THE OLD AUTHORS.
But the literary bequests of antiquity, Greek as well as Latin, were of
far more importance than the architectural, and indeed than all the
artistic remains which it had left. They were held in the most absolute
sense to be the springs of all knowledge. The literary conditions of
that age of great discoveries have been often set forth; no more can be
here attempted than to point out a few less-known features of the
picture.[432]
Great as was the influence of the old writers on the Italian mind in the
fourteenth century and before, yet that influence was due rather to the
wide diffusion of what had long been known, than to the discovery of
much that was new. The most popular Latin poets, historians, orators,
and letter-writers, together with a number of Latin translations of
single works of Aristotle, Plutarch, and a few other Greek authors,
constituted the treasure from which a few favoured individuals in the
time of Petrarch and Boccaccio drew their inspiration. The former, as is
well known, owned and kept with religious care a Greek Homer, which he
was unable to read. A complete Latin translation of the ‘Iliad’ and
‘Odyssey,’ though a very bad one, was made at Petrarch’s suggestion and
with Boccaccio’s help by a Calabrian Greek, Leonzio Pilato.[433] But
with the fifteenth century began the long list of new discoveries, the
systematic creation of libraries by means of copies, and the rapid
multiplication of translations from the Greek.[434]
Had it not been for the enthusiasm of a few collectors of that age, who
shrank from no effort or privation in their researches, we should
certainly possess only a small part of the literature, especially that
of the Greeks, which is now in our hands. Pope Nicholas V., when only a
simple monk, ran deeply into debt through buying manuscripts or having
them copied. Even then he made no secret of his passion for the two
great interests of the Renaissance, books and buildings.[435] As Pope he
kept his word. Copyists wrote and spies searched for him through half
the world. Perotto received 500 ducats for the Latin translation of
Polybius; Guarino, 1,000 gold florins for that of Strabo, and he would
have been paid 500 more but for the death of the Pope. Filelfo was to
have received 10,000 gold florins for a metrical translation of Homer,
and was only prevented by the Pope’s death from coming from Milan to
Rome. Nicholas left a collection of 5,000, or, according to another way
of calculating, of 9,000 volumes,[436] for the use of the members of the
Curia, which became the foundation of the library of the Vatican. It was
to be preserved in the palace itself, as its noblest ornament, like the
library of Ptolemy Philadelphus at Alexandria. When the plague (1450)
drove him and his court to Fabriano, whence then, as now, the best paper
was procured, he took his translators and compilers with him, that he
might run no risk of losing them.
The Florentine Niccolò Niccoli,[437] a member of that accomplished
circle of friends which surrounded the elder Cosimo de Medici, spent his
whole fortune in buying books. At last, when his money was all gone, the
Medici put their purse at his disposal for any sum which his purpose
might require. We owe to him the completion of Ammianus Marcellinus, of
the ‘De Oratore’ of Cicero, the text of Lucretius which still has most
authority, and other works; he persuaded Cosimo to buy the best
manuscript of Pliny from a monastery at Lübeck. With noble confidence he
lent his books to those who asked for them, allowed all comers to study
them in his own house, and was ready to converse with the students on
what they had read. His collection of 800 volumes, valued at 6,000 gold
florins, passed after his death, through Cosimo’s intervention, to the
monastery of San Marco, on the condition that it should be accessible to
the public, and is now one of the jewels of the Laurentian library.
Of the two great book-finders, Guarino and Poggio, the latter,[438] on
the occasion of the Council of Constanz and acting partly as the agent
of Niccoli, searched industriously among the abbeys of South Germany. He
there discovered six orations of Cicero, and the first complete
Quintilian, that of St. Gall, now at Zürich; in thirty-two days he is
said to have copied the whole of it in a beautiful handwriting. He was
able to make important additions to Silius Italicus, Manilius,
Lucretius, Valerius, Flaccus, Asconius, Pedianus, Columella, Celsus,
Aulus, Gellius, Statius, and others; and with the help of Lionardo
Aretino he unearthed the last twelve comedies of Plautus, as well as the
Verrine orations, the ‘Brutus’ and the ‘De Oratore’ of Cicero.
