The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy

‘Artes—Quis Labor est fessis demptus ab Articulis’ in a poem by Robertus Ursus about 1470, Rerum Ital. Script, ex Codd. Fiorent. tom, ii. col. 693. He rejoices rather too hastily over the rapid spread of classical literature which was hoped for. Comp. Libri, Hist. des Sciences Mathématiques, ii. 278 sqq. (See also the eulogy of Lor. Valla, Hist. Zeitschr. xxxii. 62.) For the printers at Rome (the first were Germans: Hahn, Pannartz, Schweinheim), see Gaspar. Veron. Vita Pauli II. in Murat. iii. ii. col. 1046; and Laire, Spec. Hist. Typographiæ Romanae, xv. sec. Romæ, 1778; Gregorovius, vii. 525-33. For the first Privilegium in Venice, see Marin Sanudo, in Muratori, xxii. col. 1189.

451

Something of the sort had already existed in the age of manuscripts. See Vespas. Fior. p. 656, on the Cronaco del Mondo of Zembino of Pistoia.

452

Fabroni, Laurent. Magn. Adnot. 212. It happened in the case of the libel. De Exilio.

453

Even in Petrarch the consciousness of this superiority of Italians over Greeks is often to be noticed: Epp. Fam. lib. i. ep. 3; Epp. Sen. lib. xii. ep. 2; he praises the Greeks reluctantly: Carmina, lib. iii. 30 (ed. Rossetti, vol. ii. p. 342). A century later, Æneas Sylvius writes (Comm. to Panormita, ‘De Dictis et Factis Alfonsi,’ Append.): ‘Alfonsus tanto est Socrate major quanto gravior Romanus homo quam Græcus putatur.’ In accordance with this feeling the study of Greek was thought little of. From a document made use of below, written about 1460, it appears that Porcellio and Tomaso Seneca tried to resist the rising influence of Greek. Similarly, Paolo Cortese (1490) was averse to Greek, lest the hitherto exclusive authority of Latin should be impaired, De Hominibus Doctis, p. 20. For Greek studies in Italy, see esp. the learned work of Favre, Mélanges d’Hist. Liter. i. passim.

454

See above p. 187, and comp. C. Voigt, Wiederbelebung, 323 sqq.

455

The dying out of these Greeks is mentioned by Pierius Valerian, De Infelicitate Literat. in speaking of Lascaris. And Paulus Jovius, at the end of his Elogia Literaria, says of the Germans, ‘Quum literæ non latinæ modo cum pudore nostro, sed græcæ et hebraicæ in eorum terras fatali commigratione transierint’ (about 1450). Similarly, sixty years before (1482), Joh. Argyropulos had exclaimed, when he heard young Reuchlin translate Thucydides in his lecture-room at Rome, ‘Græcia nostra exilio transvolavit Alpes.’ Geiger, Reuchlin (Lpzg. 1871), pp. 26 sqq. Burchhardt, 273. A remarkable passage is to be found in Jov. Pontanus, Antonius, opp. iv. p. 203: ‘In Græcia magis nunc Turcaicum discas quam Græcum. Quicquid enim doctorum habent Græcæ disciplinæ, in Italia nobiscum victitat.

456

Ranke, Päpste, i. 486 sqq. Comp. the end of this part of our work.

457

Tommaso Gar, Relazioni della Corte di Roma, i. pp. 338, 379.

458

George of Trebizond, teacher of rhetoric at Venice, with a salary of 150 ducats a year (see Malipiero, Arch. Stor. vii. ii. p. 653). For the Greek chair at Perugia, see Arch. Stor. xvi. ii. p. 19 of the Introduction. In the case of Rimini, there is some doubt whether Greek was taught or not. Comp. Anecd. Litt. ii. p. 300. At Bologna, the centre of juristic studies, Aurispa had but little success. Details on the subject in Malagola.

459

Exhaustive information on the subject in the admirable work of A. F. Didot, Alde Manuce et l’Héllenisme à Venise, Paris, 1875.

460

For what follows see A. de Gubernatis, Matériaux pour servir à l’Histoire des Études Orientales en Italie, Paris, Florence, &c., 1876. Additions by Soave in the Bolletino Italiano degli Studi Orientali, i. 178 sqq. More precise details below.

461

See below.

462

See Commentario della Vita di Messer Gianozzo Manetti, scritto da Vespasiano Bisticci, Torino, 1862, esp. pp. 11, 44, 91 sqq.

463

Vesp. Fior. p. 320. A. Trav. Epist. lib. xi. 16.

464

Platina, Vita Sixti IV. p. 332.

465

Benedictus Faleus, De Origine Hebraicarum Græcarum Latinarumque Literarum, Naples, 1520.

