Transition from Florence to Rome—Vicissitudes of Learning
at the Papal Court—Diplomatic
Humanists—Protonotaries—Apostolic Scribes—Ecclesiastical
Sophists—Immorality and Artificiality of Scholarship in
Rome—Poggio and Bruni, Secretaries—Eugenius IV.—His
Patronage of Scholars—Flavio Biondo—Solid
Erudition—Nicholas V.—His Private History—Nature of his
Talents—His unexpected Elevation to the Roman
See—Jubilation of the Humanists—His Protection of Learned
Men in Rome—A Workshop of Erudition—A Factory of
Translations—High Sums paid for Literary Labour—Poggio
Fiorentino—His Early Life—His Journeys—His Eminence as a
Man of Letters—His Attitude toward Ecclesiastics—His
Invectives—Humanistic Gladiators—Poggio and
Filelfo—Poggio and Guarino—Poggio and Valla—Poggio and
Perotti—Poggio and Georgius Trapezuntios—Literary
Scandals—Poggio's Collections of Antiquities—Chancellor of
Florence—Cardinal Bessarion—His Library—Theological
Studies—Apology for Plato—The Greeks in Italy—Humanism at
Naples—Want of Culture in Southern Italy—Learning an
Exotic—Alfonso the Magnificent—Scholars in the
Camp—Literary Dialogues at Naples—Antonio Beccadelli—'The
Hermaphroditus'—Lorenzo Valla—The Epicurean—The
Critic—The Opponent of the Church—Bartolommeo
Fazio—Giannantonio Porcello—Court of Milan—Filippo Maria
Visconti—Decembrio's Description of his Master—Francesco
Filelfo—His Early Life—Visit to Constantinople—Place at
Court—Marriage—Return to Italy—Venice—Bologna—His
Pretensions as a Professor—Florence—Feuds with the
Florentines—Immersion in Politics—Siena—Settles at
Milan—His Fame—Private Life and Public
Interests—Overtures to Rome—Filelfo under the Sforza
Tyranny—Literary Brigandage—Death at Florence—Filelfo as
the Representative of a Class—Vittorino da Feltre—Early
Education—Scheme of Training Youths as Scholars—Residence
at Padua—Residence at Mantua—His School of
Princes—Liberality to Poor Students—Details of his Life
and System—Court of Ferrara—Guarino da Verona—House Tutor
of Lionello d'Este—Giovanni Aurispa—Smaller
Courts—Carpi—Mirandola—Rimini and the Malatesta
Tyrants—Cesena—Pesaro—Urbino and Duke
Frederick—Vespasiano da Bisticci.
In passing from Florence to Rome, we are struck with the fact that
neither in letters nor in art had the Papal city any real life of her
own. Her intellectual enthusiasms were imported; her activity varied
with the personal interests of successive Popes. Stimulated by the
munificence of one Holy Father, starved by the niggardliness of
another; petted and caressed by Nicholas V., watched with jealous
mistrust by Paul II.; thrust into the background by Alexander, and
brought into the light by Leo—learning was subjected to rude
vicissitudes at Rome. Very few of the scholars who shed lustre on the
reigns of liberal Pontiffs were Romans, nor did the nobles of the
Papal States affect the fame of patrons. We have, therefore, in
dealing with humanism at Rome, to bear in mind that it flourished
fitfully, precariously, as an exotic, its growth being alternately
checked and encouraged at the pleasure of the priest in office.
In spite of these variable conditions, one class of humanists never
failed at Rome. During the period of schisms and councils, when Pope
and Antipope were waging wordy warfare in the Courts of congregated
Christendom, it was impossible to dispense with the services of
practised writers and accomplished orators. As composers of diplomatic
despatches, letters, bulls, and protocols; as disseminators of squibs
and invectives; as redactors of state papers; as pleaders, legates,
ambassadors, and private secretaries—scholars swarmed around the
person of the Pontiff. Their official titles varied, some being called
Secretaries to the Chancery, others Apostolic Scriptors, others again
Protonotaries; while their duties were divided between the regular
business of the Curia and the miscellaneous transactions that arose
from special emergencies of the Papal See. Their services were well
rewarded. In addition to about 700 florins of pay and perquisites,
they, for the most part, entered into minor orders and held benefices.
Men of acute intellect and finished style, who had absorbed the
culture of their age, and could by rhetoric enforce what arguments
they chose to wield, found, therefore, a good market for their talents
at the Court of Rome. They soon became a separate and influential
class, divided from the nobility by their birth and foreign
connections, and from the churchmen by their secular status and avowed
impiety, yet mingling in society with both and trusting to their
talents to support their dignity. At the Council of Basle the
protonotaries even claimed to take precedence of the bishops on
occasions of high ceremony, arguing, from the nature of their office
and the rarity of their acquirements, that they had a better right
than priests to approach the person of the Sovereign Pontiff. Poggio
and Bruni, Losco, Aurispa, and Biondo raised their voices in this
quarrel, which proved how indispensable the mundane needs of the
Papacy had rendered these free-lances of literature. Through them the
spirit of humanism, antagonistic to the spirit of the Church,
possessed itself of the Eternal City; and much of the flagrant
immorality which marked Rome during the Renaissance may be ascribed to
the influence of paganising scholars, freed from the restrictions of
family and local opinion, indifferent to religion, and less absorbed
in study for its own sake than in the profits to be gained by the
exercise of a practised pen. There was a real discord between the
principles which the Church professed, and the new culture that
flourished on a heathen soil. While merely secular interests blinded
the Popes to the perils which might spring from fostering this
discord, humanistic enthusiasm had so thoroughly penetrated Italy that
to exclude it from Rome was impossible. Neopagan scholarship added,
therefore, lustre to the Papal Court, as one among the many splendours
of that worldly period which raised the See of Rome to eminence above
the States of Italy. The light it shed, however, had no vital heat.
Learning was always an article of artificial luxury at Rome, not, as
at Florence, part of the nation's life; and when the gilded pomp of
Leo dwindled down to Clement's abject misery and utter ruin, it was
found that such encouragement as Popes had given to literature had
been a source of weakness and decay. We may still be sincerely
thankful that the Pontiffs took the line they did; for had they placed
themselves in a position of antagonism to the humanistic movement,
instead of utilising and approving of it, the free development of
Italian scholarship might have sustained a dangerous check.
It was from Florence that Rome received her intellectual stimulus. The
connection began in 1402, when Boniface IX. appointed Poggio to the
post of Apostolic Secretary, which he held for fifty years. In 1405
Lionardo Bruni obtained the same office from Innocent VII. The
powerful personality of these men, in whom the energies of the
humanistic revival were concentrated, impressed the Roman Curia with a
stamp it never lost. Good Latinity became a sine qua non in the
Papal Chancery; and when Gregory XII. named Antonio Losco of Verona
one of his secretaries, it was natural that this distinguished
scholar, following the Florentine example of Coluccio Salutato, should
compose a book of forms in Ciceronian style for the use of his
office.[187] During the insignificant pontificate of Martin V., while
the Curia resided in exile at Florence, the chain which was binding
Rome to the city of Italian culture continued to gain strength. The
result of all the discords which rent the Church in the first half of
the fifteenth century was to Italianise the Papal See; nor did
anything contribute to this end more powerfully than the Florentine
traditions of three successive Popes—Martin V., Eugenius IV., and
Nicholas V.
Eugenius was a Venetian of good family, who inherited considerable
wealth from his father. Having realised his fortune, he bestowed
20,000 ducats on charitable institutions and took orders in the
Church.[188] In 1431 he was raised to the Papacy; but the disturbed
state of Rome obliged him to quit the Vatican in mean disguise, and to
seek safety by flight from Ostia. He spent the greater portion of his
life in Tuscany, occupied less with humanistic interests than with the
reformation of monastic orders and the conduct of ecclesiastical
affairs in the Councils of Basle and Florence. Though he did not share
the passion of his age for learning, the patronage which he extended
to scholars was substantial and important. Giovanni Aurispa received
from him the title of Apostolic Secretary, and was appointed
interpreter between the Greeks and Italians at the Council of the two
Churches. Even the paganising Carlo Marsuppini was enrolled upon the
list of Papal secretaries, while Filelfo and Piero Candido Decembrio,
who added lustre at this epoch to the Court of Milan, were invited by
Eugenius with highly flattering promises. The value of these meagre
statements consists in this, that even a Pope, whose personal
proclivities were monastic rather than humanistic, felt the necessity
of borrowing all the strength he could obtain from men of letters in
an age when learning itself was power. More closely attached to his
Court than those who have been mentioned, were Maffeo Begio, the poet,
and Flavio Biondo, one of the soundest and most conscientious students
of the time.[189]
Though Biondo had but little Greek, and could boast of no beauty of
style, his immense erudition raised him to high rank among Italian
scholars. The work he undertook was to illustrate the antiquities of
Italy in a series of historical, topographical, and archæological
studies. His 'Roma Instaurata,' 'Roma Triumphans,' and 'Italia
Illustrata,' three bulky encyclopædias of information concerning
ancient manners, laws, sites, monuments, and races, may justly be said
to have formed the basis of all subsequent dictionaries of Roman
antiquities. Another product of his industry was entitled 'Historiarum
ab Inclinatione Romanorum.' Three decades and a portion of the fourth
were written, when death put a stop to the completion of this gigantic
task. In estimating the value of Biondo's contributions to history, we
must remember that he had no previous compilations whereon to base his
own researches. The vast stores of knowledge he collected and digested
were derived from original sources. He grasped the whole of Latin
literature, both classical and mediæval, arranged the results of his
comprehensive reading into sections, and furnished the learned world
with tabulated materials for the study of Roman institutions in the
State, the camp, the law courts, private life, and religious
ceremonial. Obstinate indeed must have been the industry of the
scholar, who, in addition to these classical researches, undertook to
narrate the dissolution of antique society and to present a faithful
picture of Italy in the dark ages. Biondo's 'History of the Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire,' conceived in an age devoted to
stylistic niceties and absorbed by the attractions of renascent
Hellenism, inspires our strongest admiration. Yet its author failed in
his lifetime to win the distinction he deserved. Though he held the
office of Apostolic Secretary under four Popes, his marriage stopped
the way to ecclesiastical preferment, while his incapacity to use the
arts of the stylist, the sophist, the flatterer, and the translator,
lost him the favour his more solid qualities had at first procured.
Eugenius could appreciate a man of his stamp better than Nicholas V.,
whose special tastes inclined to elegant humanism rather than to
ponderous erudition.
The lives of all the humanists illustrate the honours and the wealth
secured by learning for her votaries in the Renaissance. No example,
however, is so striking as that furnished by the biography of Nicholas
V. Tommaso Parentucelli was born at Pisa in 1398. While he was still
an infant his parents, in spite of their poverty and humble station,
which might have been expected to shield them from political tyranny,
were exiled to Sarzana;[190] and at the age of nine he lost his father
at that place. Sarzana has consequently gained the credit of giving
birth to the first great Pope of the Renaissance period. The young
Tommaso found means, though extremely poor, to visit the University of
Bologna, where he studied theology and made himself a master in the
seven liberal arts. After six years' residence at Bologna, his total
destitution, combined, perhaps, with a desire for more instruction in
elegant scholarship than the university afforded, led him to seek work
in Florence. He must have already acquired some reputation, since
Rinaldo degli Albizzi received him as house-tutor to his children for
one year, at the expiration of which time he entered the service of
Palla degli Strozzi in a similar capacity. The money thus obtained
enabled him to return to Bologna, and to take his degree as Doctor of
Theology at the age of twenty-two. He was now fully launched in life.
