The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy

The library of Urbino,[442 - Vespas. Fior. pp. 124 sqq., and ‘Inventario della Libreria Urbinata compilata nel Secolo XV. da Federigo Veterano, bibliotecario di Federigo I. da Montefeltro Duca d’Urbino,’ given by C. Guasti in tbe Giornale Storico degli Archivi Toscani, vi. (1862), 127-147 and vii. (1863) 46-55, 130-154. For contemporary opinions on the library, see Favre, Mélanges d’Hist. Lit. i. 127, note 6. The following is the substance of Dr. Geiger’s remarks on the subject of the old authors:—For the Medicean Library comp. Delle condicioni e delle vicende della libreria medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508 ricerche di Enea Piccolomini, Arch. stor. ital., 265 sqq., 3 serie, vol. xix. pp. 101-129,254-281, xx. 51-94, xxi. 102-112, 282-296. Dr. Geiger does not undertake an estimate of the relative values of the various rare and almost unknown works contained in the library, nor is he able to state where they are now to be found. He remarks that information as to Greece is much fuller than as to Italy, which is a characteristic mark of the time. The catalogue contains editions of the Bible, of single books of it, with text and annotations, also Greek and Roman works in their then most complete forms, together with some Hebrew books—tractatus quidam rabbinorum hebr.—with much modern work, chiefly in Latin, and with not a little in Italian.Dr. Geiger doubts the absolute accuracy of Vespasiano Fiorentino’s catalogue of the library at Urbino. See the German edition, i. 313, 314. [S.G.C.M.]] now in the Vatican, was wholly the work of the great Frederick of Montefeltro (p. 44 (#x5_x_5_i5) sqq.). As a boy he had begun to collect; in after years he kept thirty or forty ‘scrittori’ employed in various places, and spent in the course of time no less than 30,000 ducats on the collection. It was systematically extended and completed, chiefly by the help of Vespasiano, and his account of it forms an ideal picture of a library of the Renaissance. At Urbino there were catalogues of the libraries of the Vatican, of St. Mark at Florence, of the Visconti at Pavia, and even of the library at Oxford. It was noted with pride that in richness and completeness none could rival Urbino. Theology and the Middle Ages were perhaps most fully represented. There was a complete Thomas Aquinas, a complete Albertus Magnus, a complete Buenaventura. The collection, however, was a many-sided one, and included every work on medicine which was then to be had. Among the ‘moderns’ the great writers of the fourteenth century—Dante and Boccaccio, with their complete works—occupied the first place. Then followed twenty-five select humanists, invariably with both their Latin and Italian writings and with all their translations. Among the Greek manuscripts the Fathers of the Church far outnumbered the rest; yet in the list of the classics we find all the works of Sophocles, all of Pindar, and all of Menander. The last must have quickly disappeared from Urbino,[443 - Perhaps at the capture of Urbino by the troops of Cæsar Borgia. The existence of the manuscript has been doubted; but I cannot believe that Vespasiano would have spoken of the gnomic extracts from Menander, which do not amount to more than a couple of hundred verses, as ‘tutte le opere,’ nor have mentioned them in the list of comprehensive manuscripts, even though he had before him only our present Pindar and Sophocles. It is not inconceivable that this Menander may some day come to light.[The catalogue of the library at Urbino (see foregoing note), which dates back to the fifteenth century, is not perfectly in accordance with Vespasiano’s report, and with the remarks of Dr. Burckhardt upon it. As an official document, it deserves greater credit than Vespasiano’s description, which, like most of his descriptions, cannot be acquitted of a certain inaccuracy in detail and tendency to over-colouring. In this catalogue no mention is made of the manuscript of Menander. Mai’s doubt as to its existence is therefore justified. Instead of ‘all the works of Pindar,’ we here find: ‘Pindaris Olimpia et Pithia.’ The catalogue makes no distinction between ancient and modern books, contains the works of Dante (among others, Comœdiæ Thusco Carmine), and Boccaccio, in a very imperfect form; those of Petrarch, however, in all completeness. It may be added that this catalogue mentions many humanistic writings which have hitherto remained unknown and unprinted, that it contains collections of the privileges of the princes of Montefeltro, and carefully enumerates the dedications offered by translators or original writers to Federigo of Urbino.—L. G.]] else the philologists would have soon edited it. There were men, however, in this book-collecting age who raised a warning voice against the vagaries of the passion. These were not the enemies of learning, but its friends, who feared that harm would come from a pursuit which had become a mania. Petrarch himself protested against the fashionable folly of a useless heaping up of books; and in the same century Giovanni Manzini ridiculed Andreolo de Ochis, a septuagenarian from Brescia, who was ready to sacrifice house and land, his wife and himself, to add to the stores of his library.

We have, further, a good deal of information as to the way in which manuscripts and libraries were multiplied.[444 - For what follows and in part for what has gone before, see W. Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter, 2nd. ed. Leipzig, 1875, pp. 392 sqq., 405 sqq., 505. Comp. also the poem, De Officio Scribæ, of Phil. Beroaldus, who, however, is rather speaking of the public scrivener.] The purchase of an ancient manuscript, which contained a rare, or the only complete, or the only existing text of an old writer, was naturally a lucky accident of which we need take no further account. Among the professional copyists those who understood Greek took the highest place, and it was they especially who bore the honourable name of ‘scrittori.’ Their number was always limited, and the pay they received very large.[445 - When Piero de’ Medici, at the death of Matthias Corvinus, the book-loving King of Hungary, declared that the ‘scrittori’ must now lower their charges, since they would otherwise find no further employment (Scil. except in Italy), he can only have meant the Greek copyists, as the caligraphists, to whom one might be tempted to refer his words, continued to be numerous throughout all Italy. Fabroni, Laurent. Magn. Adnot. 156 Comp. Adnot. 154.] The rest, simply called ‘copisti,’ were partly mere clerks who made their living by such work, partly schoolmasters and needy men of learning, who desired an addition to their income, partly monks, or even nuns, who regarded the pursuit as a work pleasing to God. In the early stages of the Renaissance the professional copyists were few and untrustworthy; their ignorant and dilatory ways were bitterly complained of by Petrarch. In the fifteenth century they were more numerous, and brought more knowledge to their calling, but in accuracy of work they never attained the conscientious precision of the old monks. They seem to have done their work in a sulky and perfunctory fashion, seldom putting their signatures at the foot of the codices, and showed no traces of that cheerful humour, or of that proud consciousness of a beneficent activity, which often surprises us in the French and German manuscripts of the same period. This is more curious, as the copyists at Rome in the time of Nicholas V. were mostly Germans or Frenchmen[446 - Gaye, Carteggio, i. p. 164. A letter of the year 1455 under Calixtus III. The famous miniature Bible of Urbino is written by a Frenchman, a workman of Vespasiano’s. See D’Agincourt, La Peinture, tab. 78. On German copyists in Italy, see further G. Campori, Artisti Italiani e Stranieri negli Stati Estensi, Modena, 1855, p. 277, and Giornale di Erudizione Artistica, vol. ii. pp. 360 sqq. Wattenbach, Schriftwesen, 411, note 5. For German printers, see below.]—‘barbarians’ as the Italian humanists called them, probably men who were in search of favours at the papal court, and who kept themselves alive meanwhile by this means. When Cosimo de’ Medici was in a hurry to form a library for his favourite foundation, the Badia below Fiesole, he sent for Vespasiano, and received from him the advice to give up all thoughts of purchasing books, since those which were worth getting could not be had easily, but rather to make use of the copyists; whereupon Cosimo bargained to pay him so much a day, and Vespasiano, with forty-five writers under him, delivered 200 volumes in twenty-two months.[447 - Vespas. Fior. p. 335.] The catalogue of the works to be copied was sent to Cosimo by Nicholas V.[448 - Ambr. Trav. Epist. i. p. 63. The Pope was equally serviceable to the libraries of Urbino and Pesaro (that of Aless. Sforza, p. 38). Comp. Arch. Stor. ital. xxi. 103-106. The Bible and Commentaries on it; the Fathers of the Church; Aristotle, with his commentators, including Averroes and Avicenna; Moses Maimonides; Latin translations of Greek philosophers; the Latin prose writers; of the poets only Virgil, Statius, Ovid, and Lucan are mentioned.] who wrote it with his own hand. Ecclesiastical literature and the books needed for the choral services naturally held the chief place in the list.

