The ambiguity concerning Caesar continues in the early Quattrocento in the works of Salutati’s most famous pupil, and a later successor as Chancellor of Florence, Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444, Chancellor from 1427). This is very obvious in his most substantial early work, the Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum (1406), modeled on Cicero’s De oratore: in the first book he portrays Niccolio Niccoli, the most antivernacular humanist of the time, criticizing the achievements of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio as inferior to those of classical writers, but in the second he has Niccoli recant and praise their substantial contribution to Florentine culture. The attack on Dante in book 1 cites as his greatest mistake that of placing the republican heroes Brutus and Cassius in the pit of Hell. Dante was wrong to condemn Brutus and Cassius, says Niccoli, because ‘‘Caesar had taken possession of the commonwealth by force of arms, and when the good citizens had been slain he had taken away his country’s liberty’’ (Bruni 1996: 110; Griffiths, Hankins, & Thompson 1987: 73). However, the accusation against Dante is retracted by Niccoli in book 2 (Bruni 1996: 128-34; Griffiths, Hankins, & Thompson 1987: 79-81). In addition, at the start of the second book Bruni also has Salutati explain that he could never share the view put forward by Lactantius and echoed by Bruni in his earlier Laudatio Florentinae urbis (1403-4) that Caesar was ‘‘patricida patriae’’ (Bruni 1996: 120; Griffiths, Hankins, & Thompson 1987: 76): the elderly Chancellor points out that he had defended Caesar in his De tyranno and will never cease to praise him to the heavens for his achievements. Nevertheless, Salutati adds that he would prefer his sons to look to Marcellus or Camillus rather than to Caesar as a model ofvirtue (Bruni 1996: 120-2; Griffiths, Hankins, & Thompson 1987: 77). The two-book structure of the Dialogi thus reflects the clearly ambivalent views held by Bruni at this stage, both about vernacular culture and about Caesar.
In his Laudatio, the panegyric in praise of Florence, Bruni observes that Rome flourished most before the Caesars destroyed the republic (Bruni 1996: 600; Gilson 2005: 83-8; Baldassarri 2007: 51-6), and he denounces Julius whose ‘‘facinora’’ had overthrown the Roman state (Bruni 1996: 604). However, immediately after this denunciation, he concedes that some have objected to the harsh ‘‘truths’’ told by Lucan because Caesar’s serious vices were overshadowed (‘‘obumbrabantur’’) by his many great virtues (ibid.): so Bruni decides it is safer not to say any more about him. In the Laudatio Bruni thus remains ambivalent about Caesar himself, but he is severely critical of the Empire as a regime. Claiming that Florence was founded when Rome was still a republic and at its peak in terms of power, freedom, and genius, he explicitly cites the opening of Tacitus’s Histories, noting that ‘‘after the republic had been subjected to the power of one ruler, all those great talents (‘preclara illa ingenia’, Bruni’s variant on Tacitus’s ‘magna illa ingenia’) disappeared, as Tacitus says’’ (Bruni 1996: 606). It is important to note what Bruni does here: he takes Tacitus’s remark about the dearth of historians and extends it to apply to all writers and indeed artists (‘‘ingenia’’), suggesting that only a strong republic will allow the arts to flourish, a point that Bruni makes again in the opening pages of his History of the Florentine People (1415-44). This work begins with the blunt statement of the city’s republican origins: ‘‘The founders of Florence were Romans sent by Lucius Sulla to Faesulae’’ (Bruni 2001: 8), and cites Cicero’s (In Cat. 2.9.20) and Sallust’s ( Cat. 24.2, 27.1, 30.1) mention of these colonizers. Bruni dates the decline of the Roman state to the moment when it lost its liberty and began to be ruled by emperors, saying that first Julius Caesar’s civil wars then the ‘‘wicked triumvirate’’ of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus caused the cruel slaughter of the best men (Bruni 2001: 49-51). In both the Laudatio and the History, then, Bruni goes further than Salutati in arguing the superiority ofa republican over a monarchical regime, and one reason for his less hesitant approach was that the younger humanist had read and been influenced by Tacitus’s major historical works (Witt 1969: 473-4). It is probable that Boccaccio’s manuscript of Tacitus from Montecassino ended up in circles close to Bruni at the start of the Quattrocento: it was certainly owned by his one-time friend Niccolc) Niccoli by 1427 (Reynolds and Wilson 1991: 133; Reynolds 1986: 407-8). Once more the discovery of new texts is put to ideological use.
