as far as Scandinavia. The movement affected the convents

of Italy, which were not more respected than foreign ones, and it

created a new life at the same time in literature by multiplying and

disseminating the old supplies of learning and those newly gained. The

book trade, in the proper sense of the word, then first began.

Books were exceedingly rare and proportionately dear till the fifteenth

century. Petrarca’s and Boccaccio’s testimony brings vividly before

our eyes the straits in which learned men often found themselves; and

even those in high stations copied with their own hand works that they

would otherwise have been unable to procure, either on account of the

extravagant prices, or in cases where the originals could not be bought

on account of a deficiency of copyists and the difficulty of obtaining

them. When we regard with a feeling of gratitude the copies of Cicero’s

‘Meditations’ made by Petrarca, and now preserved in the Laurentian

library, one of which replaces the original for us, we can estimate,

in some degree, the value which these men placed on the discovery—for

discovery in a certain sense it was—of those antique models, which

became to them examples of life and conduct. This reflection brings us

back to the times which we are contemplating, when we find emendations

and conjectures of the text written on the margin of the manuscripts

in Coluccio Salutati’s hand. It but seldom occurred that learned men

copied for others, as Poggio Bracciolini, who wrote a beautiful hand,

did in his youth, when he had to live on such work. The copying for

money had in general become the business of very ignorant persons, of

whose negligence Petrarca, who had a skilful assistant in his companion

Giovanni da Ravenna, gives us an idea when he asks if Cicero, Livy,

and Pliny, would recognise their own works in this shape, or would not

rather consider them productions of the barbarians. Coluccio Salutati

wrote a special treatise on the unfortunate condition of books, and

the means of preventing harm arising to literature. Not only works

of antiquity were considered here, but modern authors also. ‘I cannot

express,’ says the Florentine chancellor once,[332] ‘how repulsive the

universal corruption which has crept into books is to me. We scarcely

find one manuscript of Petrarca’s and Boccaccio’s works which does not

deviate from the original. They are not texts, but coarse caricatures

of texts (_similitudines_), while the real texts are in a measure seals

(_sigilla_) of the original documents. What we have deviates more from

the originals than statues from the men whose counterfeit they are.

They have a mouth, but they say nothing; or worse, they frequently say

what is false. In Dante’s book this calamity is the greatest, as the

uninitiated are often unable to follow those who are at all acquainted

with the poet.’

Nevertheless a certain kind of book trade was an old-established

calling;[333] not to speak of single sales, as for example the sale, at

the little town of Poggibonzi, of a perfect copy of the ‘Corpus Juris,’

as well as the decrees of Gratian, of which we possess a notary’s

deed of transfer bearing the date 1215. The _stationarii_ at the

universities, an expression preserved in the English word stationer,

were persons who kept a supply of text-books used in the lectures,

for the purpose of copying, in which learned and unlearned, and even

women, were employed. The thronging of the ignorant to this business,

which seems to have been lucrative, necessitated superintendence,

which was exercised by Peciarii, selected among the students, and

all of the clerical order. We can easily understand that, except at

the universities, in which Bologna and Padua took the lead, such

superintendence (for which, and for the trade in manuscripts generally,

special directions were issued in the fourteenth century) could not be

organised, so that much always depended on the pleasure and ignorance

of dealers and copyists.

Copying and painting were certainly favourite employments in the

monasteries; but either the requirements of the special community

were principally kept in view, or it was chiefly a question of

ecclesiastical and devotional books. As towards the end of the Gothic

period, Cassiodorus, one of the last who witnessed antique culture

still alive, recommended copying to the monks of Squillace, so did

Fra Giovanni Dominici in the beginning of the fifteenth century, when

he remarked that such employments raised monks and nuns to pure and

holy thoughts, words which plainly show what kind of books were meant.

Even in the cloister the want of books, and those the most necessary,

was at times felt. Most of the convent libraries were poor in ancient

manuscripts. It was worse in the more recently founded ones and in

nunneries. The sainted Chiara Gambacorta,[334] daughter of a ruler of

Pisa, towards the end of the fourteenth and at the beginning of the

following century, repeatedly complains of the destitution prevailing

in her convent of Dominican nuns, and rejoiced when any book was

promised as a legacy. Once she begs for information where a Book of

Lessons or a Bible may be found. ‘We are very poor in books, and need

them for Divine service. Copying is too expensive for us to be able

to think of it. If we should find any ready made, however, I hope to

God that I shall be able, by the assistance of good people, to pay for

them.’ Three and a half to four gold florins were paid at this time for

a devotional book, the offices of the Virgin, not only by noblemen but

by wealthy citizens. Rinaldo degli Albizzi considers it worth noticing

in his memoirs,[335] that in the summer of 1406 he paid eleven gold

florins for a Bible at Arezzo. Even in a city like Florence it was not

easy to procure books of devotion, because of the small number of good

copyists. An Augustinian brother of Sto. Spirito, a skilful writer, was

engaged in 1395 by the Cardinal Piero Corsini for full two years.[336]

The materials were also costly. The parchment for a book of Epistles

cost ten silver florins. The expense of illustrating manuscripts with

miniatures and ornaments was very considerable. The convents would not

have been able to obtain so many manuscripts of this kind had not the

industry of their inhabitants been specially directed to the art of

illumination.

The rapid diffusion of learning and the equally swift increase of

literary material created the book trade properly so-called, which

till then had been pursued occasionally by persons of every calling,

among others by tavern-keepers. One of the centres of this trade was

Venice, which was materially assisted in her dealings by her extensive

commercial connections. When the study of Greek began to revive,

numerous codices were imported from Candia, among other places,

where copying had become a fruitful source of gain, and were eagerly

bought up by native and foreign collectors.[337] Of course this trade

presupposed the formation of a special class of copyists, who were

under the direction of such persons as specially devoted themselves

to this branch of business, undertook large and small orders, and had

them executed by hundreds of workmen. A certain degree of literary

cultivation was requisite in those whose duty it was to control the

workers. The great mass of manuscripts of classical works belongs

to the fifteenth century. In some cases they represent for us the

originals, which have disappeared since, especially after the invention

of printing by types, for as we know from Aldo Manuzio’s complaint,

the parchment of manuscripts which had been printed from was often

used for binding purposes. In other cases they are to be counted of

especial value, because the originals were then already in a very

injured condition, like the manuscripts of Quintilian and the ‘Sylvae’

of Statius, which Poggio found in St. Gall and in France, as was the

case also with the manuscripts of Constantinople. A numerous progeny

of errors may be derived from such copies, of which the earliest, even

when made by learned men, were not always perfectly exact, not those of

Petrarca nor Poggio, who were occasionally forced to work in a hurry

(_velociter_). The costly parchment was by no means employed for all

new manuscripts. The paper manufacture, which, if not revived in the

fourteenth century, was at least developed then in a greater degree,

wherein the first place seems to belong to the town of Fabriano, which

still furnishes the best paper in Italy. This manufacture was begun as

early as 1379 at Colle, in the Elsa valley,[338] and was of essential

service to the book trade. Of this most brilliant but brief period

of the preparation of manuscripts, and the trade in them, an epoch

which immediately preceded that of the invention of printing, and the

memorials of which are to be found in all the libraries of Italy and

elsewhere, we shall speak again later.

CHAPTER II.

LEONARDO BRUNI ARETINO AND THE FLORENTINE HUMANISTS. FRANCESCO FILELFO.

COSIMO DE’ MEDICI.

NEXT to Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni and Ambrogio Traversari

were those who did most effective service to the knowledge of classic

antiquity. Leonardo Bruni[339] was descended from a burgher family in

Arezzo, whence he derived the name of Aretino, which, after having

been held in honour, was dragged through the mud a century later by

one of his own countrymen. Although eleven years older than Poggio,

and instructed in Greek by Chrysoloras at Florence, he did not

appear till much later in the Papal exchequer, owing, it seems, to

his being disgusted with events passing at Constance. He remained at

home when Pope Martin V. returned, and the office of chancellor was

there bestowed on him in 1427, a post he filled with dignity till his

death on March 8, 1444, at the age of seventy-five. Like Coluccio,

Poggio, Gregorio Correr, the highly educated kinsman of Pope Gregory

XII., and others, he laid the foundation of a criticism which kept

his fame alive for centuries in the emendation of manuscripts; while

by the translation of Greek authors into the Latin language, he made

them accessible to a larger circle of readers, among whom a knowledge

of Greek had not found its way. Everyone who had any pretensions to

cultivation understood Latin more or less. All speeches on festive

occasions, and even some private conversations, were in Latin. Official

documents were drawn up in the same language, and most business

transactions were conducted in it. Pope Martin V. spoke Latin with his

Tuscan secretaries, even when angry at the rudeness of the Florentine

street boys. But Greek remained a subject of study which never, even in

the happiest times, extended beyond a circle privileged by exceptional

knowledge and position. Though Leonardo Aretino wrote a small treatise

in Greek[340] on the Florentine constitution, he composed his principal

works in Latin. His history of Florence, extending from the origin of

the city to the strife with Gian Galeazzo Visconti, was, so to say,

completed by Poggio’s last work, which concludes with the year 1455.

Men of the fifteenth century, who longed to see the classical form of

historiography employed on events at home, attributed an imaginary

value to this work, and believed that Florence could rival Athens,

and her two historians, statesmen as well as scholars, might compete

with Thucydides and Xenophon. Whoever wishes to study Florentine

history will not turn to the Latin historians of the humanistic epoch,

whose style, however, exercised a decided influence not merely on

contemporary works in the vulgar tongue, but on much later writings.

The importance attributed to these works is shown by the excellent

Donato Acciaiuoli having been publicly commissioned to translate into

Italian the history of his master Leonardo, which had been bought by

the State, while Poggio’s son Jacopo did the same with that of his

father. The veneration in which Leonardo Aretino was held was expressed

by a grant of the rights of citizenship to him in 1416, by the

immunity from taxation decreed in his favour twenty-three years later,

by the purchase of his principal work,[341] and by the laurel wreath

at his funeral, a distinction granted to many deserving men. On March

9, Alamanno Rinuccini wrote to Giovanni de’ Medici, Cosimo’s son, then

residing at the baths of Petriolo:[342] ‘I do not doubt that letters

and messengers will have outstripped this letter in speed, but for the

sake of our mutual friendship I will speak of him who quitted this life

but yesterday. How could I be otherwise than deeply moved when so many

undying virtues are suddenly removed from our sight, virtues which

were not only an adornment to him in whom they shone, but sufficed as

an ornament and benefit to the whole town? Who felt and exercised such

beneficence towards all, friends and strangers? who assisted friends

with advice like him? who distinguished himself by excellent qualities

and knowledge to such a degree? It is amongst ancient Romans we must

search to find men who resemble him.’

