The difficulty and expense of obtaining manuscripts in earlier times has been already noticed. Even in Lorenzo’s latter years it was by no means easy, and his correspondence shows that once, in the very height of his glory, he had to apply in his own handwriting to a prince who was probably under obligation to him, in order to obtain the loan of Dion Cassius. ‘There is in your Excellency’s library,’ he wrote on February 5, 1486, to Duke Ercole d’Este, ‘a historian, by name Dio, de Romanis historiis, that I earnestly desire to see, both on account of the enjoyment and consolation which history affords me, and because my son Piero, who has some knowledge of Greek literature, has begged me to help him to become acquainted with this author, who, I understand, is very rare in Italy. Your Excellency can understand how highly I shall prize the favour, if you will lend me the book for a few days.’ Notwithstanding their intimacy, the Duke did not send the original, but allowed a copy to be made by a copyist sent to Ferrara for the purpose. Two years later he had Niccolò Leoniceno’s translation copied for Lorenzo, on condition that it was neither to be printed nor allowed to go any further.[110] In the spring of 1491 Poliziano was, as we have seen, in Venice, where he bought for his patron a quantity of manuscripts now in the Laurentiana. He was refused permission to see Cardinal Bessarion’s collection of books, although the Ferrarese ambassador used his influence with the Doge Agostino Barbarigo—a strange token of petty mistrust.[111] ‘Your diligence in having Greek works copied, and the favour you show to scholars,’ wrote Poliziano to Lorenzo about this time, ‘procures for you such honour and attachment as no one has enjoyed for many years past.’ He mentioned at the same time the admiration for Lorenzo expressed by a Venetian poetess honoured by all scholars and literary men, as well as by popes and kings. ‘Last evening I visited Cassandra Fedele,[112] to whom I presented your salutations, Lorenzo; she is really admirable, both in Latin and in the vulgar tongue, withal very modest, and, in my opinion, also beautiful. I left her astonished. She is devoted to you, and speaks of you as if she knew all about you. Some day she will certainly come to Florence to visit you, so prepare to do her honour.’
Lorenzo’s example did not fail to bring forth fruit in his own house. Leo X. laboured all his life to follow it, with a zeal in collecting which showed that his father’s spirit survived in him. Piero, with his tutor Poliziano, superintended the arrangement and enrichment of the library, sending reports about it to his father, when the latter was ill at the baths. We learn from one of his letters[113] that the Medici, in the interests of their library, took advantage of the death of King Matthias Corvinus (April 4, 1490) to secure a number of his copyists and agents who were then thrown out of employment. That monarch vied with the book collectors of his time, and spent more than 30,000 gold florins yearly on the increase of his library at Ofen. In 1488 he sent an agent to Florence with full power to make purchases and superintend the taking of copies. The efforts made by this active and high-minded ruler of a people still half barbarous, however capable of development, were always assisted by Lorenzo, as became his friendly relations with Matthias. Long before the days of Matthias Corvinus there had been a literary and artistic connection between Florence and Hungary through Filippo Scolari, commonly called Pippo Spano by his countrymen, from his title of Count Palatine (Obergespann) of Temesvar; he held an influential position under Sigismund of Luxemburg. The connection with the Italian literary world had been actively kept up by the powerful Archbishop of Gran, Johann Vitez, who founded a high school at Ofen; still more by his nephew, Janus Pannonius, Bishop of Fünfkirchen, who studied at Padua under Guarino, and visited Cosimo de’ Medici at Careggi.
From his youth Lorenzo had extended his attention beyond what are called literary treasures in the narrower sense. In another field, bordering at once on the study of antiquity and on that of history, his name must also be mentioned with distinction. The range of classical studies was extended to ancient monuments. Rome, for centuries active only in destruction, began to be ashamed of the bad name which such barbarism had brought upon her. The time of Sixtus IV., with all its sins, was the turning-point. Like his successor and namesake, Sixtus V., the Pope did not entirely refrain from demolishing ancient monuments; but works of art and inscriptions were safe. The Roman Academy strove to wipe out the blot pointed at in an epigram by Pius II.
