Chapter V · SECOND PERIOD OF HUMANISM (continued 2)

The eldest of Gian Francesco's children, Lodovico, was a youth of lazy habits, inclined to gluttony, and already too fat for his age. The next, Carlo, had outgrown his strength, and needed more substantial food. Vittorino devised systems of diet and physical training suited to their several temperaments, making it his one object to increase their vigour, and by multiplying sources of rational enjoyment to dispose them to the energetic exercise of their faculties. He by no means neglected what we call athletics. Indeed, it was a fundamental axiom of his method that a robust body could alone harbour a healthy mind. Boys who sat poring over books, or haunted solitary places, lost in dreaming, found no favour in his eyes. To exercises in the gymnasium or the riding-school he preferred games in the open air; hunting and fishing, wrestling and fencing, running and jumping, were practised by his pupils in the park outside their palace. To harden them against severities of heat and cold, to render them temperate in food and drink, to train their voices, and to improve their carriage was his first care. Since he could not himself superintend their education in all its branches, he engaged a subordinate staff of tutors; grammarians, logicians, mathematicians, painters, and masters of riding, dancing, singing, swimming, fencing, began to crowd the halls of Joyous Gard. Each had his own allotted task to perform, while Vittorino surveyed the whole scheme. 'Perhaps,' says Rosmini,[290] 'the only sciences that were not taught in this academy were civil and canon law and natural physics.'

It must not be imagined that so extensive an apparatus existed solely for the young Gonzaghi. Noble youths from all the Courts of Italy, and students from remote parts of Europe, sought admittance to Vittorino's school. The more promising of these pupils, who were fitted by their rank and disposition to associate with his princely charges, the master housed under his own roof; while for the rest he provided suitable lodgings near at hand. Many were the poor students who thus owed to his generosity participation in the most refined and scientific culture their century afforded.[291] While paying this tribute to Vittorino da Feltre, we must remember the honour that is also due to Gian Francesco Gonzaga. Had this prince not been endowed with true liberality of soul and freedom from petty prejudice, Vittorino could never have developed a system based upon pure democratic principles, which even now may rank as an unrivalled educational ideal. If the master, again, was able to provide for sixty poor scholars at a time—teaching, feeding, clothing, and furnishing them with costly books, his friend the Marquis must, we feel sure, have supplied his purse with extra funds for charitable purposes.[292]

The numerous biographers of Vittorino have transmitted many details in illustration of his method of teaching. He used to read the classic authors aloud, prefixing biographical notices by way of introduction, and explaining the matter, as well as the language of his text, as he proceeded. Sometimes he made his pupils read, correcting their pronunciation, and obliging them to mark the meaning by emphasis. He relied much on learning by heart and repetition, as the surest means of forming a good style. Gifted with a finer instinct for language than the majority of his contemporaries, he was careful that his pupils should distinguish between different types of literary excellence, not confounding Cicero with Seneca or Virgil with Lucan, but striving to appreciate the special qualities of each. With a view to the acquisition of pure principles of taste, he confined them at first to Virgil and Homer, Cicero and Demosthenes. These four authors he regarded as the supreme masters of expression. Ovid was too luxuriant, Juvenal too coarse, to serve as guides for tiros. Horace and Persius among the satirists, Terence among the comic poets, might be safely studied. In spite of Seneca's weight as a philosophic essayist, Vittorino censured the affectations of his rhetoric; and while he praised the beauty of the Latin elegists, he judged them ill-suited for the training of the young. Criticism of this kind, though it may sound to us obvious and superficial, was extremely rare in the fifteenth century, when scholars were too apt to neglect differences of style in ancient authors, and to ignore the ethics of their works. The refinement which distinguished Vittorino, made him prefer the graces of a chastened manner to the sounding phrases of emphatic declamation. His pupils were taught to see that they had something to say first, and then to say it with simplicity and elegance.