Ambrogio Traversari,[343] born in 1386, the son of poor peasants at

Portico, a little village of Tuscan Romagna, was younger than Leonardo

by seventeen years, than Poggio by six. If he were one of Chrysoloras’

scholars,[344] it must have been at a very youthful age. At all events,

he attained an unusual knowledge of Greek, while he was considered

the best Latinist in Florence equal to Leonardo; joint praise which

the latter, who laid claims to the first undivided place, took so

amiss that he quarrelled with his rival and friends about it. As a

boy, Ambrogio entered the order of the Camaldolese monks, in which he

attained to the highest honours. When a man, the fame of his virtues

and knowledge attracted all who were interested in learned studies in

Florence to the convent of the Angeli in Via degli Alfani. This church,

which has been lately restored, is at present disused for Divine

worship, and empty. Like the great mother-house in the Casentino, the

city convents have been taken from the Camaldulese, who seemed to have

grown with Tuscan history, and yet fell a sacrifice to a revolution of

which there is yet no history. But whoever enters the pillared court

is reminded by the marble bust of Ambrogio Traversari of the time when

this spot was a centre of brilliant intellectual light illuminating the

houses of Florentine patricians, and through them the whole world. The

most illustrious and talented men flocked to Fra Ambrogio (as formerly

to Marsigli), who not only gave lectures for the clergy and laity on

Greek and Latin language and literature, but discussed philosophical

and theological questions in public conferences. In addition to the

various works of his regular calling he was employed in the translation

of Greek writings, especially the Fathers of the Church. Cosimo de’

Medici testified to his skill therein when he related how Fra Ambrogio

dictated the Latin translation of St. Chrysostom’s ‘Commentary on the

Epistles of St. Paul’ to Niccolò Niccoli, who wrote a ready hand, so

quickly that the latter was hardly able to follow him, Cosimo, who,

with his brother Lorenzo, was one of the most frequent visitors to the

convent of the Angeli, assisted Fra Ambrogio, who was not rich, with

money as well as books. The latter translated for Cosimo. Diogenes

Laertius’ ‘Lives of Philosophers,’ a work which he, having devoted

himself entirely to theological studies, undertook unwillingly, but

yet could not refuse to his generous friend. The men whom the two

Medici met most frequently at Traversari’s were Niccolò Niccoli, Carlo

Marsuppini, and Gianozzo Manetti. Such a lover of books as Niccoli

had never been seen in Florence. The son of an affluent merchant,

he devoted himself when independent zealously to literature; while

he displayed scarcely less sympathy for art, with the most famous

disciples of which he stood in intimate relations. Like Fra Ambrogio’s

cloister, his house was a centre for literary effort and learned

conversation. At the commencement of the dialogue ‘De Infelicitate

Principum,’ Poggio describes his meeting Cosimo de’ Medici and

Marsuppini at the time when he was at Florence in the suite of Pope

Eugenius IV. A conversation on the instability of human things afforded

the opportunity for holding the dialogue mentioned. Poggio observed

then, among other things, that during his thirty-four years’ service at

the Papal court he never remained more than two years in one and the

same place. Thoroughly versed in the Latin language, and instructed in

philosophy and theology under the guidance of Marsigli, Niccoli was one

of those who caused Chrysoloras to be summoned to Florence, and was one

of his most earnest scholars. His knowledge was extensive also in other

branches; no one was more at home in geography. His love for books

became a passion. He had agents everywhere, and manuscripts came to him

from all sides. If he could not obtain possession of the originals,

he borrowed and copied them himself. His copy of Lucretius, kept in

the Laurentian library, after another manuscript of Poggio had been

lost, became the original of all which were written in the fifteenth

century. He employed all his fortune on his library—no mere ornament

to his house, nor was it dead capital. Liberal and sympathetic, he

placed his treasures at the disposal of all. Many owed their progress

in studies to him. Where his own means did not suffice, he persuaded

friends to purchase, especially Cosimo de’ Medici, who cherished a

great affection for him, and in 1420, when he quitted Florence on

account of the pestilence, took him and Marsuppini to Verona. Neither

Cosimo nor his brother could refuse him anything. When he had expended

so much that his income no longer sufficed to support the modest

household which he maintained with a single aged servant (he had not

wished to marry, in order not to be interrupted in his studies), the

two Medici commissioned their banking agents to pay him as much as

he might demand, and to put it to their account. Niccoli repaid the

friendship they always showed to him. In 1433 he expressed himself

so unguardedly against Cosimo’s enemies, that he would have shared

their fate had not the change come soon. He was the most open-hearted

man in the world—cheerful, conversational, eloquent, accessible to

all, and obliging. By sincere sympathy he richly compensated for the

irritability of his temper, which more than once led him into mistakes

and often exposed him to literary attacks. His exterior was dignified,

his dress careful. Beside books, his house was full of objects of

art of various kinds; and if his food was of the simplest, he loved

to decorate his table with delicate porcelain, crystal, and fine

table-linen. He was the first to conceive the idea of a public library,

and caused the manuscripts which Boccaccio had bequeathed to the

convent of Sto. Spirito, and which were treasured up in coffers, to be

laid open for common use by having book-shelves and reading-desks made

at his own expense. We shall speak later on of the way in which his own

library was disposed of.

Through Niccoli, Carlo Marsuppini[345] was brought into contact with

the Medici, which proved the turning-point of his whole life. His

intimate relation with them is shown by the fact that at Cosimo’s wish

he made the funeral oration on the death of his mother Piccarda. Born

at Arezzo of affluent parents, at the end of the fourteenth century

(his grandfather was secretary to King Charles VI. of France, and

governor of Genoa conjointly with the Marshal of Boucicault), he came

in early youth to Florence, where he attained considerable knowledge

of the Latin and Greek languages and literature, made himself a famous

name, as a public teacher, by his eloquence and excellent memory,

and subsequently became chancellor. The numerous official duties he

undertook in later years hindered him from cultivating literature as

much as he desired. Thus he laid aside the metrical translation of

the Iliad, which aroused in Pope Nicholas V. the wish to have the

author near him, that he might devote himself undisturbed to Homer.

After some time it was taken up by a greater poet and Latinist, who,

however, also left his task unfinished.

How honourable was the position held by both Leonardo Bruni and Carlo

Marsuppini is shown by the beautiful monuments erected to them, as

well as the laurel bestowed on them after death. Giannozzi Manetti had

greater literary and political importance than the latter.[346] He was

descended from an illustrious family, and was born in 1396. While he

devoted himself to science with as much zeal as if he considered study

the main duty of his life, he developed an activity in public affairs

which extended his connections beyond the narrow limits of his country

throughout all Italy. He learnt Greek with Traversari; Latin he spoke

and wrote with equal elegance, so that he made impromptu speeches at

festivals, as at the Emperor Frederick III.’s entry into Florence, when

he answered Eneas Silvio Piccolomini’s address extempore. To aid his

theological studies he learned Hebrew, then a rarity, and disputed with

Jewish scholars over the words and meaning of the Holy Scriptures. With

three books he was so familiar that he might almost be said to know

them by heart. They were the Epistles of St. Paul, Augustine’s ‘City

of God,’ and Aristotle’s ‘Ethics.’ He translated the New Testament,

and wrote a treatise on the Psalter. He devoted himself likewise to

contemporary history, in which his extensive circle of personal friends

was of great assistance to him. Continually employed in embassies,

in which he did his native city essential service, he investigated

with unusual acuteness the nature of sovereigns and governments. He

has delineated Pope Nicholas V. and King Alfonso, while he attempted

biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and celebrated the

merits of distinguished contemporaries like Leonardo Bruni and

Giannozzo Pandolfini in memorial speeches. More perhaps than others of

the time was he subject to that literary pedantry (a strange feature

in a statesman) which appeared so strongly in the eulogy of Bruni,

for example, that Poggio Bracciolini felt himself obliged to treat

the same subjects in a freer and more independent manner. Manetti’s

many services to the State in peace and war were ill requited. When in

Cosimo de’ Medici’s later years the party came to the helm who suffered

no independent position outside their own circle, Giannozzo Manetti,

who could not be injured otherwise, was ruined by taxes, and ended his

days in a foreign country.

The men we have mentioned, whose activity extends beyond the limits

of the fifteenth century, were the most illustrious of those on whom

Manuel Chrysoloras exercised direct or indirect influence. If we

return to their training-time, we find the university so flourishing

at the beginning of the century that undisturbed continuance of its

prosperity might have been prophesied. In 1401, especially famous among

its teachers of jurisprudence was Paolo di Castro, whose name was

considered to rank only second to that of Bartolo di Sassoferrato. He

was variously employed by the Government, and took a prominent share in

reforming the Florentine statute law; a reform at which several clever

lawyers, like Bartolommeo da Soncino and others, worked for years.

This revised code, concluded and accepted in 1415, remained in force

till the abolition of all the numerous civil corporate and individual

rights in the time of the Grand Duke Leopold I.[347] Citizens of the

most illustrious families gave instruction then, as later. Not only

youths but men of mature age filled the lecture-rooms, for literary

and scientific knowledge was considered necessary in the higher ranks,

where wealth excluded the necessity of gaining bread by scholarship.

It was a noble emulation; and many, amid the sudden changes which

brought rich families to beggary, did find means of subsistence in what

they had once only regarded as an ornament of life. How many found the

studies which delighted their youth the comfort of age in desolation

and exile! The favourable prospects of the university did not last,

however. Soon after 1404 the school seems to have been closed for

eight years, in consequence of the disturbance and expense caused by

the Pisan war and the oppression of King Ladislaus. After its being

re-opened, Guarino of Verona was for a short time professor of Greek,

a knowledge of which he had gained from Giovanni of Ravenna, and then

perfected in Constantinople. In the spring of 1414 we meet with Palla

Strozzi as one of the reformers, an office which he again undertook

in the year 1428. On both occasions he rendered great services to the

state, as it was he who obtained from Pope Martin V. the taxation of

the clergy for purposes of public instruction.