The great increase in the collection of old inscriptions drew attention to those valuable witnesses of old times. At the same time the disappearance of these memorials through decay and careless removal gave warning that their contents must be secured by copying. What had been once undertaken by Nicola Signorini, Giovanni Dondi, Poggio, Ciriaco, perhaps even before them by Cola di Rienzi, was now continued under the guidance of Pomponio Leto and his friends, with the sympathy of all Italy. Inscribed stones were diligently collected in Rome, Naples, and northern Italy. Bernardo Rucellai copied a number of epigraphs from the originals in Rome. One of the most valuable of these collections of transcriptions was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici by its author, the Dominican Fra Giocondo of Verona. He was one of those many-sided geniuses frequent at the time; versed in classical literature and in knowledge of antiquity. His pupil, Julius Cæsar Scaliger, called him a living library of ancient and modern learning. He was an engineer and architect, active in many ways at Rome, at Venice, and in France, and at an advanced age master-builder of the Vatican Basilica, under Leo X. The copy of the collection of inscriptions presented by Fra Giocondo to Lorenzo de’ Medici, who came in contact with him through Alessandro Cortesi, has disappeared, but other copies remain. The dedication of the work is an eloquent lamentation over the state of ancient Rome, and over the dispersion or destruction of stone and bronze tablets. It offers a warm tribute to their value, and an acknowledgment of Lorenzo’s interest in these studies. Poliziano and other friends made use of the careful work of the energetic Veronese, who was in communication both with the future Pope and his brother Giuliano, to whom he dedicated his commentary on Cæsar’s ‘Gallic War,’ and the later edition of ‘Vitruvius.’[114]
Such were the literary tendencies which, notwithstanding the rivalry of other cities, had their chief centre and focus at Florence; such was the circle of men which had gathered together in this city. Vacant places were soon filled up again. Like Lorenzo himself, several of the most prominent were in the prime of life, and younger men began to make good their claims. Such were Marcello Virgilio Adriani, who, after Scala’s death, restored the chancellorship to its pristine glory, and Bernardo Dovizj, who grew up in the house of the Medici, and afterwards gained a worldwide reputation as Cardinal of Bibiena. Whatever personal divergences there might be in the group, Lorenzo held them all together: all did homage to him, all acknowledged him as their leader. It was no cringing homage to a mighty lord; many of those who stood nearest to him gained little in worldly goods by their position, and others were too high and independent to need his help. It was the homage due to a richly endowed mind with noble aims and endeavours. Regardless of all inequalities of rank and position, freedom and ease reigned in this circle. When the meetings were academical, they were free from the formality which afterwards crept into academical life. Lorenzo de’ Medici, cheerful and sociable, maintained unconstrained intercourse with his literary friends. He received them everywhere: in the house in Via Larga, in the garden of San Marco, in the villas at Careggi and Poggio a Cajano. The more intimate of them accompanied him also when he went to the baths or to Pisa, or when he paced the convent cloisters in serious discourse with the clergy. The Platonic Academy, an inheritance from his grandfather, was only one manifestation of this multiform social life. It was so strangely composed that it is not surprising the Platonists sometimes fell into very un-Platonic ways. There is something half comic about a letter of Landino’s dated 1464, the year Cosimo died;[115] it is a petition on behalf of the herald of the Priory Palace, who had been dismissed from his post for keeping a girl hidden two days in his room. He solicits pardon upon the following pleas: his wife was expecting her confinement, he had two little daughters and an aged mother, and was a member of the Platonic Academy.
