AS WE HAVE seen, humanism had its origins in such figures as the fourteenth-century Florentine poet Petrarch, who died just fifteen years before Cosimo de’ Medici was born. Petrarch had found his poetic temperament unsuited to the otherworldy spirituality required by medieval Christianity. In the writings of the classical authors of Ancient Greece and Rome he glimpsed an entirely different way of living, where instead of the denial of this life in favour of a life to come, he saw a cultivation of worldly sensibility, ambition and personal ability. Instead of seeing goodness in terms of aspiration to purely spiritual values, it was possible to aspire to a full expression of our humanity in this world.
Most of the original writings of the ancient authors had been lost after the fall of the Roman Empire and the onset of the Dark Ages, and what remained were mostly emasculated Christianised commentaries on these works. Petrarch devoted himself to searching out lost original manuscripts, and during his travels through Europe he discovered a number of important works, including several by the Roman author Cicero, who wrote of civic virtues and how to live a good life that would be of benefit both to the individual and the community at large. Here was a fresh, positive attitude towards life: a picture began to emerge of a great dynamic age that had preceded the decline of the Dark Ages, and with this came the realisation that it might be possible to re-create this age anew.
Despite the setback of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, Florence had remained a centre of the new interest in the classics, which gave birth to humanism, and from which we derive the modern term the ‘humanities’. The emphasis here, then as now, was on the wide range of intellectual understanding that lies between theology, on the one hand, and natural philosophy (science), on the other. Humanism, and the humanities, would encourage the understanding of the human, rather than the spiritual or technological aspects of learning. These were the first stirrings of the recognition of individual personality as a general human trait.
But it should be borne in mind that what took place was for the most part a long and gradual process. Many of the values that characterised medieval thought would not be shed either swiftly or completely; and the new humanism would develop within a pervasive and unquestioned Christian context. The earliest art, writing and architecture of the Renaissance were all religious, involving paintings of holy scenes, poems of a devout character, churches and so forth. Indeed, what has been viewed as the novelty of the emergent humanistic concepts was often little more than a gradual shift in nuances. This advent of an emergent Renaissance, and indeed the full flowering of the Renaissance itself, should be seen as slow, complex transformation rather than any sudden break into a completely new era. What had been the early inklings in the fourteenth century of Petrarch would in fact develop in several long stages, which took more than two centuries to reach their fulfilment.
One of the leading figures in Florentine humanist circles at the turn of the fifteenth century was Niccolò Niccoli, who would become an avuncular friend of the young Cosimo de’ Medici. Niccoli, who was twenty-five-years older than Cosimo, was the son of one of the new wealthy wool merchants who had made their fortune in the Florentine recovery following the Black Death. Although Florence had lost nearly half its population to the plague, its recovery had been comparatively swift, in part because the disease had largely affected the poor and unskilled workers. Those with any money at all, and this included a wider cross-section of Florentine society than could be found in other less rich and less republican societies, had simply fled to the countryside.
Niccolò Niccoli would become one of the first arbiters of the taste that would shape the Renaissance, and his dedication to the discovery of ancient texts, and the propagation of their ideas, would become his obsession. Not long after he befriended the young Cosimo, they planned a trip to the Holy Land together to search for lost Ancient Greek manuscripts, but Cosimo’s father Giovanni disapproved, and Cosimo was quickly apprenticed to the family banking business. It seems unlikely that Cosimo resented this for long; he would become an extremely able though distinctly cautious banker, very much in the mould of his father. Yet the humanist education he had received, and his early friendship with Niccolò Niccoli, must also have accorded with an element of his character, for as soon as Giovanni died, Cosimo devoted a large part of his considerable energies to humanist pursuits. Giovanni had been doing little more than carrying on a Florentine tradition of civic duty when he began patronising the building of churches in his retirement. Cosimo’s activities, on the other hand, would be the fulfilment of a personal need; and the great amount of time, energy and money that he would devote to these activities would seem to indicate how much this need had been suppressed during the first forty years of his life.
To many Florentines, and certainly Giovanni di Bicci, Niccoli was a questionable influence. Dressed in his Ancient Roman toga, and parading all the affectations of ‘sensibility’, he cut a slightly absurd figure and appeared to be little more than a privileged individual squandering his inheritance. Yet there was a forceful and abrasive side to Niccoli, and allied with his friend, the elder statesman Palla Strozzi, he proved a formative influence on the University of Florence, which had been founded in 1321, but had sunk into a rut of medieval scholasticism. In 1397, Niccoli and Strozzi fulfilled Petrarch’s long-standing wish that there should be a chair of Ancient Greek at the university, thus enabling the study of recently discovered manuscripts of Plato; to this end they appointed Manuel Chrysoloras, an emissary from the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople who had settled in Italy, as professor of Greek. (Ancient Greek was not widely known in medieval times, and even Petrarch had never fully mastered the language, mainly because he could find no competent teacher.)