We have made the acquaintance of Palla Strozzi in our description

of political life in his native city. His family was noble, and

he ennobled it still more by the high character and position he

attained. He had learned the Latin language thoroughly in his youth,

and his longing for a knowledge of Greek had essentially contributed

to the appointment of Chrysoloras. He entered the Greek’s circle of

scholars, and took care to procure books and means of assistance

from Constantinople and the Levant. His house was prudently kept,

his sons most carefully instructed. Giovanni of Imola was their

first tutor, and then Tommaso of Sarzana, who was destined for high

honours. The perplexities in which this excellent man was involved

in the disturbances of 1433-34 have been already related. The heads

of the opposite party could hardly have considered him dangerous,

but he was inconvenient to them. They said they wished for no court

of appeal in Florence,[348] and Cosimo de’ Medici who yet had had

more opportunities than others of knowing Palla’s great qualities and

honest intentions, was not magnanimous enough to lay aside hatred and

envy and restore him to his home. In his influential days the guidance

of the State was placed in the hands of men who were interested in

intellectual as well as political matters. Rinaldo degli Albizzi was

occupied all his life with public affairs, perhaps more than any other

citizen. If we consider that for more than fifteen years he was the

real and, so to say, hereditary head of the aristocratic party, we

scarcely understand how he could possibly undertake one embassy after

another, commission after commission. The astonishment increases when

we review the numberless reports and memoranda composed during his

missions, which lasted to the beginning of 1433. They are some of the

oldest of the large collection of documents the Republic can boast

of. They are memorials drawn from the cultivated mind of an acute

observer and practised business man, who treats the smallest things

with the same conscientious care as the greatest; a virtue which was

peculiar to this time and people, and the brilliant results of which

are displayed in various fields. The vulgar tongue, in general still

excluded from the treatment of scientific questions, or even political

affairs, as far as it was a question of real representation (even

in the discussions of the guilds it was first employed in 1414),

appears here with a precision and skill which forms a prelude to the

political writings of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Machiavelli. That Rinaldo

selected Tommaso of Sarzana as well as Palla Strozzi to be the tutor

of his sons shows what value he placed on good training, such as he

had enjoyed himself. A physician who united medical science with

philosophical studies, Giovanni Baldi de’ Tambini of Faenza, teacher

at the Florentine university, and burgher of the city, in intimate

connection with Rinaldo and Cosimo de’ Medici in their youth, has noted

a disputation which he held with the latter on the question as to

whether science was opposed to the Christian faith. The illustrious

youth replied in the affirmative, like Pietro Pomponazzo a century

after him, and supported his opinion by expressions of Aristotle.[349]

His eloquence was praised by several of his contemporaries; Giovanni

Cavalcanti says expressly that he maintained the honour of eloquence in

Florence. It is more than probable that he wrote political poems.[350]

Leonardo Aretino addressed a treatise on war to him. Among those who

were active at the university we do not find his name; but we find

among its promoters Niccoli, as well as Niccolò da Uzzano, the latter

of whom evinced the interest he took in science by a munificent

bequest for the foundation of a college for fifty scholars, a gift

unfortunately employed for other purposes.

Although the clouds which gathered more and more at the close of the

third decade of the century threatened disturbances and war, a busy

scientific life flourished at Florence. In April 1429, Francesco

Filelfo of Tolentino, persuaded by Palla Strozzi, was appointed teacher

of Greek literature.[351] He had studied for years at Constantinople,

and latterly taught at Bologna. Never, perhaps, had a philologist such

influence on the public, or was able to assemble such a brilliant

circle of listeners, not even Pomponio Seto. However much allowance

we may make for the boasting of a man vain beyond belief, who ranked

himself in serious earnest above Virgil and Cicero because he found

in himself the poet and orator combined, and because Greek and Latin

were alike familiar to him, he yet possessed extraordinary talents.

His versatility was as great as his industry, supported by the most

powerful constitution, which enabled him to continue the usual

fatiguing life of the humanists unharmed to a great age. After having

explained Homer and Thucydides, Cicero and Livy, he gave lectures in

Sta. Maria del Fiore on the Divine Comedy. In the spring of 1431 the

rights of citizenship were awarded to him. But his sharp tongue and

his vanity, which led him to interfere in the civil factions, made him

numerous enemies. A decree of banishment[352] promulgated against him

in April, 1432, on account of an insult to the Republic of Venice,

was not executed, but he was unable to save himself in the confusion

which led to the fall of the Albizzi. With a degree of self-assertion

which his position outside the political circle did not justify, he

placed himself on the side of the now defeated optimates, with whom

he remained in close connection even in their misfortunes. In his

confident expectation of success he put no limits to his expression

of hatred of the Medici, whom he accused of personal malice and

disloyalty. When Cosimo was imprisoned, Filelfo went so far as to call

upon his enemies in hexameters to prevent future quarrels and bloodshed

by the death of that one man.[353] This would have been sufficient,

even if he had not indulged in bitterness against the friends of the

Medici—Niccoli, Marsuppini, Poggio, the latter of whom was not far

behind his opponent in virulence. When Cosimo returned, Filelfo fled

to Siena, and for years the most undignified strife went on, not only

in books and letters, but even with sharper weapons and criminal

investigations; the effusions of the celebrated scholar himself gave

the saddest proof of his unbridled temper.

Cosimo de’ Medici was inferior to many of his illustrious

fellow-citizens in classical knowledge, but to few in scholarly

interest and vivid appreciation of those tendencies the pursuit of

which imparted to his epoch such great splendour.[354] Trained, even in

his youth, by a skilful father to the business of a great mercantile

house, gifted with rare insight into financial and mercantile affairs,

he and his brother Lorenzo received a thorough education. Lorenzo

rivalled him in respect to scientific interests. Antonio of Todi, a

pupil of Filelfo’s, extols Lorenzo by saying that, though not eloquent,

he always displayed correct understanding and ripe knowledge, which,

besides the example afforded him by excellent parents, he had obtained

through good teachers, by attending to his studies from his youth,

and collecting a number of valuable books in addition to the other

treasures of his house. Poggio, in his memorial addressed to Marsuppini

on Lorenzo’s death a quarter of a century before that of his brother,

specially dwells on his correct and refined taste, his good sense

and his urbanity of manner, and says that he has lost in him father,

brother, and friend, one who had always assisted him when he required

it, and abundantly supported him.[355] Thus we can understand how the

two brothers lived in perfect harmony together, and supported one

another in their patriotic labours.

It was Roberto de’ Rossi who instructed the two young Medici and

several of their contemporaries of the families Albizzi (Rinaldo’s

brother Luca for example), the Alessandri, Buoninsegni, Tebaldi, &c.,

in the Latin language and literature. When this man, of ripe age and

quite alone in life, walked out, the young men who were distinguished

in study and general conduct, and who sometimes shared his meals, were

seen following him. From his youth upwards, Cosimo always had a great

predilection for Latin literature and scientific labours generally.

Preferring grave conversation he soon turned his back on pleasures

which he took up for the moment, and habitually spent his leisure

hours in talk with the learned. A love of books was developed in him

in the course of time by his endeavours to place what he collected at

the disposal, first of friends and then of the city in general. This

predilection, united to a love for antiquities, was doubtless fostered

by Poggio, with whom he formed an intimate acquaintance at Florence at

the time when the latter came thither with Pope John XXIII., and later

in Constance. Poggio seldom writes a letter to a Florentine friend

without sending messages to Cosimo and Lorenzo. He took an interest

in all that concerned them. On February 28, 1429, he wrote from Rome

to Niccoli: ‘I have heard of the death of the excellent Giovanni de’

Medici, who has so well served his country. My sorrow is great, as well

because the land is poorer by the loss of such a citizen as because

his sons have lost such a father and we such a serviceable friend and

patron. I can imagine how grieved Cosimo and Lorenzo are. It cannot

be otherwise, with their excellent qualities and the merits of their

sainted father.’[356] In political affairs Poggio stood on the Medicean

side; and in his letters to Niccoli about the war against Lucca,

and its cause, he expresses himself often with great asperity, and

anticipates nothing but mischief to those engaged in it.[357]

The friendship between Cosimo and Poggio seems to have been unsullied.

The ever-ready Papal secretary always praised his patron, both before

and after the time when the latter placed the conduct of affairs in his

hands. This was in 1430, when Cosimo was residing at Rome for a time,

on business which after his father’s death had devolved upon him and

his brother, who had been there in April 1429. Cosimo always managed

to unite business with his various studies and favourite pursuits.

In a letter to Niccoli, Poggio informs him of a visit made with his

countryman to the site of Ostia, where the ruins of a mediæval castle

were raised on those of the Roman town. ‘When Cosimo and I visited the

harbour, we found no inscriptions. The temple, which has been ruined by

the people for use in lime-burning, presents none. The epigram from a

monument consisting of a single block of marble with fasces sculptured

on it, found on the banks of the river on the Via d’Ostia, I have

already sent to you.’ When Cosimo went into exile, Poggio addressed a

long consolatory letter to him. He showed him what he had lost, and

what remained to him; how rich the compensation, and what a comfort it

was he had nothing to reproach himself with, and that the consciousness

of the services he had rendered his native country was his. The letter

does not speak of a prospect of a speedy return home.[358] Poggio, who

came to Florence during the exile of his patron, did not, perhaps,

believe in it. When it occurred, however, he compared it to the return

of Cicero, as Paolo Giovio did long afterwards.

After the year 1434, Cosimo was very seldom absent from home, but

antiquities and objects of art came to him from all quarters. He

even seems to have become Poggio’s rival, for Greek sculptures

originally destined for the latter came into his possession. Everywhere

manuscripts, intaglios, inscriptions, and coins were offered to him,

even long before he began to make the large collections for his own

and others’ use, as will soon be mentioned. The most travelled and

skilful collector of antiquities of this time, the father of the race

of wandering antiquaries, a scholar and trader too, though not always

trustworthy as either, Ciriaco Pizzicolli of Ancona, has given eloquent

expression to the gratitude he owed to Cosimo. This man travelled

through Italy and the Levant at a time when the rule of the Venetians

in a part of Greece, in the Ionic and Ægean Sea, and the residence of

Italian families on the Greek islands, the Lusignans in Cyprus, and

the order of St. John in the island of Rhodes, afforded facilities for

travelling. He visited Roumania and Anatolia, which were for the most

part under Turkish rule, and went into Egypt which already maintained

many connections with the West. His eyes were directed towards the far

East, when death surprised him soon after the middle of the century. It

was Ciriaco who served as cicerone in 1433 to the Emperor Sigismund,

whom he had accompanied from Siena to Rome, the inhabitants of which

were severely and not unjustly condemned for their Vandalism by the

orderly Florentines, accustomed to a city that was growing daily richer

in ornament. The Romans made lime from the marble of their monuments,

but furnished no native antiquary to guide across their wide fields

of ruins the ruler of the empire named after Rome.[359] Ciriaco stood

in connection with the whole learned world of Florence, and many may

have availed themselves of his services, but not all spoke well of him,

for Poggio complains repeatedly of his boastfulness, a fault which was

shared by his successors.[360]

In the Medicean household renowned scholars were employed as

instructors of the two sons, of whom Pietro, the elder, was eighteen

years old when his father returned from exile. We find Antonio Pacini

of Todi and Alberto Enoch of Ascoli often named both in the literary

history and letters of the time. Enoch of Ascoli taught the Medici and

Bardi in Florence, gave public lectures in Perugia, and was variously

employed by Pope Nicholas V. in the formation of the Vatican library,

and in Germany. In the year 1451 the Pope sent him as far as to the

Grand Master of the Teutonic order in Prussia to make researches in

monastic and other libraries.[361] ‘Our Enoch,’ writes Traversari

(1436) to Cosimo[362]—‘you know whom I mean, since he was your sons’

tutor—begs pressingly to be commended to you. What the question is

he will tell you. According to my opinion, he deserves your support

both for his unusual learning and his modesty, and the confidence he

places in you and your goodness. I do all for him on my part that I

can, but your authority will do more for him than another’s.’ Antonio

of Todi[363] came from Filelfo’s school. He was very intimate in the

Medicean house, and seems especially to have attached himself to the

younger sons. ‘I have received a letter from you,’ he writes once to

Giovanni de’ Medici, ‘as welcome as it is pleasing, for I see in it

how much you aspire after virtue and good report, by accepting the

admonitions that are intended for your good. This lies at my heart as

much as at yours, on account of our mutual affection as of my love to

Cosimo, whom nothing in the world can render more happy than to see

that his son is sensible and fears God.’ Antonio of Todi’s merits of

style cannot have been great, if Cardinal Ammanati, a reasonable judge,

calls unreadable his translations of Plutarch’s Biographies, of which

he speaks in the letters to the youthful Medici.