The handwriting was that beautiful modern Italian which was already in use in the preceding century, and which makes the sight of one of the books of that time a pleasure. Pope Nicholas V., Poggio, Giannozzo Manetti, Niccolò Niccoli, and other distinguished scholars, themselves wrote a beautiful hand, and desired and tolerated none other. The decorative adjuncts, even when miniatures formed no part of them, were full of taste, as may be seen especially in the Laurentian manuscripts, with the light and graceful scrolls which begin and end the lines. The material used to write on, when the work was ordered by great or wealthy people, was always parchment; the binding, both in the Vatican and at Urbino, was a uniform crimson velvet with silver clasps. Where there was so much care to show honour to the contents of a book by the beauty of its outward form, it is intelligible that the sudden appearance of printed books was greeted at first with anything but favour. The envoys of Cardinal Bessarion, when they saw for the first time a printed book in the house of Constantino Lascaris, laughed at the discovery ‘made among the barbarians in some German city,’ and Frederick of Urbino ‘would have been ashamed to own a printed book.’[449 - Vespas. Fior. p. 129.]

But the weary copyists—not those who lived by the trade, but the many who were forced to copy a book in order to have it—rejoiced at the German invention,[450 - ‘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.] ‘notwithstanding the praises and encouragements which the poets awarded to caligraphy.’ It was soon applied in Italy to the multiplication first of the Latin and then of the Greek authors, and for a long period nowhere but in Italy, yet it spread with by no means the rapidity which might have been expected from the general enthusiasm for these works. After a while the modern relation between author and publisher began to develop itself,[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.] and under Alexander VI., when it was no longer easy to destroy a book, as Cosimo could make Filelfo promise to do,[452 - Fabroni, Laurent. Magn. Adnot. 212. It happened in the case of the libel. De Exilio.] the prohibitive censorship made its appearance.

The growth of textual criticism which accompanied the advancing study of languages and antiquity, belongs as little to the subject of this book as the history of scholarship in general. We are here occupied, not with the learning of the Italians in itself, but with the reproduction of antiquity in literature and life. One word more on the studies themselves may still be permissible.

Greek scholarship was chiefly confined to Florence and to the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It was never so general as Latin scholarship, partly because of the far greater difficulties which it involved, partly and still more because of the consciousness of Roman supremacy and an instinctive hatred of the Greeks more than counterbalanced the attractions which Greek literature had for the Italians.[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.]

The impulse which proceeded from Petrarch and Boccaccio, superficial as was their own acquaintance with Greek, was powerful, but did not tell immediately on their contemporaries;[454 - See above p. 187, and comp. C. Voigt, Wiederbelebung, 323 sqq.] on the other hand, the study of Greek literature died out about the year 1520[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.] with the last of the colony of learned Greek exiles, and it was a singular piece of fortune that northerners like Agricola, Reuchlin, Erasmus, the Stephani, and Budæus had meanwhile made themselves masters of the language. That colony had begun with Manuel Chrysoloras and his relation John, and with George of Trebizond. Then followed, about and after the time of the conquest of Constantinople, John Argyropulos, Theodore Gaza, Demetrios Chalcondylas, who brought up his sons Theophilos and Basilios to be excellent Hellenists, Andronikos Kallistos, Marcos Musuros and the family of the Lascaris, not to mention others. But after the subjection of Greece by the Turks was completed, the succession of scholars was maintained only by the sons of the fugitives and perhaps here and there by some Candian or Cyprian refugee. That the decay of Hellenistic studies began about the time of the death of Leo X. was owing partly to a general change of intellectual attitude,[456 - Ranke, Päpste, i. 486 sqq. Comp. the end of this part of our work.] and to a certain satiety of classical influences which now made itself felt; but its coincidence with the death of the Greek fugitives was not wholly a matter of accident. The study of Greek among the Italians appears, if we take the year 1500 as our standard, to have been pursued with extraordinary zeal. The youths of that day learned to speak the language, and half a century later, like the Popes Paul III. and Paul IV., they could still do so in their old age.[457 - Tommaso Gar, Relazioni della Corte di Roma, i. pp. 338, 379.] But this sort of mastery of the study presupposes intercourse with native Greeks.

Besides Florence, Rome and Padua nearly always maintained paid teachers of Greek, and Verona, Ferrara, Venice, Perugia, Pavia and other cities occasional teachers.[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.] Hellenistic studies owed a priceless debt to the press of Aldo Manucci at Venice, where the most important and voluminous writers were for the first time printed in the original. Aldo ventured his all in the enterprise; he was an editor and publisher whose like the world has rarely seen.[459 - Exhaustive information on the subject in the admirable work of A. F. Didot, Alde Manuce et l’Héllenisme à Venise, Paris, 1875.]

Along with this classical revival, Oriental studies now assumed considerable proportions.[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.] Dante himself set a high value on Hebrew, though we cannot suppose that he understood it. From the fifteenth century onwards scholars were no longer content merely to speak of it with respect, but applied themselves to a thorough study of it. This scientific interest in the language was, however, from the beginning either furthered or hindered by religious considerations. Poggio, when resting from the labours of the Council of Constance, learnt Hebrew at that place and at Baden from a baptized Jew, whom he describes as ‘stupid, peevish, and ignorant, like most converted Jews;’ but he had to defend his conduct against Lionardo Bruni, who endeavoured to prove to him that Hebrew was useless or even injurious. The controversial writings of the great Florentine statesman and scholar, Giannozzo Manetti[461 - See below.] (d. 1459) against the Jews afford an early instance of a complete mastery of their language and science. His son Agnolo was from his childhood instructed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The father, at the bidding of Nicholas V., translated the Psalms, but had to defend the principles of his translation in a work addressed to Alfonso. Commissioned by the same Pope, who had offered a reward of 5,000 ducats for the discovery of the original Hebrew text of the Evangelist Matthew, he made a collection of Hebrew manuscripts, which is still preserved in the Vatican, and began a great apologetic work against the Jews.[462 - See Commentario della Vita di Messer Gianozzo Manetti, scritto da Vespasiano Bisticci, Torino, 1862, esp. pp. 11, 44, 91 sqq.] The study of Hebrew was thus enlisted in the service of the Church. The Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari learnt the language,[463 - Vesp. Fior. p. 320. A. Trav. Epist. lib. xi. 16.] and Pope Sixtus IV., who erected the building for the Vatican library, and added to the collection extensive purchases of his own, took into his service ‘scrittori’ (librarios) for Hebrew as well as for Greek and Latin.[464 - Platina, Vita Sixti IV. p. 332.] The study of the language now became more general; Hebrew manuscripts were collected, and in some libraries, like that of Urbino, formed a specially valuable part of the rich treasure there stored up; the printing of Hebrew books began in Italy in 1475, and made the study easier both to the Italians themselves and to the other nations of Europe, who for many years drew their supply from Italy. Soon there was no good-sized town where there were not individuals who were masters of the language and many anxious to learn it, and in 1488 a chair for Hebrew was founded at Bologna, and another in 1514 at Rome. The study became so popular that it was even preferred to Greek.[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.]

Among all those who busied themselves with Hebrew in the fifteenth century, no one was of more importance than Pico della Mirandola. He was not satisfied with a knowledge of the Hebrew grammar and Scriptures, but penetrated into the Jewish Cabbalah and even made himself familiar with the literature of the Talmud. That such pursuits, though they may not have gone very far, were at all possible to him, he owed to his Jewish teachers. Most of the instruction in Hebrew was in fact given by Jews, some of whom, though generally not till after conversion to Christianity, became distinguished University professors and much-esteemed writers.[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).]

