Illuminated Manuscript Quotes

Shame is Prides cloke.

That a thing made by hand, the work and thought of a single craftsman, can endure much longer than its maker, through centuries in fact, can survive natural catastrophe, neglect, and even mistreatment, has always filled me with wonder. Sometimes in museums, looking at a humble piece of pottery from ancient Persia or Pompeii, or a finely wrought page from a medieval illuminated manuscript toiled over by a nameless monk, or a primitive tool with a carved handle, I am moved to tears. The unknown life of the maker is evanescent in its brevity, but the work of his or her hands and heart remains.

When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it.

I suppose I try to be a translator of sorts, striving to translate emotion and vision into words, to express the life force of animals and landscapes, to give them voice. I pore over the lustrous details of nature and human nature. How different is this from a monk devoting his life to an illuminated manuscript?

You-you’re a fucking illuminated gothic black-letter manuscript. You couldn’t be hypertext if you tried. I’m…I’m synaptic, while, while you’re synoptic…

To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.

A restaurant overlooking a starlit night sprang to my imagination like something out of an illuminated manuscript from the late Middle Ages.

There are no coincidences", Silette wrote. "Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs. To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.

You want gruesome? She also supposedly ripped out the Lord Ruler’s insides. I’ve seen it depicted in several illuminated manuscripts.” “Kind of graphic for a religious-type story.” “Actually, they’re all like that. I think they have to put in lots of exciting bits to make people read the rest.

It was the Church, they told me, that had kept alive the Latin and Greek of the classical world in the benighted Middle Ages, until it could be picked up again by the wider world in the Renaissance. On holidays, we would visit museums and libraries where the same point was made. As a young child, I looked at the glowing gold of the illuminated manuscripts and believed in a more metaphorical illumination in ages of intellectual darkness. And, in a way, my parents were right to believe this, for it is true. Monasteries did preserve a lot of classical knowledge. But it is far from the whole truth. In fact, this appealing narrative has almost entirely obscured an earlier, less glorious story. For before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before—and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it—during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and mutilated. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was leveled. Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces were mutilated, hands and limbs were hacked off, and gods were decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off then ground into rubble that was then used to build churches. Books—which were often stored in temples—suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed in this way by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed across the empire as outlawed books went up in flames.

King Alfonso liked to claim, in a paraphrase of Plato, that “kings ought to be learned men themselves, or at least lovers of learned men.”16 His nickname, Il Magnanimo, owed much to his generous literary patronage. His personal emblem was an open book, while his punning motto was Liber sum (which meant both “I am free” and “I am a book”).

A rural Venus, Selah rises from the gold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweeps petals of water from her skin. At once, clouds begin to sob for such beauty. Clothing drops like leaves. "No one makes poetry,my Mme. Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,” I whisper. She smiles: “We’ll shape it with our souls.” Desire illuminates the dark manuscript of our skin with beetles and butterflies. After the lightning and rain has ceased, after the lightning and rain of lovemaking has ceased, Selah will dive again into the sunflower-open river.

> The key to all mysteries and the source of all Illumination lies deep within the self. ROSICRUCIAN MANUSCRIPT

It is, however, very important never to lose sight of the fact that the miniatures in illuminated books were not conceived as individual and independent paintings. They are book illustrations and are thus always intimately connected with a text.

Do you like books, Lady Murray?' Lavinia asked. 'Just to read,' Violet said. 'A mistake. A very big mistake. A poorly bound book disintegrates. Where would our learning be then? We need something permanent, solid. We need to treat words with the respect they are due. Treasure them. Adorn the books that contain these words with leather bindings, illuminate their words with gold. We shouldn't treat learning lightly.' 'But I would treat a word scrawled on a scrap of paper with the same respect as one written on an illuminated manuscript.

For a Latin work from ancient Rome to survive the next few centuries and beyond, it therefore needed to be transferred to parchment. But this conversion from roll to codex was reliant on the early Christians—the people who made the codices—deeming the writings of their pagan predecessors worthy of preservation and study.

One of the special delights of my childhood was to go and see the cases of illuminated manuscripts in the British Museum, and to walk, as every child can, right into their pages--losing myself in an enchanted world of gold, landscapes and skies whose colours were indwelt with light as if their sun shone not above but in them. Most marvelous of all were the many manuscripts mysteriously entitled "Book of Hours", since I did not know how one kept hours in a book. Their title-pages and richly ornamented initials showed scenes of times and seasons--ploughing in springtime, formal gardens bright in summer with heraldic roses, autumn harvesting, and logging in winter snow under clear, cold skies seen through a filigree screen of black trees. I could only assume that these books were some ancient device for marking the passage of time and they associated themselves in my mind with sundials in old country yards upon hot afternoons, with the whirring and booming of clocks in towers, with astrolabes engraved with the mysterious signs of the Zodiac, and-above all-with the slow, cyclic sweep of the sun, moon and stars over my head.

Copies of Ficino’s translations were owned by Ben Jonson, John Milton, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean Racine in France, by Bishop Berkeley in Ireland and Baruch Spinoza in the Netherlands, and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant in Germany.56 The Ripoli Press’s 1484 edition is recorded at Harvard in 1735, at Yale in 1742, and even, by 1623, in China.57 More than 120 copies have survived into the twenty-first century: thirty-six in Italy, the remainder scattered from Malta, Slovakia, and Sweden to libraries in California, Kansas, Oregon, and the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress.