CHAPTER III.

THE COUNCIL OF UNION AND PLATONISM. COSIMO DE’ MEDICI’S LATER YEARS.

LEARNED studies were at their height in Florence when Pope Eugenius

IV. arrived on June 23, 1434, and soon afterwards saw his court

assembled around him. It was, as we have said, the time when Rinaldo

degli Albizzi felt the ground unsafe beneath his feet, when he hoped

to secure power to himself by proceeding against Cosimo de’ Medici,

and had been urged to the violent attempt which ended in his own

ruin. Except in the removal of Francesco Filelfo, the peaceful but

decisive revolution seems to have exercised no influence on literary

affairs. The presence of the Papal court was of service to studies of

science and those who fostered them: their long residence in the city,

which was then the centre of all scientific and literary effort, had,

too, a powerful and decided influence on the course pursued by that

court under Eugenius’ successor. This successor, Tommaso of Sarzana,

was the former tutor of the sons of Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla

Strozzi and, as secretary to Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, the excellent

bishop of Bologna, revisited the city in which he had once resided in

comparative poverty. The two men who had been most intimate with him

were forced into an exile which only terminated in death. Tommaso,

however, who showed himself grateful to their descendants in the

days of his greatness, found friendly reception and patronage from

Cosimo de’ Medici; and till the death of Nicholas V. this friendship

continued to be a great assistance to them and to science generally.

Vespasiano da Bisticci, who has left us an attractive picture of the

good and learned Pope, describes how Tommaso, after he had accompanied

his cardinal to the palace, met in the corner of the square the men

who represented learning in Florence at that time, namely, Leonardo,

and Carlo of Arezzo, Gianozzo Manetti, Giovanni Aurispa, Gasparo of

Bologna, and Poggio Bracciolini. The latter, after much danger from

Piccinino’s mercenaries, into whose hands he fell in his flight to

Rome, had been liberated for a heavy ransom and had followed Pope

Eugenius.[364] Here they conversed on learned subjects morning and

evening in the open air, with the simplicity which characterised the

manners of the time. Carlo Marsuppini, freed from a troublesome rival

by Filelfo’s removal, was the most celebrated teacher. Cardinals and

prelates might be seen among his listeners.

We now approach an occurrence, the result of which was rather a

great stir than any practical effect in the history of the Church.

The Council of Florence exercised great influence on the progress of

learning at a time when the impetus had been already given in a certain

direction. But a small number of the Greek fathers who came to Italy

were able to participate in scientific research, and the majority of

them were surpassed by the Florentines; yet the presence of so many

Greeks did exercise a decided influence on the connection between

Eastern and Western Europe, especially as the final destruction of

the eastern empire happened scarcely more than a decade later. Many

Greeks who sought a new home after the conquest of Constantinople had

the way shown to them by the council, although the Rome of Nicholas V.

had already begun to rival Florence. Among the Greek fathers, Cardinal

Bessarion, who promoted the interests of learning to the end of his

life, was perhaps the only man of scientific importance for the West.

Among the assistants and interpreters, many may be named who made

themselves famous in the history of the revival of classical literature

in Italy. In the foremost of these rank Georgios Gemistos, surnamed

Plethon, Nicolas Secundinus of Eubœa, and Theodore Gaza of Thessalonica.

Georgios Gemistos,[365] a native of the Morea, had been tutor to

Chrysoloras, whom he survived many years, attaining to a great age. He

had also instructed Bessarion. Plato’s writings and doctrines formed

his chief study. His zealous research into and dissemination of them,

and his labours for the construction of a new philosophical system

with their aid, was so great that he gave lectures everywhere on his

favourite author. He did so in Florence, where Cosimo de’ Medici

mingled among his hearers, and soon gained an interest in doctrines the

intellectual meaning of which made a deep impression on one who, like

him, inclined to peaceful meditation, seems to have found as little

to satisfy him in the lectures of the theologians of the time as in

the disputations of the philosophers, which commonly degenerated into

dialectic subtleties. As Cosimo did not understand Greek, Gemistos must

have employed the Latin language. It was his lectures which awoke in

Cosimo the idea of reviving the study of Platonic philosophy in his

native country. This is shown by the words of the man whom he chose to

carry his intention into execution. ‘The great Cosimo,’ says Marsilio

Ficino, in the translation of the works of Plotinus, dedicated to the

grandson of his first patron not long before his death, ‘at the time

when the council of Greeks and Latins summoned by Pope Eugenius IV.

was sitting at Florence, frequently heard the lectures of the Greek

philosopher called Plethon, who disputed on Platonic mysteries like

another Plato. The lively style of this man inspired him with such

enthusiasm, that there arose immediately in his lofty mind the thought

of forming an academy as soon as a favourable moment should be found.’

The history of the origin of the Platonic Academy presents two peculiar

phenomena: first, that a man who had already passed middle life should

be so strongly attracted by an author whose acquaintance he had made

through the medium of a foreign language; secondly, that he selected

as his chief companion and special instrument in carrying out his

intentions a boy who, at the time when the project was thought of,

scarcely numbered seven years.

Marsilio Ficino[366] was born in October, 1433, the turning-point in

the fortunes of the Medici, at Figline, a not insignificant place in

the upper valley of the Arno. His father was a skilful surgeon, who

removed to Florence, where the Medici among others employed him. The

son, educated at the university, seems to have entered the Medicean

house at the age of eighteen or nineteen years. He says himself that

he had two fathers, Ficino and Cosimo de’ Medici. He owed his birth to

the one, and his second birth to the other; the first had dedicated

him to Galen, the second to the divine Plato. Both were physicians,

one for the body and the other for the soul. The youth did not deceive

Cosimo’s expectations. Of a delicate constitution, he united a keen

feeling for poetry and music with a profound and delicate faculty for

investigating natural phenomena and the doctrines of ancient wisdom. He

began the study of Platonic doctrines before he understood Greek, but

even without the counsel of Cosimo and his friend Landino, his senior

by nine years, he would hardly have satisfied himself with knowledge

derived from later Roman authors, as not only the prevalent tendency

of the time, but his own intellectual bent must have urged him to seek

the fountain head. When Marsilio began his Greek studies, namely in

1456, John Argyropulos, who about the middle of the century did as

much for a knowledge of language and literature as Chrysoloras at the

beginning, must have already begun his lectures at the university,

and these were probably of assistance to Marsilio. During his exile

at Padua, Palla Strozzi had attracted him, and Cosimo de’ Medici

afterwards gained him for Florence, where for fifteen years he taught,

besides Greek literature, Aristotelian philosophy, and in 1464 was

presented with the rights of citizenship. The favour shown by Cosimo to

the Peripatetic Argyropulos was continued to his sons and grandsons,

and we shall find this useful man busy in later years, while at the

time now under consideration many who made themselves an honourable

name were among his disciples; as, for instance, Donato Acciaiuoli,

Pandolfo Pandolfini, and finally Poliziano, and Lorenzo de’ Medici.

Marsilio was thirty years old when, at Cosimo’s wish, he undertook

the translation of the Hermetic writings, and Plato’s works. That

the former, a production of scientific mysticism and sentimentality

of the new Platonic school at Alexandria, excited so strongly the

interest of a new school, which aimed at and laid claim to the revival

of Platonic tradition, shows clearly what danger this school was in

of amalgamating true Platonism with its Alexandrian outgrowths, and

of falling, like the new Platonists, into the fundamental error of

confounding true doctrine with arbitrary forms. But the circumstance

that Argyropulos translated writings of Aristotle for Cosimo at the

same time indicates, in a manner most honourable to the latter, how

anxious he was to form an independent opinion for himself by comparison

of the doctrines of the two great philosophers in whose systems all

ancient and even the germs of modern thought were preserved for later

times. This was an aspiration which certainly deserves recognition,

however imperfect the results may have been compared with the means

employed. Cosimo’s kindness towards Marsilio Ficino remained unchanged

to the end. He presented him with a house in the neighbourhood of Sta.

Maria Nuova, and a country residence at Careggi, where the little farm

of Montevecchio still reminds us of the friendly and pious man. When in

the summer of 1464 Cosimo retired seriously ill to Careggi, he invited

Marsilio thither.[367] It was in listening to the books on the One

Origin of Things and the Highest Good that the last days of the sick

man were spent. The epoch of the perfect development and most important

labours of Marsilio Ficino belongs, however, to the times of Cosimo’s

grandson.

The most fruitful labours of a man no less intimately connected with

the Medicean house belong to the same time. In the village of Borgo

alla Collina, right in the heart of the Casentino, not far from Poppi,

on the right bank of the Arno, are still to be seen the mortal remains,

dried to a mummy, of Cristoforo Landino,[368] who, descended from

a family of the neighbouring Pratovecchio, was born at Florence in

1424.[369] A papal secretary, Angelo of Todi, facilitated by a legacy

the youth’s studies, first in Volterra and then in Florence, where he

was soon recommended to Cosimo. He has gratefully acknowledged what

he owed to his patron in verse and prose,[370] and, as with others,

the affection of the head of the house was transmitted to sons and

grandsons. Among learned men Carlo Marsuppini seems to have exercised

especial influence on him; Landino himself assisted in determining the

bent of Marsilio Ficino’s studies. He soon formed friendships with all

who devoted themselves to science—with the excellent Jacopo Ammannato,

who rose from poverty and distress to the ecclesiastical purple, and,

as an affluent man, preserved an affectionate feeling for the city in

which he had gained a scanty living as teacher. Cristoforo also became

acquainted with literary men, and such as associated themselves with

them, as Antonio and Bernardo Canigiani, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Roberto

Salviati, &c. In 1457, the three-and-thirtieth year of his life, the

chair of rhetoric and poetry at the university was confided to him,

and a career began for him in which we shall meet him again an aged

man. If he had had no other pupils than Lorenzo de’ Medici and Angelo

Poliziano, they would have sufficed to prove the superiority of his

teaching.

While the Council of Union contributed directly to promote Greek

studies and the adoption of Greek philosophy, it had no influence in

the province of native theological literature. He who made himself the

greatest name as a theological writer, and took an active part in the

ecclesiastical councils, was entirely outside the literary circle. The

character of Antonio Pierozzi, who is venerated by the Florentines of

the present day as Saint Antoninus, and was the model of a pious and

active pastor, shone alike in his writings and his life—godfearing,

zealous, learned, untiring, simple and modest withal, and void of all

pomp and studied form. Born in 1389, he entered priestly orders when

about sixteen years old, and the cell in St. Mark’s convent which he

inhabited, and which preserves many memorials of him, is still shown.

