With all these scholars and their pupils enthusiastically active in Italy, it was but a short time when the classics of Greek literature and philosophy were rendered into Latin with more thoroughness, accuracy, and finish than in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Guarino translated parts of Strabo and Plutarch; Traversari, Diogenes Laertius; Valla, Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Iliad; Perotti, Polybius; Ficino, Plato and Plotinus. Plato, above all, amazed and delighted the humanists. They gloried in the fluid grace of his style; they found in the Dialogues a drama more vivid and contemporary than anything in Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides; they envied and marveled at the freedom with which the Greeks of Socrates’ time discussed the most crucial problems of religion and politics; and they thought they had found in Plato—clouded with Plotinus—a mystical philosophy that would enable them to retain a Christianity that they had ceased to believe in, but never ceased to love. Moved by the eloquence of Gemistus Pletho and the enthusiasm of his pupils at Florence, Cosimo established there (1445) a Platonic Academy for the study of Plato, and provided handsomely for Marsilio Ficino to give half a lifetime to the translation and exposition of Plato’s works. Now, after a reign of four hundred years, Scholasticism lost its domination in the philosophy of the West; the dialogue and essay replaced the scholastica disputatio as the form of philosophical exposition, and the exhilarating spirit of Plato entered like an energizing yeast into the rising body of European thought.
But as Italy recovered more and more of its own classic heritage, the admiration of the humanists for Greece was surpassed by their pride in the literature and art of ancient Rome. They revived Latin as a medium of living literature; they Latinized their names, and Romanized the terms of Christian worship and life: God became Iuppiter, Providence fatum, the saints divi, nuns vestales, the pope pontifex maximus. They fashioned their prose style on Cicero, their poetry on Virgil and Horace; and some, like Filelfo, Valla, and Politian, achieved an almost classic elegance. So, in its course, the Renaissance moved back from Greek to Latin, from Athens to Rome; fifteen centuries appeared to fall away, and the age of Cicero and Horace, of Ovid and Seneca, seemed reborn. Style became more important than substance, form triumphed over matter; and the oratory of majestic periods rang again in the halls of princes and pedagogues. Perhaps it would have been better if the humanists had used Italian; but they looked down upon the speech of the Commedia and the Canzoniere as a corrupt and degenerate Latin (which almost it was), and deplored Dante’s choice of the vernacular tongue. As a penalty the humanists lost touch with the living sources of literature; and the people, leaving their works to the aristocracy, preferred the jolly tales—novelle— of Sacchetti and Bandello, or the exciting mixture of war and love in the romances that were being translated or adapted into Italian from the French. Nevertheless this passing infatuation with a dying language and an “immortal” literature helped Italian authors to recapture the architecture, sculpture, and music of style, and to formulate the canons of taste and utterance that lifted the vernaculars to literary form, and set a goal and a standard for art. In the field of history it was the humanists who ended the succession of medieval chronicles—chaotic and uncritical—by scrutinizing and harmonizing sources, marshaling the matter into order and clarity, vitalizing and humanizing the past by mingling biography with history, and raising their narratives to some level of philosophy by discerning causes, currents, and effects, and studying the regularities and lessons of history.
The humanist movement spread throughout Italy, but until the accession of a Florentine Medici to the papacy its leaders were almost all citizens or graduates of Florence. Coluccio Salutati, who became executive secretary or chancellor (cancellarius) to the Signory in 1375, was a bridge from Petrarch and Boccaccio to Cosimo, knowing and loving all three. The public documents drawn up by him were models of classical Latinity, and set an example that officials in Venice, Milan, Naples, and Rome bestirred themselves to follow; Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan said that Salutati had done him more harm by excellence of style than could have come from an army of mercenaries.24 The fame of Niccolò de’ Niccoli as a Latin stylist rivaled his renown as a collector of manuscripts; Bruni called him the “censor of the Latin tongue,” and, like other authors, submitted his own writings to Niccoli for correction before publishing them. Niccoli filled his house with ancient classics, statuary, inscriptions, vases, coins, and gems. He avoided marriage lest it distract him from his books, but found time for a concubine stolen from his brother’s bed.25 He opened his library to all who cared to study there, and urged young Florentines to abandon luxury for literature. Seeing a wealthy youth idling the day away, Niccoli asked him, “What is your object in life?” “To have a good time,” was the frank reply. “But when your youth is over, of what consequence will you be?”26 The youth saw the point, and put himself under Niccoli’s tutelage.
Leonardo Bruni, secretary to four popes and then (1427–44) to the Florentine Signory, translated several dialogues of Plato into a Latin whose excellence for the first time fully revealed the splendor of Plato’s style to Italy; he composed a Latin History of Florence for which the Republic exempted him and his children from taxation; and his speeches were compared with those of Pericles. When he died the priors decreed him a public funeral after the manner of the ancients; he was buried in the church of Santa Croce, with his History on his breast; and Bernardo Rossellino designed for his resting place a noble and sumptuous tomb.
Born like Bruni in Arezzo, and succeeding him as secretary to the Signory, Carlo Marsuppini awed his time by carrying half the classics of Greece and Rome in his head; he left hardly one ancient author unquoted in his inaugural address as professor of literature in the University of Florence. His admiration for pagan antiquity was such that he felt called upon to reject Christianity;27 nevertheless he became for a time apostolic secretary to the Roman See; and though he was said to have died without bothering to receive the sacraments,28 he too was buried in Santa Croce under gorgeous oratory by Giannozzo Manetti and an ornate tomb by Desiderio da Settignano (1453). Manetti, who pronounced this eulogy over an atheist, was a man whose piety rivaled his learning. For nine years he hardly stirred from his house and garden, steeping himself in classical literature, and learning Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek. Sent as ambassador to Rome, Naples, Venice, Genoa, he charmed all, and won friendships precious to his government by his culture, his liberality, and his integrity.
All these men except Salutati were members of the circle that gathered in the city house or country villa of Cosimo, and led the movement of scholarship during his ascendancy. Another friend of Cosimo almost equaled him as a host to learning. Ambrogio Traversari, general of the Camaldulite order, lived in a cell in the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Florence. He mastered Greek, and suffered qualms of conscience in his affection for the classics; he refrained from quoting them in his writings, but revealed their influence in a Latin style whose idiomatic purity would have shocked all the famous Gregories. Cosimo, who knew how to reconcile the classics, as well as high finance, with Christianity, loved to visit him. Niccoli, Marsuppini, Bruni, and others made his cell a literary rendezvous.