The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  The chancellor of the Florentine Republic was in effect the permanent secretary of state for foreign affairs. Florence was an independent state in control of a substantial swath of territory in central Italy and engaged in a constant, high-stakes chess game with the other powerful states of the Italian peninsula, especially Venice and Milan in the north, Naples in the south, and the papacy in Rome, weakened by internal divisions but still rich, dangerous, and meddlesome. Each of these rivals was prepared, if its position seemed threatened, to take the risky step of calling for aid, in money and troops, from the rulers of the Continent who welcomed the opportunity to intervene. All of the players in the game were ambitious, cunning, treacherous, ruthless, and armed, and the chancellor’s conduct of diplomatic relations, including relations with the Church, was crucial not merely for the well-being of the city but for its very survival in the face of the threats from France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain.

  When Poggio arrived on the scene in Florence, in the late 1390s, Salutati—who had begun life as a lowly provincial notary—had filled this post for some twenty-five years, conducting intrigues, hiring and ridding himself of mercenaries, drafting precise instructions to ambassadors, negotiating treaties, seeing through the ruses of his enemies, forging alliances, issuing manifestos. Virtually everyone—the city’s bitterest enemies as well as its most patriotic citizens—understood that in its chancellor Florence had someone truly exceptional, endowed not only with legal knowledge, political cunning, and diplomatic skill, but also with psychological penetration, a gift for public relations, and unusual literary skill.

  Like Petrarch, with whom he had corresponded, Salutati felt the concentrated force of the buried past and had embarked on a scholarly search for the vestiges of classical culture. Like Petrarch, he was an intensely devout Christian who at the same time found almost nothing to cherish, at least stylistically, in anything written between Cassiodorus in the sixth century and Dante in the thirteenth. Like Petrarch, Salutati sought instead to imitate the style of Virgil and Cicero, and, though he recognized that he lacked Petrarch’s literary genius—Ego michi non placeo (“I do not like myself”), he ruefully wrote—he astonished his contemporaries with the power of his prose.

  Above all, Salutati shared with Petrarch the conviction that the recovery of the past had to be of more than antiquarian interest. The goal of reading was not to make oneself sound exactly like one of the ancients, even if that were possible. “I much prefer13 that my own style be my own,” Petrarch wrote, “uncultivated and rude, but made to fit, as a garment, to the measure of my mind, rather than to someone else’s, which may be more elegant, ambitious, and adorned, but one that, deriving from a greater genius, continually slips off, unfitted to the humble proportions of my intellect.” Though there is clearly a large dose of false modesty here, there is also a genuine desire to fashion a new and original voice not by disappearing into the old masters but by taking those masters into the self. The ancient authors, Petrarch wrote to Boccaccio, “have become absorbed14 into my being and implanted not only in my memory but in the marrow of my bones, and have become one with my mind so that even if I never read them again in my life, they would inhere in me with their roots sunk in the depths of my soul.” “I have always believed,”15 Salutati wrote in the same spirit, that “I must imitate antiquity not simply to reproduce it, but in order to produce something new….”

  To prove its worth,16 Petrarch and Salutati both insisted, the whole enterprise of humanism had not merely to generate passable imitations of the classical style but to serve a larger ethical end. And to do so it needed to live fully and vibrantly in the present. But here the disciple parted from his master, for while Petrarch, who was born in exile and never fully identified with a particular homeland, moved throughout his life from place to place—shuttling from royal palace to city to papal court to rural retreat, despairing of stable attachments and feeling the pull toward a contemplative withdrawal from the world—Salutati wanted17 to produce something new in the city-state he passionately loved.

