It is a characteristic feature in the history of the revival of classic literature generally, and especially of Greek, in Italy, and above all in Florence, that so many men and youths of the higher classes devoted themselves to such studies. Classical literature was not a mere ornament and secondary matter, nor was it restricted to schools and convents or to the purposes of self-maintenance. It was used in the palaces of the commonwealth as well as in ordinary business. To many it was the companion for life in fortune and misfortune—a cheering friend at home, a consoler in the gloomy days of exile. Florence can boast of a whole series of statesmen who were intimately acquainted with the Greek classics, whose works they translated in their leisure hours. Among Chrysoloras’ scholars were men of the first families, and many men who rose to the most important offices of State. Palla Strozzi was himself one of them, and in his banishment he never ceased to enjoy the fruits of his studies in earlier years. Roberto de’ Rossi instructed a number of younger pupils. Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo, for many years chancellor of the Republic, was among those who attained the most thorough knowledge of Greek. In Florence they did not wait till the fall of Constantinople scattered the ruins of the Grecian world over Italy to become intimate with Greek literature, to attract Greek teachers, and to purchase Greek literary treasures. Many went to the East not only to collect manuscripts, coins, works of art, and inscriptions, but also to study the language and literature in the country itself. Even Pope Pius II., in the speech by which he announced the plan of the crusade, testified that Constantinople had, till the day of the conquest, proved itself the monument of antique wisdom, the seat of science, and the stronghold of philosophy; the Italians had only thought they could attain the palm of excellence when, as the Romans did in Athens, they had pursued their studies in Constantinople, whence so many excellent works of antiquity had come to the West, and others were still to be expected. That the Byzantine school exercised as much influence on Italian travellers as the later Athenian did on the Romans is evident; the humanistic rhetoricians and philosophers retained some habits of mind which profound and extensive study of the great authors was not always able to overcome. But the good of a wide diffusion of classical learning outweighed the disadvantages. The rapidity of its dissemination in a short time was astonishing. The Greek fathers assembled at the Florentine conference were not a little surprised to find men among their native colleagues who knew far more of Greek language and literature than they did.
Cosimo de’ Medici was in the prime of life when this great revolution passed through its first stage. It was the epoch in which Greek literature broke like a mighty wave over Italy, while the limits still restricting Latin were broken through as with an enchanter’s rod. The Council of Constance, which restored peace and unity to the Western Church, opened also the libraries of German and French convents, in which numerous treasures, especially of Roman literature, lay unread and long forgotten. Poggio Bracciolini,[331] born at Terranuova, in the Upper Arno valley, in 1380, was thirty-five years old when he accompanied Pope John XXIII. to Constance. He was the most successful discoverer the world has known in the field of literature, which he has enriched in an undreamt-of manner. Nor was he merely a discoverer, but also one who could turn these treasures to good account—learned, skilful, acute, witty; a true child of his age in the literary quarrels which often degenerated into mere janglings, in the slander, equivocal wit and anecdotes, in the restlessness and disquiet which seemed to have seized the humanistic class generally. The papal treasury, to which he was attached all his life long without forfeiting his attachment to his native land, appointed him her chancellor, when he already numbered seventy-three years. Of no pre-eminent importance as an historian and antiquarian, he had that lively feeling for the grandeur and glory of the Roman epoch which had inspired Petrarca, and in him it was united with a wider view and surer knowledge of the monuments which had emerged from the mediæval world of fables. It was Poggio above all who abolished the Rome of the Mirabilia. The literary endeavours which began in St. Gall continued in operation during years and decades, even into the time of Leo X., and extended over Germany and France as far as Scandinavia. The movement affected the convents of Italy, which were not more respected than foreign ones, and it created a new life at the same time in literature by multiplying and disseminating the old supplies of learning and those newly gained. The book trade, in the proper sense of the word, then first began.
Books were exceedingly rare and proportionately dear till the fifteenth century. Petrarca’s and Boccaccio’s testimony brings vividly before our eyes the straits in which learned men often found themselves; and even those in high stations copied with their own hand works that they would otherwise have been unable to procure, either on account of the extravagant prices, or in cases where the originals could not be bought on account of a deficiency of copyists and the difficulty of obtaining them. When we regard with a feeling of gratitude the copies of Cicero’s ‘Meditations’ made by Petrarca, and now preserved in the Laurentian library, one of which replaces the original for us, we can estimate, in some degree, the value which these men placed on the discovery—for discovery in a certain sense it was—of those antique models, which became to them examples of life and conduct. This reflection brings us back to the times which we are contemplating, when we find emendations and conjectures of the text written on the margin of the manuscripts in Coluccio Salutati’s hand. It but seldom occurred that learned men copied for others, as Poggio Bracciolini, who wrote a beautiful hand, did in his youth, when he had to live on such work. The copying for money had in general become the business of very ignorant persons, of whose negligence Petrarca, who had a skilful assistant in his companion Giovanni da Ravenna, gives us an idea when he asks if Cicero, Livy, and Pliny, would recognise their own works in this shape, or would not rather consider them productions of the barbarians. Coluccio Salutati wrote a special treatise on the unfortunate condition of books, and the means of preventing harm arising to literature. Not only works of antiquity were considered here, but modern authors also. ‘I cannot express,’ says the Florentine chancellor once,[332] ‘how repulsive the universal corruption which has crept into books is to me. We scarcely find one manuscript of Petrarca’s and Boccaccio’s works which does not deviate from the original. They are not texts, but coarse caricatures of texts (similitudines), while the real texts are in a measure seals (sigilla) of the original documents. What we have deviates more from the originals than statues from the men whose counterfeit they are. They have a mouth, but they say nothing; or worse, they frequently say what is false. In Dante’s book this calamity is the greatest, as the uninitiated are often unable to follow those who are at all acquainted with the poet.’