His youth coincided with the first active movements of the learned

class styled humanists, but it did not concern him. His studies were

strictly theological; but as he never withdrew from public life when

the commissions given him did not clash with his pastoral duties, so

he included in his labours the field of history, which often afforded

him guidance in the science of his calling. His ‘Summa Theologiæ,’

first printed entire eighteen years after his death, and republished

in the last century, is considered in his native country as the first

text-book of moral theology. His letters, chiefly addressed to a

pious lady of high rank, Madonna Diodata degli Adimari, are moral and

theological treatises, full of apostolic zeal and love, with correct

and clear judgment, that knew how to combine active and contemplative

life; and though he advises his reader to occupy herself rather with

edifying literature than with the heroic deeds of the Paladins, he

by no means neglects the affairs of this world.[371] His chronicle,

reaching down to the year of his death, 1459, makes no pretensions to

artistic form, and the humanistic historiographers would have certainly

looked with some scorn on the work, which appeared in 1474, if they had

noticed it at all. Entire portions of this work are taken from others,

a proceeding which we meet with in the nineteenth century, and which

was less scrupled at in the times of the pious archbishop than later,

as such works were often only intended for the most intimate circle

of friends, or for a single convent. Nevertheless, the chronicle had

a value of its own for the fifteenth century, so that the number of

editions which it passed through is explained. His biography relates

how Saint Antoninus himself practised in his life what he taught and

advised in his writings, how he influenced the moral and religious

conduct of the Florentines, and put down disorders, which had become

prevalent under prelates like Vitelleschi, Scarampi, and Zabarella,

archbishops only in name or for a short time. His example had an

encouraging and elevating effect on Orlando Bonarli, his immediate

successor. ‘As much as lay in him,’ says Vespasiano,[372] ‘he attempted

to emulate the pattern afforded him by his predecessor. Although

some in the city endured him against their will, for every one tries

to escape as much as he can from the effects of the laws, he never

allowed himself to falter in the fulfilment of his duty, and knew no

respect of persons where it was a question of reason and justice. He

thus left his diocese in a praiseworthy state. Would to God that this

had lasted so!’

Cosimo de’ Medici’s position, his warm sympathy for intellectual

effort, his liberality towards men of letters, explain the number of

addresses and petitions that reached him from all sides at a time

when patronage was at its height. No treatise or dialogue could be

written, no ode or elegy composed, no book translated from a classical

author without a dedication to him—a practice connected with the

epistolography of the fourteenth century, which arose less from the

requirements of personal intercourse than from its adaptation to

learned purposes, besides being an imitation of classical models which

scholars thought to excel by remodelling letters into treatises.

Letters always remained in fashion from the days of Petrarch; and

though a good portion of the literary and even political history of

the time is found in printed collections of letters, which might be

indefinitely increased, in most of these epistolaries there is much

mere wordiness. In the matter of dedications even men of high standing

were not unfrequently influenced by pecuniary considerations. Many

made an actual business of it. Of course this circumstance did not

exclude friendly relations. When Poggio on his marriage in 1435, at

the age of fifty-five, with Vaggia Buondelmonti, then only eighteen

years old, dedicated to Cosimo the dialogue ‘Shall an old man marry?’

(‘An seni uxor sit ducenda’), in which Niccoli and Marsuppini appear

as interlocutors, it was only an expression of old friendship. The

Medicean manuscripts are full of dedications. The most striking,

however, is that of a book which has left a mournful name in the

literature of the Renaissance, and which only in later years, and in

other lands, was allowed to appear in print—the century accustomed

to grossness even to satiety having lacked the courage to print

it. This was the Hermaphroditus, the licentious production of an

otherwise learned and elegant author, Antonio Beccadelli, usually

named, after his birthplace, Panormita. When King Alfonso of Naples,

the enthusiastic admirer of antiquity, patronised and rewarded the

poet, and the Emperor Sigismund bestowed on him the laurel which had

once adorned Petrarca’s chaste and noble muse, we should scarcely be

surprised that Cosimo de’ Medici accepted the dedication, if it were

not that the work, which revelled in indecent allusions to modern

circumstances and persons, was so little in conformity with his whole

character. Beccadelli’s connections with Cosimo originated in the

year 1432, when the former taught ecclesiastical law so successfully

in Florence, that they could not part with him when Padua and Bologna

attempted to gain him for themselves.[373] Strange contrasts! on

the one side, the council and the pious archbishop; on the other,

productions of the worst paganism. The popular orators of the time,

Bernardino of Siena and Roberto of Lecce, burned the book of Panormita

at Milan and Bologna in the public square (that it was done at Ferrara

in the presence of Pope Eugenius is not proved). Poggio, Filelfo,

and Valla appeared in arms against it. Would that they had observed

morality and decency better in their own writings instead of drawing

down upon the entire literature of humanism the deserved reproach of

cynical immorality and indecency on the one hand, and servility and

unbounded vanity on the other!

It is an honour to the learned Florentine world, in the epoch here to

be considered, to have remained freer from these sins and offences

than was the case in most other places. If we except the undignified

disputes which were principally caused by a foreigner, Filelfo,

and ascribe Poggio’s reported dishonourable quarrel with Valla to

Roman tradition, Cosimo’s time offers hardly anything of this sad

kind. The circumstance that so many disciples of learning in the

higher orders did not consider it as a means of gain,nor belong to

that class of literati who consider themselves bound by no personal

considerations, certainly contributed to this pleasing state of

things. How beneficially the share in literature eagerly taken by

those highly placed affected the attitude and position of literature

in general life, we see from many accounts. They afford an insight

into the circumstances of the time when patriarchal manners still went

hand in hand with the requirements of freedom of thought and more

general culture in the city as well as in the country-houses. Pastime

alternated with serious conversation in which such as filled the first

offices of State and went repeatedly as ambassadors to Popes and

princes associated themselves with the literary men whom they often

fully equalled in scientific cultivation. The meetings at Careggi were

not the only ones. Agnolo Pandolfini did even more than the Medici,

in his beautiful villa at Signa, where the Arno, on leaving the

Pistojan plain, flows to the mountain pass of the Golfolina—a villa

which received Pope Eugenius and René of Anjou, Francesco Sforza and

Niccolò of Este.[374] This distinguished and wealthy man, who filled

the highest offices with honour, and had gained a large experience

which doubly disgusted him with the factions that had got the upper

hand in the latter times of the Albizzi, had exercised a pacifying

influence on the conflict of 1433. All the more deeply was he pained

by the inconsiderate use of that victory, and by the circumstance that

Cosimo should allow free course to the hatred and covetousness of his

partisans. He resided, therefore, much at his villa in order to avoid

city matters, and exercised the noblest hospitality in a circle of

the most important men, scholars and others. Domestic politics were

not allowed to be discussed. The much-read book on the government of

families was once ascribed to this country life, and stands in high

repute as a mirror of the times and the expression of the feelings

and views of a benevolent, sensible, and experienced man: a book of

which we shall speak more further on (p. 483). We obtain a view of the

country life of a learned and respected citizen in the characteristic

sketch of Franco Sacchetti, a grandson of the well-known novelist.[375]

He was not rich, but lived very respectably. He had no lack of honours

and experience, as he had been ambassador to Pope Pius II. and King

Alfonso, and had attained the highest honours. On friendly terms with

the Medici, he remained aloof from party-spirit. His knowledge of Greek

and Latin literature was extensive. He was intimately connected with

John Argyropulos and supported him whenever he could. When he resided

at his villa, situated in the neighbourhood of the city, the learned

Greek frequently visited him accompanied by his pupils, and the time

passed in erudite conversation. Twice in the year he arranged great

banquets where only respected and cultivated men were invited.

Even under the more modest circumstances that generally prevail among

literary men properly so called, villas and meetings there were not

uncommon. When Poggio Bracciolini, to whom the Florentine citizenship

had been granted in 1415,[376] was still in the service of the Pope,

fifteen years and more before he entered the Florentine exchequer, he

purchased an estate near his birthplace, Terranova.[377] ‘I will,’ thus

he wrote to Niccoli, ‘adorn with the collected remains of antiquity,

my Valdarnesian academy, where I hope to rest when rest be granted

me from the stormy sea of life.’ Sculptures, Greek and Roman, gems,

coins, and inscriptions embellished not only the library but the

house and garden. He has expressed his admiration for antique art in

a letter to the dealer in antiquities, Francesco of Pistoja.[378]

‘When I see nature so admirably imitated in marble, an awe of artistic

genius inspires me. Every one has his weakness; mine is to admire

the works of distinguished sculptors with a perhaps too lively

enthusiasm. But how should I not wonder when I see the expression given

to lifeless material by art?’ Learned friends, among them Lorenzo,

Cosimo’s brother, and Niccoli, came to visit him and inspect his

collection. Of these visits and conversations traces remain to us in

the literary history of the time and the traditions still preserved in

the Valdarnese Academy, a learned society which, combining the names

of two sons of the Arno valley, Petrarca and Poggio, has its seat in

Montevarchi opposite Terranova, which lies on the right bank of the

stream surrounded by green hills. When, in later years, Poggio bought

another villa in the Piano di Ripoli, only four miles to the south-east

of Florence, it may be easily understood that there was no lack of

visitors from the adjacent city.

The brilliancy of the learned society and intellectual life in Florence

extended into foreign countries. The connections with England were

various. Poggio was disappointed in his expectations of Cardinal

Beaufort, an acquaintance from the Council of Constance; and even Duke

Humphrey of Gloucester did not answer to those of Leonardo Bruni. But

William Gray, afterwards Bishop of Ely, who, after he had pursued

his studies at Cologne, continued them at Padua and Ferrara, and

represented his native country, England, at Rome in Pope Nicolas V.’s

time, had influential connections with the learned world in Italy,

particularly with Niccolò Perotto of Sassoferrato. The latter was

intimate with the Florentine circle and became subsequently Archbishop

of Manfredonia, owing his advance to Gray. Many literary treasures

bought by Gray at Florence and elsewhere went to England. So did those

which were afterwards collected by John, Earl of Worcester, who, at

the expulsion of King Edward IV. in 1470, fell a victim to the hatred

excited by the cruelty with which he had exercised his office of

Constable. He purchased manuscripts everywhere when on his return from

a pilgrimage to the Holy Land he stayed for a time in Italy. ‘On his

residence for several days in Florence,’ relates Vespasiano, ‘he wished

to inspect the whole city, and wandered about without any servant

except a guide at his left hand. As the name of John Argyropulos

was well known to him, he wished to hear his lectures, repaired one

morning to the university incognito, and was much pleased.’[379] Even

at the time when Pope Eugenius IV. still resided at Florence, the

English representative at the Papal court, whom Vespasiano[380] calls

Andrea Ols (Holles?), maintained friendly intercourse with Marsuppini,

Manetti, Palmieri, &c., and had collected such a number of manuscripts,

old and new, that he was obliged to engage a vessel to transport them

to his native country. Eneas Silvio Piccolomini had more influence than

the Florentine circle on the connections with Germany. We shall speak

later of those with Hungary.[381]

Cosimo de’ Medici lived long enough to see the entire generation

of the first Florentine humanists descend into the grave. Leonardo

Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini and Poggio Bracciolini died as chancellors of

the Republic; Ambrogio Traversari as general of the Camaldulese, a

dignity to which Pope Eugenius IV. had elevated him, a promotion by

which he was removed from his true field of action, that of science

and literature, into an overwhelming current of petty affairs;

Roberto de’ Rossi and Niccolò Niccoli had died in their native land

years before; Giannozzo Manetti in voluntary exile at Naples; Palla

Strozzi, at the age of ninety, in the spring of 1462, at Padua, after

eight-and-twenty years of exile borne with noble resignation. Cosimo

lived to see the man whom he had known as a humble teacher and whom

he afterwards supported as Pope Nicolas V., emulate him in the most

earnest and discriminating fostering of science, during the few years

of his papacy. For but a few weeks did Æneas Sylvius the successor of

Nicolas survive him. In Sylvius humanism ascended the Papal throne,

for Pope Pius II. had the most elegant and in many respects the most

comprehensive intellect of the time. A new world arose round the man

who nearly all his life had guided the fortunes of his native land.