  At the center of Florence’s cramped urban landscape of fortified towers and walled monasteries was the Palazzo della Signoria, the political heart of the republic. It was here for Salutati18 that the city’s glory resided. The independence of Florence—the fact that it was not a client of another state, that it was not dependent on the papacy, and that it was not ruled by a king, a tyrant, or a prelate but governed by a body of its own citizens—was for Salutati what most mattered in the world. His letters, dispatches, protocols, and manifestos, written on behalf of the ruling priors of Florence, are stirring documents, and they were read and copied throughout Italy. They demonstrated that ancient rhetoric was alive, that it effectively stirred up political emotions and awakened old dreams. A supremely gifted diplomat and politician, Salutati had a range of voices, a range almost impossible to convey quickly, but something of his spirit may be gauged from a letter of February 13, 1376, to the town of Ancona. Ancona was, like Florence, an independent commune, and Salutati was urging its citizens to revolt against the papal government that had been imposed upon them: “Will you always stand19 in the darkness of slavery? Do you not consider, O best of men, how sweet liberty is? Our ancestors, indeed the whole Italian race, fought for five hundred years … so that liberty would not be lost.” The revolt he was trying to incite was, of course, in Florence’s strategic interest, but in attempting to arouse a spirit of liberty, Salutati was not being merely cynical. He seems genuinely to have believed that Florence was the heir to the republicanism on which ancient Roman greatness had been founded. That greatness, the proud claim of human freedom and dignity, had all but vanished from the broken, dirty streets of Rome, the debased staging ground of sordid clerical intrigues, but it lived, in Salutati’s view, in Florence. And he was its principal voice.

  He knew that he would not be its voice forever. As he reached his seventies, troubled by intensifying religious scruples and anxious about the many threats to the city he loved, Salutati looked to a group of gifted young men he had taken under his wing. Poggio was among these young men, though we do not know precisely how Salutati identified him or the others whom he trained, in the hope that one or another would continue his labor. The most promising student was Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo, a man about ten years older than Poggio, and like Poggio, from a very modest background. Bruni had set out to study law, but, along with other intellectually gifted men of his generation and particularly those in the orbit of Salutati, he had been seized by a passion for classical studies. In his case, the decisive factor was the study of ancient Greek, made possible when in 1397 Salutati invited the preeminent Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysolaras to reside in Florence and give classes in a language that had been almost completely forgotten. “At the coming of Chrysolaras,”20 Bruni later recalled, “I was made to halt in my choice of lives, seeing that I held it wrong to desert law, and yet I reckoned it a crime to omit so great an occasion of learning the Greek literature.” The lure proved irresistible: “Conquered at last by these reasonings, I delivered myself over to Chrysolaras with such passion that what I had received from him by day in hours of waking, occupied my mind at night in hours of sleep.”

  In the circle jockeying for recognition by the great Salutati, one might have expected Poggio most to identify with the earnest, hardworking, ambitious Bruni, a penniless, provincial outsider endowed only with his own acute intelligence. But though he admired Bruni—who eventually served as a brilliant, deeply patriotic chancellor of Florence and was the author, among other works, of the first great history of the city—the young Poggio formed his deepest bond of friendship with another one of Salutati’s students, the hypersensitive, argumentative aesthete Niccolò Niccoli.

  Some sixteen years older than Poggio, Niccoli had been born to one of the city’s wealthiest families. His father had made a fortune in the manufacture of wool cloth, along with money-lending, grain futures, and other enterprises. Tax records from the 1390s indicate t
hat Niccolò Niccoli and his five brothers were wealthier than most of the residents in their quarter of the city, including such ruling families as the Brancacci and the Pitti. (Modern tourists to Florence can gauge the scale of this wealth by recalling the grandeur of the Pitti Palace, built some twenty years after Niccoli’s death.)

  By the time that Poggio came to know him, Niccoli’s fortunes, and those of his brothers, were in decline. Though they were still very rich men, the brothers were quarreling bitterly among themselves, and the family as a whole seems to have been unwilling or unable to play the political game that was always necessary in Florence to protect and enhance accumulated wealth. Only those who actively exercised political power in the city and kept a sharp eye out for their interests could avert the crushing and often vindictive taxes that were levied on vulnerable fortunes. Taxes were used in Florence,21 as the historian Guicciardini cannily remarked a century later, like a dagger.

  Niccolò Niccoli spent all he had on a ruling passion that kept him from the civic pursuits that might have helped him secure some of the family wealth. The wool trade and commodity speculation were not for him, any more than serving the republic in the Signoria, the executive body of government, or on the important councils known as the Twelve Good Men and the Sixteen Standard-bearers of the Militia. Even more than his humanist mentor and friends, Niccoli was obsessed with the vestiges of Roman antiquity and had no time for anything else. He determined, probably at an early age, to have no career and hold no civic offices, or rather, he determined to use his inherited wealth to live a beautiful and full life by conjuring up the ghosts of the ancient past.

  In the Florence of Niccoli’s time, the family was the central institution, socially, economically, and psychologically, and for anyone who did not choose to enter the special world of the Church—and particularly for anyone with inherited wealth—there was overwhelming pressure to marry, to have children, and to augment the family fortunes. “Marriage gives an abundance22 of all sorts of pleasure and delight,” wrote Niccoli’s younger contemporary, Leon Battista Alberti, summing up widely held views,

  If intimacy increases good will, no one has so close and continued a familiarity with anyone as with his wife; if close bonds and a united will arise through the revelation and communication of your feelings and desires, there is no one to whom you have more opportunity to communicate fully and reveal your mind than to your own wife, your constant companion; if, finally, an honorable alliance leads to friendship, no relationship more entirely commands your reverence than the sacred tie of marriage. Add to all this that every moment brings further ties of pleasure and utility, confirming the benevolence filling our hearts.

  And if the picture painted here was exceedingly rosy, it was reinforced by dire warnings. Woe to the man, intoned San Bernardino, the greatest popular preacher of the time, who has no wife:

  If he is rich23 and has somewhat, the sparrows eat it, and mice…. Know you what his bed is like? He lies in a ditch, and when he has put a sheet on his bed, he never takes it off again, until it is torn. And in the room in which he eats, the floor is covered with a melon rind and bones and salad leaves…. He wipes the trenchers off: the dog licks them, and so washes them. Know you how he lives? Like a brute beast.

  Niccoli rejected both the inducements and the warnings. He chose to remain single, so that, it was said, no woman would distract him from his studies. “Studies” is a perfectly accurate term—he was a deeply scholarly and learned man—but it does not adequately convey the overarching vision of a mode of life immersed in the past that Niccoli arrived at early and that he pursued with a tenacious single-mindedness. As for the rest, all that ordinarily constitutes the pursuit of happiness, he seems to have been indifferent: “He had a housekeeper,”24 his early biographer Vespasiano writes, “to provide for his wants.”

  Niccoli was one of the first Europeans to collect antiquities as works of art, prized possessions with which he surrounded himself in his Florentine apartments. Such collecting is by now such a familiar practice among the very rich that it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it was once a novel idea. Pilgrims to Rome in the Middle Ages had long been accustomed to gawking at the Colosseum and other “marvels” of paganism on their way to worshipping at the places that actually mattered, the revered Christian shrines of saints and martyrs. Niccoli’s collection in Florence represented a very different impulse: not the accumulation of trophies but the loving appreciation of aesthetic objects.

  As word got round that an eccentric man was willing to pay handsomely for ancient heads and torsos, farmers who might in the past have burned any marble fragments that they ploughed up for the lime they could extract from them or used the old carved stones for the foundations of a pigsty began instead to offer them for sale. On display in Niccoli’s elegant rooms, along with antique Roman goblets, pieces of ancient glassware, medals, cameos, and other treasures, the sculptures inspired in others the impulse to collect.

  Poggio could not possibly hope25 to be served his meals, as his friend was, on ancient Roman plates or disburse gold coins, as his friend did, for antique cameos that he happened to glimpse around the necks of street urchins. But he could share and deepen the desire that underlay Niccoli’s acquisitions, the desire to understand and to reenter imaginatively the cultural world that had fashioned the beautiful objects with which he surrounded himself. The two friends studied together, traded historical anecdotes about the Roman Republic and Empire, pondered the religion and mythology represented by the statues of the gods and the heroes, measured the foundations of ruined villas, discussed the topography and the organization of ancient cities, and above all enriched their detailed understanding of the Latin language they both loved and which they routinely used in their personal letters and perhaps in private conversation as well.

  From these letters it is clear that Niccolò Niccoli cared about one thing even more passionately than the ancient sculptures that were being exhumed from the earth: the classical and patristic texts that his fellow humanists were ferreting out of monastic libraries. Niccoli loved to possess these texts, to study them, and to copy them slowly, ever so slowly, in handwriting even more beautiful than Poggio’s. Perhaps indeed their friendship coalesced at least as much around the forms of letters—Niccoli shares with Poggio the credit for the invention of humanist script—as around the forms of ancient thought.

  Manuscripts of ancient texts were expensive to acquire, but to the avid collector no price seemed too great. Niccoli’s library was famous among humanists in Italy and elsewhere, and, though he was often reclusive, crotchety, and fiercely opinionated, he generously welcomed into his house scholars who wished to consult his collections. When in 1437 he died at the age of seventy-three, he left eight hundred manuscripts, by far the largest and best collection in Florence.

  Guided by Salutati’s vision, Niccoli had formulated an idea of what to do with these texts. Petrarch and Boccaccio had both contemplated keeping together the manuscripts they had acquired, after they died, but their valuable collections were in fact sold off, dispersed, or simply neglected. (Many of the precious codices that Petrarch painstakingly gathered and that he brought to Venice, to serve as the core of what he dreamed would be a new Alexandrian Library, were shut away and forgotten in a damp palazzo where they crumbled into dust.) Niccoli did not want to see the work of his lifetime suffer a similar fate. He drew up a will in which he called for the manuscripts to be kept together, forbade their sale or dispersion, prescribed strict rules for loans and returns, appointed a committee of trustees, and left a sum of money to build a library. The building would be constructed and the collection housed in a monastery; but Niccoli emphatically did not want this to be a monastic library, closed off to the world and reserved for the monks. He specified that the books26 would be available not for the religious alone but for all learned citizens, omnes cives studiosi. Centuries after the last Roman library had been shut down and abandoned, Niccoli had brought back into the world th
e idea of the public library.

  In the late 1390s, when Poggio first met Niccoli, the mania for collecting that led to this remarkable result must only have been in its early stages, but the friends bonded in their shared insistence on the superiority of all things ancient—setting aside matters of faith—over anything that followed. The astonishing literary ambition and creativity characteristic of Petrarch had largely shriveled up in them, as had the patriotic zeal and the passion for liberty that had fueled Salutati’s humanism. What took their place was something far less expansive in spirit, something harder and more punishing: a cult of imitation and a craving for exactitude. Perhaps the younger generation simply lacked the overpowering talent of their elders, but it was as if these gifted disciples of Salutati had deliberately rejected the bold desire to bring something truly new into the world. Despising the new, they dreamed only of calling back to life something old. This dream, narrow and arid in spirit, was doomed to failure; but, all the same, it had surprising results.

  To those outside the charmed circle of young humanists, the emerging attitude toward language and culture could seem repellent. “In order to appear well read27 to the mob,” wrote one disgusted contemporary, “they shout about the piazza how many diphthongs the ancients had and why today only two are in use.” Even Salutati was uneasy, and with good reason, for though the fervent classicism of Poggio and Niccoli was clearly indebted to him, it was also a parting of the ways, as he understood, and in some subtle sense a repudiation.

  On the death of Petrarch on July 19, 1374, the grieving Salutati had declared that Petrarch was a greater prose writer than Cicero and a greater poet than Virgil. By the 1390s, this praise seemed to Poggio and Niccoli ridiculous, and they pressed Salutati to repudiate it. In all the intervening centuries, no one, they argued, had bettered the great classic writers in stylistic perfection. It was impossible. Since ancient times all there had been, in their view, was a long, tragic history of stylistic corruption and loss. Indifferent or ignorant, even supposedly well-educated medieval writers had forgotten how to form sentences correctly, in the proper manner of the masters of classical Latin, or to use words with the elegance, accuracy, and precision with which they had once been wielded. Moreover, the surviving samples of classical texts had been corrupted, so that they could no longer serve as correct models, even if anyone had the ambition to use them as such. The “ancients” cited by medieval scholastics, Niccoli argued, “would not have recognized28 as their own the writings attributed to them, preserved as they are in corrupt texts and translated without taste and sense.”