Beginning in the late thirteenth century, the movement that came to be called humanism - the study of classical history and literature as the basis for new cultural ideals - arose in the literary and intellectual circles of northern Italy (Rabil 1988; Witt 2000). Initially fostered by jurist-poets such as the Paduans Lovato dei Lovati (12411309) and Albertino Mussato (1261-1329), the enthusiasm for Latin history and poetry inspired Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) (1304-74) to invent a career as a cosmopolitan man of letters and self-styled ‘‘moral philosopher’’ that set a pattern for generations to come. Although it was his Italian poetry that would change the course of European lyric, Petrarch was symbolically crowned as poet laureate in 1341 for undertaking a Latin epic that sought to rival Vergil’s Aeneid. And in classical studies, his exemplarity as humanist scholar was established by his discoveries of neglected manuscripts and by the philological acumen he demonstrated in emending the text of the Roman historian Livy.
The search for classical texts that lay neglected in monastery libraries had in fact begun with the Paduan poets. By visiting Pomposa and other northern Italian monasteries, Lovati brought to light the tragedies of Seneca (soon to be imitated by his pupil Mussato) as well as poems by Lucretius, Statius, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius. In 1333, Petrarch found a copy of Cicero’s oration Pro Archia (In defense of Archias), a text much valued for its defense of poetry and poets. In his enthusiasm for ancient history - evident in his Latin epic about Scipio - Petrarch devoted himself to writing biographies of Roman heroes and to assembling all the extant corpus of Livy. In the next century, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) continued the search. While attending the Council of Constance (1414-18), he made several notable discoveries: Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, Silius Italicus’ Punica, and a complete text of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (Institutes of the orator) (Sandys 1921). Poggio used such new-found sources in composing his series of neo-Ciceronian dialogues on moral topics (Marsh 1980). He also learned enough Greek, despite a busy diplomatic career in the papal Curia, to make rather free translations of works by Lucian, Diodorus Siculus, and Xenophon.
The study of ancient Greek had begun abortively with Petrarch, who owned a codex of Homer but was unable to find a suitable teacher. By contrast, Petrarch’s friend and admirer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75) brought the Calabrian scholar Leonzio Pilato to Florence in 1360, where in the next two years he produced Latin prose versions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey accompanied by textual notes. Despite some disparaging remarks about him in Petrarch’s letters, Pilato, who had spent some years in Crete, offered a valuable collation of Homeric texts and scholia, from which Boccaccio gleaned matter for his Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the pagan gods).
This residence of a Hellenist in Florence set an example for the next generation. In 1396, the chancellor of the Florentine Republic, Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), summoned the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1349-1415) to offer public lessons in Florence. Finding no textbooks in Italy, Chrysoloras composed a brief outline of Greek grammar in the form of a catechism appropriately titled Erotemata (Questions). His most illustrious pupil was Leonardo Bruni (13701444), who, like Salutati, eventually became the chancellor of Florence. As a ‘‘civic humanist,’’ Bruni wrote a Latin history of Florence that reveals a debt to Roman historians and provides a new beginning for Renaissance historiography. Even more influential were his many Latin translations from the Greek. Beginning with St. Basil’s Discourse to Young Men (1400), a Christian apology for pagan literature, Bruni in the next 30 years translated Xenophon’s Hieron and Apology, three of Demosthenes’ orations, seven of Plutarch’s Lives, five of Plato’s dialogues, and Aristotle’s Economics, Ethics, and Politics. When his translations of Aristotle drew fire from Schoolmen accustomed to medieval versions, Bruni replied in 1428 with a Latin treatise De recta interpretatione (On correct translation).
In 1400, Chrysoloras left Florence, but his contribution to Italian humanism did not end with his departure. Guarino Guarini of Verona (1374-1460) traveled to Constantinople and lived in the house of Chrysoloras from 1403-8 before returning to Italy, where he taught Greek, first in Venice and Verona, then finally in Ferrara, in the service of the Este rulers (1430-60). Guarino translated several works of Isocrates and Lucian, 15 of Plutarch’s Lives, and all of Strabo’s Geography Two decades later, another Italian, Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), likewise spent five years in Constantinople in the house of Chrysoloras’ nephew, whose daughter he married. On his return to Italy, he taught in Florence and Milan; among his many translations are Latin versions of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, four of Plutarch’s Lives, and Xenophon’s Agesilaus, Spartan Constitution, and Education of Cyrus.