Among the Oriental languages, Arabic was studied as well as Hebrew. The science of medicine, no longer satisfied with the older Latin translations of the great Arabian physicians, had constant recourse to the originals, to which an easy access was offered by the Venetian consulates in the East, where Italian doctors were regularly kept. But the Arabian scholarship of the Renaissance is only a feeble echo of the influence which Arabian civilisation in the Middle Ages exercised over Italy and the whole cultivated world—an influence which not only preceded that of the Renaissance, but in some respects was hostile to it, and which did not surrender without a struggle the place which it had long and vigorously asserted. Hieronimo Ramusio, a Venetian physician, translated a great part of Avicenna from the Arabic and died at Damascus in 1486. Andrea Mongajo of Belluno,[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.] a disciple of the same Avicenna, lived long at Damascus, learnt Arabic, and improved on his master. The Venetian government afterwards appointed him as professor of this subject at Padua. The example set by Venice was followed by other governments. Princes and wealthy men rivalled one another in collecting Arabic manuscripts. The first Arabian printing-press was begun at Fano under Julius II. and consecrated in 1514 under Leo X.[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.]

We must here linger for a moment over Pico della Mirandola, before passing on to the general effects of humanism. He was the only man who loudly and vigorously defended the truth and science of all ages against the one-sided worship of classical antiquity.[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.] He knew how to value not only Averroes and the Jewish investigators, but also the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, according to the matter of their writings. He seems to hear them say, ‘We shall live for ever, not in the schools of word-catchers, but in the circle of the wise, where they talk not of the mother of Andromache or of the sons of Niobe, but of the deeper causes of things human and divine; he who looks closely will see that even the barbarians had intelligence (mercurium), not on the tongue but in the breast.’ Himself writing a vigorous and not inelegant Latin, and a master of clear exposition, he despised the purism of pedants and the current over-estimate of borrowed forms, especially when joined, as they often are, with one-sidedness, and involving indifference to the wider truth of the things themselves. Looking at Pico, we can guess at the lofty flight which Italian philosophy would have taken had not the counter-reformation annihilated the higher spiritual life of the people.

CHAPTER IV.

HUMANISM IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY

WHO now were those who acted as mediators between their own age and a venerated antiquity, and made the latter a chief element in the culture of the former?

They were a crowd of the most miscellaneous sort, wearing one face to-day and another to-morrow; but they clearly felt themselves, and it was fully recognised by their time, that they formed a wholly new element in society. The ‘clerici vagantes’ of the twelfth century, whose poetry we have already referred to (p. 174 (#x8_x_8_i29)), may perhaps be taken as their forerunner—the same unstable existence, the same free and more than free views of life, and the germs at all events of the same pagan tendencies in their poetry. But now, as competitor with the whole culture of the Middle Ages, which was essentially clerical and was fostered by the Church, there appeared a new civilisation, founding itself on that which lay on the other side of the Middle Ages. Its active representatives became influential[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.] because they knew what the ancients knew, because they tried to write as the ancients wrote, because they began to think, and soon to feel, as the ancients thought and felt. The tradition to which they devoted themselves passed at a thousand points into genuine reproduction.

Some modern writers deplore the fact that the germs of a far more independent and essentially national culture, such as appeared in Florence about the year 1300, were afterwards so completely swamped by the humanists.[472 - Esp. Libri, Histoires des Sciences Mathém. ii. 159 sqq., 258 sqq.] There was then, we are told, nobody in Florence who could not read; even the donkey-men sang the verses of Dante; the best Italian manuscripts which we possess belonged originally to Florentine artisans; the publication of a popular encyclopædia, like the ‘Tesoro’ of Brunette Latini, was then possible; and all this was founded on a strength and soundness of character due to the universal participation in public affairs, to commerce and travel, and to the systematic reprobation of idleness. The Florentines, it is urged, were at that time respected and influential throughout the whole world, and were called in that year, not without reason, by Pope Boniface VIII., ‘the fifth element.’ The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralysed native impulses. Henceforth men looked to antiquity only for the solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink into mere quotation. Nay, the very fall of civil freedom is partly to be ascribed to all this, since the new learning rested on obedience to authority, sacrificed municipal rights to Roman law, and thereby both sought and found the favour of the despots.

These charges will occupy us now and then at a later stage of our inquiry, when we shall attempt to reduce them to their true value, and to weigh the losses against the gains of this movement. For the present we must confine ourselves to showing how the civilisation even of the vigorous fourteenth century necessarily prepared the way for the complete victory of humanism, and how precisely the greatest representatives of the national Italian spirit were themselves the men who opened wide the gate for the measureless devotion to antiquity in the fifteenth century.

To begin with Dante. If a succession of men of equal genius had presided over Italian culture, whatever elements their natures might have absorbed from the antique, they still could not fail to retain a characteristic and strongly-marked national stamp. But neither Italy nor Western Europe produced another Dante, and he was and remained the man who first thrust antiquity into the foreground of national culture. In the ‘Divine Comedy’ he treats the ancient and the Christian worlds, not indeed as of equal authority, but as parallel to one another. Just as, at an earlier period of the Middle Ages types and antitypes were sought in the history of the Old and New Testaments, so does Dante constantly bring together a Christian and a pagan illustration of the same fact.[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.] It must be remembered that the Christian cycle of history and legend was familiar, while the ancient was relatively unknown, was full of promise and of interest, and must necessarily have gained the upper hand in the competition for public sympathy when there was no longer a Dante to hold the balance between the two.

Petrarch, who lives in the memory of most people nowadays chiefly as a great Italian poet, owed his fame among his contemporaries far rather to the fact that he was a kind of living representative of antiquity, that he imitated all styles of Latin poetry, endeavoured by his voluminous historical and philosophical writings not to supplant but to make known the works of the ancients, and wrote letters that, as treatises on matters of antiquarian interest, obtained a reputation which to us is unintelligible, but which was natural enough in an age without handbooks. Petrarch himself trusted and hoped that his Latin writings would bring him fame with his contemporaries and with posterity, and thought so little of his Italian poems that, as he often tell us, he would gladly have destroyed them if he could have succeeded thereby in blotting them out from the memory of men.

It was the same with Boccaccio. For two centuries, when but little was known of the ‘Decameron’[474 - The first German translation of the Decameron, by H. Steinhovel, was printed in 1472, and soon became popular. The translations of the whole Decameron were almost everywhere preceded by those of the story of Griselda, written in Latin by Petrarch.] north of the Alps, he was famous all over Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology, geography, and biography.[475 - These Latin writings of Boccaccio have been admirably discussed recently by Schück, Zur Characteristik des ital. Hum. im 14 und 15 Jahrh. Breslau, 1865; and in an article in Fleckeisen and Masius, Jahrbücher fur Phil. und Pädag. bd. xx. (1874).] One of these, ‘De Genealogia Deorum,’ contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to ‘poesia,’ as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars.[476 - ‘Poeta,’ even in Dante (Vita Nuova, p. 47), means only the writer of Latin verses, while for Italian the expressions ‘Rimatore, Dicitore per rima,’ are used. It is true that the names and ideas became mixed in course of time.] This it is whose enemies he so vigorously combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian, to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality.[477 - Petrarch, too, at the height of his fame complained in moments of melancholy that his evil star decreed him to pass his last years among scoundrels (extremi fures). In the imaginary letter to Livy, Epp. Fam. ed. Fracass. lib. xxiv. ep. 8. That Petrarch defended poetry, and how, is well known (comp. Geiger, Petr. 113-117). Besides the enemies who beset him in common with Boccaccio, he had to face the doctors (comp. Invectivæ in Medicum Objurgantem, lib. i. and ii.).] Then follows the defence of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing mendacious, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity which is intended to repel the dull minds of the ignorant.

And finally, with a clear reference to his own scholarly work,[478 - Boccaccio, in a later letter to Jacobus Pizinga (Opere Volgari, vol. xvi.), confines himself more strictly to poetry properly so called. And yet he only recognises as poetry that which treated of antiquity, and ignores the Troubadours.] the writer justifies the new relation in which his age stood to paganism. The case was wholly different, he pleads, when the Early Church had to fight its way among the heathen. Now—praised be Jesus Christ!—true religion was strengthened, paganism destroyed, and the victorious Church in possession of the hostile camp. It was now possible to touch and study paganism almost (fere) without danger. Boccaccio, however, did not hold this liberal view consistently. The ground of his apostasy lay partly in the mobility of his character, partly in the still powerful and widespread prejudice that classical pursuits were unbecoming in a theologian. To these reasons must be added the warning given him in the name of the dead Pietro Petroni by the monk Gioacchino Ciani to give up his pagan studies under pain of early death. He accordingly determined to abandon them, and was only brought back from this cowardly resolve by the earnest exhortations of Petrarch, and by the latter’s able demonstration that humanism was reconcileable with religion.[479 - Petr. Epp. Senil. lib. i. ep. 5.]

