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

by John Addington Symonds

With the exception of Lorenzo Valla,[252] the scholars of the Court of Naples were stylists and poets rather than men of erudition. Freedom both of speculation and of morals marked society in Southern Italy, where the protection of a powerful monarch at war with the Church, and the license of a luxurious capital, released the humanists from such slight restraints as public opinion and conventional decorum placed on them in Rome and Florence.

Owing to the marked diversity exhibited by the different states of Italy, the forms assumed by art and literature are never exactly the same in any two cities. If the natives of the Two Sicilies were not themselves addicted to severe scholarship, the lighter kinds of writing flourished there abundantly, and Naples gave her own peculiar character to literature. This was not the case with Milan. Yet Milan, during the reigns of the last Visconti and the first Sforza, claims attention, owing to the accident of Filelfo's residence at the Ducal Court. Filippo Maria Visconti was one of the most repulsive tyrants who have ever disgraced a civilised country. Shut up within his palace walls among astrologers, minions, and monks, carefully protected from the public eye, and watched by double sets of mutually suspicious bodyguards, it was impossible that he should extend the free encouragement to learned men which we admire at Naples. Around despots of the stamp of the Visconti there must of necessity reign the solitude and silence of a desert, where arts and letters cannot flourish, though Pactolus be poured forth to feed their roots. The history of humanism at Milan has, therefore, less to do with the city or the Ducal circle than with the private labours of students allured to Lombardy by promise of high pay.

Piero Candido Decembrio began life as Filippo Maria's secretary. To his vigorous pen the student of Italian history owes the minutest and most vivid sketch now extant of the habits and the vices of a tyrant. This remains the best title of Decembrio to recollection, though his works, original and translated, if we may trust his epitaph in S. Ambrogio, amounted to 127 books when he died in 1447. Contemporary with Decembrio, Gasparino da Barzizza, of whom mention has already been made,[253] occupied the place of Court orator and letter-writer. This office he transmitted to his son, Guiniforte, who was also employed in the education of Francesco Sforza's children. None of these men, however, shed much splendour upon Milan; they were simply the instruments of ducal luxury, part of a prince's parade, at an epoch when even warlike sovereigns sought to crowd their Courts with pedagogues and rhetoricians.

With Filelfo the case was different. His singular abilities rendered him independent of local patronage, and drew universal attention to any place where he might choose to fix his residence. Of all the humanists he was the most restless in his humour and erratic in his movements. Still Milan, during a long period of his life, formed his headquarters; to Milan he returned when fortune frowned on him elsewhere; and with Milan his name will always be connected.

Francesco Filelfo was born in 1398 at Tolentino, in the March of Ancona. He studied grammar, rhetoric, and Latin literature at Padua, where he was appointed professor at the early age of eighteen. In 1417 he received an invitation to teach eloquence and moral philosophy at Venice. Here he remained two years, deriving much advantage from the society of Guarino da Verona and Vittorino da Feltre, and forming useful connections with the Venetian nobility. Young as he was, Filelfo had already made his mark, and won the consideration which attaches to men of decided character and extraordinary powers. The proof of this is that, after being admitted citizen of Venice by public decree, he was appointed Secretary to the Baily (Bailo, or Consul-General) of Constantinople through the interest of his friend Lionardo Giustiniani. Giustiniani having also provided him with money for his voyage, Filelfo set off in 1419 for the capital of Greek learning. Of the three Italian teachers—Guarino, Aurispa, and Filelfo—who made this journey for the express purpose of acquiring the Greek language and collecting Greek books, Filelfo was by far the most distinguished. The history, therefore, of his adventures may be taken as a specimen of what befell them all. The time spent at sea between Venice and Byzantium was five months; Filelfo did not arrive till the year 1420 was already well advanced. He put himself at once under the tuition of John Chrysoloras, the brother of Manuel, whose influence at the Imperial Court brought Filelfo into favour with John Palæologus. The young Italian student, having speedily acquired familiarity with the Greek tongue, received the titles of Secretary and Counsellor, and executed some important diplomatic missions for his Imperial master. We hear, for instance, of his being sent to Sigismund, the German Emperor, at Buda, and of his reciting an Epithalamial Oration at Cracow on the marriage of King Ladislaus. The Venetian Baily, again, despatched him to the Court of Amurath II., in order to negotiate terms of treaty between the Republic and the Turk.

The confidence extended alike by his Venetian and Greek patrons to Filelfo may well have inclined Chrysoloras to look with favour on the affection which now sprang up between the Italian stranger and his daughter Theodora. Theodora was but fourteen years of age; yet her youth probably suggested no impediment to marriage in the semi-Oriental society of the Greek capital. That she was connected by blood with the Imperial family made the alliance honourable to Filelfo; still there is no sufficient reason to conclude for certain that the match was so unequal as to justify the malignant suggestions thrown out at a later date by Poggio.[254] Of ancient blood there was enough and to spare at Constantinople; but wealth was wanting, while the talent which rendered Filelfo serviceable to great states and empires was itself sufficient guarantee for Theodora's maintenance in a becoming station.