The famous Greek, Cardinal Bessarion,[439] in whom patriotism was
mingled with a zeal for letters, collected, at a great sacrifice (30,000
gold florins), 600 manuscripts of pagan and Christian authors. He then
looked round for some receptacle where they could safely lie until his
unhappy country, if she ever regained her freedom, could reclaim her
lost literature. The Venetian government declared itself ready to erect
a suitable building, and to this day the library of St. Mark retains a
part of these treasures.[440]
The formation of the celebrated Medicean library has a history of its
own, into which we cannot here enter. The chief collector for Lorenzo
Magnifico was Johannes Lascaris. It is well known that the collection,
after the plundering in the year 1494, had to be recovered piecemeal by
the Cardinal Giovanni Medici, afterwards Leo X.
The library of Urbino,[441] now in the Vatican, was wholly the work of
the great Frederick of Montefeltro (p. 44 sqq.). As a boy he had begun
to collect; in after years he kept thirty or forty ‘scrittori’ employed
in various places, and spent in the course of time no less than 30,000
ducats on the collection. It was systematically extended and completed,
chiefly by the help of Vespasiano, and his account of it forms an ideal
picture of a library of the Renaissance. At Urbino there were catalogues
of the libraries of the Vatican, of St. Mark at Florence, of the
Visconti at Pavia, and even of the library at Oxford. It was noted with
pride that in richness and completeness none could rival Urbino.
Theology and the Middle Ages were perhaps most fully represented. There
was a complete Thomas Aquinas, a complete Albertus Magnus, a complete
Buenaventura. The collection, however, was a many-sided one, and
included every work on medicine which was then to be had. Among the
‘moderns’ the great writers of the fourteenth century--Dante and
Boccaccio, with their complete works--occupied the first place. Then
followed twenty-five select humanists, invariably with both their Latin
and Italian writings and with all their translations. Among the Greek
manuscripts the Fathers of the Church far outnumbered the rest; yet in
the list of the classics we find all the works of Sophocles, all of
Pindar, and all of Menander. The last must have quickly disappeared from
Urbino,[442] else the philologists would have soon edited it. There were
men, however, in this book-collecting age who raised a warning voice
against the vagaries of the passion. These were not the enemies of
learning, but its friends, who feared that harm would come from a
pursuit which had become a mania. Petrarch himself protested against the
fashionable folly of a useless heaping up of books; and in the same
century Giovanni Manzini ridiculed Andreolo de Ochis, a septuagenarian
from Brescia, who was ready to sacrifice house and land, his wife and
himself, to add to the stores of his library.
We have, further, a good deal of information as to the way in which
manuscripts and libraries were multiplied.[443] The purchase of an
ancient manuscript, which contained a rare, or the only complete, or the
only existing text of an old writer, was naturally a lucky accident of
which we need take no further account. Among the professional copyists
those who understood Greek took the highest place, and it was they
especially who bore the honourable name of ‘scrittori.’ Their number was
always limited, and the pay they received very large.[444] The rest,
simply called ‘copisti,’ were partly mere clerks who made their living
by such work, partly schoolmasters and needy men of learning, who
desired an addition to their income, partly monks, or even nuns, who
regarded the pursuit as a work pleasing to God. In the early stages of
the Renaissance the professional copyists were few and untrustworthy;
their ignorant and dilatory ways were bitterly complained of by
Petrarch. In the fifteenth century they were more numerous, and brought
more knowledge to their calling, but in accuracy of work they never
attained the conscientious precision of the old monks. They seem to have
done their work in a sulky and perfunctory fashion, seldom putting their
signatures at the foot of the codices, and showed no traces of that
cheerful humour, or of that proud consciousness of a beneficent
activity, which often surprises us in the French and German manuscripts
of the same period. This is more curious, as the copyists at Rome in the
time of Nicholas V. were mostly Germans or Frenchmen[445]--‘barbarians’
as the Italian humanists called them, probably men who were in search of
favours at the papal court, and who kept themselves alive meanwhile by
this means. When Cosimo de’ Medici was in a hurry to form a library for
his favourite foundation, the Badia below Fiesole, he sent for
Vespasiano, and received from him the advice to give up all thoughts of
purchasing books, since those which were worth getting could not be had
easily, but rather to make use of the copyists; whereupon Cosimo
bargained to pay him so much a day, and Vespasiano, with forty-five
writers under him, delivered 200 volumes in twenty-two months.[446] The
catalogue of the works to be copied was sent to Cosimo by Nicholas
V.[447] who wrote it with his own hand. Ecclesiastical literature and
the books needed for the choral services naturally held the chief place
in the list.