There was thus a new cause in the world and a new class of men to maintain it. It is idle to ask if this cause ought not to have stopped short in its career of victory, to have restrained itself deliberately, and conceded the first place to purely national elements of culture. No conviction was more firmly rooted in the popular mind, than that antiquity was the highest title to glory which Italy possessed.

There was a symbolical ceremony familiar to this generation of poet-scholars which lasted on into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though losing the higher sentiment which inspired it—the coronation of the poets with the laurel wreath. The origin of this system in the Middle Ages is obscure, and the ritual of the ceremony never became fixed. It was a public demonstration, an outward and visible expression of literary enthusiasm,[480 - Boccaccio (Vita di Dante, p. 50): ‘La quale (laurea) non scienza accresce ma è dell’acquistata certissimo testimonio e ornamento.’] and naturally its form was variable. Dante, for instance, seems to have understood it in the sense of a half-religious consecration; he desired to assume the wreath in the baptistery of San Giovanni, where, like thousands of other Florentine children, he had received baptism.[481 - Paradiso, xxv. 1 sqq. Boccaccio, Vita di Dante, p. 50. ‘Sopra le fonti di San Giovanni si era disporto di coronare.’ Comp. Paradiso, i. 25.] He could, says his biographer, have anywhere received the crown in virtue of his fame, but desired it nowhere but in his native city, and therefore died uncrowned. From the same source we learn that the usage was till then uncommon, and was held to be inherited by the ancient Romans from the Greeks. The most recent source to which the practices could be referred is to be found in the Capitoline contests of musicians, poets, and other artists, founded by Domitian in imitation of the Greeks and celebrated every five years, which may possibly have survived for a time the fall of the Roman Empire; but as few other men would venture to crown themselves, as Dante desired to do, the question arises, to whom did this office belong? Albertino Mussato (p. 140 (#x7_x_7_i49)) was crowned at Padua in 1310 by the bishop and the rector of the University. The University of Paris, the rector of which was then a Florentine (1341), and the municipal authorities of Rome, competed for the honour of crowning Petrarch. His self-elected examiner, King Robert of Anjou, would gladly have performed the ceremony at Naples, but Petrarch preferred to be crowned on the Capitol by the senator of Rome. This honour was long the highest object of ambition, and so it seemed to Jacobus Pizinga, an illustrious Sicilian magistrate.[482 - See Boccaccio’s letter to him in the Opere Volgari, vol. xvi. p. 36: ‘Si præstet Deus, concedente senatu Romuleo.’ …] Then came the Italian journey of Charles IV., whom it amused to flatter the vanity of ambitious men, and impress the ignorant multitude by means of gorgeous ceremonies. Starting from the fiction that the coronation of poets was a prerogative of the old Roman emperors, and consequently was no less his own, he crowned (May 15, 1355) the Florentine scholar, Zanobi della Strada, at Pisa, to the annoyance of Petrarch, who complained that ‘the barbarian laurel had dared adorn the man loved by the Ausonian Muses,’ and to the great disgust of Boccaccio, who declined to recognise this ‘laurea Pisana’ as legitimate.[483 - Matt. Villani, v. 26. There was a solemn procession on horseback round the city, when the followers of the Emperor, his ‘baroni,’ accompanied the poet. Boccaccio, l. c. Petrarch: Invectivæ contra Med. Præf. See also Epp. Fam. Volgarizzate da Fracassetti, iii. 128. For the speech of Zanobi at the coronation, Friedjung, l. c. 308 sqq. Fazio degli Uberti was also crowned, but it is not known where or by whom.] Indeed it might be fairly asked with what right this stranger, half Slavonic by birth, came to sit in judgment on the merits of Italian poets. But from henceforth the emperors crowned poets wherever they went on their travels; and in the fifteenth century the popes and other princes assumed the same right, till at last no regard whatever was paid to place or circumstances. In Rome, under Sixtus IV., the academy[484 - Jac. Volaterran. in Murat. xxiii. col. 185.] of Pomponius Lætus gave the wreath on its own authority. The Florentines had the good taste not to crown their famous humanists till after death. Carlo Aretino and Lionardo Aretino were thus crowned; the eulogy of the first was pronounced by Matteo Palmieri, of the latter by Giannozzo Manetti, before the members of the council and the whole people, the orator standing at the head of the bier, on which the corpse lay clad in a silken robe.[485 - Vespas. Fiorent. pp. 575, 589. Vita Jan. Manetti, in Murat. xx. col. 543. The celebrity of Lionardo Aretino was in his lifetime so great that people came from all parts merely to see him; a Spaniard fell on his knees before him.—Vesp. p. 568. For the monument of Guarino, the magistrate of Ferrara allowed, in 1461, the then considerable sum of 100 ducats. On the coronation of poets in Italy there is a good summary of notices in Favre, Mélanges d’Hist. Lit. (1856) i. 65 sqq.] Carlo Aretino was further honoured by a tomb in Santa Croce, which is among the most beautiful in the whole course of the Renaissance.

CHAPTER V.

THE UNIVERSITIES AND SCHOOLS

THE influence of antiquity on culture, of which we have now to speak, presupposes that the new learning had gained possession of the universities. This was so, but by no means to the extent and with the results which might have been expected.

Few of the Italian universities[486 - Comp. Libri, Histoire des Sciences Mathém. ii. p. 92 sqq. Bologna, as is well known, was older. Pisa flourished in the fourteenth century, fell through the wars with Florence, and was afterwards restored by Lorenzo Magnifico, ‘ad solatium veteris amissæ libertatis,’ as Giovio says, Vita Leonis X. l. i. The university of Florence (comp. Gaye, Carteggio, i. p. 461 to 560 passim; Matteo Villani, i. 8; vii. 90), which existed as early as 1321, with compulsory attendance for the natives of the city, was founded afresh after the Black Death in 1848, and endowed with an income of 2,500 gold florins, fell again into decay, and was refounded in 1357. The chair for the explanation of Dante, established in 1373 at the request of many citizens, was afterwards commonly united with the professorship of philology and rhetoric, as when Filelfo held it.] show themselves in their full vigour till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the increase of wealth rendered a more systematic care for education possible. At first there were generally three sorts of professorships—one for civil law, another for canonical law, the third for medicine; in course of time professorships of rhetoric, of philosophy, and of astronomy were added, the last commonly, though not always, identical with astrology. The salaries varied greatly in different cases. Sometimes a capital sum was paid down. With the spread of culture competition became so active that the different universities tried to entice away distinguished teachers from one another, under which circumstances Bologna is said to have sometimes devoted the half of its public income (20,000 ducats) to the university. The appointments were as a rule made only for a certain time,[487 - This should be noticed in the lists of professors, as in that of the University of Pavia in 1400 (Corio, Storia di Milano, fol. 290), where (among others) no less than twenty jurists appear.] sometimes for only half a year, so that the teachers were forced to lead a wandering life, like actors. Appointments for life were, however, not unknown. Sometimes the promise was exacted not to teach elsewhere what had already been taught at one place. There were also voluntary, unpaid professors.

Of the chairs which have been mentioned, that of rhetoric was especially sought by the humanist; yet it depended only on his familiarity with the matter of ancient learning whether or no he could aspire to those of law, medicine, philosophy, or astronomy. The inward conditions of the science of the day were as variable as the outward conditions of the teacher. Certain jurists and physicians received by far the largest salaries of all, the former chiefly as consulting lawyers for the suits and claims of the state which employed them. In Padua a lawyer of the fifteenth century received a salary of 1,000 ducats,[488 - Marin Sanudo, in Murat. xxii. col. 990.] and it was proposed to appoint a celebrated physician with a yearly payment of 2,000 ducats, and the right of private practice,[489 - Fabroni, Laurent. Magn. Adnot. 52, in the year 1491.] the same man having previously received 700 gold florins at Pisa. When the jurist Bartolommeo Socini, professor at Pisa, accepted a Venetian appointment at Padua, and was on the point of starting on his journey, he was arrested by the Florentine government and only released on payment of bail to the amount of 18,000 gold florins.[490 - Allegretto, Diari Sanesi, in Murat. xiii. col. 824.] The high estimation in which these branches of science were held makes it intelligible why distinguished philologists turned their attention to law and medicine, while on the other hand specialists were more and more compelled to acquire something of a wide literary culture. We shall presently have occasion to speak of the work of the humanists in other departments of practical life.