On the other hand, when it comes to non-ideological aspects of Caesar, Bruni is more positive: in his Life of Cicero (1415), he applauds Caesar’s clemency as evinced in his speech to the Senate against the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators (Bruni 1996: 442); and in the treatise on female education (De Studiis et Litteris, 1422-9), he ranks Caesar as a historian alongside Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and Quintus Curtius, praising his commentarii for their supreme fluency and elegance (‘‘summa facilitate venustateque’’; Bruni 1996: 264). Bruni’s commendation of Caesar the writer here is part of a widespread enthusiasm for the author of the Commentaries in Italy in the 1420s, because in 1421 the Lodi manuscript containing the full texts of Cicero’s Orator, De oratore, and (for the first time since antiquity) the Brutus had been discovered and disseminated amongst leading humanists (Sabbadini 1905: 100-1; Reynolds 1986: 102, 107-8). The Brutus in particular had been fulsome in its praise of Caesar’s Commentaries: Cicero praises them as ‘‘bare’’ (nudi), devoid of all ornament, with their ‘‘limpid and brilliant brevity’’ (‘‘pura et inlustri brevitate,’’ Brutus 262). The key terms, nudi and pura, would become the standard qualities ascribed to Caesar’s pure Latin by humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In addition Cicero’s remarks here on the difference between historical commentarii and historia were quoted time and again throughout the rest of the century, and they helped popularize the commentary genre in fifteenth-century Italy. Bruni himself wrote several works with this title: Commentarii de primo bello Punico (1418-21), a condensation of Polybius; Commentarii rerum Graecarum, a digest of Xenophon’s Hellenica; and Rerum suo tempore gestarum commentarius (1440-1), a kind of autobiography of the years 1378-1440; but clearly it is only this last work that looks back to Caesar rather than to the ancient and medieval commentary tradition (Ramminger 2005: 77-80). Later, other humanists favored this Caesarian genre, and wrote their own autobiographical or biographical commen-tarii, such as Pius II (who owned his own copy of Caesar), Bartolomeo Facio, Giovanni Simonetta and others (lanziti 1988, 1990, 1992).
Bruni, as we have seen, still retains a certain ambivalence about Caesar, if not about republican ideology. But his successor as Florentine Chancellor, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), went much further in a fierce polemic which he waged against humanists from the Este court in Ferrara. In April 1435 Poggio wrote to Scipione Mainenti, a Ferrarese humanist in the papal court, claiming that Scipio and the Roman republic were superior to Caesar and the Roman empire (Canfora 2001: 111-18). But a lengthy reply defending Caesar came from the pre-eminent Ferrarese humanist, Guarino da Verona (1374-1460), who had translated Plutarch’s life of Caesar into Latin by 1414, and who here was clearly speaking on behalf of another single ruler, his patron, Leonello d’Este (Canfora 2001: 119-40). In reply to Guarino’s letter, Bracciolini wrote a second, longer Defensiuncula to the Veronese humanist (Canfora 2001: 141-67).
What emerges most clearly in Poggio’s initial letter is that he is prepared to criticize Caesar more harshly than any of his predecessors. Where Bruni had hesitated or counterbalanced Caesar’s faults with his virtues, Poggio denies that there was any virtue in the man, and reverses Bruni’s formula in the Laudatio - Caesar’s faults were overshadowed (‘‘obumbrabantur’’) by his virtues - to state that ‘‘his military virtues were magnificent but pernicious to the citizens and the state, and they must be obscured (‘obscurentur’) by the treachery and cruelty he showed against the republic’’ (Canfora 2001: 114). Similarly whereas Bruni had portrayed Salutati rejecting his earlier quotation of Lactantius’s tag of‘‘patriae patricida’’, Poggio actually uses this formula to write off even Caesar’s military victories, saying he used his victories to attack, take over and destroy his fatherland ‘‘tamquam nefarius parricida’’ (Canfora 2001: 112). In fact Poggio actually distorts his sources, applying Sallust’s description of Catiline to Caesar himself: Caesar is ambitious for power, surrounded by corrupt followers, prone to lust and greed (Canfora 2001: 113; Crevatin 1982: 292, 333), all vices attributed by Sallust to Catiline (Sall. Cat. 5). Poggio’s final criticism of Caesar is that he is hated by all learned men as the parricide not only of his own fatherland, but also of Latin letters and the fine arts (‘‘latinae linguae et bonarum artium parricida,’’ Canfora 2001: 118). Like Bruni, he talks of the disappearance under the empire of praeclara ingenia, Bruni’s variant on Tacitus’s phrase magna ingenia at the opening of the Histories, and again expands the ancient writer’s remarks about the dearth of historians into a general statement on the lack of all intellectual talent under the Empire. For Poggio what disappears are eloquence and literature, the fine arts and philosophy, all of which were at their peak in the republic: the good men who practiced such arts would be hated by the ‘‘monsters’’ who succeeded as Emperors. Again Poggio expands on Bruni’s theory of the connection between republican freedom and the flourishing of culture, specifically mentioning philosophy, the liberal arts, and literature (Canfora 2001: 118).
