The Swerve (31 page)

Poggio, who had met the future pope in Bologna and had come to know him well, had in 1440 dedicated to him one of his works,
On the Unhappiness of Princes
. Now, in the congratulatory epistle he hastened to send after the election, he assured the new pope that not all princes needed to be completely unhappy. To be sure, in his elevated position, he would not be able any longer to indulge himself in the joys of friendship and literature, but at least he would be able to “become the protector of men
¹²
of genius and cause the liberal arts to raise their drooping heads.” “Let me now entreat you, most holy father,” Poggio added, “not to forget your ancient friends, of which number I profess myself to be one.”

In the event, though the reign of Nicholas V was highly gratifying, it was not perhaps as perfectly idyllic as the apostolic secretary might have dreamed. During this period Poggio had his grotesque scuffle with George of Trebizond, complete with screams and blows. He must have been vexed as well that the pope, as if taking seriously the injunction to be the patron of men of genius, chose as another of the apostolic secretaries his bitter enemy Lorenzo Valla. Poggio and Valla promptly embarked on a vitriolic public quarrel, mingling snide comments about each other’s mistakes in Latin with still nastier remarks about hygiene, sex, and family.

The ugliness of these quarrels must have intensified the dream of retirement that Poggio had been toying with since he had purchased the house in Terranuova and begun to collect ancient fragments. And the retirement project was not only his private fantasy; he was at this point in his life famous enough as a book hunter, scholar, writer, and papal official to command the attention of a broader public. He had carefully cultivated friends in Florence, marrying into an important family and allying himself with the interests of the Medici. Though he had lived and worked in Rome for most of his adult life, the Florentines were happy to claim him as one of their own. The Tuscan government passed a public revenue bill in his favor, noting that he had declared his intention eventually to retire to his native land and to dedicate the remainder of his time on earth to study. Whereas his literary pursuits would not permit him to acquire the wealth that came to those engaged in commerce, the bill declared, he and his children should thenceforth be exempted from the payment of all public taxes.

In April 1453, Carlo Marsuppini, the chancellor of Florence, died. Marsuppini was an accomplished humanist; at the time of his death, he was translating the
Iliad
into Latin. The office was no longer the actual locus of state power: the consolidation
of
Medici power had reduced the political significance of the chancellorship. Many years had passed since Salutati’s command of classical rhetoric had seemed critical to the survival of the republic. But the pattern had been set for the Florentine post to be held by a distinguished scholar, including two terms by Poggio’s old friend, the immensely gifted historian Leonardo Bruni.

The remuneration was generous and the prestige high. Florence conferred upon its humanist chancellors all the marks of respect and honor that the buoyant, self-loving city felt were its own due. Chancellors who died in office were honored with elaborate state funerals, surpassing those of any other citizen of the republic. When Poggio, seventy-three years old, was offered the vacant position, he accepted. For more than fifty years, he had worked at the court of an absolute monarch; now he would return as the titular leader of a city that prided itself on its history of civic freedom.

Poggio served as chancellor of Florence for five years. The chancellorship evidently did not function entirely smoothly under his leadership; he seems to have neglected the lesser duties of the office. But he attended to his symbolic role, and he made time to work on the literary projects he had pledged himself to pursue. In the first of these projects, a somber two-volume dialogue on
The Wretchedness of the Human Condition
, the conversation moves from a specific disaster—the fall of Constantinople to the Turks—to a general review of the catastrophes that befall virtually all men and women of every class and profession and in all times. One of the interlocutors, Cosimo de’ Medici, suggests that an exception might be made for popes and princes of the Church who certainly seem to live lives of extraordinary luxury and ease. Speaking in his own voice, Poggio replies: “I am a witness
¹³
(and I lived with them for fifty years) that I have found no one who seemed in any way happy to himself,
who
did not bemoan that life as harmful, disquieting, anxious, oppressed with many cares.”

The unremitting gloominess of the dialogue could make it seem that Poggio had entirely succumbed to late-life melancholy, but the second of the works of this period, presented to the same Cosimo de’ Medici, suggests otherwise. Drawing on the Greek he had first learned more than a half century earlier, Poggio translated (into Latin) Lucian of Samosta’s richly comic novel
The Ass
, a magical tale of witchcraft and metamorphosis. And for his third enterprise, moving in still a different direction, he undertook to write an ambitious, highly partisan
History of Florence
from the mid-fourteenth century to his own time. The remarkable range of the three projects—the first seemingly suitable for a medieval ascetic, the second for a Renaissance humanist, the third for a patriotic civic historian—suggests the complexity both of Poggio’s own character and of the city he represented. To the Florentine citizens of the fifteenth century the distinct strains seemed closely bound together, parts of a single, complex cultural whole.

In April 1458, shortly after his seventy-eighth birthday, Poggio resigned, declaring that he wished to pursue his studies and writing as a private citizen. His death followed eighteen months later, on October 30, 1459. Since he had resigned his office, the Florentine government could not give him a grand state funeral, but they buried him with appropriate ceremony in the Church of Santa Croce and hung his portrait, by Antonio Pollaiolo, in one of the city’s public halls. The city also commissioned a statue of him, which was erected in front of Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. When in 1560, a century later, the Duomo’s facade was refashioned, the statue was moved to a different part of the building and now serves as one of a sculpted group of the twelve apostles. It is, I suppose, an honor for the likeness of any pious Christian to function in this way,
but
I do not imagine that Poggio would have been entirely pleased. He was always determined to receive appropriate public recognition.