Nevertheless, the position of the philologists, as such, even where the salary was large,[491 - Filelfo, when called to the newly founded University of Pisa, demanded at least 500 gold florins. Comp. Fabroni, Laur. Magn. ii. 75 sqq. The negotiations were broken off, not only on account of the high salary asked for.] and did not exclude other sources of income, was on the whole uncertain and temporary, so that one and the same teacher could be connected with a great variety of institutions. It is evident that change was desired for its own sake, and something fresh expected from each new comer, as was natural at a time when science was in the making, and consequently depended to no small degree on the personal influence of the teacher. Nor was it always the case that a lecturer on classical authors really belonged to the university of the town where he taught. Communication was so easy, and the supply of suitable accommodation, in monasteries and elsewhere, was so abundant, that a private undertaking was often practicable. In the first decades of the fifteenth century,[492 - Comp. Vespasian. Fiorent. pp. 271, 572, 582, 625. Vita. Jan. Manetti, in Murat. xx. col. 531 sqq.] when the University of Florence was at its greatest brilliance, when the courtiers of Eugenius IV., and perhaps even of Martin V. thronged to the lecture-rooms, when Carlo Aretino and Filelfo were competing for the largest audience, there existed, not only an almost complete university among the Augustinians of Santo Spirito, not only an association of scholars among the Camaldolesi of the Angeli, but individuals of mark, either singly or in common, arranged to provide philosophical and philological teaching for themselves and others. Linguistic and antiquarian studies in Rome had next to no connection with the university (Sapienza), and depended almost exclusively either on the favour of individual popes and prelates, or on the appointments made in the Papal chancery. It was not till Leo X. (1513) that the great reorganisation of the Sapienza took place, with its eighty-eight lecturers, among whom there were able men, though none of the first rank, at the head of the archæological department. But this new brilliancy was of short duration. We have already spoken briefly of the Greek and Hebrew professorships in Italy (pp. 195 sqq.).

To form an accurate picture of the method of scientific instruction, then pursued, we must turn away our eyes as far as possible from our present academic system. Personal intercourse between the teachers and the taught, public disputations, the constant use of Latin and often of Greek, the frequent changes of lecturers and the scarcity of books, gave the studies of that time a colour which we cannot represent to ourselves without effort.

There were Latin schools in every town of the least importance, not by any means merely as preparatory to higher education, but because, next to reading, writing, and arithmetic, the knowledge of Latin was a necessity; and after Latin came logic. It is to be noted particularly that these schools did not depend on the Church, but on the municipality; some of them, too, were merely private enterprises.

This school system, directed by a few distinguished humanists, not only attained a remarkable perfection of organisation, but became an instrument of higher education in the modern sense of the phrase. With the education of the children of two princely houses in North Italy institutions were connected which may be called unique of their kind.

At the court of Giovan Francesco Gonzaga at Mantua (reg. 1407 to 1444) appeared the illustrious Vittorino da Feltre[493 - Vespas. Fiorent. p. 1460. Prendilacqua (a pupil of Vitt.), Intorno alla Vita di V. da F., first ed. by Natale dalle Laste, 1774, translated by Giuseppe Brambilla, Como, 1871. C. Rosmini, Idea dell’ottimo Precettore nella Vita e Disciplina di Vittorino da Feltre e de’ suoi Discepoli, Bassano, 1801. Later works by Racheli (Milan, 1832), and Venoit (Paris, 1853).] (b. 1397, d. 1446), otherwise Vittore dai Rambaldoni—he preferred to be called a Mantuan rather than a Feltrese—one of those men who devote their whole life to an object for which their natural gifts constitute a special vocation. He wrote almost nothing, and finally destroyed the few poems of his youth which he had long kept by him. He studied with unwearied industry; he never sought after titles, which, like all outward distinctions, he scorned; and he lived on terms of the closest friendship with teachers, companions, and pupils, whose goodwill he knew how to preserve. He excelled in bodily no less than in mental exercises, was an admirable rider, dancer, and fencer, wore the same clothes in winter as in summer, walked in nothing but sandals even during the severest frost, and lived so that till his old age he was never ill. He so restrained his passions, his natural inclination to sensuality and anger, that he remained chaste his whole life through, and hardly ever hurt any one by a hard word.

He directed the education of the sons and daughters of the princely house, and one of the latter became under his care a woman of learning. When his reputation extended far and wide over Italy, and members of great and wealthy families came from long distances, even from Germany, in search of his instructions, Gonzaga was not only willing that they should be received, but seems to have held it an honour for Mantua to be the chosen school of the aristocratic world. Here for the first time gymnastics and all noble bodily exercises were treated along with scientific instruction as indispensable to a liberal education. Besides these pupils came others, whose instruction Vittorino probably held to be his highest earthly aim, the gifted poor, often as many as seventy together, whom he supported in his house and educated, ‘per l’amore di Dio,’ along with the high-born youths who here learned to live under the same roof with untitled genius. The greater the crowd of pupils who flocked to Mantua, the more teachers were needed to impart the instruction which Vittorino only directed—an instruction which aimed at giving each pupil that sort of learning which he was most fitted to receive. Gonzaga paid him a yearly salary of 240 gold florins, built him besides a splendid house, ‘La Giocosa,’ in which the master lived with his scholars, and contributed to the expenses caused by the poorer pupils. What was still further needed Vittorino begged from princes and wealthy people, who did not always, it is true, give a ready ear to his entreaties, and forced him by their hardheartedness to run into debt. Yet in the end he found himself in comfortable circumstances, owned a small property in town and an estate in the country, where he stayed with his pupils during the holidays, and possessed a famous collection of books which he gladly lent or gave away, though he was not a little angry when they were taken without leave. In the early morning he read religious books, then scourged himself and went to church; his pupils were also compelled to go to church, like him, to confess once a month, and to observe fast days most strictly. His pupils respected him, but trembled before his glance. When they did anything wrong, they were punished immediately after the offence. He was honoured by all contemporaries no less than by his pupils, and people took the journey to Mantua merely to see him.

More stress was laid on pure scholarship by Guarino of Verona[494 - Vespas. Fior. p. 646, of which, however, C. Rosmini, Vita e Disciplina di Guarino Veronese e de’ suoi Discepoli, Brescia, 1856 (3 vols.), says that it is (ii. 56), ‘formicolante di errori di fatto.’] (1370-1460), who in the year 1429 was called to Ferrara by Niccolò d’Este to educate his son Lionello, and who, when his pupil was nearly grown up in 1436, began to teach at the university as professor of eloquence and of the ancient languages. While still acting as tutor to Lionello, he had many other pupils from various parts of the country, and in his own house a select class of poor scholars, whom he partly or wholly supported. His evening hours till far into the night were devoted to hearing lessons or to instructive conversation. His house, too, was the home of a strict religion and morality. Guarino was a student of the Bible, and lived in friendly intercourse with pious contemporaries, though he did not hesitate to write a defence of pagan literature against them. It signified little to him or to Vittorino that most of the humanists of their day deserved small praise in the matter of morals or religion. It is inconceivable how Guarino, with all the daily work which fell upon him, still found time to write translations from the Greek and voluminous original works.[495 - For these and for Guarino generally, see Facius, De Vir. Illustribus, p. 17 sqq.; and Cortesius, De Hom. Doctis, p. 13. Both agree that the scholars of the following generation prided themselves on having been pupils of Guarino; but while Fazio praises his works, Cortese thinks that he would have cared better for his fame if he had written nothing. Guarino and Vittorino were friends and helped one another in their studies. Their contemporaries were fond of comparing them, and in this comparison Guarino commonly held the first place (Sabellico, Dial. de Lingu. Lat. Reparata, in Rosmini, ii. 112). Guarino’s attitude with regard to the ‘Ermafrodito’ is remarkable; see Rosmini, ii. 46 sqq. In both these teachers an unusual moderation in food and drink was observed; they never drank undiluted wine: in both the principles of education were alike; they neither used corporal punishment; the hardest penalty which Vittorino inflicted was to make the boy kneel and lie upon the ground in the presence of his fellow-pupils.] He was wanting in that wise self-restraint and kindly sweetness which graced the character of Vittorino, and was easily betrayed into a violence of temper which led to frequent quarrels with his learned contemporaries.