Guarino in his reply to Poggio starts with his last point, and he is able to marshall a whole range of weighty authorities against the idea that Caesar had killed culture: Cicero’s Brutus, Quintilian, Suetonius, and especially Plutarch, whose life of Caesar Guarino had translated. Guarino deliberately takes his first quotation from Caesar himself (Canfora 2001: 120) and cites from several Greek sources since he is aware that Poggio knows less Greek than himself. Nor does he have a problem in listing the many famous writers that flourished under Caesar and the Empire: poets from Catullus to Silius Italicus, historians from Sallust to Livy and Tacitus, philosophers from Seneca to Boethius. For Guarino, Scipio’s achievements were limited to the military sphere, as even Livy acknowledged, whereas Caesar was ‘‘civis magnanimus, princeps prudentissimus, imperator excellentissimus’’ (Canfora 2001: 139). Poggio’s final say on the matter, in his Defensiuncula, is equally lengthy but simply reiterates the points made in his first letter to Mainenti, though he makes intelligent use of source criticism to counter Guarino’s many quotations from Greek. Scholars have debated whether the Scipio-Caesar debate between Poggio and Guarino was merely a rhetorical exercise or had a genuinely political dimension. From the vehemence with which the Tuscan attacks Caesar, which is consistent with the approach of other republican theorists such as Bruni, it is likely that this was no mere rhetorical exercise, but rather a fierce ideological debate, seriously argued by the two protagonists. This is confirmed by the fact that a few years later, in 1440, Pietro del Monte, another humanist from the only other important republic in Italy, Venice, reopened the dispute and again took the ‘‘republican’’ side, agreeing with Poggio that Caesar was a ‘‘turbulentus civis’’ and a tyrant (Canfora 2001: 68), though - as has been pointed out - del Monte was not against monarchy per se: rather he saw Caesar as an anti-type for a king (Rundle 2002). The debate also attracted the interest of the antiquarian Ciriaco d’Ancona who in 1435 wrote a Latin letter praising Caesar to Leonardo Bruni, but Ciriaco’s was more a poetic than an ideological defense of the dictator (Schadee 2008a). After 1440 the Scipio-Caesar polemics continued to be read but no major humanist intervened in the controversy in writing.
It was no accident that the defense of Caesar from republican attacks should spring from the court at Ferrara. In fact the Este court appears to have promoted a particular cult of the figure of Julius Caesar throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: Guarino had translated Plutarch’s life of Caesar by 1414, and in 1435 began a new translation of it, probably in the context of the dispute with Poggio, though the retranslation has not survived (Pade 1990). In addition he mentions Julius as a princely model on many occasions to his pupil, Leonello d’Este, and by 1432 he prepared for Leonello an emended and finely illustrated manuscript of Caesar’s works (now in Modena, Biblioteca Estense, a. W. 1.3: see Brown 1972: 46; Grafton 1997: 22, 47). Another humanist at Leonello’s court, Angelo Decembrio, provided a fictional portrayal of the court’s literary discussions in the 1440s in his Politia litteraria (c. 1463), and it is no surprise that Caesar surfaces often in these debates: not only do the discussants show a deep knowledge of Caesar’s Latinity, but Leonello is portrayed as attacking Petrarch’s sonnet on Caesar’s false tears at seeing Pompey’s head (Petrarca 2004: 102) and claiming that in fact the dictator, famous for his clemency, often wept genuine tears (Decembrio 2002: 192-3). Even as late as 1590 Tasso, also attached to the Ferrarese court, would write a defense of the superiority of Caesar over Alexander the Great, in his Risposta di Roma a Plutarco (Tasso 1875: II, 323-78).
The most spectacular visual example of this cult came from the nearby court of Mantua in the second half of the century: Andrea Mantegna painted what he considered his masterpiece, the nine canvases of the Triumphs of Caesar (now in the Royal Collection in Hampton Court) for Francesco Gonzaga II of Mantua between 1485 and 1492. Once more, Caesar represented an ideal image of the Mantuan ruler, who was a successful soldier as well; in addition the turn of the century was the period when Caesar’s popularity in Italy had been further enhanced by the advent of printing, as we shall see. The sequence of canvases depicts one or more of Julius’s triumphs, probably the Gallic and Pontic War triumphs (Lightbown 1986: 140-53; Beard 2007: 154), ending with the dictator himself being crowned beneath a triumphal arch: Mantegna, in touch with the leading humanists of the day, would have read descriptions of triumphs in either manuscript or printed editions of Livy, Suetonius, Plutarch, Josephus, and Appian, but these were probably filtered through the account of Roman triumphs based on these antique sources by Flavio Biondo in his Roma Triumphans (c. 1460). Besides textual sources, Mantegna’s archaeological details draw on images from the Arch of Titus in Rome, particularly for the long ‘‘tubae’’ (trumpets) and the winged deity (Fortuna? Victoria?) placing the crown on Caesar’s head. The painter’s depiction of besieged cities and siege-engines anticipates the images that would accompany Caesar’s text in the sixteenth century, and Julius’s triumphal moment in the final canvas constitutes a fitting image of the hold Caesar exercised over the Italian imagination at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
World History