Such intellectual commerce between Italy and Constantinople eventually guaranteed the survival of Greek scholars and manuscripts. In 1423, the Sicilian Giovanni Aurispa (1376-1459) brought to Italy 238 Byzantine codices, including the tenth-century codex (now Laurentianus 32.9) that remains an essential witness for Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Apollonius of Rhodes. Most of this commerce took place by way of Venice, whose empire in the eastern Mediterranean was to contribute Italian elements to modern Greek; and with the advent of printing it was Venice that naturally became the capital of Greek imprints. Aldo Manuzio (1449-1515), who was renowned for his elegant pocket-sized editions of Latin and Italian classics, also published some 27 first editions of Greek classics, many of them edited by the Cretan Marcus Musurus (ca. 1470-1517) and his colleagues.
As early as Leonzio Pilato, the teaching of Greek had entailed the paraphrasing of texts in Latin, and Italian humanists undertook numerous translations to make ancient works accessible to a wider readership. In this field, they were encouraged by the example of Cicero, whose dialogues had purveyed the tenets of Greek philosophical schools to an educated Roman elite. More important, the demands of accurate translation provoked lively discussions not only about the relations between style and meaning, but also about the historical development of languages as well. The foundations of modern philology were laid when the language of texts as canonical as Aristotle and the New Testament Vulgate was analyzed by Lorenzo Valla (1405-57), who later translated the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides for Pope Nicholas V. Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459) was a wealthy Florentine - today we would call him ‘‘an independent scholar’’ - who, like Valla, enjoyed the patronage of both Alphonse of Aragon and Pope Nicholas V. Besides applying his knowledge of Greek to Aristotelian and biblical texts, he also studied Hebrew and translated the Psalter - a controversial enterprise that he defended in his treatise Apologeticus of 1454.
The humanists’ engagement with classical texts proved beneficial to vernacular literature as well. By the 1430s, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-74) could assert that Latin and Italian possessed equal dignity as vehicles of literature and philosophy, since each language was the normative means of communication in its day; and he sought to demonstrate the fact in neo-Ciceronian dialogues written in Italian, such as his four books Della famiglia (On the family). This reassessment of the medieval view of Latin as an unchanging and eternal language inaugurates the Renaissance cultivation of vernacular languages, which were subsequently enriched by infusions of classical ideas and vocabulary.
The humanist movement also effected a shift in educational practice, which occurred largely outside the established institutions of the universities. To the university disciplines of medicine, law, and theology, Petrarch had preferred the classical studia humanitatis, which concentrated on grammar, rhetoric, history, moral philosophy, and poetry. In the 1430s, Guarini in Ferrara and Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua established schools that adopted this curriculum. Eventually, what is now known as an undergraduate ‘‘liberal arts’’ education developed from such schools, while universities continued to offer advanced (today’s ‘‘graduate’’) professional training (Grafton and Jardine 1986). Contributors to the humanist program included scholars like Pier
Paolo Vergerio and Leonardo Bruni, who wrote treatises on the subject but never taught in classrooms (Kallendorf 2002). In the Quattrocento (fifteenth century), humanist educators taught Latin and Greek as the classical foundation of the educated individual. But even vernacular education perforce included a large ‘‘classical’’ component, since the works of Italian poets from Dante to Ariosto were imbued with allusions to the culture of antiquity (Grendler 1989; Black 2001).
Even before the advent of printing, many humanists published dialogues and epistles, genres in which learning and discussion are presented in the social context of the author’s friends and correspondents. (The principal Roman model for both was, of course, Cicero, whose letters and philosophical dialogues were widely imitated during the Renaissance.) The same process of relativization evolved in the humanists’ reflections on history. In the vanguard was Leonardo Bruni, whose Latin Historia populi Florentini (History of the Florentine people) advances historiography from medieval chronicle and exemplary anecdote to an analysis of political institutions and motivations. At mid-century, Bruni was succeeded both as chancellor and historian of Florence by Poggio Bracciolini, whose political acumen and historical vocation were certainly less inspired. In the vernacular, the engagement with Livy’s Roman history, which had begun with Petrarch, was carried forward by Niccolct Machiavelli (14691527), who also followed in the footsteps of Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini as both chancellor and historian of Florence.
The rediscovery of ancient Greek texts in Quattrocento Florence naturally stimulated the study ofphilosophy. Here, too, Bruni was in the vanguard. By 1415, he had translated seven of Plato’s dialogues, and in the next 20 years he was to translate Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Economics, and Politics. In 1433, Ambrogio Traver-sari (1386-1439) completed his Latin version of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, a text that offered new insights into Greek schools of thought (Grafton 1988; Schmitt 1988). In the next generation, Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) published a complete translation of Plato’s works in 1484, and numerous works by Plotinus and other Neoplatonists between 1492 and 1497. In addition to paraphrases and commentaries on various texts, he also composed an elaborate ‘‘Platonic theology’’ that attempts to reconcile ancient philosophy with Christian belief (Ficino 2001-6).