The education he had received at Bologna qualified him for office in
the church, while his two years' residence at Florence had rendered
him familiar with men of polite learning and of gentle breeding.
Niccolo degli Albergati, Archbishop of Bologna, became his patron, and
appointed him controller of his household. Albergati was one of the
cardinals of Eugenius IV., a man of considerable capacity, and alive
to the intellectual interests of his age. When he followed the Papal
Court to Florence, Tommaso attended him, and here began the period
which was destined to influence his subsequent career. Inspired with
a passionate devotion to books for their own sake, and gifted with
ardent curiosity and all-embracing receptivity of intellect, the young
scholar found himself plunged into a society of which literature
formed the most absorbing occupation. He soon became familiar with
Cosimo de' Medici, and no meetings of the learned were complete
without him. A glimpse may be obtained of the literary circle he
frequented at this time from a picturesque passage in Vespasiano.[191]
'It was the wont of Messer Lionardo d'Arezzo, Messer Giannozzo
Manetti, Messer Poggio, Messer Carlo d'Arezzo, Messer Giovanni
Aurispa, Maestro Gasparo da Bologna, and many other men of learning to
congregate every morning and evening at the side of the Palazzo, where
they entered into discussions and disputes on various subjects. As
soon, then, as Maestro Tommaso had attended the Cardinal to the
Palazzo, he joined them, mounted on a mule, with two servants on foot;
and generally he was attired in blue, and his servants in long dresses
of a darker colour. At that time the pomp of the Court of Rome was not
by any means what it is nowadays. In the place I have named he was
always to be found, conversing and disputing, since he was a most
impassioned debater.'
Tommaso was not a man of genius; his talents were better suited for
collecting and digesting what he read, than for original research and
composition. He had a vast memory, and was an indefatigable student,
not only perusing but annotating all the books he purchased. Pius II.
used to say of him that what he did not know, must lie outside the
sphere of human knowledge. In speech he was fluent, and in disputation
eager; but he never ranked among the ornate orators and stylists of
the age. His wide acquaintance with all branches of literature, and
his faculty for classification, rendered him useful to Cosimo de'
Medici, who employed him on the catalogue of the Marcian Library.
From Cosimo in return, Tommaso caught the spirit which sustained him
in his coming days of greatness. Already, at this early period, while
living almost on the bounty of the Medici, he never lost an
opportunity of accumulating books, and would even borrow money to
secure a precious MS.[192] He used to say that, if ever he acquired
wealth, he would expend it in book-buying and building—a resolution
to which he adhered when he rose to the Pontificate.
Soon after the death of Albergati in 1443, Eugenius promoted Tommaso
to the see of Bologna; a cardinal's hat followed within a few months;
and in 1447 he was elected Pope of Rome. So sudden an elevation from
obscurity and poverty to the highest place in Christendom has rarely
happened; nor is it even now easy to understand what combinations of
unsuccessful intrigues among the princes of the Church enabled this
little, ugly, bright-eyed, restless-minded scholar to creep into S.
Peter's seat. Perhaps the simplest explanation is the best. The times
were somewhat adverse to the Papacy, nor was the tiara quite as much
an object of secular ambition as it afterwards became. Humanism
meanwhile exercised strong fascination over every class in Italy, and
it would seem that Tommaso Parentucelli had nothing but his reputation
for learning to thank for his advancement. 'Who in Florence would have
thought that a poor bell-ringer of a priest would be made Pope, to the
confusion of the proud?' This was his own complacent exclamation to
Vespasiano, who had gone to kiss his old friend's feet, and found him
seated on a throne with twenty torches blazing round him.[193]
The rejoicings with which the humanists hailed the elevation of one of
their own number to the Papal throne may be readily imagined; nor were
their golden expectations, founded on a previous knowledge of his
liberality in all things that pertained to learning, destined to be
disappointed. Nicholas V., to quote the words of Vespasiano, who knew
him well, 'was a foe to ceremonies and vain flatteries, open and
candid, without knowing how to feign; avarice he never harboured, for
he was always spending beyond his means.'[194] His revenues were
devoted to maintaining a splendid Court, rebuilding the fortifications
and palaces of Rome, and showering wealth on men of letters. In the
protection extended by this Pope to literature we may notice that he
did not attempt to restore the studio pubblico of Rome, and that he
showed a decided preference for works of solid learning and
translations. His tastes led him to delight in critical and
grammatical treatises, and his curiosity impelled him to get Latin
versions made of the Greek authors. It is possible that he did nothing
for the Roman university because he considered Florence sufficient for
the humanistic needs of Italy, and his own Alma Mater for the graver
studies of the three professions. Still this neglect is noticeable in
the case of a Pontiff whose one public aim was to restore Rome to the
rank of a metropolis, and whose chief private interest was study.
The most permanent benefit conferred by him on Roman studies was the
foundation of the Vatican Library, on which he spent about 40,000
scudi forming a collection of some 5,000 volumes.[195] He employed the
best scribes, and obtained the rarest books; nor was there anyone in
Italy better qualified than himself to superintend the choice and
arrangement of such a library. It had been his intention to place it
in S. Peter's and to throw it open to the public; but he died before
this plan was matured. It remained for Sixtus IV. to carry out his
project.
During the pontificate of Nicholas Rome became a vast workshop of
erudition, a factory of translations from Greek into Latin. These
were done for the most part by Greeks who had an imperfect knowledge
of Latin, and by Italians who had not complete mastery of Greek. The
work achieved was unequal and of no great permanent value; yet for the
time being it served a purpose of utility, nor could the requirements
of the age have been so fully satisfied by any other method. Nearly
all the eminent scholars at that time in Italy were engaged in this
labour. How liberally they were rewarded may be gathered from the
following details. Lorenzo Valla obtained 500 scudi for his version of
Thucydides; Guarino received the larger sum of 1,500 scudi for Strabo;
Perotti 500 ducats for Polybius; while Manetti was pensioned at the
rate of 600 scudi per annum to enable him to carry on his sacred
studies. Nicholas delighted in Greek history. Accordingly, Appian was
translated by Piero Candido Decembrio, Diodorus Siculus and the
'Cyropædia' of Xenophon by Poggio,[196] Herodotus by Valla. Valla and
Decembrio were both engaged upon the 'Iliad' in Latin prose; but the
dearest wish of Nicholas in his last years was to see the poems of
Homer in the verse of Filelfo. Nor were the Greeks then resident in
Italy neglected. To Georgios Trapezuntios the Pope entrusted the
'Physics,' 'Problems,' and 'Metaphysics' of Aristotle. The same
scholar tried his hand at the 'Laws' of Plato, and, in concert with
Decembrio, produced a version of the 'Republic.' Gregorios Tifernas
undertook the 'Ethics' of Aristotle, and Theodorus Gaza the 'History
of Animals.' To this list should be added the Greek Fathers,
Theophrastus, Ptolemy, and minor works which it would be tedious to
enumerate.[197]
The profuse liberality of Nicholas brought him thus into relation with
the whole learned world of Italy. Among the humanists who resided at
his Court in Rome, mention must be made of Lorenzo Valla, who was
appointed Apostolic Scriptor in 1447, and who opened a school of
eloquence in 1450. Piero Candido Decembrio obtained the post of
secretary and overseer of the Abbreviators.[198] Giovanni Tortello, of
Arezzo, the author of a useful book on the orthography of Greek words,
superintended the Pope's library. Piero da Noceto, whose tomb in the
cathedral at Lucca is one of Matteo da Civitale's masterpieces, was
private secretary and comptroller of the Pope's affairs. Of the circle
gathered round Bessarion I shall have occasion to speak later on. Our
present attention must be concentrated on a man who, more even than
Nicholas himself, might claim the right to give his own name to this
age of learning.
Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini is better known in the annals of
literature as Poggio Fiorentino, though he was not made a burgher of
Florence until late in life. Born in 1380 at Terranova, a village of
the Florentine contado, he owed his education to Florence. In Latin
he was the pupil of John of Ravenna, and in Greek of Manuel
Chrysoloras. During his youth he supported himself by copying MSS. for
the Florentine market. Coluccio Salutato and Niccolo de' Niccoli
befriended the young student, who entered as early as the year 1402 or
1403 into the Papal Chancery.[199] Though Poggio's life for the
following half-century was spent in the service of the Roman Curia, he
refused to take orders in the Church, and remained at heart a
humanist. With the Florentine circle of scholars he maintained an
unremitting correspondence, sending them notices of his discoveries in
the convents of Switzerland and Germany, receiving from them literary
gossip in return, joining in their disputes, and more than once
engaging in fierce verbal duels to befriend his Medicean allies. His
duties and his tastes alike made him a frequent traveller, and not the
least of the benefits conferred by him upon posterity are his pictures
of foreign manners. At the Council of Constance, for example, he saw
and heard Jerome of Prague, in whom he admired the firmness and
intrepid spirit of a Cato.[200] At Baden in Switzerland he noticed the
custom, strange to Italian eyes, of men and women bathing together,
eating, drinking, and playing at chess or cards upon floating tables
in the water, while visitors looked down upon them from galleries
above, as they now do at Leukerbad.[201] In England he observed that
the gentry preferred residence in their country houses and secluded
parks to the town life then, as now, fashionable in Italy, and
commented upon the vast wealth and boorish habits of the great
ecclesiastics.[202] Concerning his discoveries of MSS. I have had
already occasion to write; nor need I here repeat what I have said
about his antiquarian researches among the ruins of ancient Rome.
Poggio was a man of wide sympathies, active curiosity, and varied
interests—no mere bookworm, but one whose eyes and mind were open to
the world around him.
In literature he embraced the whole range of contemporary studies,
making his mark as a public orator, a writer of rhetorical treatises
and dialogues, a panegyrist of the dead, a violent impeacher and
impugner of the living, a translator from the Greek, an elegant
epistolographer, a grave historian, and a facetious compiler of
anecdotes and epigrams. He possessed a style at once easy and pointed,
correct in diction and varied in cadence, equally adapted for serious
discourse and witty trifling, and not less formidable in abuse than
delicate in flattery. This at least was the impression which his
copious and facile Latin, always fluent and yet always full of sense,
produced on his contemporaries. For us its finest flights of rhetoric
have lost their charm, and its best turns of phrase their point. So
impossible is it that the fashionable style of one age should retain
its magic for posterity, unless it be truly classical in form, or
weighted with sound thought, or animated with high inspiration. Just
these qualities were missed by Poggio and his compeers. Setting no
more serious aim before them than the imitation of Livy and Cicero,
Seneca and Cæsar, they fell far short of their originals; nor had they
matter to make up for their defect of elegance. Poggio's treatises 'De
Nobilitate,' 'De Varietate Fortunæ,' 'De Miseriâ Humanæ Conditionis,'
'De Infelicitate Principum,' 'An Seni sit Uxor ducenda,' 'Historia
Disceptiva Convivialis,' and so forth, were as interesting to Italy in
the fifteenth century as Voltaire's occasional essays to our more
immediate ancestors. His controversial writings passed for models of
destructive eloquence, his satires on the clergy for masterpieces of
sarcastic humour, his Florentine history for a supreme achievement in
the noblest Latin manner. Yet the whole of this miscellaneous
literature seems coarse and ineffective to the modern taste. We read
it, not without repugnance, in order to obtain an insight into the
spirit of the author's age.
