The Swerve (18 page)

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 handsome 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 advantage
¹²
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.

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 prefer
¹³
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 absorbed
¹⁴
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 wanted
¹⁷
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 Salutati
¹⁸
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 stand
¹⁹
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.”