This purity of taste was no mere matter of æsthetic sensibility with Vittorino. Habits which brutalise the mind or debase the body, however sanctioned by the usage of the times, met with little toleration in his presence. Swearing, obscene language, vulgar joking, and angry altercation were severely punished. Personal morality and the observance of religious exercises he exacted from his pupils. Lying was a heinous offence. Those who proved intractable upon these points were excluded from his school. Of the rest Vespasiano writes with emphasis that 'his house was a sanctuary of manners, deeds, and words.'[293]

Concerning the noble Italian youths who were educated with the Gonzaga family at Mantua, enough has been said in another place.[294] Appended to Rosmini's copious biography will be found, by those who are curious to read such details, the notices of forty more or less distinguished pupils.[295] Beside the two sons of Gian Francesco Gonzaga already mentioned, Vittorino educated three other children of his master—Gianlucido, Alessandro, and Cecilia.[296] Wholly dedicated to the cares of teaching, and more anxious to survive in the good fame of his scholars than to secure the immortality of literature, Vittorino bequeathed no writings to posterity. He lived to a hale and hearty old age; and when he died, in 1446, it was found that the illustrious scholar, after enjoying for so many years the liberality of his princely patron, had not accumulated enough money to pay for his own funeral. Whatever he possessed, he spent in charity during his lifetime, trusting to the kindness of his friends to bury him when dead. Few lives of which there is any record in history, are so perfectly praiseworthy as Vittorino's; few men have more nobly realised the idea of living for the highest objects of their age; few have succeeded in keeping themselves so wholly unspotted by the vices of the world around them.

By the patronage extended to Vittorino da Feltre the Court of Mantua took rank among the high schools of humanism in Italy. Ferrara won a similar distinction through the liberality of the House of Este. What has already been said about Milan applies, however, in a less degree to Ferrara. The arts and letters, though they flourished with exceeding brilliance beneath the patrons of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, were but accessories to a splendid and voluptuous Court life. Literature was little better than an exotic, cultivated for its rarity and beauty by the princes of the Este family.

The golden age of culture at Ferrara began in 1402, when Niccolo III. reopened the university. Twenty-seven years later Guarino da Verona made it one of the five chief seats of Southern learning. The life of this eminent scholar in many points resembles that of Filelfo, though their characters were very different. Guarino was born of respectable parents at Verona in 1370. He studied Latin in the school of Giovanni da Ravenna, and while still a lad of eighteen travelled to Constantinople at the cost of a noble Venetian, Paolo Zane, in order to learn Greek. After a residence of five years in Greece he returned to Venice, and began to lecture to crowded audiences.[297] Like all the humanists, he seems to have preferred temporary to permanent engagements—passing from Venice to Verona, from Trent to Padua, from Bologna to Florence, and everywhere acquiring that substantial reputation as a teacher to which he owed the invitation of Niccolo d'Este in 1429. He was now a man of nearly sixty, master of the two languages, and well acquainted with the method of instruction. The Marquis of Ferrara engaged him as tutor to his illegitimate son Lionello, heir apparent to his throne. For seven years Guarino devoted himself wholly to the education of this youth, who passed for one of the best scholars of his age. Granting that the reputation for learning was lightly conferred on princes by their literary parasites, it seems certain that Lionello derived more than a mere smattering in culture from his tutor. Amid the pleasures of the chase, to which he was passionately devoted, and the distractions of the gayest Court in Italy, he found time to correspond on topics of scholarship with Poggio, Filelfo, Decembrio, and Francesco Barbaro. His conversation turned habitually upon the fashionable themes of antique ethics, and his favourite companions were men of polite education. It is no wonder that the humanists, who saw in him a future Augustus, deplored his early death with unfeigned sorrow, though we, who can only judge him by the general standard of his family, may be permitted to reserve our opinion. The profile portrait of Lionello, now preserved in the National Gallery, does not, at any rate, prepossess us very strongly in his favour.