Two important points in Poggio's biography will serve to illustrate
the social circumstances of the humanists. The first is the attitude
adopted by him toward the churchmen, with whom he passed the best
years of his life in close intimacy; the second, his fierce warfare
waged with rivals and opponents in the field of scholarship. Though
Poggio served the Church for half a century, no one exposed the vices
of the clergy with more ruthless sarcasm, or turned the follies of the
monks to ridicule with more relentless scorn. After reading his
'Dialogue against the Hypocrites,' his 'Invective against Felix the
Antipope,' and his 'Facetiæ,' it is difficult to understand how a
satirist who knew the weak points of the Church so intimately, and
exposed them so freely, could have held high station and been honoured
in the Papal Curia. They confirm in the highest degree all that has
been written in the previous volume about the division between
religion and morality in Italy, the cynical self-satisfaction of the
clergy, and the secular indifference of the Papacy, proving at the
same time the proudly independent position which the talents of the
humanists had won for them at Rome. At the end of the 'Facetiæ'—a
collection of grossly indecent and not always very witty
stories—Poggio refers to the meetings with which he and his comrades
entertained themselves after the serious business of the day was
over.[203] Their place of resort was in the precincts of the Lateran,
where they had established a club which took the name of 'Bugiale,' or
Lie Factory.[204] Apostolic secretaries, writers to the Chancery,
protonotaries, and Papal scribes here met together after laying down
the pens they had employed in drafting Bulls and dispensations,
encyclical letters and diplomatic missives. To make puns, tell
scandalous stories, and invent amusing plots for novelettes was the
chief amusement of these Roman wits. Their most stinging shafts of
satire were reserved for monks and priests; but they spared no class
or profession, and made free with the names of living persons.[205]
Against the higher clergy it might not have been safe to utter even
the truth, except in strictest privacy, seeing that preferment had to
be expected from the Sacred College and the Holy Father. The mendicant
orders and the country parsons, therefore, bore the brunt of their
attack, while the whole tone of their discourse made it clear how
little they respected the religion and the institutions of the Church.
Such fragments of these conversations as Poggio thought fit to
preserve, together with anecdotes borrowed from the 'Cent Nouvelles
nouvelles' and other sources, he committed to Latin, and printed in
the later years of his life. The title given to the book was
'Facetiarum Liber.' It ran speedily through numerous editions, and was
read all over Europe with the same eagerness that the 'Epistolæ
Obscurorum Virorum' afterwards excited. Underneath its ribaldry and
nonsense, however, there lay no serious intention. The satires on the
clergy were contemptuous and flippant, arguing more liking on the part
of their author for scurrilous jests than any earnest wish to prove
the degradation of monasticism. Not a word of censure from the Vatican
can I find recorded against this marvellous production of a Papal
secretary's pen. Here, by way of illustration, it may be mentioned
that Filelfo, on his way through Rome to Naples, placed his
satires—the most nauseous compositions that coarse spite and filthy
fancy ever spawned—in the hands of Nicholas V. The Pope retained them
for nine days, read them, returned them with thanks, and rewarded
their author with a purse of 500 ducats.
The 'Dialogue against the Hypocrites' contains less of mere
scurrility and more that bears with real weight on the vices of the
clergy. Begging friars, preachers, confessors, and aspirants to the
fame of holiness are cited by name and scourged with pitiless
impartiality, while the worldly ambition of the Roman churchmen is
unmasked. The 'Fratres Observantiæ,' who flourished under Pope
Eugenius, receive stern castigation at the hands of Carlo Aretino.
Shepherd remarks, not without justice, on this dialogue that, had the
author 'ventured to advance the sentiments which it contains in the
days of Eugenius, he would in all probability have expiated his
temerity by the forfeit of his life.[206] Nicholas V., who appreciated
the pungency of its satiric style, instead of resenting its free
speech, directed his friend Poggio's pen against his rival Felix.
Raised to the Papacy by the Council of Basle in 1439, Amadeus, the
ex-Duke of Savoy, still persisted in his Papal title after the
election of Nicholas; and though the Sovereign of the Vatican could
well afford to scorn the hermit of Ripaille, he thought it prudent to
discharge the heavy guns of humanistic eloquence against the Antipope.
A ponderous invective was the result, wherein Poggio described the
unfortunate Felix as 'another Cerberus,' 'a rapacious wolf,' 'a golden
calf,' 'a perverter of the faith and foe to true religion,' 'a high
priest of malignity,' 'a roaring lion'—stigmatising the Council to
whom he owed his election as 'that sink of iniquity the Synagogue of
Basle,' 'a monstrous birth,' 'conventicle of reprobates,' 'tumultuary
band of debauched men,' 'apostates, fornicators, ravishers, deserters,
men convicted of most shameful crimes, blasphemers, rebels against
God.'[207] To such amenities of controversial rhetoric did even Popes
descend, substituting sound and fury for sense, and trusting to
vituperation in the absence of more valid arguments.
Poggio, next to Filelfo, was the most formidable gladiator in that age
of literary duellists. 'In his invectives he displayed such
vehemence,' writes Vespasiano,[208] 'that the whole world was afraid
of him.' Even Alfonso of Naples found it prudent to avert his anger by
a timely present of 600 ducats, when Poggio complained of his
remissness in acknowledging the version of Xenophon's
'Cyropædia,'[209] and hinted at the same time that a scholar's pen was
powerful enough to punish kings for their ingratitude. The overtures,
again, made to Poggio by Filippo Maria Visconti, and the consideration
he received from Cosimo de' Medici, testified to the desire of princes
for the goodwill of a spiteful and unscrupulous pamphleteer.[210] The
most celebrated of Poggio's feuds with men of letters began when
Filelfo assailed the character of Cosimo, and satirised the whole
society of Florence in 1433. The full history of Filelfo's animosity
against the Florentines belongs to the biography of that famous
scholar. It is enough here to mention that he ridiculed Cosimo under
the name of Mundus, described Poggio as Bambalio, Carlo Aretino as
Codrus, and Niccolo de' Niccoli as Outis,[211] accusing them of
literary imbecility, and ascribing to them all the crimes and vices
that disgrace humanity. Poggio girded up his loins for the combat,
and, in reply to Filelfo's ponderous hexameters, discharged a bulky
invective in prose against the common adversary. This was answered by
more satires, Poggio replying with new invectives. The quarrel lasted
over many years; when, having heaped upon each other all the insults
it is possible for the most corrupt imagination to conceive, they
joined hands and rested from the contest.[212] To sully these pages
with translations of Poggio's rank abuse would be impossible. I must
content myself with referring readers, who are anxious to gain a more
detailed acquaintance with the literary warfare of that age, to the
excerpts preserved by Shepherd and Rosmini.[213] Suffice it to say
that he poured a torrent of the filthiest calumnies upon Filelfo's
wife and mother, that he accused Filelfo himself of the basest vice in
youth and the most flagrant debauchery in manhood, that he represented
him as a public thief, a professed cut-purse, a blasphemous atheist,
soiled with sordid immoralities of every kind, and driven by his
exposed felonies from town to town in search of shelter for his hated
head. Filelfo replied in the same strain. All the resources of the
Latin language were exhausted by the combatants in their endeavours to
befoul each other's character, and the lowest depths of human nature
were explored to find fresh accusations. The learned world of Italy
stood by applauding, while the valiant antagonists, like gladiators of
the Roman arena, plied their diverse weapons, the one discharging
darts of verse, the other wielding a heavy club of prose.[214]
Unhappily, there was enough of scandalous material in both their lives
to give some colour to their accusations. Yet the virulence with which
they lied against each other defeated its own object. Raking that
literary dunghill, it is now impossible to distinguish the true from
the false; all proportion is lost in the mass of overcharged and
indiscriminate scurrility. That such encounters should have been
enjoyed and applauded by polite society is one of the strangest signs
of the times; and that the duellists themselves should have imagined
they were treading in the steps of Cicero and Demosthenes is even more
astounding.
The dispute with Filelfo was rather personal than literary. Another
duel into which Poggio entered with Guarino turned upon the respective
merits of Scipio and Julius Cæsar. Poggio had occasion to explain, in
correspondence with a certain Scipione Ferrarese, his reasons for
preferring the character of Scipio Africanus. Guarino, with a view to
pleasing his pupil Lionello d'Este, a professed admirer of Cæsar, took
up the cudgels in defence of the dictator,[215] and treated Poggio,
whom he called Cæsaromastix, with supreme contempt. Poggio replied in
a letter to the noble Venetian scholar Francesco Barbaro.[216] Hard
words were exchanged on both sides, and the antagonists were only
reconciled on the occasion of Poggio's marriage in 1435. Rome,
however, was the theatre of his most celebrated exploits as a
disputant. It chanced one day that he discovered a copy of his own
epistles annotated by a Spanish nobleman who was a pupil of Lorenzo
Valla.[217] Poggio's Latinity was not spared in the marginal
strictures penned by the young student; and the fiery scholar, flying
to the conclusion that the master, not the pupil, had dictated them,
discharged his usual missile, a furious invective, against Valla. Thus
attacked, the author of the 'Elegantiæ' responded in a similar
composition, entitled 'Antidotum in Poggium,' and dedicated to
Nicholas V.[218] Poggio followed with another invective; nor did the
quarrel end till he had added five of these disgusting compositions to
his previous achievements in the same style, and had drawn a young
Latinist of promise, Niccolo Perotti, into the disgraceful fray.[219]
What makes the termination of the squabble truly comic is that
Filelfo, himself the worst offender in this way, was moved at last to
write a serious letter of admonishment to the contending parties,
exhorting them to consult their own dignity and to lay down arms.[220]
Concerning the invectives and antidotes by which this war was carried
on Tiraboschi writes, 'Perhaps they are the most infamous libels that
have ever seen the light; there is no sort of vituperation which the
antagonists do not vomit forth against each other, no obscenity and
roguery of which they are not mutually accused.'
The inconceivably slight occasions upon which these learned men rushed
into the arena, and flung dirt upon one another, may be imagined when
we find Lorenzo Valla at feud on the one side with Georgios
Trapezuntios because the one preferred Cicero and the other
Quintilian, and on the other with Benedetto Morando because that
scholar doubted whether Lucius and Aruns were the grandsons of
Tarquinius Priscus. Sometimes private incidents aroused their wrath,
as in the curious rupture between Lionardo Bruni and Niccolo de'
Niccoli at Florence. The story, since it is characteristic of the
time, may be briefly told. Niccolo had stolen his brother's mistress
Benvenuta, and made her his concubine.[221] His relatives, indignant
at the domestic scandal, insulted Benvenuta in the street, and Niccolo
bemoaned himself to all his friends. Lionardo, to whom he applied for
sympathy, very properly observed that a student ought to be better
occupied than with the misfortunes of a kitchen wench. This tart reply
roused Niccolo's bile, and set his caustic tongue wagging against his
old friend; whereupon Lionardo Bruni launched a fierce invective in
nebulonem maledicum against him, and the learned society of Florence
indulged in a free fight on both sides.