Niccoli’s influence in Florence was all-pervasive, to such an extent that during the first three decades of the fifteenth century he presided over the intellectual life of the city almost like an unofficial minister of culture. Besides maintaining a fine house in Florence, he also paid agents to search out ancient manuscripts for him all over Europe – a costly business that eventually threatened him with bankruptcy. This was only averted when Cosimo discreetly came to his rescue, ordering Niccoli’s bank drafts to be honoured without question, at any branch of the Medici Bank. This was fortunate, for Niccoli’s sharp manner had won him few friends outside the humanist circle in Florence, and even here he became involved in several violent disageements. However, his most persistent arguments took place at home with his mistress Benvenuta, who had originally been the mistress of his younger brother; but according to a contemporary source, ‘this syren’ by means of her ‘charms and allurements gained such an ascendancy over [Niccoli’s] better principles’ that he stole her from his brother. To his cost, Niccoli soon discovered that Benvenuta required higher standards of attention than his scholarly nature was willing, or able, to provide, and as a result the somewhat humdrum bachelor routine of his home life became transformed into a drama filled with operatic surprises.
Niccoli’s fastidious taste prevented him from producing any original work of his own, for when setting down his ideas he became too aware of what he perceived to be his own inadequacies, though his writing would have lasting effect in its own oblique fashion. Niccoli was in the habit of making copies of the many rare manuscripts in his library. Those manuscripts that he was unable to acquire would frequently be loaned to him so that he could transcribe their contents – for the age of printing still lay in the future, and this was the only way to disseminate the contents of rare manuscripts. Ironically, it was this unoriginal activity that would leave Niccoli’s most original and lasting mark: the clear, distinctive forward-leaning script that he developed to copy manuscripts would eventually be adopted by the first Italian printers after his death – it would become known as italic.
Niccoli’s influence would spread beyond literary tastes, and would also prove formative in modelling the taste of artists such as Donatello and Brunelleschi, who met Niccoli at Cosimo’s house. It was from Niccoli that Donatello acquired his passion for classical sculpture, and he also helped open Brunelleschi’s eyes to the wonders of Ancient Rome, which still lay in ruins amidst the ramshackle medieval city that had grown up in its place. When Niccoli died in 1437, he bequeathed his library of 800 manuscripts to Cosimo. Niccoli had always regarded his collection as something of a public service, open to scrutiny by any scholar or artist willing to brave its owner’s forthright questioning, and he knew that Cosimo would continue this tradition of openness. Four hundred of Niccoli’s manuscripts would become the core of the Medici Library, which Cosimo founded in 1444, when he finally moved into the Palazzo Medici on the Via Larga; at the same time Cosimo added manuscripts from his own collection, and this became the first extensive public library in Europe. It was even possible to borrow original manuscripts, and Cosimo was constantly extending the library’s contents. At one stage he would employ no fewer than forty-five copyists, who would produce more than zoo further manuscripts in the space of just two years. Cosimo would split the rest of Niccoli’s manuscripts between his own private collection and the library that he had founded at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in gratitude for hospitality during his exile.
Another novelty of Cosimo’s library was that it provided knowledge from a source other than the Church – here was the initial public manifestation of a new lay learning. Conversely, the manuscripts that Cosimo provided for the library at San Giorgio Maggiore, a religious institution, marked a broadening of knowledge available within the Church. Although the Church was losing its medieval monopoly on scholarship, there was initially no conflict here – both secular and sacred knowledge co-existed.
By far the most successful agent, whom Niccoli employed to search out manuscripts for him all over Europe, was Poggio Bracciolini, who would become another leading light of Cosimo’s humanist circle, both as a writer and as a collector of manuscripts. Bracciolini was born in 1380, the son of a poor apothecary in the small town of Arezzo, forty miles south-east of Florence, and is said to have made his way to Florence at the age of eighteen, where he arrived all but penniless. Somehow he managed to talk his way into the university, where he studied law, but also found time to learn Greek, being one of the first to benefit from the newly appointed professor, Manuel Chrysoloras, who is now generally recognised as the founder of Greek studies in Italy. After Bracciolini’s graduation in 1403, he obtained a post as a scrivener in the papal service, and when Baldassare Cossa became Pope John XXIII in 1410, he promoted Bracciolini to the post of chief writer of his letters and papal edicts. In 1414 Bracciolini accompanied Pope John XXIII to the fateful Council of Constance, and it was here that Bracciolini became a close friend of the young Cosimo de’ Medici, who was also in the papal entourage.