Guarino, like his friend Vittorino, was celebrated for the method of his teaching and for the exact order of his discipline.[298] Students flocked from all the cities of Italy to his lecture-room; for, as soon as his tutorial engagements with the prince permitted, he received a public appointment as professor of eloquence from the Ferrarese Consiglio de' Savi. In this post he laboured for many years, maintaining his reputation as a student and filling the universities of Italy with his pupils. A sentence describing his manner of life in extreme old age might be used to illustrate the enthusiasm which sustained the vital energy of scholars in that generation:—'His memory is marvellous, and his habit of reading is so indefatigable, that he scarcely takes the time to eat, to sleep, or to go abroad; and yet his limbs and senses have the vigour of youth.[299] Guarino was one of the few humanists whose moral character won equal respect with his learning. When he died at the age of ninety, the father of six boys and seven girls by his wife Taddea Cendrata of Verona, it was possible to say with truth that he had realised the ideal of a temperate scholar's life. Yet this incomparable teacher of youth undertook the defence of Beccadelli's obscene verses: this anchorite of humanism penned virulent invectives with the worst of his contemporaries.[300] Such contrasts were common enough in the fifteenth century.

The name of Giovanni Aurispa must not be omitted in connection with Ferrara. Born in 1369 at Noto in Sicily, he lived to a great age, and died in 1459. He too travelled in early youth to Constantinople, and returned, laden with MSS. and learning, to profess the humanities in Italy. His life forms, therefore, a close parallel with that of both Guarino and Filelfo. Aurispa, however, was gifted with a less unresting temper than Filelfo; nor did he achieve the same professorial success as Guarino. In his school at Ferrara he enjoyed the calmer pleasures of a student's life, 'devoted,' as Filelfo phrased it, 'to the placid Muses.'[301]

To give an account of all the minor Courts, where humanism flourished under the patronage of petty princes, would be tedious and unprofitable. It is enough to notice that the universities, in this age of indefatigable energy, kept forming scholars, eager to make their way as secretaries and tutors, while the nobles competed for the honour and the profit to be derived from the service of illustrious wits and ready pens. The seeds of classic culture were thus sown in every little city that could boast its castle. Carpi, for example, was preparing the ground where Aldus and Musurus flourished. At Forli the Ordelaffi, doomed to extinction at no distant period, gave protection to Codrus Urceus.[302] Mirandola was growing fit to be the birthplace of the mighty Pico. Alessandro and Costanzo Sforza were adorning their lordship of Pesaro with a library that rivalled those of Rome and Florence.[303] In the fortress of Rimini, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta conversed with men of learning whenever his intrigues and his military duties gave him leisure. The desperate and godless tyrant, whose passions bordered upon madness, and whose name was a byeword for all the vices that disgrace humanity, curbed his temper before petty witlings like Porcellio, and carved a record of his burning love for learning on the temple raised to celebrate his fame in Rimini. To the same passion for scholarship in his brother, Malatesta Novello, the tiny burgh of Cesena owed the foundation of a library, not only well supplied with books, but endowed with a yearly income of 300 golden florins for its maintenance. The money spent on scholarship at these minor Courts was gained, for the most part, in military service—the wealth of Florentine and Venetian citizens, of Milanese despots, and ambitious Popes flowing through the hands of professional war-captains into the pockets of booksellers and students. It consequently happened that the impulse given at this time to learning in the lesser cities was but temporary. With the fall of the Malatesti and the Sforza family, for instance, erudition died at Rimini and Pesaro.