Such quarrels were not always confined to words. There is no doubt
that the dagger was employed against Filelfo by the Medicean party,
while it now and then happened that the literary gladiators came to
actual fisticuffs. A scene of this sort occurred at Rome in public.
Georgios Trapezuntios complained that the credit of Poggio's
translations from Diodorus and Xenophon really belonged to him, since
he had done the work of them. Poggio shrieked out, 'You lie in your
throat!' Georgios retorted with a box on Poggio's ears. Then Poggio
came to close quarters, catching his adversary by the hair; and the
two professors pommelled each other till their respective pupils
parted them.[222] Such anecdotes might be multiplied indefinitely. Nor
would it be unprofitable to give some account of the vehement warfare
waged in Italy between the Platonists and Aristotelians, were it not
that enough has already been said to illustrate the acrimonious temper
of the times.
The animosity displayed by scholars in these disputes may be taken as
a proof of their enthusiasm for their studies. Men have always
quarrelled about politics, because politics furnish matter of profound
interest to everyone. Theology, for a similar reason, never fails to
rouse the deepest rancours, hatreds, and hostilities of which the
human breast is capable. Science, as we know from the annals of our
days, sets the upholders of antagonistic theories by the ears; and at
times when politics have been dull, theology dormant, and science
undemonstrative, even music has been found sufficient to excite a
nation. In the fifteenth century scholarship was all-absorbing. It
corresponded to science in our age, since it engaged the talents of
the strongest workers and supplied the sources of progressive
intellectual discovery. Moreover, it included both philosophy and
theology, and formed the most attractive topic in all conversation. No
wonder, therefore, that the limpid fountains of classical erudition
were troubled by the piques and jealousies of students.
It is pleasant to turn from Poggio's wrangling to more honourable
passages in his biography. Since the year 1434 he had owned a farm not
far from Florence. Here he built a country residence, vying, if not in
splendour, at least in elegance, with the villas of the Florentine
burghers. He called it his Valdarniana, and adorned it with the
fragments of antique sculpture, inscriptions, and coins, collected by
him partly in person on the Roman Campagna and partly by purchase from
Greece. In the following year (1435) Poggio, then a man of fifty-five,
married a girl of eighteen, named Vaggia, of the noble Buondelmonte
blood. In forming this connection he had to separate from a mistress
who had borne him fourteen children, four of them then living. His
biographer, Shepherd, indulges in some sentimental reflections upon
the pain this leave-taking must have cost him. Yet the impartial
critic will hardly be brought to pity Poggio, seeing that he cancelled
the brief whereby he had previously legitimised his natural children,
and responded with raptures to the congratulations of friends upon his
new engagement. He had already been admitted to the burghership of
Florence, and exempted from its taxes in consideration of his literary
services; so that, on the death of his friend Carlo Aretino, in 1453,
no one was found more fitting for the post of Chancellor to the
Republic. As an increase of dignity, Poggio fulfilled the office of
Prior, and sat among the Signory. The 'History of the Florentine
Republic,' written in continuation of Lionardo Aretino's, occupied the
closing years of his life. He left it still unfinished in the year
1459, when he died, and was buried in the Church of Santa Croce. I
cannot find that his funeral was accompanied by the peculiar honours
voted in the case of his two predecessors. The Florentines, however,
erected his statue on the façade of Santa Maria del Fiore, and placed
his picture by Antonio dal Pollajuolo in the hall of the Proconsolo.
The fate of this statue, a work of Donatello's, was not a little
curious. On the occasion of some alterations in 1560, it was removed
from its first station, and set up as one among the Twelve Apostles in
another part of the cathedral.
Any survey of the Court of Nicholas V. would be incomplete without
some notice of the Cardinal Bessarion. Early in life he rose to high
station in the Greek Church, and attended the Council of Florence as
Archbishop of Nicea. Eugenius IV., by making him a cardinal in 1439,
converted him to the Latin faith; and, as it so happened, he missed
the Papacy almost by an accident thirty-two years later.[223] His
palace at Rome became the meeting-place of scholars of all
nations,[224] where refugee Greeks in particular were sure of finding
hearty welcome. In obedience to the reigning passion for
book-collecting, he got together a considerable library of Greek and
Latin authors, the number of which Vespasiano estimated at 600
volumes, while Platina reckoned their total cost at 30,000 scudi. In
1468 he offered this collection to the Church of S. Mark at Venice.
The Republic accepted his gift, but showed no alacrity to build the
library. It was not until the next century that Bessarion's books
were finally housed according to their dignity.[225] The Cardinal's
own studies lay in the direction of theological philosophy. We have
already seen that in his youth he was a pupil of Gemistos, and he now
appears as the defender of Plato. Georgios Trapezuntios had published
a treatise in the year 1458, in which, on the pretence of upholding
Aristotle, he vilified Plato's moral character, accused him of having
ruined Greece, and maintained that Mahomet was a far better
legislator. Bessarion replied by the oration 'In Calumniatorem
Platonis,' vindicating the morality of the philosopher and supporting
him against Aristotle. This book was printed by Sweynheim and Pannartz
in the infancy of the Roman press. Theodoros Gaza,[226] who, on his
settlement in Rome in 1450, had been received into Bessarion's
household, entered the lists with a critique of Gemistos; to which
Bessarion replied: and so the warfare begun by Gennadios at Byzantium
was continued by the Greek exiles at Rome. The titles of the works
issued in this contest, among which we find 'De Naturâ et Arte,'
'Utrum Natura Consilio Agat,' 'Comparationes Philosophorum Aristotelis
et Platonis,' sufficiently indicate the extent of ground traversed.
The chief result was the rousing of Italian scholars to weightier
points of issue in philosophy than had at first been raised by
mystical Neoplatonists and pedantic Peripatetics.
Among the Greeks protected by Bessarion, passing notice may be made of
Andronicus Callistus, whose lectures found less favour at Rome than
they afterwards obtained at Florence, where he had the great Poliziano
for his pupil. He was one of the first of the Greeks to seek fortune
in France.[227] Nor must Demetrius Chalcondylas be omitted, who fled
from Byzantium to Rome about the year 1447, and afterwards professed
Greek in the University of Perugia. A letter written by one of his
pupils, Gian Antonio Campano,[228] gives such an agreeable impression
of the effect he produced in the city of the Baglioni, that I will
translate a portion of it. 'A Greek has just arrived, who has begun to
teach me with great pains, and I to listen to his precepts with
incredible pleasure, because he is a Greek, because he is Athenian,
and because he is Demetrius. It seems to me that in him is figured all
the wisdom, the civility, and the elegance of those so famous and
illustrious ancients. Merely seeing him, you fancy you are looking on
Plato; far more when you hear him speak.' It was a young man of
twenty-three who wrote this, the companion, probably, of such
magnificent youths as Signorelli loved to paint and Matarazzo to
describe.[229] It is interesting to compare this letter with the
panegyric passed upon Ognibene da Lonigo five years after his death by
Bartolommeo Pagello in an oration delivered at Vicenza. The young men
of Vicenza, said the rhetorician, left their dice, their duels, their
wine cups, and their loves to listen to this humanist; his learning
wrought a reformation in the morals of the town.[230] Such were the
fascinations of scholarship in the fifteenth century.
The Greeks hitherto mentioned quitted their country before the capture
of Constantinople. It is, therefore, wrong to ascribe to that event
the importation of Hellenic studies into Italy. Their Italian pupils
carried on the work they had begun, with wider powers and nobler
energy. All the great Grecians of the third age of humanism are
Italians. Florence received learning from Byzantium at the very moment
when the Greek Empire was about to be extinguished, and spread it far
and wide through Europe, herself achieving by far the largest and most
arduous portion of the task.
In passing down to Naples, we find a marked change in the external
conditions under which literature flourished. Men of learning at the
Courts of Italy occupied a position different from that of their
brethren in the Papal Chancery. They had to suit their habits to the
customs of the Court and camp, to place their talents at the service
of their patron's pleasure, to entertain him in his hours of idleness,
to frame compliments and panegyrics, and to repay his bounty by the
celebration of his deeds in histories and poems. Their footing was
less official, more subject to the temper and caprices of the reigning
sovereign, than at Rome; while the peculiar advantages, both political
and social, which, even under the sway of the Medicean family, made
Florence a real republic of letters, existed in no other town of
Italy.
At Naples there was no such thing as native culture. The semi-feudal
nobility of the South were addicted to field sports, feats of arms,
and idleness. The people of the country were sunk in barbarism. In the
cities there was no middle class analogous to that of the more
northerly republics. Nevertheless, the kingdom of the Two Sicilies
played an important part in the development of Italian literature.
While the Mussulmans held sway at Palermo, Sicily was the most refined
and enlightened state of Southern Europe. Under the Norman dynasty
this Arabic civilisation began to influence North Italy, and during
the reign of Frederick II. Naples bade fair to become the city of
illumination for the modern world. The failure of Frederick's attempt
to restore life to arts and letters in the thirteenth century belongs
to the history of his warfare with the Church. What his courtiers
effected for the earliest poetry of the Italians is told by Dante in
the treatise 'De Vulgari Eloquio.' For our present purpose it is
enough to notice that the zeal for knowledge planted by the Arabs,
tolerated by the Normans, and fostered by the House of Hohenstauffen
in the south of Italy, was an exotic which took no deep root in the
people. No national poem was produced in the golden age of Frederick's
brief supremacy; no stories are told of Neapolitan carters and boatmen
reciting the sonnets of his courtiers. As culture began, so it
continued to exist at Naples—flourishing at intervals in close
connection with the sovereign's taste, and owing to local influences
not life and vigour, but colour and complexion, suavity and softness,
caught from the surrounding beauties of the sea and shore.
Each of the dynasties which held the throne of the Two Sicilies could
boast a patron of literature. Robert of Anjou was proud to call
himself the friend of Petrarch, and Boccaccio found the flame of
inspiration at his Court.[231] In the second age of humanism, with
which we are now occupied, Alfonso of Aragon deserved the praise
bestowed on him by Vespasiano of being, next to Nicholas V., the most
munificent promoter of learning.[232] His love of letters was genuine.
