The Bookseller of Florence Quotes

“King Alfonso liked to claim, in a paraphrase of Plato, that “kings ought to be learned men themselves, or at least lovers of learned men.”16 His nickname, Il Magnanimo, owed much to his generous literary patronage. His personal emblem was an open book, while his punning motto was Liber sum (which meant both “I am free” and “I am a book”).”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“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.56 The Ripoli Press’s 1484 edition is recorded at Harvard in 1735, at Yale in 1742, and even, by 1623, in China.57 More than 120 copies have survived into the twenty-first century: thirty-six in Italy, the remainder scattered from Malta, Slovakia, and Sweden to libraries in California, Kansas, Oregon, and the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“For a Latin work from ancient Rome to survive the next few centuries and beyond, it therefore needed to be transferred to parchment. But this conversion from roll to codex was reliant on the early Christians—the people who made the codices—deeming the writings of their pagan predecessors worthy of preservation and study.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“All evil is born from ignorance,” as Vespasiano wrote. “Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness.” This darkness he and his friends hoped to dispel by casting onto their fractured and unhappy times the pure radiance of the past, one scribe and one manuscript at a time.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“The other is Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino’s friend and fellow Plato enthusiast: a tall, green-eyed intellectual virtuoso who can read, among other languages, Aramaic and Chaldean, and who can recite the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy both forward and backward. The awestruck Ficino regards him as a member of “a superhuman race.”5 “They wanted to see everything in our library,” Brother Gregorio later notes of his distinguished visitors.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Chasing Away the Darkness”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Ficino’s translations were the means by which for many centuries readers across Europe gained access to Plato. His complete Latin translation was republished twenty-four times over the following century.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Plato advanced into domains far vaster and more exotic than merely the pipe-smoke-garlanded realms of university philosophy departments. His ideas shaped countless cultural and intellectual trends: ideas of love, of magic and the occult, of art and imitation, of creativity through the divine frenzy of the “mad poet.” His theories on the structure of the cosmos influenced such pioneers of the Scientific Revolution as Johannes Kepler (who used the Platonic solids described in the Timaeus to determine the number of the planets and their distances from the Sun) and Galileo (who credited Plato with the theory of the common origin of the planets). His theories of the soul have been said to prefigure Sigmund Freud’s understanding of the psyche, while Friedrich Nietzsche argued in The Birth of Tragedy that Plato’s dialogues inspired the novel. Few things in heaven and earth were not dreamt of in Plato’s philosophy.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“The billows and swells of the Platonic revival generated in Florence soon became a deluge that washed across the European intellectual landscape. Plato would so dominate the Western philosophical tradition for the next half-millennium that in 1927 the British philosopher A. N. Whitehead could famously declare in a lecture in Edinburgh: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“All too often these walls proved minor impediments. Court records in Tuscany describe how men secretly entered convents to satisfy what one document called their “libidinous desires.” Included among them was a man who in 1419 managed to live for five months in a Dominican convent in Pisa, and a priest who, two years later, entered a convent of Poor Clares thirty miles west of Florence “and stayed many days, knowing carnally day and night one of the recluses who wore the nun’s habit.”17 The most notorious convent in Florentine territories was undoubtedly Santa Margherita in Prato, scene in the 1450s of the love affair between an Augustinian novice and a Carmelite friar: Sister Lucrezia Buti and the amorous painter Fra Filippo Lippi (the painter Filippino Lippi would be the result of the liaison).”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“The ciarlatani likewise plied their trade in the streets—men who removed teeth and sold miraculous remedies (and who gave us the word “charlatan”).”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“The map of Florence, a bird’s-eye view from the north, shows the city embraced by a diamond-shaped circuit of walls and split in half by the River Arno, spanned by its four bridges. Many of Florence’s churches and various other monuments are shown inside the walls, all identified by inscriptions helpfully added by a scribe in reddish ink. The artist, Piero del Massaio, even included the copper ball that in 1471 Andrea del Verrocchio added to the lantern at the top of Brunelleschi’s dome. The map also shows, on the south side of the Arno, between the Ponte Rubaconte and the Ponte Vecchio, a handsome private home. The reddish ink clearly identifies the occupant: Domus Vespasiani—the house, that is, of Vespasiano. The inclusion of Vespasiano’s home in Via de’ Bardi indicates his friendship with Duke Alfonso, who must have appreciated this little in-joke, and who may have been a visitor to Vespasiano’s house during his stay in Florence. It also gives proof of Vespasiano’s eminence: his house, like that of Niccolò Niccoli many years earlier, had become one of the sights of Florence.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Here the nuns were safely sequestered in a sprawling complex completely surrounded by walls. Theirs quickly became the most populous convent in Florence, housing more than a hundred sisters by 1300 and boasting a giant wooden crucifix painted by the great Cimabue and a series of frescoes showing scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“This convent, San Jacopo di Ripoli, was home to a community of forty-seven Dominican nuns.1 It stood on the western outskirts of Florence, in Via della Scala, close to the Porta al Prato and a ten-minute walk from the great Dominican basilica of Santa Maria Novella.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Federico da Montefeltro enjoyed a tremendous reception in Florence in the summer of 1472 following his brutal conquest of Volterra.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Giovanni da Castro,”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Pope Paul II died in the Vatican at the age of fifty-four in the summer of 1471,”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Today I bring you victory over the Turk,” the discoverer, Giovanni da Castro, announced to Pope Pius II.2 Mines quickly went into production, and alum was declared a papal monopoly (overseen by a three-man committee featuring the ubiquitous Cardinal Bessarion) whose profits were dedicated to a crusade.