Much which he had planted flourished luxuriantly; much also assumed

a new shape. Classical literature had become the principal object

in his time. The most illustrious humanists wrote only in Latin.

The unassuming sister of this classical literature, who spoke the

popular language, studded as it was in the preceding century with the

most brilliant flowers, but not yet considered equal in birth, lived

unhonoured by a glance from the learned men who, uninstructed by the

fate of Petrarca’s ‘Africa,’ continued to sing the deeds of Alfonso of

Aragon and Francesco Sforza in Latin, and were guilty of a far greater

error than that of Petrarca. Yet the time was not far distant when this

despised language of the people should once more spread its wings in

freedom and soar aloft.

CHAPTER IV.

LIBRARIES AND THE BOOK TRADE. VESPASIANO DA BISTICCI.

WHILE such a busy life was developed under the influence and continual

encouragement of Cosimo de’ Medici, the two great collections had

originated through him which at that time supplied a centre for

literary work, and now have combined their most important contents in

the same locality and form the most considerable part of the celebrated

library to which (as to a sanctuary of the literature of antiquity

and the Renaissance) learned men of all countries continually direct

their steps. In the days of his exile, Cosimo, in conjunction with his

brother, by the erection of the library-hall of San Giorgio Maggiore

at Venice,[382] had bequeathed to a foreign city where he found eager

fellow-labourers—especially one, Francesco Barbaro—a monument of his

gratitude and munificence. Should he not do the same, and even more,

for his native city? In San Marco he would not only found a monument

of his piety but of his love of knowledge. In the third dormitory of

the convent we see two cells which, according to tradition, Cosimo

retained for his own use when he resided here in pious intercourse with

St. Antoninus and his holy companions, and where, as the inscription

says, Pope Eugenius IV. spent the night after having been present

at the consecration of the church on the day of Epiphany, 1442. Fra

Angelico painted the Epiphany here, and later the cell was adorned with

an excellent portrait of Cosimo by the hand of Jacopo da Pontormo. The

library-hall makes the greatest impression. It is more than fifty yards

long by ten yards broad, and has along its whole length a double row

of eleven slender columns supporting the roof, and at the end a square

space shut off by transverse walls, from the large windows of which

the inmates formerly looked over broad quiet gardens, now turned into

streets.[383] On the narrow outer side of this hall we see the Medicean

arms with the balls as they were before the alterations made by King

Louis XI. On the book-shelves, now set up along the rows of columns,

lie more than eighty choir-books—partly belonging to the convent of

San Marco, partly to other convents and churches—with miniatures from

the hands of celebrated artists of the fifteenth century.

While the building was in progress Niccolò Niccoli died in 1437.

The wish he had always cherished of seeing his valuable collection

of books useful to the community, as he had always placed them at

the disposal of his friends, was fulfilled. In his will he directed

that a commission of sixteen members should dispose of his literary

property so that it might best serve the community. Ambrogio

Traversari, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Carlo Marsuppini,

Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Giannozzo Manetti, and Francesco

Sacchetti, were among these sixteen.[384] As Cosimo de’ Medici, who

had long supported Niccoli, undertook to satisfy his creditors, the

disposal of the property was referred to him. The entire value of the

manuscripts, about 800 in number, was estimated at 6,000 gold florins,

a considerable sum which yet hardly corresponded with their real value

at that time. When in 1441 the hall was finished, 400 manuscripts were

laid out on sixty-four long reading-desks such as we still see in the

Laurentian library, all inscribed with Niccoli’s name.[385] At Cosimo’s

request Tommaso of Sarzana made regulations for the arrangement of the

books,—rules which then served for the Fiesolan library, for that at

Urbino, and that of the Sforzas of Pesaro.[386] ‘Whoever has to arrange

a library,’ remarks Vespasiano in Pope Nicolas V.’s life, ‘cannot

dispense with that inventory written by Tommaso’s own hand.’

Of the remains of Niccoli’s manuscripts Cosimo retained a part

to increase the literary treasures of his house, which, enlarged

by his sons and grandsons, formed the nucleus of the subsequent

Medicean-Laurentian library. He divided others among his friends. But

he continually thought of filling up the vacancies in the collection of

San Marco, for which he made purchases and copies. A part of Coluccio

Salutati’s books had gone thither with Niccoli’s library; Cosimo bought

and presented it with another part,[387] as well as manuscripts of

Filippo di Ser Ugolini, one of the cleverest and best-informed men in

the public service of the State.[388] Vespasiano and the Dominican Fra

Giuliano Lapaccini were especially occupied in Lucca and Siena with

purchasing and copying. Cosimo, so variously occupied, had ordered

that one of the monks of San Marco should send in the receipt to his

bank in order to receive the necessary sums. Death alone prevented him

from making this library complete according to the requirements of the

times; Biondio Flavio, the Roman annalist and antiquary, declared that,

as it was, it was the finest of the age. In 1453 the hall and a part of

the books were seriously damaged by an earthquake, but were restored by

Cosimo and his son Piero.

This one collection, however, was not sufficient for the active and

liberal man. When he rebuilt the abbey of Fiesole, he determined to

furnish this also with literary treasures. Vespasiano, whom he employed

in this, describes how it was done.[389] ‘When I was in his chamber

one morning, he asked what means I could suggest for forming this

library? I answered that it was impossible to procure it by purchase,

as the requisite books could not be collected. He answered, And how

are they otherwise to be obtained? On my answering that new copies

must be made, he asked further if I would undertake such copies? I

declared myself ready to do so. Thereupon he empowered me to begin

the work, the execution of which he left to me. The payments would be

made by his bank on presentation of the receipts by the prior of the

abbey. So I went to work; and as he wished it to be done as speedily as

possible, and there was no want of money, I engaged in a short time 45

copyists, and furnished 200 volumes in 22 months. The arrangement was

the excellent one suggested by Pope Nicolas, which was used in his own

library. As all the works were not to be found at Florence, we sent to

Milan, Bologna, and other places. Thus Cosimo saw this collection and

an inventory of it finished, and had great pleasure in it, while he

rejoiced at the speed with which it had been completed.’ The present

Medicean-Laurentian library preserves, beside the literary treasures

of the Medici house, the principal part of the collections made by

Cosimo. In 1783 the manuscripts from the dissolved abbey of Fiesole,

223 in number, were added to the Laurentiana, and in 1808 those of San

Marco. The latter, at the time of the abolition of clerical orders by

the Napoleonic government, amounted to about a thousand, many of which

have, however, been lost, and others returned to their former place at

the restoration of 1814.[390] As with the collection of the Dominican

convent, Cosimo and his sons and grandsons continued to increase that

of Fiesole by new acquisitions and presents. The magniloquence of the

inscriptions of many of the volumes, in which the regular clergy of

the abbey praise the liberality of their patrons, may be carried too

far. Nevertheless it is pleasing to meet with these proofs of the

affectionate interest taken by the men in whose hands the guidance

of the State lay in the institutions connected with ecclesiastical

foundations, and through them profitable to the whole community. They

are proofs, too, of an intimate intercourse between the clergy and

laity which was advantageous to both.[391]

When Federigo of Montefeltro founded the celebrated library of

Urbino, for which from thirty to forty copyists were fully employed

in different towns, so that the copies alone are said to have cost

nearly thirty thousand gold florins; a library, the beautiful hall

of which, in the noble ducal palace, is described to us by Bernardo

Baldi[392] and its wealth by Vespasiano[393]—the library of San Marco

was of great use to him. ‘Illustrious lord and brother,’ he wrote on

January 23, 1473, to Cosimo’s grandson,[394] ‘I have already requested

your Magnificence to charge the brethren of San Marco to deliver to

Vespasiano any of their books which he may require for the use of

the copyists employed for me in your city. I now repeat the request

that it may please you to give these orders, that for my sake they

may be obliging to Vespasiano, whereby your Magnificence would do me

a great favour.’ From this letter, and that addressed to Lorenzo by

the brethren of the convent, in which they sign themselves as ‘Custos

librorum bibliothecæ vestræ in Sto. Marco,’[395] we see that the family

reserved a certain right of possession for themselves.

Vespasiano da Bisticci, to whom we owe so many valuable data for the

history of his times, is the worthiest representative of the book

trade, as it was developed about the middle of the fifteenth century in

consequence of the great discoveries then made and increased literary

activity. His intimate intercourse with popes, princes, prelates, and

great lords, and the numerous and important commissions entrusted to

him, prove his excellence and the high respect he enjoyed. The contents

and tone of his biographies and character sketches, exceeding a hundred

in number, are most valuable for a knowledge of the literary as well as

the moral and general culture of the times. He displays a warm heart

and excellent feeling, nor is his correct judgment weakened by his

benevolence. People of high position were in intimate correspondence

with him; Giannozzo Manetti, Donato Acciaiuoli, Niccolò Perotti, &c.,

for whom he purchased books, while, beside the Medici and the Duke of

Urbino, Pope Nicolas V. employed him in the foundation of the Vatican.

‘I accept,’ thus Manetti[396] writes to him on one occasion, ‘your

offer respecting the books you heard of—the Bible, and “Lives of the

Fathers.” Send them me, I beg, and it will give me much pleasure. But

that you do not mention the “Avicenna” seems a bad sign for medicine.

Try to procure it for me, for I need it. In case you succeed in

finding a “Paulus Orosius,” and Euclid’s Geometry, do the same.’ He

did not pursue his business mechanically. When employed in arranging

the Urbino library he used, for comparison, beside the inventories of

the Vaticana and San Marco, those of Pavia and Oxford.[397] In the

number of new manuscripts which he caused to be prepared, there was

unavoidably a great deal of carelessness. Angelo Poliziano complains

once in the dictata composed in 1481 for Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s

son, of the incorrectness of the Urbino manuscripts;[398] a complaint

which Bottari made, in the last century, in reference to the codex of

Virgil belonging to the time of Vespasiano. But it would be unjust

to lay the blame of this on him. Down to his latest years he was

continually employed by Cosimo’s son and grandson, and seems to have

been considered the first literary connoisseur in Florence. When an old

man, in 1487 and 1490, he presented several books to the library of San

Marco, of which he had himself witnessed the origin.[399]

This man, to whom we are indebted in a variety of ways, belonged to

a burgher family of mediocre means, residing at the little village

of Sta. Lucia, near Bisticci in the upper valley of the Arno, and

was born in Florence in 1421.[400] He had evidently attained by

business practice a certain literary cultivation (which is shown in

his writings, and, with the hearty interest of the author in person

and things, makes us easily forget his deficiencies of style), and he

witnessed the most brilliant epoch of the Italian book trade, in which

one library arose after another and the treasures of antiquity were

speedily multiplied; an epoch in which numerous practised copyists

worked in Florence for natives and strangers. Here, as elsewhere,

many foreigners pursued the same calling; French, German, and Dutch,

ecclesiastics and laymen, associated themselves with the Italians, and

sometimes settled entirely in Italy. The beauty and regularity of the

writing, the richness of the miniatures, the fineness and smoothness

of the parchments, the value of the niellos adorning the bindings,

explain why, long after the discovery of the art of printing by types,

manuscripts such as these retained the favour of those who did not fear

expense. The codex of the Divine Comedy which Cristofo degli Amerighi

of Pesaro, Podestà of Florence in 1457, caused to be executed here

for his wife in that year, and which is now in the National library,

is a splendid specimen of the luxury in books at that time.[401]

The regularity of the writing on the finest parchment is such that

at first we are rather reminded of mechanical reproduction than of

penmanship. That those who belonged neither to the learned class nor

to the special trade of copyists were occasionally employed in it, is

shown by the manuscript found in the Laurentian library of the Divine

Comedy, which an Umbrian soldier, Gasparo di Tommaso of Montone, wrote

in ‘semi-Gothic characters’ in 1456 at Ferrara, where he was in the

service of the Podestà.[402]

The prices of books still remained very high, which was unavoidable

considering it was a question of new copies, and the price depended on

the rate of pay of the copyists. In older books their rarity, state

of preservation, &c., had of course to be considered. About 1430

Traversari informs Leonardo Giustiniani that he has found a skilful

man to copy Livy, &c., for thirty gold florins yearly salary and

comfortable board and lodging.[403] About 1442 Poggio sold two volumes

of the letters of St. Jerome to Lionello of Este for a hundred gold

florins. The marquis, a generous and munificent master, found the price

extravagant, and regarded the surplus pay as a present to Poggio, who

considered, however, that the present was too small for a prince, and

that he should receive it as a pledge of future liberality.[404] Even

persons like Poggio paid a good deal; twenty-five golden florins for

a copy of the Bible that was not even complete, ten for a Lactantius,

and seven for some tragedies. Piero de’ Medici obtained a Cornelius

Celsus for twenty gold florins; the price was pretty high, Giannozzo

Manetti thought, but it was a fine and beautiful manuscript.[405] In

the years 1470-72 Vespasiano furnished Cardinal Bessarion with a copy

of the works of St. Augustine for the price of 500 gold florins.[406]

The constant commissions from abroad, especially from King Matthias

Corvinus, Alessandro Sforza, the Earl of Worcester, &c.,[407]

necessarily had an influence on the prices, and it may be easily

understood how the whole business was restricted to a few persons by

the extravagant cost of the books. Just when manuscript copies were at

their dearest, printing by types began. Vespasiano da Bisticci died

fully twenty-six years after the first book had been printed at the

Florentine press;[408] but in his writings, which certainly extended

to the year 1482, we only find one mention of the new discovery, which

so quickly produced the greatest revolution in the field where he had

worked so honourably. This mention is characteristic enough. ‘In this

library,’ we read in the description of the treasures collected by the

Duke of Urbino,[409] ‘all the volumes are of the most faultless beauty,

written by hand, with elegant miniatures, and all on parchment. There

are no printed books among them; the duke would have been ashamed to

have them.’

CHAPTER V.

LITERATURE OF THE VULGAR TONGUE. POPULAR AND SACRED POETRY.

THE period succeeding Petrarca and Boccaccio gave indications that

the spirit of poetry was extinguished for some time to come. After

Boccaccio’s death, his would-be rival, Franco Sacchetti, a man not only

skilled in grave and gay compositions, but able to unite literary work

with political office at home and abroad, a man capable of thoroughly

appreciating the varied circumstances of life, merrily sang:

The spring of poetry is now grown dry,

No living form dwells on the Muses’ mount;

Nor can we think that Dante could return,

Since none will slake their thirst at his pure fount.

Where’er we listen we but hear the tone

Of horns, that blow the signal to refrain:

Where’er we look we see but dead leaves strewn,

And time must pass ere verdure clothes the plain.

Nor were indications deceptive. For many centuries elapsed ere a poet

of real significance arose. Here and there a hand touched the lyre of

Petrarca, as, for instance, the Roman Giusto de’ Conti, the best among

the imitators of Madonna Laura’s poet. We can hardly call poetry the

greater works of the Florentine Antonio Pucci, in which he recounts the

chronicle of Villani in _terzine_ and the Pisan war in _ottava rima_,

the eight-lined stanza. He was a popular poet, who was not wanting in

either feeling or talent, as many of his sonnets testify. Whatever

might be attempted in various quarters passed without leaving a

trace amid the efforts of the humanists, who despised the language of

the people, and thought of nothing but perpetuating ancient culture,

compared to which, according to the prevailing opinion, this language

took the position of an inferior in birth. All its native power,

and the cheerful, calm energy of the Tuscan people, were necessary

to prevent its perishing in the midst of a twofold danger. Contempt

might have excluded the language from any application to nobler ends,

and so caused it to deteriorate. The attempts of the philologists to

elevate the vulgar tongue after their fashion might have robbed it of

naturalness, independence, character, and originality, and made it a

clumsy compromise between old and new, without life or root in the

people. The Tuscan language, which became the written speech of Italy,

was in the fifteenth century threatened with both these dangers from a

want of appreciation of its true spirit and life.

At the commencement of this century we meet with a work which, like

its author, still represents the thirteenth, but which casts some

rays of light over the following period. It is the tract, ‘Del

governo di cura familiare,’ by the Dominican monk Giovanni Dominici,

who has been already mentioned (p. 426). The book originated at the

suggestion of a noble lady, Bartolommea degli Obizzi, who, with her

husband Antonio degli Alberti and four children, were involved in the

fearful persecution which the family had to endure in consequence

of the implication of one of the Alberti in the events of 1378. The

sensible, God-fearing woman, suddenly overwhelmed with all the cares

of the household and the education of her children under the most

distressing circumstances, had turned to a pious preaching friar whose

counsel stood in high repute in and beyond his native town. He answered

with this book, which was preceded by others of the same kind. It is

an introduction to Christian life, and to the duties of a Christian

education, containing many small details inseparable from the opinions

and manners of the time. It is full of a manly spirit, with a clear

recognition of the position and duties of parents and heads of families

in the midst of changes which arose everywhere in consequence of the

newly discovered antique world having already begun to penetrate, as

it were, into a society hitherto hedged about by the narrow limits

of mediæval culture and customs. From a special reference to the

duties of a mother left in some sense in the position of a widow, the

book passes to general remarks and considerations suggested by the

state of a commonwealth torn by sectarian hatred.[410] The domestic

ordinances for a Christian education in reference to respect for

parents and authorities are followed by those which are dictated by

active patriotism, zeal for the common good, and the preservation of

unity. Parts of this book afford us a complete picture of the domestic

condition of the time. The language is still that of the thirteenth

century, but the structure of the sentences has no longer the graceful

simplicity and transparent clearness which characterise more than one

of the author’s brethren in orders.

More than a generation after Fra Giovanni Dominici, a man standing in

the midst of the new classical school took up the same subject from

a wider point of view. He belonged to the family for whose use the

book of his predecessor had been destined. We meet with Leon Batista

Alberti in almost every field—in science, literature, and art—and

only his unexampled versatility hindered him from ascending to the

height which he often approached. In his dialogue, consisting of

several books, ‘La Cura della Famiglia,’[411] Alberti, to whom in a

certain sense all the knowledge of the times lay open, displays, in

his moral and philosophical view of life, the greatest harmony with the

monk who hardly crossed the threshold of his age, and expresses himself

on education and the true relation of the authors of antiquity to

Christian morality in the same sense, and sometimes in the same words,

as Giovanni. Dante and Petrarca had completed and purified by Christian

wisdom the old philosophy as it had appeared to them; Alberti, a

disciple of Greek learning, maintained the doctrine that, without

Christianity, the world would remain in a valley of error, and wisdom

would be impossible or vain. There was no lack of similar tendencies;

out of the theological circle no book has spoken so decidedly.

If we regard the style of this work, which purported to be popular,

we feel the difference between it and that of the book which gave

the author the impulse to its composition. Here is a learned man who

endeavours to make use of a language despised by the learned, if not

for strictly scientific purposes, yet for the discussion of questions

which include a philosophy of life. He will, so he declares, write in

a simple, naked style, though he has always Xenophon in his mind. More

than the lost sovereignty of the world, he laments the loss of the

rich and harmonious language of the world; but he does not understand

why the Tuscan language of his day should excite so much aversion that

even excellent things composed in it should displease. It was only a

question of being easily understood, and knowing how to handle the

language. It would be foolish to despise what was in daily use or to

praise what no one understood. The ancient language had attained such

authority because numerous learned men had written in it. It would

be the same with that of the present day if learned men would expend

real industry and pains to purify and cultivate it. Thus wrote Leon

Batista Alberti about the middle of the century. His words indicate

the direction of the effort then made to impart to the popular language

dignity and euphony, not merely by an imitation of Latin phrases like

Boccaccio’s, but even by a Latin formation of words. The error was not

entirely avoided by this gifted man, who in the book under discussion,

though striving after simplicity and comprehensiveness did not overcome

the pedantry which sought safety in foreign elements only. When the

accomplished scholar, Cristoforo Landino, at the commencement of his

explanation of Petrarch’s poetry, before the ‘Padri Conscripti,’[412]

expressed his opinion of the feasability of cultivating the Tuscan

language which, like the Latin, ought to be subjected to grammar,

he propounded the aphorism ‘He who would be a good Tuscan must be a

Latinist.’ He then praised Leon Batista as the foremost master of the

prose of later times, Leonardo Bruni as the reviver of antique poetry,

and the hendecasyllabics as Sapphic and heroic verses. Knowing all this

we cannot see from whence the fresh spirit was to come that could alone

breathe life into the forms of language.