After making all deductions for the flattery of official
historiographers, it is clear that Alfonso found his most enduring
satisfaction in the company of students, listening to their debates on
points of scholarship, attending their public lectures, employing them
in the perusal of ancient poets and historians, insisting on their
presence in his camp, and freely supplying them with money for the
purchase of books and for their maintenance while engaged in works of
erudition. Vespasiano relates that Beccadelli's daily readings to his
master were not interrupted during the campaign of 1443, when Alfonso
took the field against Francesco Sforza's armies in the March.[233]
The Neapolitan captains might be seen gathered round their monarch,
listening to the scholar's exposition of Livy, instead of wasting
their leisure at games of hazard. Beccadelli himself professes to have
cured an illness of Alfonso's in three days by reading aloud to him
Curtius's Life of Alexander, while Lorenzo Valla describes the
concourse of students to his table during the recitations of Virgil or
of Terence.[234] Courtiers with no taste for scholarship were excluded
from these literary meetings; but free access was given to poor youths
who sought to profit by the learning of the lecturers. The king,
meantime, sat at meat, now and then handing fruits or confectionery to
refresh the reader when his voice seemed failing. His passion for the
antique assumed the romantic character common in that age. When the
Venetians sent him one of the recently discovered bones of Livy, he
received it like the relic of a saint; nor could the fears of his
physicians prevent him from opening and reading the MS. of Livy
forwarded from Florence by Cosimo de' Medici, who was then suspected
of wishing to poison him. On his military excursions he never
neglected the famous sites of antiquity, saluting the genius loci
with pious thanks at Ovid's birthplace, and expressly forbidding his
engineers to trespass on the site of Cicero's villa at Gaeta.[235]
Alfonso was no less assiduous than his contemporaries in the
collection of books. The Palace library at Naples was his favourite
place of recreation; here Giannozzo Manetti found him among his
scholars on the famous occasion when the king sat through a long
congratulatory oration like a brazen statue, without so much as
brushing away the flies that settled on his face. His MSS. were
dispersed when Charles VIII. occupied Naples, and what became of them
is doubtful.[236]
Among the humanists who stood nearest to the person of this monarch,
Antonio Beccadelli, called from his birthplace Il Panormita, deserves
the first place. Born at Palermo in 1394, he received his education at
Siena, where he was a fellow-student with Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini.
The city of Siena, molles Senæ, as the poet himself called it, was
notorious throughout Italy for luxury of living. Here, therefore, it
may be presumed that Beccadelli in his youth enjoyed the experiences
which he afterwards celebrated in 'Hermaphroditus.'[237] Nothing is
more striking in that amazing collection of elegies than the frankness
of their author, the free and liberal delight with which he dwells on
shameless sensualities, and the pride with which he publishes his own
name to the world. Dedicated to Cosimo de' Medici, welcomed with
applause by the grey-headed Guarino da Verona,[238] extolled to the
skies by Antonio Losco, eagerly sought after by Bartolommeo, Bishop of
Milan—this book, which Strato and Martial might have blushed to own,
passed from copyist to copyist, from hand to hand. Among the learned
it found no serious adversaries. Poggio, indeed, gently reminded the
poet that even the elegance of its Latinity and the heat of its
author's youth were hardly sufficient excuses for its wantonness.[239]
Yet the almost unanimous verdict of students was favourable. Its open
animalism, as free from satire as from concealment, took the world by
storm; while the facile elegance of fluent verse with which the sins
of Sodom and Gomorrha were described placed it, in the opinion of
scholars, on a level with Catullus.[240] When the Emperor Sigismund
crowned Beccadelli poet at Siena in 1433, he only added the weight of
Imperial approval to the verdict of the lettered public.
The Church could not, however, tolerate the scandal. Ever since the
days of Petrarch and Boccaccio, monks had regarded the study of
antique poetry with suspicion. Now their worst fears were realised.
Beccadelli had proved that the vices of renascent Paganism were not
only corrupting Italian society in secret, but that a young scholar of
genius could openly proclaim his participation in the shame, abjure
the first principles of Christian morality, and appeal with confidence
to princes and humanists for sympathy. The Minorite Friars denounced
the 'Hermaphroditus' from their pulpits, and burned it, together with
portraits of the poet, on the public squares of Bologna, Milan, and
Ferrara.[241] Eugenius IV. proscribed the reading of it under penalty
of excommunication. Dignitaries of the Church, who found it in the
hands of their secretaries, did not scruple to tear it to pieces, as a
book forbidden by the Pope and contrary to sound morality.[242] Yet
all this made but little difference to Beccadelli's reputation.[243]
He lectured with honour at Bologna and Pavia, received a stipend of
800 scudi from the Visconti, and in 1435 was summoned to the Court of
Naples. Alfonso raised him to the rank of noble, and continually
employed him near his person, enjoying his wit, and taking special
delight in his readings of classic authors. As official
historiographer, Beccadelli committed to writing the memorable deeds
and sayings of his royal master.[244] As ambassador and orator, he
represented the King at foreign Courts. As tutor to the Crown Prince,
Ferdinand, he prepared a sovereign for the State of Naples. This
favour lasted till the year 1471, when he died, old, rich, and
respected, in his lovely villa by the Bay of Naples. A more signal
instance of the value attached in this age to pure scholarship,
irrespective of moral considerations, and apart from profound
learning—since Beccadelli was, after all, only an elegant
Latinist—cannot be adduced. The 'Hermaphroditus,' therefore, deserves
a prominent place in the history of Renaissance manners.
Those among us who have had the curiosity to study Beccadelli's
'Hermaphroditus' will find sufficient food for reflection upon his
post of confidence and honour at the Court of Alfonso.[245] Yet the
position of Lorenzo Valla at the same Court is even more remarkable.
While Beccadelli urged the levity of youth in extenuation of his
heathenism, and spoke with late regret of his past follies,[246] Valla
showed the steady front of a deliberate critic, hostile at all points
to the traditions and the morals of the Church. The parents of this
remarkable man were natives of Piacenza, though, having probably been
born at Rome, he assumed to himself the attribute of Roman.[247]
Before he fixed his residence at Naples, he had already won
distinction by a 'Dialogue on Pleasure,' in which he contrasted the
principles of the Stoics and Epicureans, making it clear, in spite of
cautious reservation, that he upheld the rights of the flesh in
opposition to the teaching of philosophies and Churches. The virtue of
virginity, so strongly prized by Christian saints, was treated by him
as a violence to nature's laws, an intolerable torment inflicted upon
man as God has made him.[248]
The attack opened by Valla upon the hypocrisies and false doctrines of
monasticism was both powerful and novel. Humanistic freedom of
thought, after assuming the form of witty persiflage in Poggio's
anecdotes and appearing as pure Paganism in Beccadelli's poems, now
put on the sterner mask of common sense and criticism in Lorenzo
Valla. The arms which he assumed in his first encounter with Church
doctrine, he never laid aside. To the end of his life Valla remained
the steady champion of unbiassed criticism, the living incarnation of
that 'verneinender Geist' to which the reason of the modern world has
owed its motive force.
Before leaving Rome at the age of twenty-four, Valla tried to get the
post of Apostolic Secretary, but without success. It is probable that
his youth told less against him than his reputation for plain speech
and fearlessness. In 1431 we hear of him at Pavia, where, according to
the slanders of his enemies,[249] he forged a will and underwent
public penance at the order of the Bishop. This, however, is just one
of those stories on which the general character of the invectives that
contain it, throws uncertainty. Far more to our purpose is the fact
that at this period he became the supreme authority on points of Latin
style in Italy by the publication of his 'Elegantiæ.' True to his own
genius, Valla displayed in this masterly treatise the qualities that
gave him a place unique among the scholars of his day. The forms of
correct Latinity which other men had picked out as they best could by
close adherence to antique models, he subjected to critical analysis,
establishing the art of style on scientific principles.
When Alfonso invited Valla to Naples in 1437, giving him the post of
private secretary, together with the poet's crown, he must have known
the nature of the man who was to play so prominent a part in the
history of free thought. It is not improbable that the feud between
the House of Aragon and the Papal See, which arose from Alfonso's
imperfect title to the throne of Naples, and was embittered by the
intrigues of the Church, disposed the King to look with favour on the
uncompromising antagonist of Papacy. At all events, Valla's treatise
on 'Constantine's Donation,' which appeared in 1440, assumed the
character of a political pamphlet.[250] The exordium contained fierce
personal abuse of Eugenius IV. and Cardinal Vitelleschi. The body of
the tract destroyed the fabric of lies which had imposed upon the
Christian world for centuries. The peroration ended with a menace.
Worse chastisement was in store for a worldly and simoniacal
priesthood, if the Popes refused to forego their usurped
temporalities, and to confess the sham that criticism had unmasked.
War to the death was thus declared between Valla and Rome. The storm
his treatise excited, raged at first so wildly that Valla thought it
prudent to take flight. He crossed the sea to Barcelona, and remained
there a short while, until, being assured of Alfonso's protection, he
once more returned to Naples. From beneath the shield of his royal
patron, he now continued to shoot arrow after arrow at his enemies,
affirming that the letter of Christ to Abgarus, reported by Eusebius,
was a palpable forgery, exposing the bad Latin style of the Vulgate,
accusing S. Augustine of heresy on the subject of predestination, and
denying the authenticity of the Apostles' Creed. That a simple
humanist, trusting only to his learning, should have dared to attack
the strong places of orthodoxy—its temporalities, its favourite code
of ethics, its creed, and its patristic authorities—may well excite
our admiration. With the stones of criticism and the sling of
rhetoric, this David went up against the Goliath of the Church; and
though he could not slay the Philistine, he planted in his forehead
the first of those many missiles with which the battery of the reason
has assailed tyrannical tradition in the modern world.
The friars, whom Valla attacked with frigid scorn, and whose empire
over the minds of men he was engaged in undermining, could not be
expected to leave him quiet. Sermons from all the pulpits of Italy
were launched at the heretic and heathen; the people were taught to
loathe him as a monster of iniquity; and finally a Court of
Inquisition was opened, at the bar of which he was summoned to attend.
To the interrogatories of the inquisitors Valla replied that 'he
believed as Mother Church believed: it was quite true that she knew
nothing: yet he believed as she believed.' That was all they could
extract from the disdainful scholar, who, after openly defying them,
walked away to the king and besought him to suspend the sitting of the
Court. Alfonso told the monks that they must leave his secretary
alone, and the process was dropped.
On the death of Eugenius, Nicholas V. summoned Valla to Rome, not to
answer for his heresies and insults at the Papal bar, but to receive
the post of Apostolic Writer, with magnificent appointments. The entry
of Valla into the Roman Curia, though marked by no external ceremony,
was the triumph of humanism over orthodoxy and tradition. We need not
suppose that Nicholas was seeking to bribe a dangerous antagonist to
silence. He simply wanted to attach an illustrious scholar to his
Court, and to engage him in the labour of translation from the Greek.
To heresy and scepticism he showed the indifference of a tolerant and
enlightened spirit; with the friars who hated Valla the Pope in Rome
had nothing whatsoever in common. The attitude assumed by Nicholas on
this occasion illustrates the benefit which learning in the
Renaissance derived from the worldliness of the Papacy. It was not
until the schism of the Teutonic Churches, and the intrusion of the
Spaniards into Italy, that the Court of Rome consistently adopted a
policy of persecution and repression.
A large portion of Valla's biography is absorbed by the history of his
quarrels with Poggio, Georgios Trapezuntios, and other men of mark.
Enough has already been said about these literary feuds; nor need I
allude to them again, except for the purpose of bringing a third
Court-scholar of Alfonso's into notice. Bartolommeo Fazio, a native of
La Spezzia, occupied the position of historiographer at Naples. In
addition to his annals of the life of Alfonso, he compiled a book on
celebrated men, and won the reputation of being the neatest Latinist
in prose of his age. Fazio ventured to criticise the style of Valla,
in whose works he professed to have detected five hundred faults of
language. Eight books of invectives and recriminations were exchanged
between them; and when both died in 1457, this epigram was composed in
celebration of their animosity:—
Ne vel in Elysiis sine vindice Valla susurret,
Facius haud multos post obit ipse dies.
|
The amusement afforded to Roman emperors by fights in the arena, and
to feudal nobles by the squabbles of their fools, seems to have been
extracted by Italian patrons from the duels of well-matched humanists.