After this, Bracciolini seems to have operated for several years as a sort of freelance manuscript hunter, roving the monasteries of Switzerland, Germany and France in search of lost ancient works for various employers, including Niccolò Niccoli, and Cosimo de’ Medici, who had recently started collecting books and ancient manuscripts. Despite Bracciolini’s high-minded quest for knowledge, he was not above using underhand methods to obtain what he wanted; he would copy manuscripts, even when expressly forbidden to do so, and frequently bribed or cajoled reluctant abbots. When he happened upon unknown caches in dusty cloister cellars, he was not above having recourse to a hidden pocket in his cloak; no one was any the wiser, and back in Italy the cause of learning received a further boost, while the finder received a suitably lavish fee. In this way Bracciolini was able to continue with the well-heeled travelling style to which he was becoming accustomed; indeed, his appetite for ancient learning is said to have been matched only by his appetite for good food and beautiful women.
Amongst Bracciolini’s finds was an entire hoard of forgotten ancient manuscripts found in the dungeon of a tower at the Swiss monastery of St Galen, though his most famous discovery was the unearthing in 1417 of a complete manuscript of De Return Natura by the first-century BC Roman author Lucretius, a work which had been lost since the fall of the Roman Empire and was known only through brief quotations in the works of others. De Return Natuta (On the Nature of Things) is a long poem whose six books include a quasi-scientific explanation of the universe, much of it derived from Ancient Greek philosophers such as Democritus and Epicurus, who described a surprisingly modern universe made of atoms, governed by scientific laws, where the gods had no role to play. In De Return Natuta Lucretius put forward the Epicurean view that human beings should pursue pleasure and avoid pain; philosophy was intended to cure humanity of its fear of death and the gods; and Religio appears as a monster whose gruesome visage peers down from a distant region of the sky. According to Lucretius, Epicurus had reached beyond ‘the fiery ramparts of the world’ and seen into the very core of nature’s truth. Nearly one and a half millennia previously Lucretius had articulated much that still remained in embryo in the early humanist vision: here was an incitement for humanity to discover itself, and to discover the workings of a world free from metaphysical influence.
Bracciolini sent this manuscript of Lucretius to Niccoli in Florence, where he made a painstaking copy in his meticulous italic hand – a fortunate precaution, as the manuscript that Bracciolini discovered has since been lost, and all we know of its contents is from Niccoli’s copy. In the year following this miraculous find, Bracciolini went to England for four years in the hope of making further discoveries, but was disappointed owing to the effect of the damp climate, which had rendered so many ancient manuscripts mouldy and unreadable. On his return to Italy he was pleased to rejoin the papal service, which enabled him to continue searching for manuscripts, as well as composing his own works. Unlike many papal appointments, this post did not require him to take holy orders; consequently, at the age of fifty-six he decided to settle down and married an eighteen-year-old girl, who would eventually bear him six children – to add to the fourteen illegitimate children he had already fathered.
Later Bracciolini returned permanently to Florence, where he took on a leading role in the humanist circle, becoming a close friend of Cosimo. In 1427 they even went on holiday together to Ostia, the port of Rome, where they dug amongst the ancient ruins, which at the time lay scattered and largely ignored. Further evidence of his close friendship with Cosimo is found during the period of the latter’s exile, when Bracciolini sent him a series of supportive, if somewhat hypocritical letters, which are replete with philosophical advice such as: ‘Be thankful that life has given you this opportunity to exercise such great virtue.’ Interestingly, Bracciolini appears to have accepted that Cosimo would not be returning to Florence, consoling him: ‘Whatever land fate takes you to, think of that as your country’ – a sentiment that prompts the suspicion that this feeling must have been widespread in Florence at the time.
