The most active and troublesome of the Italian humanists was Poggio Bracciolini. Born poor near Arezzo (1380), he was educated at Florence, studied Greek under Manuel Chrysoloras, supported himself by copying manuscripts, was befriended by Salutati, and secured appointment, at twenty-four, as a secretary in the papal chancery at Rome. For the next half century he served the Curia, never taking even minor orders, but wearing ecclesiastical dress. Valuing his energy and his learning, the Curia sent him on a dozen missions. From these he digressed, time and again, to search for classic manuscripts; his credentials as a papal secretary won him access to the most jealously guarded, or most carelessly neglected, treasures in the monastic libraries at St. Gall, Langres, Weingarten, and Reichenau; and his spoils were so rich that Bruni and other humanists hailed them as epochal. Back in Rome he wrote for Martin V vigorous defenses of Church dogmas, and then, in private gatherings, joined with other employees of the Curia in laughing at the Christian creed.29 He composed dialogues and letters in rough but breezy Latin, satirizing the vices of the clergy even while practising them to the extent of his means. When Cardinal Sant’ Angelo reproved him for having children, which hardly befitted a man in ecclesiastical dress, and for maintaining a mistress, which seemed unbecoming in a layman, Poggio replied with his usual insolence: “I have children, which is becoming to a layman, and I have a mistress, which is an old custom of the clergy.”30 At fifty-five he abandoned the mistress who had given him fourteen children, and married a girl of eighteen. Meanwhile he almost founded modern archeology by collecting ancient coins, inscriptions, and statuary, and by describing with scholarly precision the surviving monuments of classic Rome. He accompanied Pope Eugenius IV to the Council of Florence, quarreled with Francesco Filelfo, and exchanged with him enthusiastic invectives of the coarsest indecency, peppered with accusations of theft, atheism, and sodomy. Again in Rome, he worked with especial pleasure for the humanist Pope Nicholas V. At seventy he composed his famous Liber facetiarum, a collection of stories, satires, and obscenities. When Lorenzo Valla joined the papal secretariat Poggio attacked him in a new series of Invectivae, charging him with larceny, forgery, treachery, heresy, drunkenness, and immorality. Valla replied by laughing at Poggio’s Latin, quoting his sins against grammar and idiom, and setting him aside as a fool in his dotage.31 No one but the immediate victim took such literary assaults seriously; they were competitive essays in Latin composition; indeed Poggio proclaimed, in one of them, that he would show how well classic Latin could express the most modern ideas and the most private concerns. He was so adept in the art of erudite scurrility that “the whole world,” said Vespasiano, “was afraid of him.”32 His pen, like that of a later Aretine, became an instrument of blackmail. When Alfonso of Naples delayed in acknowledging Poggio’s gift of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia translated into Latin, the irate humanist hinted that a good pen could stab any king, and Alfonso hastily sent him 500 ducats to hold his tongue. After enjoying every instinct and impulse for seventy years, Poggio composed a treatise De miseriis humanae conditionis, in which he reckoned that the ills of life outweigh the joys, and concluded, like Solon, that the luckiest people are those who escape being born.33 At seventy-two he returned to Florence, was soon made secretary to the Signory, and finally was elected to the Signory itself. He expressed his appreciation by writing a history of Florence in the style of the ancients—politics, war, and imaginary speeches. Other humanists breathed relief when at last, aged seventy-nine, he died (1459). He too was buried in Santa Croce; his statue by Donatello was erected on the façade of the duomo; and in 1560, in the confusion of some alterations, it was set up inside the cathedral as one of the twelve Apostles.34