What personal jealousies, what anxious competition for the princely
favour, such warfare concealed may be readily imagined; nor is it
improbable that Fazio's attack on Valli was prompted by the covert
spite of Beccadelli. Scarcely less close to the person of Alfonso than
the students with whom we have been occupied, stood Giannantonio
Porcello, a native of Naples. He was distinguished by his command of
versification: the fluency with which he poured fourth Latin elegiacs
and hexameters approached that of an improvisatore of the Molo.
Alfonso sent him to the camp of the Venetians during the war waged by
their general Piccinino in 1452-3 with Sforza. Porcello, who shared
the tent of Piccinino on this occasion, wrote a Latin history of the
campaign in the style of Livy, with moral reflections, speeches, and
all the apparatus of Roman rhetoric. Piccinino figured as Scipio
Æmilianus; Sforza as Hannibal. The work was dedicated to Alfonso.[251]
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]
The occasion of Filelfo's removal to Siena was this:—When his
position at Florence had become untenable, he received an invitation
from Antonio Petrucci to lecture for two years, with a stipend of 350
florins. Filelfo replied that he preferred small pay and quiet to a
larger income among the swords and poisons of his envious rivals.
Accordingly he took up his abode at Siena for four years in the
Piccolomini Palace. Like many greater and more admirable men, he had a
restless disposition, always pleased with what is new, yet always
grumbling when the taste of bitter mounted to his lips. The most
honourable invitations now began to shower upon him. The Council of
Basle, the Venetian Senate, the Emperor of the East, Eugenius IV., the
Universities of Perugia and Bologna, and the Duke of Milan applied for
his services. It was not, however, until the year 1439 that his love
of change, combined with the allurements of higher pay, induced him to
close with the offers of the Senate of Bologna. Once more, then, he
crossed the Apennines, and once more, after a brief sojourn of a few
months, he again quitted Bologna, and transferred himself to Milan.
His reception by Filippo Maria Visconti was most flattering. Placing a
diamond ring upon his finger, the Duke welcomed him among the nobles
of his Court on New Year's Day in 1440. Thus began Filelfo's
connection with the Lombard capital, which, though often interrupted,
was never wholly broken till his death.
The munificence of the Visconti exceeded that of any of Filelfo's
patrons,[267] while the mode of life at Milan exactly suited his
vainglorious temperament. He loved to throw his money about among
lords, to appear at high Court festivals, and to take the lead on
ceremonial occasions in his rank of orator. There was, moreover, no
rival strong enough to threaten the blasting of his popularity.[268]
We find him, during his residence at Milan, continually engaged in the
exercise of rhetoric. Public and private incidents of the most various
character employed his skill, nor is there any doubt that his large
professorial income was considerably increased by presents received
from patrons and employers.[269] In addition to the labours of his
chair, he engaged in various literary works. His Satires and Odes were
gradually growing into ponderous volumes.[270] Other fugitive pieces
in prose he put together under the title of 'Convivia Mediolanensia.'
Meanwhile he carried on an active correspondence, both familiar and
hortatory, with the scholars and the princes of his day.[271] There
was no branch of letters with which, sustained by sublime
self-approval, he was not willing and eager to meddle. As he had
professed Dante at Florence, so here at Milan, by ducal command, he
undertook to comment upon Petrarch, and actually composed a poem on S.
John the Baptist in terza rima. There is something ludicrous in the
thought of this Visconti, would-be Herod as in truth he was,
commissioning Filelfo, the outrageous Pagan, to versify the life of
Christ's forerunner. If Filelfo despised anything more than sacred
history, it was the Italian language; and if there was a task for
which he was unfitted, it was the composition of poetry.
During the second year of his Milanese residence Filelfo lost his wife
Theodora. He speedily married again, choosing for his bride a
beautiful young lady of good family in Milan. Her name was Orsina
Osnaga. Since I have touched upon this matter of Filelfo's private
life, it may be well to add that when he lost his second wife, he
took in wedlock for the third time Laura Magiolini. By each of his
marriages he acquired no inconsiderable property, and all his brides
belonged to highly distinguished families. The best thing that can be
said about Filelfo as a man is, that he was undoubtedly attached to
his wives and to the numerous children they bore him.[272] This
feeling did not, however, protect him from numerous infidelities, or
save his fortune from the burden of illegitimate children.[273] It is
even doubtful whether credence should not be accorded to suggestions
of worse debauchery, repeated with every appearance of belief by his
enemies, and on his side but imperfectly refuted. Filelfo was, in
truth, a man of great physical vigour, whose energies the mere labour
of the student was insufficient to exhaust. Loves and hatreds,
domestic sympathies and turbulent passions, absorbed a portion of his
superfluous force; nor was he at any time restrained by scruples of
religion or morality. What was good for Greeks and Romans was good for
him. It is also to be noted that the innate sense of delicacy which
sometimes forms the safeguard of excessive temperaments was altogether
alien to his nature.
During the disasters that befell the State of Milan on the death of
Filippo Maria, Filelfo at first espoused the cause of the burghers. A
letter to the Florentines is extant, in which he exhorts them to aid
their sister commonwealth at the extreme hour of her peril. It was not
natural, however, that a humanist, who had no zeal for freedom, and
whose personal interests led him to desire a settled government at any
price, should continue staunch to a republic so unnerved as that of
Milan. When Carlo Gonzaga played the Milanese false by admitting the
troops of Francesco Sforza, Filelfo was the first to welcome the new
monarch with a set oration. He professed great admiration for the
general who, by careful management and double-dealing, had placed
himself at the head of the third state in the peninsula. Yet his
correspondence at this period proves that his mind was uneasy, and
that he desired a change. In an impudent letter addressed to Nicholas
V., he solicited ecclesiastical preferment, suggesting that the
promise of a bishop's mitre would secure his splendid talents for the
service of the Papacy.[274] However desirous the Pope might be to
engage Filelfo for his translation factory at Rome, the price demanded
was too great. He could not recognise a vocation so clearly inspired
by mercenary motives; and to receive into the high places of the
Church, at his own request, a man accused of many vices, who had twice
been married, would have established a dangerous precedent. Filelfo,
receiving neither substantial encouragement nor a flat refusal, turned
his thoughts to matrimony for the third time, and addressed a prayer
on this occasion to Dame Venus, in which he besought the mother of
Priapus to befriend her votary. The intelligent student of the
Renaissance will not fail to notice the state of mind implied by the
juxtaposition of this letter to the Holy Father and this ode to Venus.
Filelfo was now fain to content himself with the patronage of
Francesco Sforza, a prince who had no natural turn for literature, but
who was wise enough to know that a parvenu could least of all afford
to neglect the ruling fashions of his age. The letters he wrote at
this period abound in impudent demands for money, querulous outcries
over the poverty to which the first scholar of the century was
condemned, and violent menaces of retaliation if his salary remained
in arrears.[275] Not only Francesco Sforza, but all the patrons upon
whom Filelfo thought he had a claim, were assailed with reptile
lamentations and more reptile menaces. Alessandro Sforza, Lodovico
Gonzaga, and three Popes in succession may be mentioned among the more
distinguished princes who suffered from this literary brigandage.[276]
Not without strict justice did a contemporary describe him in the
following severe terms:—'He is calumnious, envious, vain, and so
greedy of gold that he metes out praise or blame according to the
gifts he gets, both despicable as proceeding from a tainted
source.'[277] Filelfo's rapacity is truly disgusting when we remember
that he received far more than any equally distinguished student of
his age. Not the illiberality of patrons, but his own luxurious
habits, reduced him to beggary. All the while that he was screaming in
bad Latin verse, he lived expensively, indulging ostentatious tastes,
and finding money for unclean indulgences. In order to confirm his
claim on the Duke of Milan's generosity, he began a gigantic Latin
epic upon the life of Sforza. Without plan, a mere versified
chronicle, encumbered with foolish mythological machinery, and loaded
with fulsome flatteries, this leaden Sforziad crawled on until 12,800
lines had been written. Only the first eight books of it were
published in MS., nor were these ever printed.[278]
By fair means and by foul, Filelfo had managed to secure a splendid
reputation throughout Italy. His journey to Naples in 1453 resembled a
triumphal progress. Nicholas V. entertained him with distinction, read
his infamous satires, presented him with a purse of 500 ducats, and
offered him a yearly stipend of 600 if he would dedicate his talents
to translation. Alfonso dubbed him knight, and placed the poet's
laurel on his brow with his own royal hands. As he passed through
their capitals, the princes received him like an equal. At Ferrara he
enjoyed the hospitalities of Duke Borso, at Mantua the friendship of
the Marchese Lodovico Gonzaga; the terrible Gismondo Pandolfo
Malatesta welcomed him in Rimini, and the General Jacopo Piccinino in
his camp at Fossombrone. Nor was this fame confined to Italy. On the
fall of Constantinople he addressed a letter to the Sultan, beseeching
him to release his mother-in-law and her two daughters from captivity;
the humanist's eloquence obtained this favour from the Turkish
conqueror, who refused to accept a ransom for the relatives of so
illustrious an orator.[279]
Until the death of Francesco Sforza Milan continued to be the city of
Filelfo's choice. After that event he turned his thoughts to Rome.
Pius II., Paul II., and Sixtus IV., in succession, had testified their
regard for him, either by moderate presents, sufficient to excite his
cupidity and check his slanderous temper, or by negotiations which
came to nothing. At last, in 1474, he received from Rome the offer of
a professorial chair, with a stipend of 600 florins, and the promise
of the first vacant post in the Apostolic Chancery.
The old man of seventy-seven years once more journeyed across the
plains of Lombardy, ascended the Apennines, passed through
Florence,[280] and began his lectures with the 'Tusculans' of Cicero,
on the twelfth day of January, 1475, in Rome. The marks of favour with
which Sixtus had received him were highly honourable. Filelfo was
permitted to sit in the Pope's presence, and on Christmas Day he stood
among the ambassadors while Sixtus celebrated mass. The vigorous old
scholar at first felt that all his previous life had been a tedious
prologue to this blissful play. Soon, however, a cloud arose on the
horizon. The Pope's treasurer, Milliardo Cicala, was remiss in
payments. Filelfo retaliated by describing Cicala's vices in the most
lurid colours to Sixtus.[281] Though his style and eloquence were
always vulgar, the concentrated fury and impassioned hatred of these
invectives cannot fail to impress the imagination. Such a picture of
the dissolute and grasping treasurer, painted by Filelfo and sent to
Sixtus, has a sinister humour which might recommend itself to the
audience of an infernal comedy. It is only necessary to have some
knowledge of the three men in order to perceive its force. Nor did
Sixtus himself long continue in Filelfo's graces. Frequent journeys
prove how unsettled he became; at last he left Rome in 1476, never to
return. When the Pazzi Conjuration failed at Florence, Filelfo wrote
to congratulate Lorenzo de' Medici on his escape, and undertook the
task of composing a history of the whole intrigue. Two long and
violent letters addressed to Sixtus, accusing him of participation in
the conspiracy, and heaping on him charges of vice, were the result of
this determination.[282] These epistles were dated from Milan, whither
Filelfo had retired in 1476, to find his third wife dead of the
plague, and buried on the eve of his arrival. His sorrow on this
occasion was genuine; nor is it likely that he derived much comfort
from a curious epistle addressed to him by Paolo Morosini, who,
himself a husband and father, attempted to console the septuagenarian
professor by elaborate abuse of matrimony.[283] To such ridiculous
vagaries did the rhetorical spirit of humanism lead its votaries.
