FOURTH BOOK.THE MEDICI IN THEIR RELATION TOLITERATURE AND ART.FIRST PART.THE HUMANISTS AND POPULAR LITERATURE TO THE SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.CHAPTER I.COMMENCEMENT OF HUMANISM. COLUCCIO SALUTATI AND POGGIO BRACCIOLINI. THE BOOK TRADE.Duringthe first half of the fifteenth century the great revolution was accomplished which introduced a new era. The antique classical world entered the lists against the Middle Ages. The contest had already begun before events which properly extended beyond the learned circles produced a swift and irresistible reaction. At a time when ecclesiastical schism was already throwing its dark shadow over the general disturbances in Western Christendom, two great poets, Petrarch and Boccaccio, died, after having brought the ancient world, of which they themselves possessed but an imperfect view, closer to their contemporaries and those who followed them than had been the case during the eight centuries which had elapsed since Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Between the first humanists who pursued the road taken by these writers and the faction who held fast to ecclesiastical and learned traditions, a contest had arisen which, properly speaking, never ceased in life and literature, however different might be the forms under which it was designated. The Florentine chancellor, Coluccio Salutati, to whom inthe latter third of the fourteenth century the first place belongs in State documents and learned treatises, had displayed more Pagan learning than Christian views in his book ‘De Fato et Fortuna.’ The Dominican Fra Giovanni Dominici, afterwards cardinal of Ragusa, in his treatise on family life,[325]spoke against a school which made youths, nay children, ‘rather heathen than Christian, taught them rather of Jupiter and Saturn, Venus and Cybele, than of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; would poison the tender and helpless minds by sacrifices before false Gods, and train Nature’s apostate from the truth in the bosom of infidelity.’Another contest was beginning now. The Latin language asserted an exclusive pre-eminence in the learned world. It had discarded the ungainly form of preceding centuries; but although it claimed to emulate Cicero and Virgil and renew the Augustan age, many decades were to pass before learning clothed itself in the originality of a living idiom. The authors of the time we are now considering, however high they stand above those of the preceding epoch, among whom only Petrarch possessed a shadow of true Latinity, were never otherwise than imitators. Their true services are not to be sought for in their own intellectual work as poets, rhetoricians, historians, or letter-writers. While they retarded, if they did not prevent, the development of the vulgar tongue, they created nothing new in the direction they themselves pursued. The last third of the fifteenth century was the first to witness the sudden and simultaneous revival of Latin and Italian poetry. The first assumed a peculiar tone, while the latter rose to a lofty flight by an independent use of the models of its grand youth and a liberal appropriation of new elements. The literature of the first epoch of humanism had played its part then. Its importance did not so much consist in original productions as in the ground it prepared and fertilised, in the ideas it smoothedthe way for, the intellectual material which it collected, and in the superannuated things which it abolished for ever. This limited and conditional recognition, which its representatives would have proudly repelled at a time when they thought they governed the world, and really did so in certain respects, includes both praise and blame. For while the revival of classical spirit and forms called forth in the plastic arts great works which will endure through all centuries by their own merits, it left not a single independent typical monument in literature.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, especiallythe 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 Florentinesby 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 tohave 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 ofOrdinamenta 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 thanbeen 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 lectureson 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 Greekclassics, 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 thisgreat 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 extendedover 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 preventingharm 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. Thestationariiat 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 fourteenthcentury) 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, becauseof 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 thenalready 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.
FOURTH BOOK.THE MEDICI IN THEIR RELATION TOLITERATURE AND ART.FIRST PART.THE HUMANISTS AND POPULAR LITERATURE TO THE SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.CHAPTER I.COMMENCEMENT OF HUMANISM. COLUCCIO SALUTATI AND POGGIO BRACCIOLINI. THE BOOK TRADE.Duringthe first half of the fifteenth century the great revolution was accomplished which introduced a new era. The antique classical world entered the lists against the Middle Ages. The contest had already begun before events which properly extended beyond the learned circles produced a swift and irresistible reaction. At a time when ecclesiastical schism was already throwing its dark shadow over the general disturbances in Western Christendom, two great poets, Petrarch and Boccaccio, died, after having brought the ancient world, of which they themselves possessed but an imperfect view, closer to their contemporaries and those who followed them than had been the case during the eight centuries which had elapsed since Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Between the first humanists who pursued the road taken by these writers and the faction who held fast to ecclesiastical and learned traditions, a contest had arisen which, properly speaking, never ceased in life and literature, however different might be the forms under which it was designated. The Florentine chancellor, Coluccio Salutati, to whom inthe latter third of the fourteenth century the first place belongs in State documents and learned treatises, had displayed more Pagan learning than Christian views in his book ‘De Fato et Fortuna.’ The Dominican Fra Giovanni Dominici, afterwards cardinal of Ragusa, in his treatise on family life,[325]spoke against a school which made youths, nay children, ‘rather heathen than Christian, taught them rather of Jupiter and Saturn, Venus and Cybele, than of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; would poison the tender and helpless minds by sacrifices before false Gods, and train Nature’s apostate from the truth in the bosom of infidelity.’Another contest was beginning now. The Latin language asserted an exclusive pre-eminence in the learned world. It had discarded the ungainly form of preceding centuries; but although it claimed to emulate Cicero and Virgil and renew the Augustan age, many decades were to pass before learning clothed itself in the originality of a living idiom. The authors of the time we are now considering, however high they stand above those of the preceding epoch, among whom only Petrarch possessed a shadow of true Latinity, were never otherwise than imitators. Their true services are not to be sought for in their own intellectual work as poets, rhetoricians, historians, or letter-writers. While they retarded, if they did not prevent, the development of the vulgar tongue, they created nothing new in the direction they themselves pursued. The last third of the fifteenth century was the first to witness the sudden and simultaneous revival of Latin and Italian poetry. The first assumed a peculiar tone, while the latter rose to a lofty flight by an independent use of the models of its grand youth and a liberal appropriation of new elements. The literature of the first epoch of humanism had played its part then. Its importance did not so much consist in original productions as in the ground it prepared and fertilised, in the ideas it smoothedthe way for, the intellectual material which it collected, and in the superannuated things which it abolished for ever. This limited and conditional recognition, which its representatives would have proudly repelled at a time when they thought they governed the world, and really did so in certain respects, includes both praise and blame. For while the revival of classical spirit and forms called forth in the plastic arts great works which will endure through all centuries by their own merits, it left not a single independent typical monument in literature.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, especiallythe 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 Florentinesby 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 tohave 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 ofOrdinamenta 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 thanbeen 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 lectureson 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 Greekclassics, 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 thisgreat 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 extendedover 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 preventingharm 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. Thestationariiat 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 fourteenthcentury) 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, becauseof 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 thenalready 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.
FOURTH BOOK.
THE MEDICI IN THEIR RELATION TOLITERATURE AND ART.
FIRST PART.
THE HUMANISTS AND POPULAR LITERATURE TO THE SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
COMMENCEMENT OF HUMANISM. COLUCCIO SALUTATI AND POGGIO BRACCIOLINI. THE BOOK TRADE.
Duringthe first half of the fifteenth century the great revolution was accomplished which introduced a new era. The antique classical world entered the lists against the Middle Ages. The contest had already begun before events which properly extended beyond the learned circles produced a swift and irresistible reaction. At a time when ecclesiastical schism was already throwing its dark shadow over the general disturbances in Western Christendom, two great poets, Petrarch and Boccaccio, died, after having brought the ancient world, of which they themselves possessed but an imperfect view, closer to their contemporaries and those who followed them than had been the case during the eight centuries which had elapsed since Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Between the first humanists who pursued the road taken by these writers and the faction who held fast to ecclesiastical and learned traditions, a contest had arisen which, properly speaking, never ceased in life and literature, however different might be the forms under which it was designated. The Florentine chancellor, Coluccio Salutati, to whom inthe latter third of the fourteenth century the first place belongs in State documents and learned treatises, had displayed more Pagan learning than Christian views in his book ‘De Fato et Fortuna.’ The Dominican Fra Giovanni Dominici, afterwards cardinal of Ragusa, in his treatise on family life,[325]spoke against a school which made youths, nay children, ‘rather heathen than Christian, taught them rather of Jupiter and Saturn, Venus and Cybele, than of God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; would poison the tender and helpless minds by sacrifices before false Gods, and train Nature’s apostate from the truth in the bosom of infidelity.’
Another contest was beginning now. The Latin language asserted an exclusive pre-eminence in the learned world. It had discarded the ungainly form of preceding centuries; but although it claimed to emulate Cicero and Virgil and renew the Augustan age, many decades were to pass before learning clothed itself in the originality of a living idiom. The authors of the time we are now considering, however high they stand above those of the preceding epoch, among whom only Petrarch possessed a shadow of true Latinity, were never otherwise than imitators. Their true services are not to be sought for in their own intellectual work as poets, rhetoricians, historians, or letter-writers. While they retarded, if they did not prevent, the development of the vulgar tongue, they created nothing new in the direction they themselves pursued. The last third of the fifteenth century was the first to witness the sudden and simultaneous revival of Latin and Italian poetry. The first assumed a peculiar tone, while the latter rose to a lofty flight by an independent use of the models of its grand youth and a liberal appropriation of new elements. The literature of the first epoch of humanism had played its part then. Its importance did not so much consist in original productions as in the ground it prepared and fertilised, in the ideas it smoothedthe way for, the intellectual material which it collected, and in the superannuated things which it abolished for ever. This limited and conditional recognition, which its representatives would have proudly repelled at a time when they thought they governed the world, and really did so in certain respects, includes both praise and blame. For while the revival of classical spirit and forms called forth in the plastic arts great works which will endure through all centuries by their own merits, it left not a single independent typical monument in literature.
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, especiallythe 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 Florentinesby 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 tohave 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 ofOrdinamenta 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 thanbeen 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 lectureson 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 Greekclassics, 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 thisgreat 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 extendedover 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 preventingharm 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. Thestationariiat 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 fourteenthcentury) 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, becauseof 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 thenalready 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.