It is clear that Christianity, in both its theology and its ethics, had lost its hold on perhaps a majority of the Italian humanists. Several, like Traversari, Bruni, and Manetti in Florence, Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua, Guarino da Verona in Ferrara, and Flavio Biondo in Rome, remained loyal to the faith. But to many others the revelation of a Greek culture lasting a thousand years, and reaching the heights of literature, philosophy, and art in complete independence of Judaism and Christianity, was a mortal blow to their belief in the Pauline theology, or in the doctrine of nulla salus extra ecclesiam—”no salvation outside the Church.” Socrates and Plato became for them uncanonized saints; the dynasty of the Greek philosophers seemed to them superior to the Greek and Latin Fathers, the prose of Plato and Cicero made even a cardinal ashamed of the Greek of the New Testament and the Latin of Jerome’s translation; the grandeur of Imperial Rome seemed nobler than the timid retreat of convinced Christians into monastic cells; the free thought and conduct of Periclean Greeks or Augustan Romans filled many humanists with an envy that shattered in their hearts the Christian code of humility, otherworldliness, continence; and they wondered why they should subject body, mind, and soul to the rule of ecclesiastics who themselves were now joyously converted to the world. For these humanists the ten centuries between Constantine and Dante were a tragic error, a Dantesque losing of the right road; the lovely legends of the Virgin and the saints faded from their memory to make room for Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Horace’s ambisexual odes; the great cathedrals now seemed barbarous, and their gaunt statuary lost all charm for eyes that had seen, fingers that had touched, the Apollo Belvedere.
So the humanists, by and large, acted as if Christianity were a myth conformable to the needs of popular imagination and morality, but not to be taken seriously by emancipated minds. They supported it in their public pronouncements, professed a saving orthodoxy, and struggled to harmonize Christian doctrine with Greek philosophy. The very effort betrayed them; implicitly they accepted reason as the supreme court, and honoured Plato’s Dialogues equally with the New Testament. Like the Sophists of pre-Socratic Greece, they directly or indirectly, willfully or unwittingly undermined their hearers’ religious faith. Their lives reflected their actual creed; many of them accepted and practised the ethics of paganism in the sensual rather than in the Stoic sense. The only immortality they recognized was that which came through the recording of great deeds; they with their pens, not God, would confer it, would destine men to everlasting glory or shame. A generation after Cosimo they would agree to share this magic power with the artists who carved or painted the effigies of patrons, or built noble edifices that preserved a donor’s name. The desire of patrons to achieve such mundane immortality was one of the strongest generative forces in the art and literature of the Renaissance.
The influence of the humanists was for a century the dominant factor in the intellectual life of Western Europe. They taught writers a sharper sense of structure and form; they taught them also the artifices of rhetoric, the frills of language, the abracadabra of mythology, the fetishism of classical quotation, the sacrifice of significance to correctness of speech and beauty of style. Their infatuation with Latin postponed for a century (1400–1500) the development of Italian poetry and prose. They emancipated science from theology, but impeded it by worshiping the past, and by stressing erudition rather than objective observation and original thought. Strange to say, they were least influential in the universities. These were already old in Italy; and at Bologna, Padua, Pisa, Piacenza, Pavia, Naples, Siena, Arezzo, Lucca, the faculties of law, medicine, theology, and “arts”—i.e., language, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy—were too mortised in medieval custom to allow a new emphasis on ancient cultures; at most they yielded, here and there, a chair of rhetoric to a humanist. The influence of the “revival of letters” operated chiefly through academies founded by patron princes in Florence, Naples, Venice, Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, and Rome. There the humanists dictated in Greek or Latin the classic text they proposed to discuss; at each step they commented in Latin on the grammatical, rhetorical, geographical, biographical, and literary aspects of the text; their students took down the dictated text, and, in the margins, much of the commentary; in this way copies of the classics, and of commentaries as well, were multiplied and were scattered into the world. The age of Cosimo was therefore a period of devoted scholarship, rather than of creative literature. Grammar, lexicography, archeology, rhetoric, and the critical revision of classical texts were the literary glories of the time. The form, machinery, and substance of modern erudition were established; a bridge was built by which the legacy of Greece and Rome passed into the modern mind.