Other children were born to Guccio Bracciolini and his wife Jacoba—two daughters (one of whom died very young) and another son, about whom his older brother Poggio had angry complaints later in his life. To judge from his father’s tax payments, Poggio’s early years were reasonably comfortable; but around 1388, when he was eight years old, things took a very bad turn. Guccio had to sell his house and property, flee from his creditors, and move with his family to nearby Arezzo. According to Tomaso Morroni, young Poggio was sent out to the fields to labor for someone named Luccarus. When he was caught cheating Luccarus, Morroni reports, Poggio was condemned to be crucified and was pardoned only because of his tender years. Once again we should not take these slanders seriously, except as symptoms of the boundless loathing of squabbling scholars. In Arezzo, Poggio must have been attending a school, learning the elements of Latin, and mastering the art of handwriting, not ploughing someone’s fields or dodging the executioner. But that he had few resources he himself attested later in his life, recalling that he arrived in Florence cum quinque solidis—with five pennies in his pocket.
It was at some point in the 1390s, well before he turned twenty, that the impoverished young man came to Florence. He probably had in hand a letter of recommendation from his schoolteacher in Arezzo, and he might have acquired as well a smattering of legal knowledge from brief studies in Bologna. After a time he was reunited with his improvident father and the rest of his family, all of whom eventually moved to Florence. But when he initially set foot in the Piazza della Signoria or looked up for the first time at Giotto’s beautiful belltower next to the Duomo, Poggio was by himself, a nobody.
With a population hovering around 50,000, Florentine political, social, and commercial life was dominated by a small number of powerful mercantile and noble families: the Albizzi, Strozzi, Peruzzi, Capponi, Pitti, Buondelmonti, and a few others. The leading families signaled their presence and importance through conspicuous expenditure. “It is much sweeter3 to spend money than to earn it,” wrote Giovanni Rucellai, whose family had grown rich in wool dying and banking; “spending gave me deeper satisfaction.” The wealthy were attended by large numbers of clients, bailiffs, accountants, clerics, secretaries, messengers, tutors, musicians, artists, servants, and slaves. The labor shortage after the Black Death in 1348 had greatly increased the market for slaves,4 brought not only from Muslim Spain and Africa but also from the Balkans, Constantinople, and the shores of the Black Sea. The traffic was allowed, provided that the slaves were infidels, not Christians, and Poggio must have seen a fair number of them, North Africans, Cypriots, Tartars, Greeks, Russians, Georgians, and others.
Florence was an oligarchy, and the small coterie of the wealthy and wellborn were the people who counted. Wealth lay in banking and landowning, as it usually does, and it derived as well from the weaving and finishing of cloth, for which the city was famous. The cloth business required a cosmopolitan outlook, strong nerves, and extraordinary attention to detail. The surviving archive of a single great merchant of this period, Francesco di Marco Datini of nearby Prato—not, by any means, the greatest of these early capitalists—contains some 150,000 letters, along with 500 account books or ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, 400 insurance policies, several thousand bills of lading, letters of advice, bills of exchange, and checks. On the first pages of Datini’s ledgers were inscribed the words: “In the name of God5 and of profit.”
In Florence, God was served in the astonishing number of churches that adjoined one another in the crowded streets. He was served as well in the long, passionate sermons that drew huge crowds, in the harangues of itinerant friars, in the prayers, vows, offerings, and expressions of religious fear that recur in almost all writings, formal and informal, and must have saturated everyday speech, and in periodic bursts of popular piety.
Profit was served in a vibrant international cloth industry6 that required large numbers of trained workmen. Some of the most skilled of these were organized in powerful guilds that looked out for their interests, but other workmen labored for a pittance. In 1378, two years before Poggio’s birth, the seething resentment of these miserable day laborers, the populo minuto, had boiled over into a full-scale bloody revolt. Gangs of artisans ran through the streets, crying, “Long live the people and the crafts!” and the uprising briefly toppled the ruling families and installed a democratic government. But the old order was quickly restored, and with it a regime determined to maintain the power of the guilds and the leading families.
After the defeat of the Ciompi, as the working-class revolutionaries were called, the resurgent oligarchs held on to power tenaciously for more than forty years, shaping Poggio’s whole knowledge and experience of the city where he determined to make his fortune. He had to find a way into a conservative, socially bounded world. Fortunately for him, by innate skill and training he possessed one of the few gifts that would enable someone of his modest origins and resources to do so. The key that opened the first door through which he slipped was something that has come to mean next to nothing in the modern world: beautiful handwriting.
Poggio’s way of fashioning letters was a move away from the intricately interwoven and angular writing known as Gothic hand. The demand for more open, legible handwriting had already been voiced earlier in the century by Petrarch (1304–1374). Petrarch complained that the writing then in use in most manuscripts often made it extremely difficult to decipher the text, “as though it had been designed,”7 he noted, “for something other than reading.” To make texts more legible, the individual letters had somehow to be freed from their interlocking patterns, the spaces between the words opened up, the lines spaced further apart, the abbreviations filled out. It was like opening a window and letting air into a tightly closed room.
What Poggio accomplished, in collaboration with a few others, remains startling. They took Carolingian minuscule—a scribal innovation of the ninth-century court of Charlemagne—and transformed it into the script they used for copying manuscripts and writing letters. This script in turn served as the basis for the development of italics. They were then in effect the inventors of the script we still think of as at once the clearest, the simplest, and the most elegant written representation of our words. It is difficult to take in the full effect without seeing it for oneself, for example, in the manuscripts preserved in the Laurentian Library in Florence: the smooth bound volumes of vellum, still creamy white after more than five hundred years, contain page after page of perfectly beautiful script, almost magical in its regularity and fineness. There are tiny pinholes on the margins, where the blank sheets must have been fixed to hold them steady, and scarcely visible score marks to form straight lines, twenty-six per page. But these aids cannot begin to explain how the tasks could have been accomplished with such clean elegance.
To have invented a way to design letters immediately recognizable and admired after six centuries is no small achievement. But the way Poggio fashioned his letters showed more than just unusual skill in graphic design; it signaled a creative response to powerful cultural currents stirring in Florence and throughout Italy. Poggio seems to have grasped that the call for a new cursive writing was only a small piece of a much larger project, a project that linked the creation of something new with a search for something ancient. To speak of this search as a project runs the risk of making it sound routine and familiar. In fact it was a shared mania, one whose origin can be traced back to Petrarch, who, a generation before Poggio’s birth, had made the recovery of the cultural heritage of classical Rome a collective obsession.
Modern scholarship has found dozens of ways to qualify and diminish this obsession. Petrarch’s admirers wrote as if the ancient past had been utterly forgotten, until their hero heroically recalled it to life, but it can be demonstrated that Petrarch’s vision was less novel than it seemed. In addition to the fifteenth-century Renaissance, there had been other moments of intense interest in antiquity, both throughout medieval Italy and in the kingdoms of the north,
including the great Carolingian Renaissance of the ninth century. And it was not these moments alone that kept the intellectual heritage of antiquity alive. Medieval compendia provided much more continuity with classical thought than believed by those under Petrarch’s spell. In the high Middle Ages, scholastic philosophers, reading Aristotle through the lens of the brilliant Arabic commentator Averroës, constructed a sophisticated, highly rational account of the universe. And even Petrarch’s vaunted aesthetic commitment to classical Latinity—his dream of walking in the footsteps of the ancients—had been evident for at least seventy years before his birth. Much of what Petrarch and his followers claimed for the novelty of their approach was tendentious, self-congratulatory exaggeration.
But it is difficult entirely to demystify the movement to which Petrarch gave rise, if only because he and his contemporaries were so articulate about their experience. To them at least it did not seem obvious that the search on which they embarked was only a polite stroll onto well-trodden ground. They saw themselves as adventurous explorers both in the physical world—the mountains they crossed, the monastic libraries they investigated, the ruins they dug up—and in their inner world of desire. The urgency of the enterprise reflects their underlying recognition that there was nothing obvious or inevitable about the attempt to recover or imitate the language, material objects, and cultural achievements of the very distant past. It was a strange thing to do, far stranger than continuing to live the ordinary, familiar life that men and women had lived for centuries, making themselves more or less comfortable in the midst of the crumbling, mute remains of antiquity.
Those remains were everywhere visible in Italy and throughout Europe: bridges and roads still in use after more than a millennium, the broken walls and arches of ruined baths and markets, temple columns incorporated into churches, old inscribed stones used as building materials in new constructions, fractured statues and broken vases. But the great civilization that left these traces had been destroyed. The remnants could serve as walls to incorporate into new houses, as reminders that all things pass and are forgotten, as mute testimony to the triumph of Christianity over paganism, as literal quarries to be mined for precious stones and metals. Generations of men and women, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had developed effective techniques for the recycling of classical fragments, in their writing as well as their building. The techniques bypassed any anxiety about meddling with the leftovers of a pagan culture: as broken shards whether of stone or of language, these leftovers were at once useful and unthreatening. What more would anyone want with the rubble over which the living had clambered for more than a thousand years?
To insist on the original, independent meaning of this rubble would cause trouble and moral perplexity. A passion for antiquity could certainly not be justified on the basis of curiosity alone, for curiosity had long been rigorously condemned8 as a mortal sin. The religion of the pagans was widely regarded as the worship of demons, and, even setting aside that fear, the Christian faithful was urged to remember the cultural achievements of ancient Greece and Rome as the quintessential works of the world, the kingdom of man, set against the transcendent, timeless kingdom of God.
Petrarch was a devout Christian,9 and throughout his life he reflected with ardent seriousness on his spiritual condition. And yet he was, over the course of a complex career of restless journeying, diplomacy, soul-searching, and compulsive writing, a man held in the grip of a fascination with pagan antiquity that he himself could never completely fathom. Though he was for long periods of his life a relatively solitary figure, Petrarch did not keep this fascination to himself. He insisted with missionary zeal on the expressive power, the beauty, and the challenge of all that lay broken and buried beneath the crushing weight of neglect.
A gifted scholar, Petrarch began to search for ancient texts that had been forgotten. He was not the first to do so, but he managed to invest this search with a new, almost erotic urgency and pleasure, superior to all other treasure seeking:
Gold, silver, jewels,10 purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.
Copying, comparing, and correcting the ancient Latin texts that he found, Petrarch returned them to circulation by sharing them with a vast network of correspondents to whom, often rising at midnight to sit at his desk, he wrote with manic energy. And he responded to the ancient writers as if they were somehow a living part of this network, intimate friends and family with whom he could share his thoughts. When he found a great cache of Cicero’s private letters to his wealthy friend Atticus, candid letters filled with glimpses of egotism, ambition, and resentment, Petrarch did not hesitate to write a letter to Cicero, reproaching him for failing to live up to his own high principles.
For his own present,11 where he was forced to live, Petrarch professed limitless contempt. He lived in a sordid time, he complained, a time of coarseness, ignorance, and triviality that would quickly vanish from human memory. But his was the kind of contempt that seems only to intensify charisma and celebrity. His fame steadily grew, and with it the cultural significance of his obsession with the past. In succeeding generations that obsession was partly routinized and settled into an influential new educational curriculum, the humanities (studia humanitatis), with emphasis on a mastery of Greek and Latin language and literature and a particular focus on rhetoric. But the humanism that Petrarch himself helped to create and that he communicated to his closest friends and disciples—preeminently, to Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1374) and Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406)—was not a strictly academic affair.
The early humanists felt themselves, with mingled pride, wonder, and fear, to be involved in an epochal movement. In part the movement involved recognizing that something that had seemed alive was really dead. For centuries, princes and prelates had claimed that they were continuing the living traditions of the classical world and had appropriated, in some form or other, the symbols and the language of the past. But Petrarch and those he inspired insisted that this easy appropriation was a lie: the Roman Empire did not actually exist in Aachen, where the ruler who called himself the “Holy Roman Emperor” was crowned; the institutions and ideas that had defined the world of Cicero and Virgil had been torn to pieces, and the Latin written by the philosophers and theologians of the past six or seven hundred years was an ugly and distorted image, like that reflected in a badly made mirror, of what had once been so beautifully eloquent. It was better not to pretend any longer, but to acknowledge that there was no continuity. Instead, there was a corpse, long buried and by now disintegrated, under one’s feet.
But this acknowledgment was only the necessary first step. Once one recognized what was gone, once one had mourned the tragic loss, it was possible to prepare the way for what lay on the other side of death: nothing less than resurrection. The pattern was, of course, familiar to every good Christian—and Petrarch, in holy orders, was a very good Christian indeed—but the resurrection in this case was in this world, not in the next. The object of recovery was fundamentally cultural and secular.
Poggio arrived in Rome a quarter of a century after Petrarch’s death, at a time when the charismatic moment of the movement had already begun to fade. The sense of creative daring was gradually giving way to a spirit of antiquarianism and with it a desire to discipline, correct, and regulate all relations with the ancient past. Poggio and his generation became increasingly caught up in the desire to avoid mistakes in Latin grammar and to catch the blunders of others. But the lingering sense of the strangeness of the recovery of classical antiquity helps to explain the peculiar impact of his handwriting. The script that he fashioned was not a direct evocation of the handwriting used by the ancient Romans: all traces of that handwriting had long since vanished, leaving only the carved inscriptions in hand
some capital letters on stone and occasional rough graffiti. But Poggio’s script was a graphic expression of the deep longing for a different style of beauty, a cultural form that would signal the recovery of something precious that had been lost. The shape of his letters was based on the manuscript style of certain Carolingian scribes. But Poggio and his contemporaries did not identify this style with the court of Charlemagne; they called it lettera antica, and, in doing so, they dreamed not of Charlemagne’s tutor Alcuin but of Cicero and Virgil.
In order to earn money the young Poggio copied books and documents, probably a very large number of them. His handwriting and his skill in copying—for which he became celebrated in his lifetime—must have been sufficiently remarkable from the beginning to enable him to pay for lessons. He improved his Latin, which was already quite advanced, by studying with a gifted scholar from Ravenna, Giovanni Malpaghino, a restless, quarrelsome man who had in his youth been Petrarch’s secretary and amanueunsis and who had made a living lecturing in Venice, Padua, Florence, and elsewhere on Cicero and Roman poetry. Poggio’s earnings paid too for his training as a notary, training that had the advantage12 of being cheaper and shorter than the long course of study required to become a lawyer.
At twenty-two years old, Poggio stood for his exam, not in the university but before a panel of lawyers and notaries. He had managed to survive the vagaries of his impoverished childhood and was poised to begin a career. The first notarial document in his hand is a letter of recommendation for his own father, who had fled from Florence to Rimini to escape an irate moneylender. We do not have a clue what Poggio thought when he penned this copy. Perhaps what already mattered more to him was the person in whose name the letter of recommendation was written: Coluccio Salutati, the great chancellor of the Florentine Republic.
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