Renaissance in Italy, Volume 2 (of 7) / The Revival of Learning

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While handling the theme of the Italian Renaissance, I have selected such points, and emphasised such details, as I felt to be important for the biography of a nation at the most brilliant epoch of its intellectual activity. The historian of culture sacrifices much that the historian of politics will judge essential, and calls attention to matters that the general reader may sometimes find superfluous. He must submit to bear the reproach of having done at once too little and too much. He must be content to traverse at one time well-worn ground, and at another to engage in dry or abstruse inquiries. He must not shrink from seeming to affect the fame of a compiler; nor, unless his powers be of the highest, can he hope altogether to avoid repetitions wearisome alike to reader and to writer. His main object is to paint the portrait of national genius identical through all varieties of manifestation; and in proportion as he has preserved this point of view with firmness, he may hope to have succeeded.
For the History of the Revival of Learning I have had continual recourse to Tiraboschi's 'Storia della Letteratura Italiana.' That work is still the basis of all researches bearing on the subject. I owe besides particular obligations to Vespasiano's 'Vite di Uomini Illustri,' to Comparetti's 'Virgilio nel Medio Evo,' to Rosmini's 'Vita di Filelfo,' 'Vita di Vittorino da Feltre,' and 'Vita di Guarino da Verona,' to Shepherd's 'Life of Poggio Bracciolini,' to Dennistoun's 'Dukes of Urbino,' to Schultze's 'Gemistos Plethon,' to Didot's 'Alde Manuce,' to Von Reumont's 'Lorenzo de' Medici,' to Burckhardt's 'Cultur der Renaissance in Italien,' to Voigt's 'Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums,' and to Gregorovius's 'Geschichte der Stadt Rom.' To Voigt and Burckhardt, having perforce traversed the same ground that they have done, I feel that I have been in a special sense indebted. At the same time I have made it my invariable practice, as the notes to this volume will show, to found my own opinions on the study of original sources. To mention in detail all the editions of the works of humanists and scholars I have consulted, would be superfluous.