This might have been the case at Urbino also, if the House of Montefeltro had not succeeded, by wise conduct and prudent marriages, in resisting the encroachments of the Church, and transmitting its duchy to the Della Rovere family. As it was, Urbino retained for three generations the stamp of culture and refinement impressed upon it by the good Duke Frederick. Of his famous library, Vespasiano, who was employed in its formation, has given us minute and interesting details.[304] During more than fourteen years the Duke kept thirty or forty copyists continually employed in transcribing Greek and Latin MSS. Not only the classics in both languages, but the ecclesiastical and mediæval authors, the Italian poets, and the works of contemporary humanists found a place in his collection. The cost of the whole was estimated at considerably over 30,000 ducats. Each volume was bound in crimson, with silver clasps; the leaves were of vellum, exquisitely adorned with miniatures; nor could you find a printed book in the whole library, for the Duke would have been ashamed to own one. Vespasiano's admiration for these delicately finished MSS. and the contempt he expresses for the new art of printing are highly characteristic.[305] Enough has been already said by me elsewhere about Federigo da Montefeltro and his patronage of learning.[306] The Queen's collection at Windsor contains a curious picture, attributed to Melozza da Forli, of which I may be allowed to speak in this place, since it possesses more than usual interest for the student of humanism at the Italian Courts. In a large rectangular hall, lighted from above by windows in a dome, the Duke of Urbino is seated, wearing the robes and badges of the Garter, and resting his left hand on a folio. His son Guidobaldo, a boy of about eleven years of age, or little more, stands at the Duke's knee, dressed in yellow damask trimmed with pearls. Behind them, on a raised bench with a desk before it, sit three men, one attired in the red suit of a prelate, the second in black ecclesiastical attire, and the third in secular costume. At a door, opening on a passage, stand servants and lesser courtiers. The whole company are listening attentively to a grey-haired, black-robed humanist, seated in a sort of pulpit opposite to the Duke and his son. A large book, bound in crimson, with silver clasps is open on the desk before him; and by the movement of his mouth it is clear that he is reading aloud passages from some classical or ecclesiastical author, and explaining them for the benefit of his illustrious audience. To identify the scholar and the three men behind Federigo would not be impossible, if the exact date of this curious work could be ascertained; for they are clearly portraits. I like to fancy that in the layman we may perhaps recognise the excellent Vespasiano. Such conjectures are, however, hazardous; meanwhile the picture has intrinsic value as the unique representation, so far as I know, of a scene of frequent occurrence in the Courts of Italy, where listening to lectures formed a part of every day's occupation.

This is the proper place to speak of Vespasiano da Bisticci, on whose 'Lives of Illustrious Men' I have had occasion to draw so copiously. Peculiar interest attaches to him as the last of mediæval scribes, and at the same time the first of modern booksellers.[307] Besides being the agent of Cosimo de' Medici, Nicholas V., and Frederick of Urbino, Vespasiano supplied the foreign markets, sending MSS. by order to Hungary, Portugal, Germany, and England. The extent of his trade rendered him the largest employer of copyists in Europe at the moment when this industry was about to be superseded, and when scholars were already inquiring for news about the art that saved expense and shortened the labour of the student.[308] Vespasiano, who was born in 1421 at Florence, lived until 1498; so that after having helped to form the three greatest collections of MSS. in Italy, he witnessed the triumph of printing, and might have even handled the Musæus issued from the Aldine Press in 1493. Vespasiano was no mere tradesman. His knowledge of the books he sold was accurate; continual study enabled him to overlook the copyists, and to vouch for the exactitude of their transcripts.[309] At the same time his occupation brought him into close intimacy with the chief scholars of the age, so that the new culture reached him by conversation and familiar correspondence. As a biographer Vespasiano possessed rare merit. Personally acquainted with the men of whom he wrote, he drew their characters with praiseworthy succinctness and simplicity. There is no panegyrical emphasis, no calumnious innuendo, in his sketches. It may even be said that they suffer from reservation of opinion and suppression of facts. Vespasiano's hatred of vice and love of virtue were so genuine that, in his eagerness to honour men of letters and their patrons, he softened down harsh outlines and passed over all that is condemnable in silence. He was less anxious to paint character in the style of Tacitus or Guicciardini, than to relate what he knew about the progress of learning in his age. The ethical intention in his work is obvious. The qualities he loves to celebrate are piety, chastity, generosity, devotion to the cause of liberal culture, and high-souled patriotism. Of the vices that added a lurid lustre to the age in which he lived, of the political rancours that divided the cities into hostile parties, and of the imperfections in the characters of eminent men, we hear nothing from Vespasiano. It is pleasant to conclude this chapter with an expression of gratitude to a man so blameless in his life, so charitable in his judgments, and so trustworthy in his record of contemporary history.