Not only in these two courts, but generally throughout Italy, the education of the princely families was in part and for certain years in the hands of the humanists, who thereby mounted a step higher in the aristocratic world. The writing of treatises on the education of princes, formerly the business of theologians, fell now within their province.

From the time of Pier Paolo Vergerio the Italian princes were well taken care of in this respect, and the custom was transplanted into Germany by Æneas Sylvius, who addressed detailed exhortations to two young German princes of the House of Habsburg[496 - To the Archduke Sigismond, Epist. 105, p. 600, and to King Ladislaus Postumus, p. 695; the latter as Tractatus de Liberorum Educatione (1450).] on the subject of their further education, in which they are both urged, as might be expected, to cultivate and nurture humanism, but are chiefly bidden to make themselves able rulers and vigorous, hardy warriors. Perhaps Æneas was aware that in addressing these youths he was talking in the air, and therefore took measures to put his treatise into public circulation. But the relations of the humanists to the rulers will be discussed separately.

CHAPTER VI.

THE FURTHERERS OF HUMANISM

WE have here first to speak of those citizens, mostly Florentines, who made antiquarian interests one of the chief objects of their lives, and who were themselves either distinguished scholars, or else distinguished dilettanti who maintained the scholars. (Comp. pp. 193 sqq.) They were of peculiar significance during the period of transition at the beginning of the fifteenth century, since it was in them that humanism first showed itself practically as an indispensable element in daily life. It was not till after this time that the popes and princes began seriously to occupy themselves with it.

Niccolò Niccoli and Giannozzo Manetti have been already spoken of more than once. Niccoli is described to us by Vespasiano[497 - P. 625. On Niccoli, see further a speech of Poggio, Opera, ed. 1513, fol. 102 sqq.; and a life by Manetti in his book, De Illustribus Longaevis.] as a man who would tolerate nothing around him out of harmony with his own classical spirit. His handsome long-robed figure, his kindly speech, his house adorned with the noblest remains of antiquity, made a singular impression. He was scrupulously cleanly in everything, most of all at table, where ancient vases and crystal goblets stood before him on the whitest linen.[498 - The following words of Vespasiano are untranslatable: ‘A vederlo in tavola cosi antico come era, era una gentilezza.’] The way in which he won over a pleasure-loving young Florentine to intellectual interests is too charming not to be here described.[499 - Ibid. p. 495.] Piero de’ Pazzi, son of a distinguished merchant, and himself destined to the same calling, fair to behold, and much given to the pleasures of the world, thought about anything rather than literature. One day, as he was passing the Palazzo del Podestà,[500 - According to Vespas. p. 271, learned men were in the habit of meeting here for discussion.] Niccolò called the young man to him, and although they had never before exchanged a word, the youth obeyed the call of one so respected. Niccolò asked him who his father was. He answered, ‘Messer Andrea de’ Pazzi.’ When he was further asked what his pursuit was, Piero replied, as young people are wont to do, ‘I enjoy myself’ (‘attendo a darmi buon tempo’). Niccolò said to him, ‘As son of such a father, and so fair to look upon, it is a shame that thou knowest nothing of the Latin language, which would be so great an ornament to thee. If thou learnest it not, thou wilt be good for nothing, and as soon as the flower of youth is over, wilt be a man of no consequence’ (virtù). When Piero heard this, he straightway perceived that it was true, and said that he would gladly take pains to learn, if only he had a teacher. Whereupon Niccolò answered that he would see to that. And he found him a learned man for Latin and Greek, named Pontano, whom Piero treated as one of his own house, and to whom he paid 100 gold florins a year. Quitting all the pleasures in which he had hitherto lived, he studied day and night, and became a friend of all learned men and a noble-minded statesman. He learned by heart the whole ‘Æneid’ and many speeches of Livy, chiefly on the way between Florence and his country house at Trebbio.[501 - Of Niccoli it may be further remarked that, like Vittorino, he wrote nothing, being convinced that he could not treat of anything in as perfect a form as he desired; that his senses were so delicately poised that he ‘neque rudentem asinum, neque secantem serram, neque muscipulam vagientem sentire audireve poterat.’ But the less favourable sides of Niccoli’s character must not be forgotten. He robbed his brother of his sweetheart Benvenuta, roused the indignation of Lionardo Aretino by this act, and was embittered by the girl against many of his friends. He took ill the refusal to lend him books, and had a violent quarrel with Guarino on this account. He was not free from a petty jealousy, under the influence of which he tried to drive Chrysoloras, Poggio, and Filelfo away from Florence.] Antiquity was represented in another and higher sense by Giannozzo Manetti (1393-1459).[502 - See his Vita, by Naldus Naldi, in Murat. xx. col. 532 sqq. See further Vespasiano Bisticci, Commentario della Vita di Messer Giannozzo Manetti, first published by P. Fanfani in Collezione di Opere inedite o rare, vol. ii. Torino, 1862. This ‘Commentario’ must be distinguished from the short ‘Vita’ of Manetti by the same author, in which frequent reference is made to the former. Vespasiano was on intimate terms with Giannozzo Manetti, and in the biography tried to draw an ideal picture of a statesman for the degenerate Florence. Vesp. is Naldi’s authority. Comp. also the fragment in Galetti, Phil. Vill. Liber Flor. 1847, pp. 129-138. Half a century after his death Manetti was nearly forgotten. Comp. Paolo Cortese, p. 21.] Precocious from his first years, he was hardly more than a child when he had finished his apprenticeship in commerce, and became book-keeper in a bank. But soon the life he led seemed to him empty and perishable, and he began to yearn after science, through which alone man can secure immortality. He then busied himself with books as few laymen had done before him, and became, as has been said (p. 209 (#x9_x_9_i22)), one of the most profound scholars of his time. When appointed by the government as its representative magistrate and tax-collector at Pescia and Pistoja, he fulfilled his duties in accordance with the lofty ideal with which his religious feeling and humanistic studies combined to inspire him. He succeeded in collecting the most unpopular taxes which the Florentine state imposed, and declined payment for his services. As provincial governor he refused all presents, abhorred all bribes, checked gambling, kept the country well supplied with corn, required from his subordinates strict obedience and thorough disinterestedness, was indefatigable in settling law-suits amicably, and did wonders in calming inflamed passions by his goodness. The Pistojese loved and reverenced him as a saint, and were never able to discover to which of the two political parties he leaned; when his term of office was over, both sent ambassadors to Florence to beg that it might be prolonged. As if to symbolise the common rights and interests of all, he spent his leisure hours in writing the history of the city, which was preserved, bound in a purple cover, as a sacred relic in the town-hall.[503 - The title of the work, in Latin and Italian, is given in Bisticci, Commentario, pp. 109, 112.] When he took his leave the city presented him with a banner bearing the municipal arms and a splendid silver helmet. On diplomatic missions to Venice, Rome, and King Alfonso, Manetti represented, as at Pistoja, the interests of his native city, watching vigilantly over its honour, but declining the distinctions which were offered to him, obtained great glory by his speeches and negotiations, and acquired by his prudence and foresight the name of a prophet.

For further information as to the learned citizens of Florence at this period the reader must all the more be referred to Vespasiano, who knew them all personally, because the tone and atmosphere in which he writes, and the terms and conditions on which he mixed in their society, are of even more importance than the facts which he records. Even in a translation, and still more in the brief indications to which we are here compelled to limit ourselves, this chief merit of his book is lost. Without being a great writer, he was thoroughly familiar with the subject he wrote on, and had a deep sense of its intellectual significance.