466

For Dante, see Wegele, Dante, 2nd ed. p. 268, and Lasinio, Dante e le Lingue semitiche in the Rivista Orientale (Flor. 1867-8). On Poggio, Opera, p. 297; Lion. Bruni, Epist. lib. ix. 12, comp. Gregorovius, vii. 555, and Shepherd-Tonelli, Vita di Poggio, i. 65. The letter of Poggio to Niccoli, in which he treats of Hebrew, has been lately published in French and Latin under the title, Les Bains de Bade par Pogge, by Antony Méray, Paris, 1876. Poggio desired to know on what principles Jerome translated the Bible, while Bruni maintained that, now that Jerome’s translation was in existence, distrust was shown to it by learning Hebrew. For Manetti as a collector of Hebrew MSS. see Steinschneider, in the work quoted below. In the library at Urbino there were in all sixty-one Hebrew manuscripts. Among them a Bible ‘opus mirabile et integrum, cum glossis mirabiliter scriptus in modo avium, arborum et animalium in maximo volumine, ut vix a tribus hominibus feratur.’ These, as appears from Assemanni’s list, are now mostly in the Vatican. On the first printing in Hebrew, see Steinschneider and Cassel, Jud. Typographic in Esch. u. Gruber, Realencyclop. sect. ii. bd. 28, p. 34, and Catal. Bodl. by Steinschneider, 1852-60, pp. 2821-2866. It is characteristic that of the two first printers one belonged to Mantua, the other to Reggio in Calabria, so that the printing of Hebrew books began almost contemporaneously at the two extremities of Italy. In Mantua the printer was a Jewish physician, who was helped by his wife. It may be mentioned as a curiosity that in the Hypnerotomachia of Polifilo, written 1467, printed 1499, fol. 68 a, there is a short passage in Hebrew; otherwise no Hebrew occurs in the Aldine editions before 1501. The Hebrew scholars in Italy are given by De Gubernatis (p. 80 (#x6_x_6_i6)), but authorities are not quoted for them singly. (Marco Lippomanno is omitted; comp. Steinschneider in the book given below.) Paolo de Canale is mentioned as a learned Hebraist by Pier. Valerian. De Infel. Literat. ed. Mencken, p. 296; in 1488 Professor in Bologna, Mag. Vicentius; comp. Costituzione, discipline e riforme dell’antico studio Bolognese. Memoria del Prof. Luciano Scarabelli, Piacenza, 1876; in 1514 Professor in Rome, Agarius Guidacerius, acc. to Gregorovius, viii. 292, and the passages there quoted. On Guid. see Steinschneider, Bibliogr. Handbuch, Leipzig, 1859, pp. 56, 157-161.

467

The literary activity of the Jews in Italy is too great and of too wide an influence to be passed over altogether in silence. The following paragraphs, which, not to overload the text, I have relegated to the notes, are wholly the substance of communications made me by Dr. M. Steinschneider, of Berlin, to whom I [Dr. Ludwig Geiger] here take the opportunity of expressing my thanks for his constant and friendly help. He has given exhaustive evidence on the subject in his profound and instructive treatise, ‘Letteratura Italiana dei Giudei,’ in the review Il Buonarotti, vols. vi. viii. xi. xii.; Rome, 1871-77 (also printed separately); to which, once for all, I refer the reader.

There were many Jews living in Rome at the time of the Second Temple. They had so thoroughly adopted the language and civilisation prevailing in Italy, that even on their tombs they used not Hebrew, but Latin and Greek inscriptions (communicated by Garucci, see Steinschneider, Hebr. Bibliogr. vi. p. 102, 1863). In Lower Italy, especially, Greek learning survived during the Middle Ages among the inhabitants generally, and particularly among the Jews, of whom some are said to have taught at the University of Salerno, and to have rivalled the Christians in literary productiveness (comp. Steinschneider, ‘Donnolo,’ in Virchow’s Archiv, bd. 39, 40). This supremacy of Greek culture lasted till the Saracens conquered Lower Italy. But before this conquest the Jews of Middle Italy had been striving to equal or surpass their bretheren of the South. Jewish learning centred in Rome, and from there spread, as early as the sixteenth century, to Cordova, Kairowan, and South Germany. By means of these emigrants, Italian Judaism became the teacher of the whole race. Through its works, especially through the work Aruch of Nathan ben Jechiel (1101), a great dictionary to the Talmud, the Midraschim, and the Thargum, ‘which, though not informed by a genuine scientific spirit, offers so rich a store of matter and rests on such early authorities, that its treasures have even now not been wholly exhausted,’ it exercised indirectly a great influence (Abraham Geiger, Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte, Breslau, bd. ii. 1865, p. 170; and the same author’s Nachgelassene Schriften, bd. ii. Berlin, 1875, pp. 129 and 154). A little later, in the thirteenth century, the Jewish literature in Italy brought Jews and Christians into contact, and received through Frederick II., and still more perhaps through his son Manfred, a kind of official sanction. Of this contact we have evidence in the fact that an Italian, Niccolò di Giovinazzo, studied with a Jew, Moses ben Salomo, the Latin translation of the famous work of Maimonides, More Nebuchim; of this sanction, in the fact that the Emperor, who was distinguished for his freethinking as much as for his fondness for Oriental studies, probably was the cause of this Latin translation being made, and summoned the famous Anatoli from Provence into Italy, to translate works of Averroes into Hebrew (comp. Steinschneider, Hebr. Bibliogr. xv. 86, and Renan, L’Averroes et l’Averroisme, third edition, Paris, 1866, p. 290). These measures prove the acquaintance of early Jews with Latin, which rendered intercourse possible between them and Christians—an intercourse which bore sometimes a friendly and sometimes a polemical character. Still more than Anatoli, Hillel b. Samuel, in the latter half of the thirteenth century, devoted himself to Latin literature; he studied in Spain, returned to Italy, and here made many translations from Latin into Hebrew; among them of writings of Hippocrates in a Latin version. (This was printed 1647 by Gaiotius, and passed for his own.) In this translation he introduced a few Italian words by way of explanation, and thus perhaps, or by his whole literary procedure, laid himself open to the reproach of despising Jewish doctrines.

But the Jews went further than this. At the end of the thirteenth and in the fourteenth centuries, they drew so near to Christian science and to the representatives of the culture of the Renaissance, that one of them, Giuda Romano, in a series of hitherto unprinted writings, laboured zealously at the scholastic philosophy, and in one treatise used Italian words to explain Hebrew expressions. He is one of the first to do so (Steinschneider, Giuda Romano, Rome, 1870). Another, Giuda’s cousin Manoello, a friend of Dante, wrote in imitation of him a sort of Divine Comedy in Hebrew, in which he extols Dante, whose death he also bewailed in an Italian sonnet (Abraham Geiger, Jüd. Zeitsch. v. 286-331, Breslau, 1867). A third, Mose Riete, born towards the end of the century, wrote works in Italian (a specimen in the Catalogue of Hebrew MSS., Leyden, 1858). In the fifteenth century we can clearly recognise the influence of the Renaissance in Messer Leon, a Jewish writer, who, in his Rhetoric, uses Quintilian and Cicero, as well as Jewish authorities. One of the most famous Jewish writers in Italy in the fifteenth century was Eliah del Medigo, a philosopher who taught publicly as a Jew in Padua and Florence, and was once chosen by the Venetian Senate as arbitrator in a philosophical dispute (Abr. Geiger, Nachgelassene Schriften, Berlin, 1876, bd. iii. 3). Eliah del Medigo was the teacher of Pico della Mirandola; besides him, Jochanan Alemanno (comp. Steinschneider, Polem. u. Apolog. Lit. Lpzg. 1877, anh. 7, § 25). The list of learned Jews in Italy may be closed by Kalonymos ben David and Abraham de Balmes (d. 1523), to whom the greater part of the translations of Averroes from Hebrew into Latin is due, which were still publicly read at Padua in the seventeenth century. To this scholar may be added the Jewish Aldus, Gerson Soncino, who not only made his press the centre of Jewish printing, but, by publishing Greek works, trespassed on the ground of the great Aldus himself (Steinschneider, Gerson Soncino und Aldus Manutius, Berlin, 1858).

468

Pierius Valerian. De Infelic. Lit. ed. Mencken, 301, speaking of Mongajo. Gubernatis, p. 184, identifies him with Andrea Alpago, of Bellemo, said to have also studied Arabian literature, and to have travelled in the East. On Arabic studies generally, Gubernatis, pp. 173 sqq. For a translation made 1341 from Arabic into Italian, comp. Narducci, Intorno ad una tradizione italiana di una composizione astronomica di Alfonso X. rè di Castiglia, Roma 1865. On Ramusio, see Sansovino, Venezia, fol. 250.

469

Gubernatis, p. 188. The first book contains Christian prayers in Arabic; the first Italian translations of the Koran appeared in 1547. In 1499 we meet with a few not very successful Arabic types in the work of Polifilo, b. 7 a. For the beginnings of Egyptian studies, see Gregorovius, viii. p. 304.

470

Especially in the important letter of the year 1485 to Ermolao Barbaro, in Ang. Politian. Epistolæ, l. ix. Comp. Jo. Pici, Oratio de Hominis Dignitate. For this discourse, see the end of part iv.; on Pico himself more will be given in part vi. chap. 4.

471

Their estimate of themselves is indicated by Poggio (De Avaritia, fol. 2), according to whom only such persons could say that they had lived (se vixisse) who had written learned and eloquent books in Latin or translated Greek into Latin.

472

Esp. Libri, Histoires des Sciences Mathém. ii. 159 sqq., 258 sqq.

473

Purgatorio, xviii. contains striking instances. Mary hastens over the mountains, Cæsar to Spain; Mary is poor and Fabricius disinterested. We may here remark on the chronological introduction of the Sibyls into the profane history of antiquity as attempted by Uberti in his Dittamondo (i. cap. 14, 15), about 1360.

474