The Swerve (19 page)

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 that 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 abundance
²²
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 rich
²³
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 hope
²⁵
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 books
²⁶
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 the 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 read
²⁷
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 recognized
²⁸
as their own the writings attributed to them, preserved as they are in corrupt texts and translated without taste and sense.”

Petrarch, who repeatedly insisted that the mastery of a classical style was by itself inadequate for the achievement of true literary or moral greatness, had once stood on the steps of the Capitol and had himself crowned poet laureate—as if the spirit of the ancient past had truly been reborn in him. But from the perspective of the radical, hard-core classicism of the younger generation, nothing truly worthwhile had been achieved by
Dante
, Petrarch, or Boccaccio, let alone by lesser lights: “While the literary legacy
²⁹
of antiquity is in such a pitiful state, no real culture is possible, and any disputation is necessarily built on shaky ground.”

These were unmistakably Niccoli’s views, but they were not his precise words. Rather, they were the words attributed to him in a dialogue by Leonardo Bruni. For apart from letters to intimate friends, Niccoli wrote virtually nothing. How could he, given his hypercritical sourness and narrow, unrelenting classicism? Friends sent their Latin texts to him and anxiously awaited his corrections, which were almost invariably punishing, stern, and unforgiving. But Niccoli was at his most unforgiving in relation to himself.

Niccolò Niccoli was, Salutati observed, Poggio’s “second self.”
³⁰
But Poggio did not suffer from the crippling inhibitions that virtually silenced his friend. In the course of his long career, he wrote books on such subjects as hypocrisy, avarice, true nobility, whether an old man should marry, the vicissitudes of fortune, the miseries of the human condition, and the history of Florence. “He had a great gift
³¹
of words,” his younger contemporary Vespasiano da Bisticci wrote of him, adding, “He was given to strong invective, and all stood in dread of him.” If Poggio, the master of invective, was not willing to grant to his old master that any writer of the past millennium could equal, let alone outstrip, the eloquence of the ancients, he was willing to concede that Petrarch had accomplished something: Petrarch was the first, Poggio granted, “who with his labor,
³²
industry, and watchful attention called back to light the studies almost brought to destruction, and opened the path to those others who were eager to follow.”