How far they went in this direction, when dead if learned imitation

triumphed over nature, genius, and the laws of a living language,

which, as a modern writer expresses it, produced a greater reverence

for the dead than for the living, is shown best by the Academy of

Languages held in 1441, principally at the instigation of Alberti,

under the patronage of Piero de’ Medici, in Sta. Maria del Fiore,

to celebrate the presence of Pope Eugenius IV. The rectors of the

university proclaimed a poetical competition, the theme of which was

to be a eulogy on friendship. A silver laurel-wreath was appointed the

prize; from this is derived the name of ‘Academia coronaria;’ the papal

secretaries were the umpires. Before the Signoria, the archbishop,

the Venetian ambassadors, prelates, nobles, and people, eight poets

read their verses, most of them in triplets or _terza rima_, and one

in stanzas or _ottava rima_, on Sunday, October 22. The worst poets

certainly would not have presented themselves; but we search in vain

for poetry in these dry and bombastic productions. The amusing yet

pathetic character of this competition was most manifested in the

dialogues recited by a celebrated man, Leonardo Dati, the first and

second part of which were in hexameters, the third in Sapphic metre,

and the fourth ended in a sonnet, composed, as it was said, after

antique rules. The metres corresponding with the language, neither

Italian nor Latin, were modelled after Latin words and syntax; an

incomprehensible and most indigestible mixture of new and old.[413] The

judges awarded the prize to none of the competitors, but gave it to

the Church, which, in respect to poetry, was accustomed to something

different when the ‘Divine Comedy’ was expounded in her lofty halls.

He who gave the impulse to the competition seems, however, not to have

found this degradation of poetry so dreadful, for he arranged a second

tournament on Envy, which, however, happily did not take place. This

corrupted taste found sufficient defenders in the following century,

and even men of genius retained the morbid taste for mingling languages

and exaggerated artificial forms of words, which these times made a

fashion, and which bore the same relation to the true language as

periwigs to natural hair. Happily a counterpoise to such a caricature

was not wanting—a counterpoise that weighed all the heavier because

connected with the inward nature and life of the people, with their

faith and feeling, their religious requirements and traditions, which,

if much degenerated into superficiality and mere observance, not only

opposed the progress of worldliness, but won before the end of the

century a victory, the echoes of which were long heard. Not to speak

of the low comic branch of popular poetry, the people’s language was

preserved living and fresh in letters, both those relating to business

and those of a religious character, in smaller writings intended for

the people, and in sacred poetry.

Thus in the second half of the fourteenth century, when the schism in

the Church oppressed the minds of men, when that which had been held to

be unchangeable began to totter, as well as in the first half of the

following, when humanism began to develop its necessary but undermining

effects, there still existed a fervent and living religious sense,

which held together many things that threatened to fall asunder, and

explains much that would otherwise be a riddle. Caterina of Siena is

the greatest and most brilliant figure in the first epoch; all the more

significant because in her the purest piety is united to penetration,

blended with mysticism. Her insight into the secrets of the soul and

the nature of doctrine, and her clear perception of the requirements

of the age, were combined with unwearied activity and frank courage.

The respect due and willingly shown by her to popes and princes,

detracts in nothing from the decided character and expressive language

of her discourses. But St. Caterina, unequalled before or since, does

not stand alone. In writings which contain the natural unadorned

expression of feeling and opinion, and in letters which, unlike those

of learned men, were not intended for the public and for national

collections, we find the explanation of many phenomena that contrast

with the facts of public life noted by history. These phenomena must

surprise him who does not regard the domestic life of the people in

all ranks, or who has not sounded the inner working of a religious

feeling, the manifestation of which in architectural monuments in an

age full of violence and predominating worldly activity, attracts

our principal attention, and scarcely seems in accord with the time.

Besides several ecclesiastical representatives of this school, like

Giovanni Dominici and Giovanni delle Celle, who was also canonised,

Chiara Gambacorti—the foundress of the Pisan convent of Dominican nuns

of the Strict Observance, who died in 1420—may be mentioned. We find

others certainly not less important in that class of laymen, who were

as numerous as they were influential in the towns of Tuscany in the two

centuries we have spoken of—men who divided their activity between

public offices and private business, and who with time and power, had

an open eye, and a warm heart for whatever concerned intellectual

interests, especially religious tendencies and ecclesiastical matters.

These fervent natures, whose numbers increased as worldliness became

more threatening, finally gathered round Fra Girolamo Savonarola as

round a fixed centre in their protest against the pagan tendencies

which constantly gained ground, in spite of many contradictory

phenomena, in the second half of the fifteenth century. And the same

natures, thirty years later, at the last flash of this mystic piety

and ascetic reformatory movement in the decisive battle for life or

death of the commonwealth, lent their best powers to the champions of

freedom, who were overthrown for a second and last time.[414]

With this intellectual tendency a style of poetry was connected to

which the philologists of the Renaissance period would have disdained

to award a place in literature, even if they would have noticed it

at all, had not their attention been in a certain measure forced to

it by persons of high standing who guided the general taste in their

circles. Popular sacred poetry was as old as the language of Dante’s

time, and Fra Jacopone of Todi, to whom some pathetic if not grand

Latin hymns of the later Middle Ages are ascribed, touched the keynote

in his Canticles, which was echoed for three centuries in the lauds

or hymns of praise. But Fra Jacopone himself only transmitted the

tradition, which had remained alive since Francis of Assisi. The

great number of fraternities, who assembled after the day’s work in

churches and chapels and at the corners of streets and sang hymns; the

numerous processions and pilgrimages, even if we except those which,

like the processions of the White Penitents, set whole villages and

towns in commotion; the frequent evening devotions, which were shared

in by others than members of the confraternities; the expressions of

pious feeling and religious aspiration, after the labour and toil of

the day—all this contributed to the growth of a species of popular

poetry which bore rich fruit, especially in the fifteenth century. The

continuance of Christian feeling and the desire to manifest it among

the people at a time when paganism had revived in the learned world is

remarkable, and to judge of the general opinions and tendencies merely

by the literary monuments of the age would lead to wrong conclusions.

If, as we have said, the full development of this kind of poetry

belongs to the fifteenth century, the preceding age, when trials of

every kind—sanguinary civil wars, devastating marches of mercenary

and robber bands, pestilence and Church schism—called men to serious

reflection, presents hardly less activity in this direction. The crowds

of Florentine burghers who, during the strife with Pope Gregory XI. on

his return from Avignon, sought compensation for the discontinuance

of Divine worship in the city while under the interdict by devotions

in the open air, by prayer and psalmody before the tabernacles in the

streets, were a remarkable and, in their way, elevating sight. The

oldest company, or _schola_, of the psalm-singers, or _laudesi_, which

originated in a chapel near the cathedral church where the bell-tower

now stands, and was named after the Holy Virgin or St. Zanobi, was

instituted before the end of the twelfth century. From it proceeded the

pious men who founded the order of Servi di Maria (Servites), who had

their residence in Florence, near the church of the Annunziata, on the

wooded heights of the Apennines, in the far-seen cloisters of Monte

Senario, and who are often mentioned in connection with the history of

the Florentine patriciate.[415] Other societies followed: the companies

of Or San Michele, Sta. Maria Novella, Sta. Croce, Sto. Spirito, of

the Carmine and Ognissanti. In short from all the large churches

were formed brotherhoods which, in conjunction with similar ones for

benevolent purposes, included a considerable part of the higher class

of citizens, and several of which still exist. The style of poetry

fostered in and by these fraternities had a long life, and sent forth

aftershoots centuries later, when Vincenzo da Filicaia composed hymns

for the society of St. Benedict, which, in the Jubilee year 1700,

undertook a pilgrimage to Rome at the same time as the last but one of

the Medicean rulers.

Nor do we meet with these phenomena in Florence alone, but in the

neighbouring towns of Tuscany also. In Siena—where, as in adjacent

Umbria, in the midst of all civil disturbances, not seldom accompanied

with bloodshed, a peculiar spiritual life penetrated with mysticism had

been developed and long upheld—arose the society of Jesuates about the

middle of the fourteenth century, originally a congregation of laymen

which formed themselves into an order and, like the Humiliates before

them, combined monastic life with the practice of arts and industry.

When in 1367 Pope Urban V., for whom all the serious and believing

inhabitants of Rome longed, arrived at Corneto on his return from

Avignon to Rome, Giovanni Colombini, the founder of this congregation,

marched with his followers singing lauds through Viterbo to the

sea-shore. With olive branches in their hands they accompanied with

hymns the procession of the Holy Father, who granted the white robe

to them in Toscanella. From its origin this popular order had sacred

poets,[416] by whom the tradition of Fra Jacopone was kept alive,

himself a member of one of the most popular orders. When the Venetian

Antonio Bembo, who belonged to the Jesuates, lay on his death-bed in

Pistoja, the two brethren who tended him began at his wish to sing

the hymn of the saint of Todi, ‘Thou love of God hast wounded me.’

Towards the end of the century we find the fraternity of the Bianchi in

Siena singing lauds like the Florentine brotherhoods. In Lorenzo de’

Medici’s days these consisted principally of artisans who assembled on

Saturdays, after nine, in a church and sang lauds in four voices before

a picture of the Madonna, changing about among themselves with every

hymn. It was partly a kind of _canto fermo_, and partly sung after

popular melodies. If we consider that till the reform of church music,

undertaken at the wish of the Council of Trent by Giovanni Pierluigi of

Palestrina, Divine worship had been accompanied by vaudeville melodies,

we cannot be surprised if the same tunes to which carnival songs were

sung—Italian, French, and Flemish—were occasionally used with the

lauds without anyone taking offence at it. Thus we find them founded

on melodies as those of the ‘Leggiadra damigella,’ or ‘Una donna

d’amor fino,’ ‘O Rosa mia gentile,’ ‘O crudel donna ch’hai lassato

me,’ ‘Vicin, vicin, vicin, chi mol’ spazar camin,’ ‘Plus que je vis

le regar gracieuse,’ and similar ones. Occasionally it is remarked

that the melody is the same as that of dances or _strambotti_, as the

popular songs were called, which might be referred to King Manfred’s

days and make the nearest approach to our street-tunes.

This sacred poetry is very prolific, and though the frequent recurrence

of the same motive is wearying, we are astonished at the endless wealth

of the variations and the delicate expression of effect, elegant in its

simplicity. The form and metre of the hymns, some of which are quite

short and others extending to several verses, are very different. Fra

Jacopone was succeeded by the Minorite, Fra Ugo Panziera of Prato; the

Dominican, Fra Domenico Cavalco of Vico Pisano, who, as an ascetic

writer, has proved himself a master of prose; Bianco dall’Anciolina,

one of the companions of Giovanni Colombini; and, about the

beginning of the fifteenth century, by the learned Venetian Leonardo

Giustiniani, brother of the patriarch Lorenzo who was venerated

as a saint; contemporaneous with him were Fra Giovanni Dominici,

Francesco d’Albizzo, and many others. The succeeding epoch witnessed

the appearance of the two men who have given this popular poetry its

greatest brilliancy and importance: they were Feo Belcari and Girolamo

Benivieni.[417]