Lorenzo sometimes took part in the meetings of the learned society, which he was fond of summoning to Careggi, being less disturbed there than in the city. In both places the Symposia were renewed which, according to Alexandrian tradition, were to celebrate the day of Plato’s birth and death (November 7). Marsilio Ficino has described one of these banquets which took place under the presidency either of Lorenzo or Francesco Bandini.[116] Among the guests were Marsilio and his father, Landino, Antonio degli Agli Bishop of Fiesole, Carlo and Cristoforo Marsuppini, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Bernardo Nuzzi, and Tommaso Benci. The academical celebration or exercise succeeded the repast. Plato’s ‘Symposion’—the book which treats of the tokens of love at similar happy meetings, and a commentary on which Marsilio furnished in his treatise on love—was used as a starting-point for free disputation, the parts being divided among the persons present. Giovanni Cavalcanti developed the ‘Phædro,’ and showed how the birth of Eros from the conjunction of the earth with chaos, amid the throes of creation and the struggle for light, signified the original motive force of all that is good, noble, and beautiful in mankind. With this discourse was connected the exposition, also allotted to Cavalcanti, of the speech of Pausanias on the double Aphrodite, and Urania; on the distinction and confusion between moral and physical affections, their emanation, extension, stages of purification, and participation in the manifold forces of nature. Landino undertook to explain the speech of Aristophanes. According to this, love is the never-sleeping longing of man for a return to his former state of oneness with the Divine, from which Zeus, in wrath, had divided him by means of his earthly form and by sin. To Carlo Marsuppini fell the discourse of Agathon, which glorifies the qualities of the god who is at once so various and yet blends all variety into unity. Tommaso Benci devoted himself to pointing out the connection between the Christian view and the supposed inspired words of the priestess Diotima, who disclosed to Socrates the nature of a love that raises man to the highest good or sinks him to the lowest depths of evil. Cristoforo Marsuppini undertook to bring into harmony with the Socratic doctrine of Love the poems of Guido Cavalcanti, to which, as an emanation of Greek philosophy in the arena of the new-born Italian literature, great importance was attached by contemporaries, especially by Lorenzo de’ Medici. Such were the occupations of these famous assemblies. Their positive scientific results were not great, yet they afford a brilliant testimony to the cultivation which enabled the upper classes in Florence to take part in the noblest intellectual efforts.
While poetry and philosophy were thus flourishing, the exact sciences were making considerable progress. It is doubtful whether Fra Luca Paciolo, of Borgo San Sepolcro—who first recalled true geometry to life by his exposition of Euclid, and who exercised so much influence on Leonardo da Vinci—began his labours during the lifetime of Lorenzo. But Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, the physician, philosopher, naturalist, and mathematician, commenced his studies as early as the days of Cosimo the Elder. In 1468 he laid down the famous meridian in Sta. Maria del Fiore, primarily for the purpose of ascertaining exactly the solstices in order to fix the festivals of the Church. The importance of the work was appreciated by later generations, and the task was performed more perfectly 300 years afterwards, at the suggestion of La Condamine.[117] It is well known that Toscanelli, who died in 1482, aged seventy-five, exerted great influence on the mind of Christopher Columbus by his calculations of the longitudinal extent of Eastern Asia, which, however, rested chiefly on Marco Polo’s mistaken hypotheses. Long after Toscanelli’s death, Columbus—when upon his first voyage—made use of the map, marked with the latitudes and longitudes, which the former had once sent to Lisbon. It was in the last years of Lorenzo’s life that a man whose name is more famous than his deeds, and who has been the subject of renewed controversy in our own times, left his home to seek a new one in Southern Spain.[118] The family of Amerigo Vespucci, which reckoned among the navigator’s near relatives men of both scientific and political importance, was sometimes on friendly, sometimes on hostile terms with the Medici; but we hear nothing of any personal relation between him and Lorenzo. About the age of forty, Amerigo settled in Seville, where he joined the banking and commercial house of his fellow-countryman Giovanni Berardi. Well furnished with knowledge, to which his learned uncle Giorgio Antonio had contributed not a little, he began a course of practical preparations for the undertaking which led him to the Far West. Not with the Florentines, but with a schoolman of Lorraine, originated the name of the new continent which, as long as the world stands, will recall Amerigo Vespucci. Still the Florentines rightly rejoiced in the fame of their countryman. A later generation has seen the house of his forefathers turned into a hospital, and has inscribed on it in homage to his memory: ‘Ob repertam Americam sui et patriæ nominis illustratori amplificatori orbis terrarum.’ When the news of his discoveries made in the voyage of 1497 reached Florence, the Signoria had the above-named house illuminated for three nights, a distinction they were wont to bestow only on the most conspicuous merit.
THIRD PART.