If we seek to analyse the charm which the Medici of the fifteenth century, especially Cosimo the Elder (d. 1464) and Lorenzo the Magnificent (d. 1492) exercised over Florence and over all their contemporaries, we shall find that it lay less in their political capacity than in their leadership in the culture of the age. A man in Cosimo’s position—a great merchant and party leader, who also had on his side all the thinkers, writers, and investigators, a man who was the first of the Florentines by birth and the first of the Italians by culture—such a man was to all intents and purposes already a prince. To Cosimo belongs the special glory of recognising in the Platonic philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought,[504 - What was known of Plato before can only have been fragmentary. A strange discussion on the antagonism of Plato and Aristotle took place at Ferrara in 1438, between Ugo of Siena and the Greeks who came to the Council. Comp. Æneas Sylvius, De Europa, cap. 52 (Opera, p. 450).] of inspiring his friends with the same belief, and thus of fostering within humanistic circles themselves another and a higher resuscitation of antiquity. The story is known to us minutely.[505 - In Niccolò Valori, Life of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Comp. Vespas. Fiorent. p. 426. The first supporters of Argyropulos were the Acciajuoli. Ib. 192: Cardinal Bessarion and his parallels between Plato and Aristotle. Ib. 223: Cusanus as Platonist. Ib. 308: The Catalonian Narciso and his disputes with Argyropulos. Ib. 571: Single Dialogues of Plato, translated by Lionardo Aretino. Ib. 298: The rising influence of Neoplatonism. On Marsilio Ficino, see Reumont, Lorenzo de’ Medici, ii. 27 sqq.] It all hangs on the calling of the learned Johannes Argyropulos, and on the personal enthusiasm of Cosimo himself in his last years, which was such, that the great Marsilio Ficino could style himself, as far as Platonism was concerned, the spiritual son of Cosimo. Under Pietro Medici, Ficino was already at the head of a school; to him Pietro’s son and Cosimo’s grandson, the illustrious Lorenzo, came over from the Peripatetics. Among his most distinguished fellow-scholars were Bartolommeo Valori, Donato Acciajuoli, and Pierfilippo Pandolfini. The enthusiastic teacher declares in several passages of his writings that Lorenzo had sounded all the depths of the Platonic philosophy, and had uttered his conviction that without Plato it would be hard to be a good Christian or a good citizen. The famous band of scholars which surrounded Lorenzo was united together, and distinguished from all other circles of the kind, by this passion for a higher and idealistic philosophy. Only in such a world could a man like Pico della Mirandola feel happy. But perhaps the best thing of all that can be said about it is, that, with all this worship of antiquity, Italian poetry found here a sacred refuge, and that of all the rays of light which streamed from the circle of which Lorenzo was the centre, none was more powerful than this. As a statesman, let each man judge him as he pleases; a foreigner will hesitate to pronounce what was due to human guilt and what to circumstances in the fate of Florence, but no more unjust charge was ever made than that in the field of culture Lorenzo was the protector of Mediocrity, that through his fault Lionardo da Vinci and the mathematician Fra Luca Pacciolo lived abroad, and that Toscanella, Vespucci, and others at least remained unsupported. He was not, indeed, a man of universal mind; but of all the great men who have striven to favour and promote spiritual interests, few certainly have been so many-sided, and in none probably was the inward need to do so equally deep.

The age in which we live is loud enough in proclaiming the worth of culture, and especially of the culture of antiquity. But the enthusiastic devotion to it, the recognition that the need of it is the first and greatest of all needs, is nowhere to be found but among the Florentines of the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth centuries. On this point we have indirect proof which precludes all doubt. It would not have been so common to give the daughters of the house a share in the same studies, had they not been held to be the noblest of earthly pursuits; exile would not have been turned into a happy retreat, as was done by Palla Strozzi; nor would men who indulged in every conceivable excess have retained the strength and the spirit to write critical treatises on the ‘Natural History’ of Pliny like Filippo Strozzi.[506 - Varchi, Stor. Fior. p. 321. An admirable sketch of character.] Our business here is not to deal out either praise or blame, but to understand the spirit of the age in all its vigorous individuality.

Besides Florence, there were many cities of Italy where individuals and social circles devoted all their energies to the support of humanism and the protection of the scholars who lived among them. The correspondence of that period is full of references to personal relations of this kind.[507 - The lives of Guarino and Vittorino by Rosmini mentioned above (p. 213 (#x9_x_9_i29), note 1; and 215, note 1), as well as the life of Poggio by Shepherd, especially in the enlarged Italian translation of Tonelli (2 vols. Florence, 1825); the Correspondence of Poggio, edited by the same writer (2 vols. Flor. 1832); and the letters of Poggio in Mai’s Spicilegium, tom. x. Rome, 1844, pp. 221-272, all contain much on this subject.] The feeling of the instructed classes set strongly and almost exclusively in this direction.

But it is now time to speak of humanism at the Italian courts. The natural alliance between the despot and the scholar, each relying solely on his personal talent, has already been touched upon (p. 9 (#x4_x_4_i17)); that the latter should avowedly prefer the princely courts to the free cities, was only to be expected from the higher pay which they there received. At a time when the great Alfonso of Aragon seemed likely to become master of all Italy, Æneas Sylvius wrote to another citizen of Siena:[508 - Epist. 39; Opera, p. 526, to Mariano Socino.] ‘I had rather that Italy attained peace under his rule than under that of the free cities, for kingly generosity rewards excellence of every kind.[509 - We must not be misled by the fact that along with all this complaints were frequently heard of the inadequacy of princely patronage and of the indifference of many princes to their fame. See e.g. Bapt. Mantan, Eclog. v. as early as the fifteenth century; and Ambrogio Traversari, De Infelicitate Principum. It was impossible to satisfy all.] Too much stress has latterly been laid on the unworthy side of this relation, and the mercenary flattery to which it gave rise, just as formerly the eulogies of the humanists led to a too favourable judgment on their patrons. Taking all things together, it is greatly to the honour of the latter that they felt bound to place themselves at the head of the culture of their age and country, one-sided though this culture was. In some of the popes,[510 - For the literary and scientific patronage of the popes down to the end of the fifteenth century, see Gregorovius, vols. vii. and viii. For Pius II., see Voigt, En. Silvio als Papst Pius II. bd. iii. (Berlin, 1863), pp. 406-440.] the fearlessness of the consequences to which the new learning might lead strikes us as something truly, but unconsciously, imposing. Nicholas V. was confident of the future of the Church, since thousands of learned men supported her. Pius II. was far from making such splendid sacrifices for humanism as were made by Nicholas, and the poets who frequented his court were few in number; but he himself was much more the personal head of the republic of letters than his predecessor, and enjoyed his position without the least misgiving. Paul II. was the first to dread and mistrust the culture of his secretaries, and his three successors, Sixtus, Innocent, and Alexander, accepted dedications and allowed themselves to be sung to the hearts’ content of the poets—there even existed a ‘Borgiad,’ probably in hexameters[511 - Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, De Poetis Nostri Temporis, speaking of the Sphaerulus of Camerino. The worthy man did not finish it in time, and his work lay for forty years in his desk. For the scanty payments made by Sixtus IV., comp. Pierio Valer. De Infelic. Lit. on Theodoras Gaza. He received for a translation and commentary of a work of Aristotle fifty gold florins, ‘ab eo a quo se totum inauratum iri speraverat.’ On the deliberate exclusion of the humanists from the cardinalate by the popes before Leo, comp. Lor. Grana’s funeral oration on Cardinal Egidio, Anecdot. Litt. iv. p. 307.]—but were too busy elsewhere, and too occupied in seeking other foundations for their power, to trouble themselves much about the poet-scholars. Julius II. found poets to eulogise him, because he himself was no mean subject for poetry (p. 117 (#x7_x_7_i4)), but he does not seem to have troubled himself much about them. He was followed by Leo X., ‘as Romulus by Numa’—in other words after the warlike turmoil of the first pontificate, a new one was hoped for wholly given to the muses. The enjoyment of elegant Latin prose and melodious verse was part of the programme of Leo’s life, and his patronage certainly had the result that his Latin poets have left us a living picture of that joyous and brilliant spirit of the Leonine days, with which the biography of Jovius is filled, in countless epigrams, elegies, odes, and orations.[512 - The best are to be found in the Deliciae Poetarum Italorum, and in the Appendices to the various editions of Roscoe, Leo X. Several poets and writers, like Alcyonius, De Exilio, ed. Menken, p. 10, say frankly that they praise Leo in order themselves to become immortal.] Probably in all European history there is no prince who, in proportion to the few striking events of his life, has received such manifold homage. The poets had access to him chiefly about noon, when the musicians had ceased playing;[513 - Paul. Jov. Elogia speaking of Guido Posthumus.] but one of the best among them[514 - Pierio Valeriano in his Simia.] tells us how they also pursued him when he walked in his garden or withdrew to the privacy of his chamber, and if they failed to catch him there, would try to win him with a mendicant ode or elegy, filled, as usual, with the whole population of Olympus.[515 - See the elegy of Joh. Aurelius Mutius in the Deliciae Poetarum Italorum.] For Leo, prodigal of his money, and disliking to be surrounded by any but cheerful faces, displayed a generosity in his gifts which was fabulously exaggerated in the hard times that followed.[516 - The well-known story of the purple velvet purse filled with packets of gold of various sizes, in which Leo used to thrust his hand blindly, is in Giraldi Hecatommithi, vi. nov. 8. On the other hand, the Latin ‘improvisatori,’ when their verses were too faulty, were whipped. Lil. Greg. Gyraldus, De Poetis Nostri Temp. Opp. ii. 398 (Basil, 1580).] His reorganisation of the Sapienza (p. 212 (#x9_x_9_i28)) has been already spoken of. In order not to underrate Leo’s influence on humanism we must guard against being misled by the toy-work that was mixed up with it, and must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the apparent irony with which he himself sometimes treated these matters (p. 157 (#x8_x_8_i6)). Our judgment must rather dwell on the countless spiritual possibilities which are included in the word ‘stimulus,’ and which, though they cannot be measured as a whole, can still, on closer study, be actually followed out in particular cases. Whatever influence in Europe the Italian humanists have had since 1520 depends in some way or other on the impulse which was given by Leo. He was the Pope who in granting permission to print the newly found Tacitus,[517 - Roscoe, Leone X. ed. Bossi. iv. 181.] could say that the great writers were a rule of life and a consolation in misfortune; that helping learned men and obtaining excellent books had ever been one of his highest aims; and that he now thanked heaven that he could benefit the human race by furthering the publication of this book.