The impact of classical texts during the Quattrocento was facilitated by two new cultural mechanisms. First, libraries guaranteed the consolidation of humanist acquisitions, as manuscripts that had lain unknown in monasteries were transferred to, or copied for, private collections that soon passed into public libraries. In Florence, the book collector Niccolio Niccoli (1363-1437) bequeathed some 800 codices to the library of the Dominican convent of San Marco; and the collection of the Medici family eventually passed into the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, now housed in a building designed by Michelangelo. In Rome, the Vatican Library - officially, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana - was consolidated under Nicholas V (1447-55) and officially institutionalized by Sixtus IV (1471-84). In the course of time, it would acquire the libraries of prelates, princes, and potentates, and amass one of the most important collections of classical manuscripts and printed books in the world (Grafton 1993). In Venice, the exceptional library of the Greek cardinal Bessarion (1403-72) formed the basis of the city’s Biblioteca Marciana.
Second, the advent of printing accelerated the diffusion of humanist learning and promoted the emergence of classical philology as scholars collated and edited texts for publication. The new technology of movable type, invented by Gutenberg around 1450, arrived in Italy in 1465, and soon Italians were ‘‘classicizing’’ the new print culture. Based on the humanistic script devised by Quattrocento humanists like Poggio Bracciolini, typographers created a ‘‘Roman’’ font to replace the ‘‘Gothic’’ characters of German printers. And they eagerly sought to provide new and improved editions of classical texts. In the preface to his 1469 edition of Apuleius, the prolific editor Giovanni Andrea Bussi coined the term media tempestas, or ‘‘middle age,’’ referring to the centuries that separated contemporary humanists from classical antiquity.
In the Renaissance, as later in the Risorgimento, the city of Rome was the symbolic center of Italy, historically and geographically, which came to dominate much of the entire peninsula. In 1309, the papacy moved to Avignon, and the failed attempt by Italian cardinals to restore it to Rome resulted in the Great Schism. In 1417, a Roman of the powerful Colonna family was elected as Pope Martin V, and by mid-century Pope Nicholas V began to reshape the physical and cultural landscape of the Eternal City. As Rome gradually emerged from the backwater of the fourteenth century into the caput mundi of the sixteenth century, it was transformed by men inspired by the classical past.
In the Middle Ages, Rome had been a natural destination for pilgrims and travelers, but medieval guidebooks like the Mirabilia urbis Rome (Wonders of the city of Rome) contained numerous inaccuracies about classical sites and institutions. With his fervid interest in Roman history, Petrarch was the first to study critically the ruins of Rome, which he described in his writings and put to literary use in his epic poem about Scipio Africanus. And he pointed the way toward modern numismatics by collecting Roman coins and adducing them as evidence for understanding ancient history. In the Quattrocento, the description of extant monuments was continued and elaborated by humanists like Poggio Bracciolini, whose dialogue De varietate fortunae (On the variability of fortune) contains a survey of ancient Rome, and Flavio Biondo (1392-1463), whose Roma triumphans (Rome triumphant), Roma instaurata (Rome restored), and Italia illustrata (Italy illustrated) offer detailed commentary on Roman monuments and institutions. Another member of the papal Curia, Leon Battista Alberti, surveyed Rome’s most notable monuments from the Capitoline hill and charted them on a polar-coordinate map. Epigraphy, or the study of inscriptions, developed from the research of men like Biondo and his contemporary Ciriaco d’Ancona (1391-1452), who traveled to Greece and sketched details from ruins (Cyriac of Ancona 2003). In the sixteenth century, printing and the papacy joined forces to promote the antiquarian movement in the Eternal City (Stinger 1985; Weiss 1988; Jacks 1993).
At the same time, new Latin translations of Greek writers like Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus greatly expanded the humanists’ repertory of historical data. In the field of architecture, Alberti based his Latin De re aedificatoria (On the art of building, 1452) on Vitruvius’ De architectura as well as on his own analysis of ancient monuments. And the discovery in Rome of the Domus Aurea in the 1480s inspired artists like Pinturicchio and Raphael to devise the elaborate ornamental patterns called grottesche after the grottos in which they were found. If during the Renaissance, popes paid lip service to preserving ancient monuments, while in fact quarrying them for new projects, the papacy began to take an interest in the conservation of artworks. Pope Sixtus IV founded the Capitoline Museum, the first public collection in Europe (Ridley 1992).
World History