The handwriting was that beautiful modern Italian which was already in
use in the preceding century, and which makes the sight of one of the
books of that time a pleasure. Pope Nicholas V., Poggio, Giannozzo
Manetti, Niccolò Niccoli, and other distinguished scholars, themselves
wrote a beautiful hand, and desired and tolerated none other. The
decorative adjuncts, even when miniatures formed no part of them, were
full of taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts,
with the light and graceful scrolls which begin and end the lines. The
material used to write on, when the work was ordered by great or wealthy
people, was always parchment; the binding, both in the Vatican and at
Urbino, was a uniform crimson velvet with silver clasps. Where there was
so much care to show honour to the contents of a book by the beauty of
its outward form, it is intelligible that the sudden appearance of
printed books was greeted at first with anything but favour. The envoys
of Cardinal Bessarion, when they saw for the first time a printed book
in the house of Constantino Lascaris, laughed at the discovery ‘made
among the barbarians in some German city,’ and Frederick of Urbino
‘would have been ashamed to own a printed book.’[448]
But the weary copyists--not those who lived by the trade, but the many
who were forced to copy a book in order to have it--rejoiced at the
German invention,[449] ‘notwithstanding the praises and encouragements
which the poets awarded to caligraphy.’ It was soon applied in Italy to
the multiplication first of the Latin and then of the Greek authors, and
for a long period nowhere but in Italy, yet it spread with by no means
the rapidity which might have been expected from the general enthusiasm
for these works. After a while the modern relation between author and
publisher began to develop itself,[450] and under Alexander VI., when it
was no longer easy to destroy a book, as Cosimo could make Filelfo
promise to do,[451] the prohibitive censorship made its appearance.
The growth of textual criticism which accompanied the advancing study of
languages and antiquity, belongs as little to the subject of this book
as the history of scholarship in general. We are here occupied, not with
the learning of the Italians in itself, but with the reproduction of
antiquity in literature and life. One word more on the studies
themselves may still be permissible.
Greek scholarship was chiefly confined to Florence and to the fifteenth
and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It was never so general as
Latin scholarship, partly because of the far greater difficulties which
it involved, partly and still more because of the consciousness of Roman
supremacy and an instinctive hatred of the Greeks more than
counterbalanced the attractions which Greek literature had for the
Italians.[452]
The impulse which proceeded from Petrarch and Boccaccio, superficial as
was their own acquaintance with Greek, was powerful, but did not tell
immediately on their contemporaries;[453] on the other hand, the study
of Greek literature died out about the year 1520[454] with the last of
the colony of learned Greek exiles, and it was a singular piece of
fortune that northerners like Agricola, Reuchlin, Erasmus, the Stephani,
and Budæus had meanwhile made themselves masters of the language. That
colony had begun with Manuel Chrysoloras and his relation John, and with
George of Trebizond. Then followed, about and after the time of the
conquest of Constantinople, John Argyropulos, Theodore Gaza, Demetrios
Chalcondylas, who brought up his sons Theophilos and Basilios to be
excellent Hellenists, Andronikos Kallistos, Marcos Musuros and the
family of the Lascaris, not to mention others. But after the subjection
of Greece by the Turks was completed, the succession of scholars was
maintained only by the sons of the fugitives and perhaps here and there
by some Candian or Cyprian refugee. That the decay of Hellenistic
studies began about the time of the death of Leo X. was owing partly to
a general change of intellectual attitude,[455] and to a certain satiety
of classical influences which now made itself felt; but its coincidence
with the death of the Greek fugitives was not wholly a matter of
accident. The study of Greek among the Italians appears, if we take the
year 1500 as our standard, to have been pursued with extraordinary zeal.
The youths of that day learned to speak the language, and half a century
later, like the Popes Paul III. and Paul IV., they could still do so in
their old age.[456] But this sort of mastery of the study presupposes
intercourse with native Greeks.
Besides Florence, Rome and Padua nearly always maintained paid teachers
of Greek, and Verona, Ferrara, Venice, Perugia, Pavia and other cities
occasional teachers.[457] Hellenistic studies owed a priceless debt to
the press of Aldo Manucci at Venice, where the most important and
voluminous writers were for the first time printed in the original. Aldo
ventured his all in the enterprise; he was an editor and publisher whose
like the world has rarely seen.[458]
Along with this classical revival, Oriental studies now assumed
considerable proportions.[459] Dante himself set a high value on Hebrew,
though we cannot suppose that he understood it. From the fifteenth
century onwards scholars were no longer content merely to speak of it
with respect, but applied themselves to a thorough study of it. This
scientific interest in the language was, however, from the beginning
either furthered or hindered by religious considerations. Poggio, when
resting from the labours of the Council of Constance, learnt Hebrew at
that place and at Baden from a baptized Jew, whom he describes as
‘stupid, peevish, and ignorant, like most converted Jews;’ but he had to
defend his conduct against Lionardo Bruni, who endeavoured to prove to
him that Hebrew was useless or even injurious. The controversial
writings of the great Florentine statesman and scholar, Giannozzo
Manetti[460] (d. 1459) against the Jews afford an early instance of a
complete mastery of their language and science. His son Agnolo was from
his childhood instructed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The father, at the
bidding of Nicholas V., translated the Psalms, but had to defend the
principles of his translation in a work addressed to Alfonso.