Not long after their marriage Filelfo received an offer of the Chair of Eloquence at Venice, with a stipend of 500 sequins. In 1427, tempted by the prospect of good pay and growing fame, he landed with his wife, their infant son, four female slaves, and two men servants on the quay before S. Mark's.[255] The object of his journey to Constantinople had been amply attained. After an absence of seven and a half years, he returned to his native country with Greek learning, increased reputation, and a large supply of Greek books.[256] His proud boast, frequently repeated in after-life, that no man living but himself had mastered the whole literature of the ancients in both languages, that no one else could wield the prose of Cicero, the verse of Horace and of Virgil, and the Greek of Homer and of Xenophon with equal versatility, was not altogether an empty vaunt.[257] We may indeed smile at his pretension to have surpassed Virgil because he was an orator, and Cicero because he was a poet, and both of them together because he could write Greek as well as Latin.[258] We know that his Latin hexameters are such as not only Virgil but Cicero would have scorned to own, that his Latin orations would have been hissed before the Roman rostra, and that his Greek style is at the same time tame and tumid. Neither he nor his contemporaries were sufficiently critical to comprehend the force of these objections. They only saw that he possessed the keys to all the learning of the ancient world, and that, besides unlocking those treasures for modern students, he was also competent to give to current thoughts a form that aped the classic masterpieces each in its own kind. Taken at their lowest valuation, the claims of Filelfo, well founded in fact, mark him out as the most universal scholar of his age. A genius he was not: for while his perceptions were coarse, his intellect was receptive rather than originative. Of deep thought, true taste, penetrative criticism, or delicate fancy he knew nothing. The unimaginable bloom of style is nowhere to be found upon his work. Yet a man of his stamp was needed at that epoch to act as a focus for the streams of light which flooded Italy from divers sources, to collect them in himself, and to bequeath to students of a happier age the ideal of comprehensive scholarship which Poliziano and Erasmus realised.

Filelfo's reception at Venice by no means corresponded to the promises by which he had been tempted, or to the value which he set on his own services. The plague was in the city; the nobles had taken flight to their country houses; and there was no one to attend his lectures. He therefore very readily accepted an offer sent him from Bologna, and early in the year 1428 we find him settled in that city as professor of eloquence and moral philosophy, with a stipend of 450 sequins. He was not destined to remain there long, however, for the disturbed state of the town rendered teaching impossible; and when flattering proposals arrived from the Florentines, he set off in haste and transferred his whole family across the Apennines from Imola.[259] The delight which he experienced in viewing the architectural monuments of Florence, and the enthusiasm he aroused by his stupendous learning in an audience of unprecedented variety and multitude, are expressed with almost childish emphasis in his correspondence. 'The whole State,' he writes,[260] 'is turned to look at me. All men love and honour me, and praise me to the skies. My name is on every lip. Not only the leaders of the city, but women also of the noblest birth make way for me, paying me so much respect that I am ashamed of their worship. My audience numbers every day four hundred persons, mostly men advanced in years and of the dignity of senators.' These were the halcyon days of Filelfo's residence at Florence,[261] when he was still enjoying the friendship of learned men, receiving new engagements from the University with augmentations of pay,[262] and when as yet he had not won the hatred of the Medicean faction. His industry at this epoch was amazing. He began the day by reading and explaining the 'Tusculans' and rhetorical treatises of Cicero; then he proceeded to Livy or Homer; after a brief rest at midday he resumed his labours with Terence and a Greek author, Thucydides or Xenophon. On holidays he read Dante to an audience assembled in the Duomo, bestowing these lectures as a free gift on the people of Florence. Amid these public labours, the weight of which may be estimated by remembering what was required of professors in the fifteenth century,[263] Filelfo still found leisure for private work. He translated two speeches of Lysias, the 'Rhetoric' of Aristotle, two Lives of Plutarch, and Xenophon's panegyrics of Agesilaus and the Spartan institutions.

At the same time he had abundant energy for the prosecution of the feuds in which he soon found himself engaged with the Florentine scholars. So great was the arrogance displayed by Filelfo, his meanness in private life, and his imprudence in public,[264] that even the men who had invited him became his bitter foes. Niccolo de' Niccoli, always jealous of superiority, and apt to take offence, was the first with whom he quarrelled; then followed Carlo Marsuppini and Ambrogio Traversari, until at last the whole of the Medicean party were inflamed against him. Filelfo on his side spared neither satires nor slanders; and when the political crisis, which for a time depressed the Medicean faction, was impending, he declared himself the public opponent of Cosimo. Already in the spring of 1433 he had been stabbed in the face while walking to the University one morning by Filippo, a cut-throat from Casale; nor does there seem any reason to doubt that, as Filelfo himself firmly believed, the man was paid to kill him by the Medici. When the same bravo afterwards followed him to Siena,[265] Filelfo hired a Greek, by name Antonio Maria, to retaliate upon his foes in Florence. It is not probable that a merely literary quarrel would have run to these extremities. Even the foulness of Poggio's invectives and the fury of Filelfo's satires fail to account for the intervention of assassins. We know, however, that Filelfo had not confined himself to calumnies and criticisms of his literary rivals. During Cosimo's imprisonment he urged the Signory in open terms to take his life; when he was living in exile at Venice, he pursued him with abominable slanders; and now, on Cosimo's return, though himself expelled from the city as a rebel and a proscript, he kept stirring up the burghers of Florence and the Courts of Italy against the tyrant.[266]