Much of the recognition by now has vanished. His tomb in Santa Croce has disappeared, displaced by those of other celebrities. To be sure, the town where he was born has been renamed Terranuova Bracciolini, in honor of its native son, and in 1959, on the five hundredth anniversary of his death, his statue was erected in the leafy town square. But few of those who pass through, on their way to the nearby fashion factory outlets, can have any idea who is being commemorated.

Nonetheless, in his book-hunting exploits in the early fifteenth century, Poggio had done something amazing. The texts he returned to circulation gave him a claim to a place of honor amidst his more famous Florentine contemporaries: Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Luca della Robbia, Masaccio, Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca. Unlike Brunelleschi’s massive cupola, the greatest dome constructed since classical antiquity, Lucretius’ great poem does not stand out against the sky. But its recovery permanently changed the landscape of the world.

MORE THAN FIFTY
manuscripts of
De rerum natura
from the fifteenth century survive today—a startlingly large number, though there must have been many more. Once Gutenberg’s clever technology was commercially established, printed editions quickly followed. The editions were routinely prefaced with warnings and disavowals.

As the fifteenth century neared its end, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola ruled Florence for several years as a strict “Christian republic.” Savonarola’s passionate, charismatic preaching had provoked large numbers of Florentines, the elite as well as the masses, into a short-lived but feverishly intense mood of repentance. Sodomy was prosecuted as a capital crime; bankers and merchant princes were attacked for their extravagant luxuries and their indifference to the poor; gambling was suppressed, along with dancing and singing and other forms of worldly pleasure. The most memorable event of Savonarola’s turbulent years was the famous “Bonfire of the Vanities,” when the friar’s ardent followers went through the streets collecting sinful objects—mirrors, cosmetics, seductive clothing, songbooks, musical instruments, playing cards and other gambling paraphernalia, sculptures and paintings of pagan subjects, the works of ancient poets—and threw them onto an enormous blazing pyre in the Piazza della Signoria.

After a while, the city tired of its puritanical frenzy, and on May 23, 1498, Savonarola himself was hanged in chains, alongside two of his key associates, and burned to ashes on the spot where he had staged his cultural bonfire. But when his power was at its height and his words still filled the citizenry with pious fear and loathing, he devoted a series of his Lenten sermons to attacking ancient philosophers, singling out one group in particular for special ridicule. “Listen women,”
¹
he preached to the crowd, “They say that this world was made of atoms, that is, those tiniest of particles that fly through the air.” No doubt savoring the absurdity, he encouraged his listeners to express their derision out loud: “Now laugh, women, at the studies of these learned men.”

By the 1490s, then, some sixty or seventy years after Lucretius’ poem was returned to circulation, atomism was sufficiently present in Florence to make it worth ridiculing. Its presence did not mean that its positions were openly embraced as true. No prudent person stepped forward and said, “I think that the world is only atoms and void; that, in body and soul, we are only fantastically complex structures of atoms linked for a time and destined one day to come apart.” No respectable citizen openly said, “The soul dies with the body. There is no judgment after death. The universe was not created for us by divine power, and the whole notion of the afterlife is a superstitious fantasy.” No one who wished to live in peace stood up in public and said, “The preachers who tell us to live in fear and trembling are lying. God has no interest in our actions, and though nature is beautiful and intricate, there is no evidence of an underlying intelligent design. What should matter to us is the pursuit of pleasure, for pleasure is the highest goal of existence.” No one said, “Death is nothing to us and no concern of ours.” But these subversive, Lucretian thoughts percolated and surfaced wherever the Renaissance imagination was at its most alive and intense.

At the very time that Savonarola was urging his listeners to mock the foolish atomists, a young Florentine civil servant was quietly copying out for himself the whole of
On the Nature of Things
. Though its influence may be detected, he did not once mention the work directly in the famous books he went on to write. He was too cunning for that. But the handwriting was conclusively identified in 1961: the copy was made by Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli’s copy of Lucretius
²
is preserved in the Vatican Library, MS Rossi 884. What better place for the progeny of Poggio, the apostolic secretary? In the wake of Poggio’s friend, the humanist pope Nicholas V, classical texts had a place of honor in the Vatican Library.

Still, Savonarola’s warnings corresponded to authentic concerns: the set of convictions articulated with such poetic power in Lucretius’ poem was virtually a textbook—or, better still, an inquisitor’s—definition of atheism. Its eruption into Renaissance intellectual life elicited an array of anxious responses precisely from those most powerfully responsive to it. One such response was that of the great mid-fifteenth-century Florentine Marsilio Ficino. In his twenties, Ficino
³
was deeply shaken by
On the Nature of Things
and undertook to write a learned commentary on the poet he called “our brilliant Lucretius.” But, coming to his senses—that is, returning to his faith—Ficino burned this commentary. He attacked those he called the “Lucretiani” and spent much of his life adapting Plato to construct an ingenious philosophical defense of Christianity. A second response was to separate Lucretius’ poetic style from his ideas. This separation seems to have been Poggio’s own tactic: he took pride in his discovery, as in the others he made, but he never associated himself or even grappled openly with Lucretian thought. In their Latin compositions Poggio and close friends like Niccoli could borrow elegant diction and turns of phrase from a wide range of pagan texts, but at the same time hold themselves aloof from their most dangerous ideas. Indeed, later in his career
Poggio
did not hesitate to accuse his bitter rival, Lorenzo Valla, of a heretical adherence
⁴
to Lucretius’ master, Epicurus. It is one thing to enjoy wine,
⁵
Poggio wrote, but quite another to sing its praises, as he claims Valla did, in the service of Epicureanism. Valla even went beyond Epicurus himself, Poggio adds, in attacking virginity and praising prostitution. “The stains of your sacrilegious speech will not be cleansed by means of words” Poggio added ominously, “but with fire, from which I hope you will not escape.”