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“it happens, Bussi’s claim of a printed book costing a fifth of the price of a manuscript held true in the case of The City of God.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Where the rattle of ducats failed to produce a result, Cincinello deployed other, more drastic means. When he was ambassador to Rome he arranged for the kidnapping of one of Ferrante’s enemies who was slipping in and out of the kingdom on some nefarious business. Determined to “get his hands on him,” Cincinello lured his victim beyond the gates of Rome, where he had him seized and gagged by a band of horsemen, then bundled to Naples and hauled before Ferrante. The king enjoyed taking his vengeance through such baleful whimsies as strangling his enemies and then embalming them for display in a museum of mummies in the Castelnuovo. This latest enemy did not, apparently, become the latest exhibit, because as Vespasiano, in a statement that strains the bounds of credulity, claimed, Ferrante was “a most clement man who had no wish to do violence,” and the offender was released with a caution. Vespasiano did admit that Cincinello’s actions, here and elsewhere, raised certain uncomfortable moral questions. “Now in this case,” he wrote of the kidnapping, “whether I agree or not, I pass no judgment, knowing Antonio to be a man of good conscience.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Vespasiano was, as Ferrante told Piero de’ Medici, someone on whom the king relied for “information and experience.” Though Ferrante may not have initiated these reports, he certainly welcomed and encouraged them once they started arriving. In November 1467 he wrote Vespasiano to thank him for a letter sent ten days earlier, saying he was gratified to receive his news and urging Vespasiano to be diligent in reporting “the things happening there.”33 In another letter written a few weeks later, Ferrante thanked Vespasiano for supplying “a great deal of diverse news,” then wrote of making a great effort against “those who have disturbed the peace of Italy”—a reference to the Venetians and the ruler of Ferrara, Borso d’Este, who supported the Angevin claim to the throne of Naples, and who was, like so many other involved parties, Ferrante included, one of Vespasiano’s customers.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“A historian has recently argued that by the 1460s Vespasiano’s bookshop was “a political nexus … and even a listening post for the subversive, the disaffected, or the potentially so.”31 A few years earlier his bookshop was said to have “Aragonese doors” whose threshold Angevin supporters dared not darken (though in fact many Angevin supporters, such as Piero de’ Pazzi, freely came and went). By 1466 there was a danger that the bookshop could have been perceived as a site of anti-Medici activity.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Since his father’s death in 1464, Piero de’ Medici had done his best to maintain his family’s preeminent position in Florence. According to a chronicler, Piero enjoyed “great authority, many friends, wealth, and a power similar to his father’s.”24 By 1466, however, Piero, at fifty years old, was increasingly disabled by gout. As a result, government meetings and ambassadorial receptions were held not in the Palazzo della Signoria but in the Palazzo Medici, which increasingly served as the seat of government. Moreover, Piero lacked his father’s shrewdness and experience, and his power and grandeur soon provoked indignation among the citizens. His father had faced similar crises due to rivals and malcontents, most recently in 1458. On that occasion, the Medici maintained their power thanks to Cosimo’s longtime ally, the duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza, who sent troops to quell an insurrection. As mercenary troops poured into the city, Cosimo took the opportunity to arrest 150 opponents, torture a few others, and strengthen his grip on power. However, the death of Sforza in March 1466 robbed Piero, so soon after losing his father, of this reliable supplier of military might.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Federico da Montefeltro was the hereditary ruler of Urbino, a city-state of seven thousand inhabitants a zigzagging 125-mile journey from Florence through the hills and valleys of the Apennines. Federico was almost exactly the same age as Vespasiano. Born in 1422, the illegitimate son of Guidantonio da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino, he was at first welcomed by his father since the count’s twenty-five-year marriage had failed to produce a legitimate heir. However, he found himself shunted aside when Guidantonio’s first wife died and his second marriage resulted, in 1427, in a legitimate son, Oddantonio. Federico was educated in Venice and then Mantua, and as an adolescent he distinguished himself with a series of narcissistic poems celebrating his amorous achievements. Federico’s true destiny, however, involved conquests of a different sort. At the age of fifteen he entered the service of the warlord Niccolò Piccinino, commanding a cavalry of eight hundred horses and proving himself a brilliant warrior through such feats as capturing a hitherto impregnable fortress from the ferocious Sigismondo Malatesta.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“The differences between Christianity and Islam might fade with the final blast of heavenly trumpets, but those between Plato and Aristotle were, for George, forever entrenched.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“The slaughter of so many people in the streets of Mainz in October 1462, followed by the exile of eight hundred more, is often seen as the catalyst for the spread of printing beyond the Rhine Valley—for an exodus of printers, the workshop assistants of both Gutenberg and Fust, who made their separate ways across Germany, into France and, ultimately, over the Alps to seek their fortunes in the lucrative Italian market. As a Carthusian monk in Cologne wrote, “printers of books multiplied across the land.”7 Gutenberg, Fust,”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“They quickly selected the nobleman known as the “Cardinal of Venice”: Pietro Barbo, the forty-seven-year-old nephew of Pope Eugenius IV.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Cosimo heard was the Philebus, in which Socrates, arguing against the hedonistic Philebus, declared that “wisdom and thought and memory and their kindred, right opinion and true reasonings, are better and more excellent than pleasure.”22 At which point, as Ficino wrote, Cosimo “was recalled from this shadow of life and approached the heavenly light.”23 At Cosimo’s bedside as he passed from the shadow of life was his grandson, the son of Piero, a fifteen-year-old boy named Lorenzo.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini): a humanist on the throne of Saint Peter.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance

“Zanobi di Mariano.”
― Ross King, The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance