TBV (on hiatus)’s Reviews > The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance > Status Update

“Copies of Ficino’s translations were owned by Ben Jonson, John Milton, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean Racine in France, by Bishop Berkeley in Ireland and Baruch Spinoza in the Netherlands, and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant in Germany.”

“The city’s streets had long been used by itinerant entertainers such as the cantimbanchi, or ‘bench singers,’ who performed in the streets and piazzas. The ciarlatani likewise plied their trade in the streets – men who removed teeth and sold miraculous remedies (and who gave us the word ‘charlatan’).” [ciarlatani is pronounced charlatani]

“He distinguished himself as a precocious poet and brilliant scholar, studying Greek with Marsilio Ficino and translating four books of the Iliad into Latin hexameters by the time he was sixteen. His talents reached the ears of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who, in 1473, took him into his palace and provided him with access to its library.” [Angelo Ambrosini, later named Poliziano]

“Snobbishly, he lamented that books were suddenly available to people who ‘in happier times’ possessed no access to them. Thanks to the printing press, works that had once been ‘remote and hidden and unknown to those of average learning’ were now ‘repeated at cross-roads and among the lower classes as common knowledge.’” [“A Venetian scholar named Giorgio Merula”]

“Between 1465 and 1472, 85 per cent of all books printed in Italy were in Latin, a proportion that rose even higher across Europe as a whole: 91 per cent. Anyone wishing to find a book in his or her own language would have a difficult time of it. Before 1472, only thirty-six titles had been printed in German and thirty-one in Italian. Not a single book had yet been published in French.”

“Federico was indeed a voracious bookworm. Like King Alfonso, he preferred Roman histories and treatises on warfare – Livy, Caesar, and Plutarch. His study of history was, in Vespasiano’s view, one of the reasons why he proved so successful in battle. ‘A commander who knows Latin,’ Vespasiano claimed, ‘holds an advantage over one who does not.’” [Federico da Montefeltro]

“When the Lancastrians gained the upper hand, Tiptoft was captured (disguised as a shepherd and hiding in a tree) and then marched to the executioner’s block on Tower Hill. As a friend in England noted, ‘The axe then did at one blow cut off more learning than was left in the heads of all the surviving nobility.’” [Tiptoft had previously bought exquisite books before chopping off Lancastrian heads]

One of Livy’s few critics proved to be Caligula, the mad emperor who reigned from AD 37 to 41. According to his biographer, Suetonius, Caligula had Livy’s books removed from the imperial libraries after denouncing him as a ‘verbose and careless historian.’ Livy was in good company: Caligula regarded Virgil as ‘a man of no literary talent,’ and he expressed his desire to destroy the works of Homer.

“Medieval marginalia freely depicted a topsy-turvy world of role reversal in which rabbits pursue the hunter, mice hogtie the cat, and, in one memorable image, a nun plucks penises from a tree and puts them in her basket.”

“Petrarch had likewise criticised collectors who hoarded manuscripts as ornaments for their homes. ‘There are those who decorate their rooms with furniture devised to decorate their minds,’ he sniffed, ‘and they use books as they use Corinthian vases.’” [Guilty as charged!]