Filelfo's last journey was undertaken in 1481. Ill at ease, and sore
of heart, the veteran of scholarship still longed for further
triumphs. All his wishes for some time past had been set on ending his
days at Florence, near the person of Lorenzo de' Medici; and when an
invitation to the Chair of Greek Literature arrived, it found him
eager to set forth. He was so poor, however, that the Duke's
secretary, Jacopo Antiquari, had to lend him money for the
journey.[284] He just managed to reach Florence, where he died of
dysentery a fortnight after his arrival, at the age of eighty-three.
The Florentines buried him in the Church of the Annunziata.
The sketch which I have given of Filelfo's life, abounds in details
beyond the just proportions of the present chapter. This is due partly
to the copiousness and the excellence of the authorities collected by
Rosmini in his exhaustive biography, but more to the undoubted fact
that Filelfo ranks as the typical humanist of his age. The
universality of his acquirements and the impression they made upon
contemporaries, his enormous physical vigour and incessant mental
activity, the vehemence with which he prosecuted his literary warfares
and the restlessness that drove him from capital to capital in Italy,
are themselves enough to mark him out as the representative hero of
the second period of humanism. Not less characteristic were the
quality and the form of his literary work—ridiculously over-valued
then, and now perhaps too readily depreciated. There is something
pathetic in the certainty of everlasting fame that sustained the
student through so many years of unremitting labour. It makes us
wonder whether the achievements of the human intellect, in science and
discovery, acceptable as these may be to their own time, are not,
equally with Filelfo's triumph of scholarship, foredoomed to speedy
obscuration. Nothing is imperishable but high thought, to which art
has communicated the indestructible form of beauty.
The 'Age of the Despots'[285] contains a promise of further details
concerning Vittorino da Feltre, to redeem which the time has now come.
His father's name was Bruto de' Rambaldoni; but having been born at
Feltre in the year 1378, he took from his birthplace the surname by
which he is best known.
Like the majority of his contemporaries, Vittorino studied Latin under
John of Ravenna and rhetoric under Gasparino da Barzizza. His poverty
compelled him at the same time to support himself by taking pupils;
this drudgery, however, was so unremunerative that, when he wanted to
attend the mathematical lectures of Biagio Pelacane, he had to pay
that avaricious and eccentric teacher by personal service. As Haydn
got his much-desired instruction from Porpora by playing the part of
valet,[286] so Vittorino became the scullery boy of Pelacane,[287] in
order that he might acquire geometry. These early studies were carried
on at Padua, from which town he appears to have moved about the year
1417 to Venice. Here he entered into friendship with Guarino da
Verona, and having learned Greek, returned to his old university as
professor of rhetoric.[288] The bias of Vittorino's genius inclined
toward private teaching, and it is this by which he is distinguished
among contemporary humanists. Accordingly we find that, as soon as he
was settled in Padua, he opened a school for a fixed number of young
men, selected without regard to rank or wealth. From the richer pupils
he required fees proportioned to their means; from the poor he exacted
nothing: thus the wealthy were made to support the needy, while the
teacher obtained for himself the noble satisfaction of relieving
aspirants after knowledge from the pressure of want and privation.
Other gain than this he never thought of. Only genuine students were
allowed to remain in Vittorino's school; the moral rule was strict,
and high thinking and plain living were expected from all his pupils.
This generous devotion to the cause of learning for its own sake
contrasts strongly with the self-seeking and vainglory of other
humanists. When Filelfo was urged on one occasion to open a school for
promising young men, of noble birth, he asked disdainfully whether his
friends expected him to take rank as a licensed victualler.[289] He
was unable to comprehend the possibility of doing anything that would
not reflect lustre on himself or place him in the light of popular
applause.
Vittorino found it difficult to govern his school at Padua as strictly
as he wished. The public Gymnasium was ill-ordered, and great license
of life was permitted to its students. He therefore removed to Venice
in 1423, where he continued his work as private tutor. By this time,
however, he had acquired considerable reputation as an educator, to
whose care the youth of both sexes might be entrusted with implicit
confidence—no small testimony to his goodness in that age of
ungoverned passions and indescribable vices. The Marchese Gian
Francesco Gonzaga was looking out for a master for his children, and
his choice fell on Vittorino. The admiration of antiquity was no mere
matter of fashion with this prince. He loved history for its own sake,
and professed a special reverence for the Roman Camillus. His
practical good sense made him understand that, if he wished his sons
and daughters to become thoroughly educated, not only in the
humanities and mathematics, but also in the republican virtues of the
ancients, which then formed the ideal of life in Italy, he must be
willing to commit them wholly to the charge of their appointed
governor. Vittorino, who would have undertaken the duty on no other
condition, obtained full control of the young princes and their
servants. An appointment of twenty sequins per month was assigned to
him, together with a general order on the treasury of Mantua. A villa,
called Casa Zojosa, which we may translate Joyous Gard, was allotted
to the new household, and there Vittorino established himself as
master in 1425. He had much to do before this dwelling could be
converted from the pleasure house of a mediæval sovereign into the
semi-monastic resort of earnest students. Through its open galleries
and painted banquet chambers the young Gonzaghi lounged with favourite
friends selected from the Mantuan nobility. The tables groaned under
gold and silver plate, while perfumed lacqueys handed round rich wines
and highly seasoned dishes, and the garden alleys echoed to the sound
of lute and viol. Without making any brusque or sudden reformation,
Vittorino managed, by degrees, and on various pretexts, to dismiss the
more dangerous friends and servants of his pupils. A strict
house-porter was engaged, with orders to exclude suspicious visitors.
Plain clothes, simple habits, and frugal meals became the rule of the
household, Vittorino contriving to render these changes no less
agreeable than salutary to his pupils. When complaints arose from the
former companions of the princes and their parents, he laid his plan
of training clearly before the Marquis, who had the good sense to
approve of all that he had done.
The eldest of Gian Francesco's children, Lodovico, was a youth of lazy
habits, inclined to gluttony, and already too fat for his age. The
next, Carlo, had outgrown his strength, and needed more substantial
food. Vittorino devised systems of diet and physical training suited
to their several temperaments, making it his one object to increase
their vigour, and by multiplying sources of rational enjoyment to
dispose them to the energetic exercise of their faculties. He by no
means neglected what we call athletics. Indeed, it was a fundamental
axiom of his method that a robust body could alone harbour a healthy
mind. Boys who sat poring over books, or haunted solitary places, lost
in dreaming, found no favour in his eyes. To exercises in the
gymnasium or the riding-school he preferred games in the open air;
hunting and fishing, wrestling and fencing, running and jumping, were
practised by his pupils in the park outside their palace. To harden
them against severities of heat and cold, to render them temperate in
food and drink, to train their voices, and to improve their carriage
was his first care. Since he could not himself superintend their
education in all its branches, he engaged a subordinate staff of
tutors; grammarians, logicians, mathematicians, painters, and masters
of riding, dancing, singing, swimming, fencing, began to crowd the
halls of Joyous Gard. Each had his own allotted task to perform, while
Vittorino surveyed the whole scheme. 'Perhaps,' says Rosmini,[290]
'the only sciences that were not taught in this academy were civil and
canon law and natural physics.'
It must not be imagined that so extensive an apparatus existed solely
for the young Gonzaghi. Noble youths from all the Courts of Italy, and
students from remote parts of Europe, sought admittance to Vittorino's
school. The more promising of these pupils, who were fitted by their
rank and disposition to associate with his princely charges, the
master housed under his own roof; while for the rest he provided
suitable lodgings near at hand. Many were the poor students who thus
owed to his generosity participation in the most refined and
scientific culture their century afforded.[291] While paying this
tribute to Vittorino da Feltre, we must remember the honour that is
also due to Gian Francesco Gonzaga. Had this prince not been endowed
with true liberality of soul and freedom from petty prejudice,
Vittorino could never have developed a system based upon pure
democratic principles, which even now may rank as an unrivalled
educational ideal. If the master, again, was able to provide for sixty
poor scholars at a time—teaching, feeding, clothing, and furnishing
them with costly books, his friend the Marquis must, we feel sure,
have supplied his purse with extra funds for charitable purposes.[292]
The numerous biographers of Vittorino have transmitted many details in
illustration of his method of teaching. He used to read the classic
authors aloud, prefixing biographical notices by way of introduction,
and explaining the matter, as well as the language of his text, as he
proceeded. Sometimes he made his pupils read, correcting their
pronunciation, and obliging them to mark the meaning by emphasis. He
relied much on learning by heart and repetition, as the surest means
of forming a good style. Gifted with a finer instinct for language
than the majority of his contemporaries, he was careful that his
pupils should distinguish between different types of literary
excellence, not confounding Cicero with Seneca or Virgil with Lucan,
but striving to appreciate the special qualities of each. With a view
to the acquisition of pure principles of taste, he confined them at
first to Virgil and Homer, Cicero and Demosthenes. These four authors
he regarded as the supreme masters of expression. Ovid was too
luxuriant, Juvenal too coarse, to serve as guides for tiros. Horace
and Persius among the satirists, Terence among the comic poets, might
be safely studied. In spite of Seneca's weight as a philosophic
essayist, Vittorino censured the affectations of his rhetoric; and
while he praised the beauty of the Latin elegists, he judged them
ill-suited for the training of the young. Criticism of this kind,
though it may sound to us obvious and superficial, was extremely rare
in the fifteenth century, when scholars were too apt to neglect
differences of style in ancient authors, and to ignore the ethics of
their works. The refinement which distinguished Vittorino, made him
prefer the graces of a chastened manner to the sounding phrases of
emphatic declamation. His pupils were taught to see that they had
something to say first, and then to say it with simplicity and
elegance.
This purity of taste was no mere matter of æsthetic sensibility with
Vittorino. Habits which brutalise the mind or debase the body, however
sanctioned by the usage of the times, met with little toleration in
his presence. Swearing, obscene language, vulgar joking, and angry
altercation were severely punished. Personal morality and the
observance of religious exercises he exacted from his pupils. Lying
was a heinous offence. Those who proved intractable upon these points
were excluded from his school. Of the rest Vespasiano writes with
emphasis that 'his house was a sanctuary of manners, deeds, and
words.'[293]
Concerning the noble Italian youths who were educated with the Gonzaga
family at Mantua, enough has been said in another place.[294] Appended
to Rosmini's copious biography will be found, by those who are curious
to read such details, the notices of forty more or less distinguished
pupils.[295] Beside the two sons of Gian Francesco Gonzaga already
mentioned, Vittorino educated three other children of his
master—Gianlucido, Alessandro, and Cecilia.[296] Wholly dedicated to
the cares of teaching, and more anxious to survive in the good fame of
his scholars than to secure the immortality of literature, Vittorino
bequeathed no writings to posterity. He lived to a hale and hearty old
age; and when he died, in 1446, it was found that the illustrious
scholar, after enjoying for so many years the liberality of his
princely patron, had not accumulated enough money to pay for his own
funeral. Whatever he possessed, he spent in charity during his
lifetime, trusting to the kindness of his friends to bury him when
dead. Few lives of which there is any record in history, are so
perfectly praiseworthy as Vittorino's; few men have more nobly
realised the idea of living for the highest objects of their age; few
have succeeded in keeping themselves so wholly unspotted by the vices
of the world around them.