Bracciolini also advised Cosimo on how to build up his growing collection of manuscripts, and it was possibly on Bracciolini’s advice that Cosimo hired Cyriac of Ancona, a renowned merchant and antique dealer. Cyriac had travelled through the Near East and North Africa copying down inscriptions he found amongst classical ruins and providing the first description of many ancient sites (centuries later, these would become primary sources for exploring archaeologists). Cosimo sent Cyriac on trading expeditions to Constantinople, the Holy Land and Egypt, during which he was also asked to seek out manuscripts, and it was this that prompted the historian Edward Gibbon to his celebrated, if somewhat rose-tinted, description of Cosimo in his prime: ‘his riches were dedicated to the service of mankind; he corresponded at once with Cairo and London; and a cargo of Indian spices and Greek books were often imported in the same vessel’.
Bracciolini must have made an endearing and entertaining companion for Cosimo, if his literary works are any guide to his character. These are amongst the finest of this early humanist period: they are stylish, witty and original, covering the whole range from bawdy tales to profound philosophical dialogues. In one of the latter, On the Unhappiness of Princes, Niccoli appears as the embodiment of classical taste, while Cosimo features as the worldly but high-minded banker. It has been said that, when crossed, Bracciolini was capable of producing some of the most notorious and vituperative polemics of a polemical age – his writings frequently satirised the corruption of the Church and the hypocrisy of priests who fathered illegitimate children (a topic on which he was undeniably an expert). Coincidentally, Bracciolini’s distinctive handwriting would also leave its lasting impression: this he modelled on the precise script, with clearly separated words, that appeared in German manuscripts of the eleventh century. After this date writing had degenerated into the speedily executed but barely legible Gothic script favoured by bored copyist monks in medieval monasteries. As a result, Bracciolini’s distinctive script also came to the notice of the early Italian printers in the following century, when it was used as a model for what is now known as roman type, which remains a much-favoured font to this day (being the type you are at present reading). At the age of seventy-three Bracciolini was profoundly moved when he was honoured by being elected as Chancellor of Florence, a move in which his friend Cosimo must surely have played a part. Six years later Braccioloni died, and Florence honoured the writer whose Latin was said to be as sweet as honey, and who preferred to work seated beside a beautiful woman ‘in preference to a long-horned buffalo’ (his fanciful notion of the conditions that prevailed in a medieval monastery).
The other leading figure amongst the humanist circle in Florence that Cosimo frequented was Marsilio Ficino, the son of his physician, who was born in 1433. Ficino was a strange figure: a small hunchback who walked with a limp, his inclinations were spiritual, but he occasionally displayed an explosive temper. Initially he studied medicine, but at the same time he also learned Greek and developed a profound interest in Plato, so much so that he would come to be regarded as Florence’s leading expert on the philosopher and his works. Cosimo was particularly keen to read Plato, but could find no satisfactory translations of his work; as a result, he virtually adopted Ficino, establishing him in a cottage on his estate in the Mugello where he was to translate for Cosimo all of Plato’s dialogues into Latin. In the summer, when Cosimo retreated from the heat of Florence to the cooler mountain air of the Mugello, he would invite Ficino to his villa in the evenings, where they would read and discuss Plato long into the night.
The way of life that Cosimo led left him particularly susceptible to philosophical problems. The usury upon which his bank prospered was still strictly speaking a mortal sin, and this worried him; similarly, the devious political machinations involved in the running of the city made him ponder the morality of his life. Beneath the prudent humanist façade lurked an increasingly guilt-ridden soul, and Plato’s discussions of the immortality of the soul, of the ideal republic ruled by the philosopher-king and the qualities necessary for the good life, all affected Cosimo deeply.
Ficino would eventually produce his own neo-Platonic ideas on these subjects. In his view, the immortality of the soul depended on its participation during life in the divine properties of reason, unity and self-sufficiency. He saw the writings of the Ancient Greek philosophers as prefiguring the truth of the Christian religion, and strove to unite Plato’s pagan philosophy with Christianity in a distinctly humanist religion. The Platonic ideas of beauty, truth and the absolute became central to Ficino’s thinking, which resulted in his interpretations of these ideas becoming highly influential amongst the artistic and literary humanists of Florence. He famously wrote that beauty lay ‘Not in the shadows of matter, but in the light and form; not in the darkling stuff of the body, but in its lucid proportion; not in the sluggardly sullied weight of the flesh, but in number and measure.’ This could almost be a manifesto of the humanist artists.
Yet Ficino could not accept all manifestations of humanism; his ideas tended to the spiritual, and at the age of thirty he would become a priest. One winter’s night, whilst reading a copy of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in his cottage, he became so exasperated by its Epicurean worldliness that he flung it into the fire. Cosimo was not the only one troubled by the deep contradictions exposed by his attempt to live a new way of life.