The sack of Rome in the year 1527 scattered the scholars no less than the artists in every direction, and spread the fame of the great departed Mæcenas to the furthest boundaries of Italy.

Among the secular princes of the fifteenth century, none displayed such enthusiasm for antiquity as Alfonso the Great of Aragon, King of Naples (see p. 35). It appears that his zeal was thoroughly unaffected, and that the monuments and writings of the ancient world made upon him, from the time of his arrival in Italy, an impression deep and powerful enough to reshape his life. Possibly he was influenced by the example of his ancestor Robert, Petrarch’s great patron, whom he may have wished to rival or surpass. With strange readiness he surrendered the stubborn Aragon to his brother, and devoted himself wholly to his new possessions. He had in his service,[518 - Vespas. Fior. p. 68 sqq. For the translations from Greek made by Alfonso’s orders, see p. 93; Vita Jan. Manetti, in Murat. xx. col. 541 sqq., 450 sqq., 495. Panormita, Dicta et Facta Alfonsi, with the notes by Æneas Sylvius, ed. by Jacob Spiegel, Basel, 1538.] either successively or together, George of Trebizond, the younger Chrysoloras, Lorenzo Valla, Bartolommeo Facio and Antonio Panormita, of whom the two latter were his historians; Panormita daily instructed the King and his court in Livy, even during military expeditions. These men cost him yearly 20,000 gold florins. He gave Panormita 1,000 for his work: Facio received for the ‘Historia Alfonsi,’ besides a yearly income of 500 ducats, a present of 1,500 more when it was finished, with the words, ‘It is not given to pay you, for your work would not be paid for if I gave you the fairest of my cities; but in time I hope to satisfy you.’[519 - Even Alfonso was not able to please everybody—Poggio, for example. See Shepherd-Tonelli, Poggio ii. 108 sqq. and Poggio’s letter to Facius in Fac. de Vir. Ill. ed. Mehus, p. 88, where he writes of Alfonso: ‘Ad ostentationem quædam facit quibus videatur doctis viris favere;’ and Poggio’s letter in Mai, Spicil. tom. x. p. 241.] When he took Giannozzo Manetti as his secretary on the most brilliant conditions, he said to him, ‘My last crust I will share with you.’ When Giannozzo first came to bring the congratulations of the Florentine government on the marriage of Prince Ferrante, the impression he made was so great, that the King sat motionless on the throne, ‘like a brazen statue, and did not even brush away a fly, which had settled on his nose at the beginning of the oration.’ In restoring the castle, he took Vitruvius as his guide; wherever he went, he had the ancient classics with him; he looked on a day as lost in which he had read nothing; when he was reading, he suffered no disturbance, not even the sound of music; and he despised all contemporary princes who were not either scholars or the patrons of learning. His favourite haunt seems to have been the library of the castle at Naples, which he opened himself if the librarian was absent, and where he would sit at a window overlooking the bay, and listen to learned debates on the Trinity. For he was profoundly religious, and had the Bible, as well as Livy and Seneca, read to him, till after fourteen perusals he knew it almost by heart. He gave to those who wished to be nuns the money for their entrance to the monastery, was a zealous churchgoer, and listened with great attention to the sermon. Who can fully understand the feeling with which he regarded the supposititious remains (p. 143 (#x7_x_7_i53)) of Livy at Padua? When, by dint of great entreaties, he obtained an arm-bone of the skeleton from the Venetians, and received it with solemn pomp at Naples, how strangely Christian and pagan sentiment must have been blended in his heart! During a campaign in the Abruzzi, when the distant Sulmona, the birthplace of Ovid, was pointed out to him, he saluted the spot and returned thanks to its tutelary genius. It gladdened him to make good the prophecy of the great poet as to his future fame.[520 - Ovid. Amores, iii. 11, vs. ii.; Jovian. Pontan. De Principe.] Once indeed, at his famous entry into the conquered city of Naples (1443), he himself chose to appear before the world in ancient style. Not far from the market a breach forty ells wide was made in the wall, and through this he drove in a gilded chariot like a Roman Triumphator.[521 - Giorn. Napolet. in Murat. xxi. col. 1127.] The memory of the scene is preserved by a noble triumphal arch of marble in the Castello Nuovo. His Neapolitan successors (p. 37 (#x4_x_4_i54)) inherited as little of this passion for antiquity as of his other good qualities.

Alfonso was far surpassed in learning by Frederick of Urbino[522 - Vespas. Fior. pp. 3, 119 sqq. ‘Volle aver piena notizia d’ogni cosa, cosi sacra come gentile.’]—the great pupil of the great teacher Vittorino da Feltre—who had but few courtiers around him, squandered nothing, and in his appropriation of antiquity, as in all other things, went to work considerately. It was for him and for Nicholas V. that most of the translations from the Greek, and a number of the best commentaries and other such works, were written. He spent much on the scholars whose services he used, but spent it to good purpose. There were no traces of the official poet at Urbino, where the Duke himself was the most learned in the whole court. Classical antiquity, indeed, only formed a part of his culture. An accomplished ruler, captain, and gentleman, he had mastered the greater part of the science of the day, and this with a view to its practical application. As a theologian, he was able to compare Scotus with Aquinas, and was familiar with the writings of the old fathers of the Eastern and Western Churches, the former in Latin translations. In philosophy, he seems to have left Plato altogether to his contemporary Cosimo, but he knew thoroughly not only the ‘Ethics’ and ‘Politics’ of Aristotle but the ‘Physics’ and some other works. The rest of his reading lay chiefly among the ancient historians, all of whom he possessed; these, and not the poets, ‘he was always reading and having read to him.’