By the patronage extended to Vittorino da Feltre the Court of Mantua
took rank among the high schools of humanism in Italy. Ferrara won a
similar distinction through the liberality of the House of Este. What
has already been said about Milan applies, however, in a less degree
to Ferrara. The arts and letters, though they flourished with
exceeding brilliance beneath the patrons of Boiardo, Ariosto, and
Tasso, were but accessories to a splendid and voluptuous Court life.
Literature was little better than an exotic, cultivated for its rarity
and beauty by the princes of the Este family.
The golden age of culture at Ferrara began in 1402, when Niccolo III.
reopened the university. Twenty-seven years later Guarino da Verona
made it one of the five chief seats of Southern learning. The life of
this eminent scholar in many points resembles that of Filelfo, though
their characters were very different. Guarino was born of respectable
parents at Verona in 1370. He studied Latin in the school of Giovanni
da Ravenna, and while still a lad of eighteen travelled to
Constantinople at the cost of a noble Venetian, Paolo Zane, in order
to learn Greek. After a residence of five years in Greece he returned
to Venice, and began to lecture to crowded audiences.[297] Like all
the humanists, he seems to have preferred temporary to permanent
engagements—passing from Venice to Verona, from Trent to Padua, from
Bologna to Florence, and everywhere acquiring that substantial
reputation as a teacher to which he owed the invitation of Niccolo
d'Este in 1429. He was now a man of nearly sixty, master of the two
languages, and well acquainted with the method of instruction. The
Marquis of Ferrara engaged him as tutor to his illegitimate son
Lionello, heir apparent to his throne. For seven years Guarino devoted
himself wholly to the education of this youth, who passed for one of
the best scholars of his age. Granting that the reputation for
learning was lightly conferred on princes by their literary parasites,
it seems certain that Lionello derived more than a mere smattering in
culture from his tutor. Amid the pleasures of the chase, to which he
was passionately devoted, and the distractions of the gayest Court in
Italy, he found time to correspond on topics of scholarship with
Poggio, Filelfo, Decembrio, and Francesco Barbaro. His conversation
turned habitually upon the fashionable themes of antique ethics, and
his favourite companions were men of polite education. It is no wonder
that the humanists, who saw in him a future Augustus, deplored his
early death with unfeigned sorrow, though we, who can only judge him
by the general standard of his family, may be permitted to reserve our
opinion. The profile portrait of Lionello, now preserved in the
National Gallery, does not, at any rate, prepossess us very strongly
in his favour.
Guarino, like his friend Vittorino, was celebrated for the method of
his teaching and for the exact order of his discipline.[298] Students
flocked from all the cities of Italy to his lecture-room; for, as soon
as his tutorial engagements with the prince permitted, he received a
public appointment as professor of eloquence from the Ferrarese
Consiglio de' Savi. In this post he laboured for many years,
maintaining his reputation as a student and filling the universities
of Italy with his pupils. A sentence describing his manner of life in
extreme old age might be used to illustrate the enthusiasm which
sustained the vital energy of scholars in that generation:—'His
memory is marvellous, and his habit of reading is so indefatigable,
that he scarcely takes the time to eat, to sleep, or to go abroad; and
yet his limbs and senses have the vigour of youth.[299] Guarino was
one of the few humanists whose moral character won equal respect with
his learning. When he died at the age of ninety, the father of six
boys and seven girls by his wife Taddea Cendrata of Verona, it was
possible to say with truth that he had realised the ideal of a
temperate scholar's life. Yet this incomparable teacher of youth
undertook the defence of Beccadelli's obscene verses: this anchorite
of humanism penned virulent invectives with the worst of his
contemporaries.[300] Such contrasts were common enough in the
fifteenth century.
The name of Giovanni Aurispa must not be omitted in connection with
Ferrara. Born in 1369 at Noto in Sicily, he lived to a great age, and
died in 1459. He too travelled in early youth to Constantinople, and
returned, laden with MSS. and learning, to profess the humanities in
Italy. His life forms, therefore, a close parallel with that of both
Guarino and Filelfo. Aurispa, however, was gifted with a less
unresting temper than Filelfo; nor did he achieve the same
professorial success as Guarino. In his school at Ferrara he enjoyed
the calmer pleasures of a student's life, 'devoted,' as Filelfo
phrased it, 'to the placid Muses.'[301]
To give an account of all the minor Courts, where humanism flourished
under the patronage of petty princes, would be tedious and
unprofitable. It is enough to notice that the universities, in this
age of indefatigable energy, kept forming scholars, eager to make
their way as secretaries and tutors, while the nobles competed for the
honour and the profit to be derived from the service of illustrious
wits and ready pens. The seeds of classic culture were thus sown in
every little city that could boast its castle. Carpi, for example, was
preparing the ground where Aldus and Musurus flourished. At Forli the
Ordelaffi, doomed to extinction at no distant period, gave protection
to Codrus Urceus.[302] Mirandola was growing fit to be the birthplace
of the mighty Pico. Alessandro and Costanzo Sforza were adorning their
lordship of Pesaro with a library that rivalled those of Rome and
Florence.[303] In the fortress of Rimini, Sigismondo Pandolfo
Malatesta conversed with men of learning whenever his intrigues and
his military duties gave him leisure. The desperate and godless
tyrant, whose passions bordered upon madness, and whose name was a
byeword for all the vices that disgrace humanity, curbed his temper
before petty witlings like Porcellio, and carved a record of his
burning love for learning on the temple raised to celebrate his fame
in Rimini. To the same passion for scholarship in his brother,
Malatesta Novello, the tiny burgh of Cesena owed the foundation of a
library, not only well supplied with books, but endowed with a yearly
income of 300 golden florins for its maintenance. The money spent on
scholarship at these minor Courts was gained, for the most part, in
military service—the wealth of Florentine and Venetian citizens, of
Milanese despots, and ambitious Popes flowing through the hands of
professional war-captains into the pockets of booksellers and
students. It consequently happened that the impulse given at this time
to learning in the lesser cities was but temporary. With the fall of
the Malatesti and the Sforza family, for instance, erudition died at
Rimini and Pesaro.
This might have been the case at Urbino also, if the House of
Montefeltro had not succeeded, by wise conduct and prudent marriages,
in resisting the encroachments of the Church, and transmitting its
duchy to the Della Rovere family. As it was, Urbino retained for three
generations the stamp of culture and refinement impressed upon it by
the good Duke Frederick. Of his famous library, Vespasiano, who was
employed in its formation, has given us minute and interesting
details.[304] During more than fourteen years the Duke kept thirty or
forty copyists continually employed in transcribing Greek and Latin
MSS. Not only the classics in both languages, but the ecclesiastical
and mediæval authors, the Italian poets, and the works of contemporary
humanists found a place in his collection. The cost of the whole was
estimated at considerably over 30,000 ducats. Each volume was bound in
crimson, with silver clasps; the leaves were of vellum, exquisitely
adorned with miniatures; nor could you find a printed book in the
whole library, for the Duke would have been ashamed to own one.
Vespasiano's admiration for these delicately finished MSS. and the
contempt he expresses for the new art of printing are highly
characteristic.[305] Enough has been already said by me elsewhere
about Federigo da Montefeltro and his patronage of learning.[306] The
Queen's collection at Windsor contains a curious picture, attributed
to Melozza da Forli, of which I may be allowed to speak in this place,
since it possesses more than usual interest for the student of
humanism at the Italian Courts. In a large rectangular hall, lighted
from above by windows in a dome, the Duke of Urbino is seated, wearing
the robes and badges of the Garter, and resting his left hand on a
folio. His son Guidobaldo, a boy of about eleven years of age, or
little more, stands at the Duke's knee, dressed in yellow damask
trimmed with pearls. Behind them, on a raised bench with a desk before
it, sit three men, one attired in the red suit of a prelate, the
second in black ecclesiastical attire, and the third in secular
costume. At a door, opening on a passage, stand servants and lesser
courtiers. The whole company are listening attentively to a
grey-haired, black-robed humanist, seated in a sort of pulpit opposite
to the Duke and his son. A large book, bound in crimson, with silver
clasps is open on the desk before him; and by the movement of his
mouth it is clear that he is reading aloud passages from some
classical or ecclesiastical author, and explaining them for the
benefit of his illustrious audience. To identify the scholar and the
three men behind Federigo would not be impossible, if the exact date
of this curious work could be ascertained; for they are clearly
portraits. I like to fancy that in the layman we may perhaps recognise
the excellent Vespasiano. Such conjectures are, however, hazardous;
meanwhile the picture has intrinsic value as the unique
representation, so far as I know, of a scene of frequent occurrence in
the Courts of Italy, where listening to lectures formed a part of
every day's occupation.
This is the proper place to speak of Vespasiano da Bisticci, on whose
'Lives of Illustrious Men' I have had occasion to draw so copiously.
Peculiar interest attaches to him as the last of mediæval scribes, and
at the same time the first of modern booksellers.[307] Besides being
the agent of Cosimo de' Medici, Nicholas V., and Frederick of Urbino,
Vespasiano supplied the foreign markets, sending MSS. by order to
Hungary, Portugal, Germany, and England. The extent of his trade
rendered him the largest employer of copyists in Europe at the moment
when this industry was about to be superseded, and when scholars were
already inquiring for news about the art that saved expense and
shortened the labour of the student.[308] Vespasiano, who was born in
1421 at Florence, lived until 1498; so that after having helped to
form the three greatest collections of MSS. in Italy, he witnessed the
triumph of printing, and might have even handled the Musæus issued
from the Aldine Press in 1493. Vespasiano was no mere tradesman. His
knowledge of the books he sold was accurate; continual study enabled
him to overlook the copyists, and to vouch for the exactitude of their
transcripts.[309] At the same time his occupation brought him into
close intimacy with the chief scholars of the age, so that the new
culture reached him by conversation and familiar correspondence. As a
biographer Vespasiano possessed rare merit. Personally acquainted with
the men of whom he wrote, he drew their characters with praiseworthy
succinctness and simplicity. There is no panegyrical emphasis, no
calumnious innuendo, in his sketches. It may even be said that they
suffer from reservation of opinion and suppression of facts.
Vespasiano's hatred of vice and love of virtue were so genuine that,
in his eagerness to honour men of letters and their patrons, he
softened down harsh outlines and passed over all that is condemnable
in silence. He was less anxious to paint character in the style of
Tacitus or Guicciardini, than to relate what he knew about the
progress of learning in his age. The ethical intention in his work is
obvious. The qualities he loves to celebrate are piety, chastity,
generosity, devotion to the cause of liberal culture, and high-souled
patriotism. Of the vices that added a lurid lustre to the age in which
he lived, of the political rancours that divided the cities into
hostile parties, and of the imperfections in the characters of eminent
men, we hear nothing from Vespasiano. It is pleasant to conclude this
chapter with an expression of gratitude to a man so blameless in his
life, so charitable in his judgments, and so trustworthy in his record
of contemporary history.