Commissioned by the same Pope, who had offered a reward of 5,000 ducats
for the discovery of the original Hebrew text of the Evangelist Matthew,
he made a collection of Hebrew manuscripts, which is still preserved in
the Vatican, and began a great apologetic work against the Jews.[461]
The study of Hebrew was thus enlisted in the service of the Church. The
Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari learnt the language,[462] and Pope
Sixtus IV., who erected the building for the Vatican library, and added
to the collection extensive purchases of his own, took into his service
‘scrittori’ (_librarios_) for Hebrew as well as for Greek and
Latin.[463] The study of the language now became more general; Hebrew
manuscripts were collected, and in some libraries, like that of Urbino,
formed a specially valuable part of the rich treasure there stored up;
the printing of Hebrew books began in Italy in 1475, and made the study
easier both to the Italians themselves and to the other nations of
Europe, who for many years drew their supply from Italy. Soon there was
no good-sized town where there were not individuals who were masters of
the language and many anxious to learn it, and in 1488 a chair for
Hebrew was founded at Bologna, and another in 1514 at Rome. The study
became so popular that it was even preferred to Greek.[464][465]
Among all those who busied themselves with Hebrew in the fifteenth
century, no one was of more importance than Pico della Mirandola. He was
not satisfied with a knowledge of the Hebrew grammar and Scriptures, but
penetrated into the Jewish Cabbalah and even made himself familiar with
the literature of the Talmud. That such pursuits, though they may not
have gone very far, were at all possible to him, he owed to his Jewish
teachers. Most of the instruction in Hebrew was in fact given by Jews,
some of whom, though generally not till after conversion to
Christianity, became distinguished University professors and
much-esteemed writers.[466]
Among the Oriental languages, Arabic was studied as well as Hebrew. The
science of medicine, no longer satisfied with the older Latin
translations of the great Arabian physicians, had constant recourse to
the originals, to which an easy access was offered by the Venetian
consulates in the East, where Italian doctors were regularly kept. But
the Arabian scholarship of the Renaissance is only a feeble echo of the
influence which Arabian civilisation in the Middle Ages exercised over
Italy and the whole cultivated world--an influence which not only
preceded that of the Renaissance, but in some respects was hostile to
it, and which did not surrender without a struggle the place which it
had long and vigorously asserted. Hieronimo Ramusio, a Venetian
physician, translated a great part of Avicenna from the Arabic and died
at Damascus in 1486. Andrea Mongajo of Belluno,[467] a disciple of the
same Avicenna, lived long at Damascus, learnt Arabic, and improved on
his master. The Venetian government afterwards appointed him as
professor of this subject at Padua. The example set by Venice was
followed by other governments. Princes and wealthy men rivalled one
another in collecting Arabic manuscripts. The first Arabian
printing-press was begun at Fano under Julius II. and consecrated in
1514 under Leo X.[468]
We must here linger for a moment over Pico della Mirandola, before
passing on to the general effects of humanism. He was the only man who
loudly and vigorously defended the truth and science of all ages against
the one-sided worship of classical antiquity.[469] He knew how to value
not only Averroes and the Jewish investigators, but also the scholastic
writers of the Middle Ages, according to the matter of their writings.
He seems to hear them say, ‘We shall live for ever, not in the schools
of word-catchers, but in the circle of the wise, where they talk not of
the mother of Andromache or of the sons of Niobe, but of the deeper
causes of things human and divine; he who looks closely will see that
even the barbarians had intelligence (_mercurium_), not on the tongue
but in the breast.’ Himself writing a vigorous and not inelegant Latin,
and a master of clear exposition, he despised the purism of pedants and
the current over-estimate of borrowed forms, especially when joined, as
they often are, with one-sidedness, and involving indifference to the
wider truth of the things themselves. Looking at Pico, we can guess at
the lofty flight which Italian philosophy would have taken had not the
counter-reformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the
people.