Nevertheless a certain kind of book trade was an old-established calling;[333] not to speak of single sales, as for example the sale, at the little town of Poggibonzi, of a perfect copy of the ‘Corpus Juris,’ as well as the decrees of Gratian, of which we possess a notary’s deed of transfer bearing the date 1215. The stationarii at the universities, an expression preserved in the English word stationer, were persons who kept a supply of text-books used in the lectures, for the purpose of copying, in which learned and unlearned, and even women, were employed. The thronging of the ignorant to this business, which seems to have been lucrative, necessitated superintendence, which was exercised by Peciarii, selected among the students, and all of the clerical order. We can easily understand that, except at the universities, in which Bologna and Padua took the lead, such superintendence (for which, and for the trade in manuscripts generally, special directions were issued in the fourteenth century) could not be organised, so that much always depended on the pleasure and ignorance of dealers and copyists.
Copying and painting were certainly favourite employments in the monasteries; but either the requirements of the special community were principally kept in view, or it was chiefly a question of ecclesiastical and devotional books. As towards the end of the Gothic period, Cassiodorus, one of the last who witnessed antique culture still alive, recommended copying to the monks of Squillace, so did Fra Giovanni Dominici in the beginning of the fifteenth century, when he remarked that such employments raised monks and nuns to pure and holy thoughts, words which plainly show what kind of books were meant. Even in the cloister the want of books, and those the most necessary, was at times felt. Most of the convent libraries were poor in ancient manuscripts. It was worse in the more recently founded ones and in nunneries. The sainted Chiara Gambacorta,[334] daughter of a ruler of Pisa, towards the end of the fourteenth and at the beginning of the following century, repeatedly complains of the destitution prevailing in her convent of Dominican nuns, and rejoiced when any book was promised as a legacy. Once she begs for information where a Book of Lessons or a Bible may be found. ‘We are very poor in books, and need them for Divine service. Copying is too expensive for us to be able to think of it. If we should find any ready made, however, I hope to God that I shall be able, by the assistance of good people, to pay for them.’ Three and a half to four gold florins were paid at this time for a devotional book, the offices of the Virgin, not only by noblemen but by wealthy citizens. Rinaldo degli Albizzi considers it worth noticing in his memoirs,[335] that in the summer of 1406 he paid eleven gold florins for a Bible at Arezzo. Even in a city like Florence it was not easy to procure books of devotion, because of the small number of good copyists. An Augustinian brother of Sto. Spirito, a skilful writer, was engaged in 1395 by the Cardinal Piero Corsini for full two years.[336] The materials were also costly. The parchment for a book of Epistles cost ten silver florins. The expense of illustrating manuscripts with miniatures and ornaments was very considerable. The convents would not have been able to obtain so many manuscripts of this kind had not the industry of their inhabitants been specially directed to the art of illumination.
The rapid diffusion of learning and the equally swift increase of literary material created the book trade properly so-called, which till then had been pursued occasionally by persons of every calling, among others by tavern-keepers. One of the centres of this trade was Venice, which was materially assisted in her dealings by her extensive commercial connections. When the study of Greek began to revive, numerous codices were imported from Candia, among other places, where copying had become a fruitful source of gain, and were eagerly bought up by native and foreign collectors.[337] Of course this trade presupposed the formation of a special class of copyists, who were under the direction of such persons as specially devoted themselves to this branch of business, undertook large and small orders, and had them executed by hundreds of workmen. A certain degree of literary cultivation was requisite in those whose duty it was to control the workers. The great mass of manuscripts of classical works belongs to the fifteenth century. In some cases they represent for us the originals, which have disappeared since, especially after the invention of printing by types, for as we know from Aldo Manuzio’s complaint, the parchment of manuscripts which had been printed from was often used for binding purposes. In other cases they are to be counted of especial value, because the originals were then already in a very injured condition, like the manuscripts of Quintilian and the ‘Sylvae’ of Statius, which Poggio found in St. Gall and in France, as was the case also with the manuscripts of Constantinople. A numerous progeny of errors may be derived from such copies, of which the earliest, even when made by learned men, were not always perfectly exact, not those of Petrarca nor Poggio, who were occasionally forced to work in a hurry (velociter). The costly parchment was by no means employed for all new manuscripts. The paper manufacture, which, if not revived in the fourteenth century, was at least developed then in a greater degree, wherein the first place seems to belong to the town of Fabriano, which still furnishes the best paper in Italy. This manufacture was begun as early as 1379 at Colle, in the Elsa valley,[338] and was of essential service to the book trade. Of this most brilliant but brief period of the preparation of manuscripts, and the trade in them, an epoch which immediately preceded that of the invention of printing, and the memorials of which are to be found in all the libraries of Italy and elsewhere, we shall speak again later.
CHAPTER II.
LEONARDO BRUNI ARETINO AND THE FLORENTINE HUMANISTS. FRANCESCO FILELFO. COSIMO DE’ MEDICI.