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.[452]
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;[453] on the other hand, the study of Greek literature died out about the year 1520[454] 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,[455] 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.[456] 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.[457] 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.[458]
Along with this classical revival, Oriental studies now assumed considerable proportions.[459] 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[460] (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.[461] The study of Hebrew was thus enlisted in the service of the Church. The Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari learnt the language,[462] 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.[463] 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.[464][465]
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.[466]
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,[467] 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.[468]
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.[469] 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]), 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[470] 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.