Copulating Cats and Holy Men The Story of the Creation of the Book of Kells   In the year 791 A.D an Irish monk named Connachtach brought together a team of the finest calligraphers the world has ever seen, on the island of Iona, a sliver of limestone rock off the northwest coast of Scotland. They came from Northumbria in England, from Constantinople, from Italy and from Ireland. All of them had worked on other illuminated manuscripts. But Connachtach, eminent scribe and abbot of Iona, as he is described in contemporary annals, wanted from them the most richly ornamented book ever created by man’s hand. It was to be more beautiful than the great book of Lindisfarne: more beautiful than the gospel-books made at the court of Charlemagne: more beautiful than all the Korans of Persia. It would be known as the Book of Kells. Eighth century Europe was in a state of cultural meltdown. Since the end of the Pax Romana, three centuries earlier, warring tribes had decimated the continent. From the East the Ostrogoths had blundered into the spears of the Germanic tribes to be overrun, in their turn, by the Huns. Their western cousins, the Visigoths, plundered along a confident north- east, southwest axis from Spain to Cologne. The Vandals did what vandals do. As though that wasn't enough, a blunt-faced raggle-taggle band of pirates and pyromaniacs came looting and raping their way out of the freezing seas of the North. For a Viking there was no tomorrow, culture something you stuffed into a hemp sack; happiness, a warm sword. Wherever they went they extorted protection money: the Danegeld. Fighting drunk on a mixture of animist religion and aquavit they threatened to plunge the house of Europe into total darkness. The Book of Kells was to be a rainbow-bridge of light thrown across the abyss of the Dark Ages. Its colors were to burn until the end of time.   #

At school, my religious-education teacher expressly forbade us to write "Xmas." It was regarded as a foul blasphemy. How would I like it if people used an anonymous X in place of my name? However, it would seem that the word "Xmas" is not blasphemous after all. In the original Greek, "Christ" was written "Xristos," but the X isn't the Roman "ecks"; The Cassell Dictionary of Word Histories explains that it is the Greek letter "chi" (pronounced with a k to rhyme with "eye"--k'eye). The x is simply a stand-in for "the first letter of Greek Khristos--Christ." Indeed, the Chi-Rho (CH-r--the first two syllables of "Christ") illumination can be seen in the ancient Irish manuscript of the Gospels, The Book of Kells, which is housed at Trinity College in Dublin. This work dates back to the ninth century. Of course, strictly speaking, Xmas" should still be pronounced "Christmas" because it's an abbreviation, not an alternative word.

Book-writing is the province of specialists, living is the business of us all. Moral life, sentimental life, religious life, whatever is above the terre à terre of mere existing, also consists of illuminations which once departed return no more. A diary, a few old letters, a few sheets containing thoughts or meditations, may keep up the connection between us today and our better selves of the past. I was deeply impressed as a youth by the advice of a spiritual writer to read one's own spiritual notes preferably to even famous works. All saints seem to have done so. The moment we realize that any thought, ours or borrowed, is pregnant enough not to be wasted, or original enough not to be likely to come back again, we must fix it on paper. Our manuscripts should mirror our reading, our meditations, our ideals, and our approach to it in our lives. Anybody who has early taken the habit to record himself in that way knows that the loss of his papers would also mean a loss to his thinking possibilities.

he was no mountaineer when he decided to climb the Hindu Kush. A few days scrambling on the rocks in Wales, enchantingly chronicled here, were his sole preparation. It was not mountaineering that attracted him; the Alps abound in opportunities for every exertion of that kind. It was the longing, romantic, reasonless, which lies deep in the hearts of most Englishmen, to shun the celebrated spectacles of the tourist and without any concern with science or politics or commerce, simply to set their feet where few civilized feet have trod. An American critic who read the manuscript of this book condemned it as ‘too English’. It is intensely English, despite the fact that most of its action takes place in wildly foreign places and that it is written in an idiomatic, uncalculated manner the very antithesis of ‘Mandarin’ stylishness. It rejoices the heart of fellow Englishmen, and should at least illuminate those who have any curiosity about the odd character of our Kingdom. It exemplifies the essential traditional (some, not I, will say deplorable) amateurism of the English. For more than two hundred years now Englishmen have been wandering about the world for their amusement, suspect everywhere as government agents, to the great embarrassment of our officials. The Scotch endured great hardships in the cause of commerce; the French in the cause of either power or evangelism. The English only have half (and wholly) killed themselves in order to get away from England. Mr Newby is the latest, but, I pray, not the last, of a whimsical tradition. And in his writing he has all the marks of his not entirely absurd antecedents. The understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited; finally in his formal self-effacement in the presence of the specialist (with the essential reserve of unexpressed self-respect) which concludes, almost too abruptly, this beguiling narrative – in all these qualities Mr Newby has delighted the heart of a man whose travelling days are done and who sees, all too often, his countrymen represented abroad by other, new and (dammit) lower types. Dear reader, if you have any softness left for the idiosyncrasies of our rough island race, fall to and enjoy this characteristic artifact. EVELYN

It had become too powerful, its abbots competed with kings: in Abo did I not perhaps have the example of a monarch who, with monarch’s demeanor, tried to settle controversies between monarchs? The very knowledge that the abbeys had accumulated was now used as barter goods, cause for pride, motive for boasting and prestige; just as knights displayed armor and standards, our abbots displayed illuminated manuscripts. . . . And all the more so now (what madness!), when our monasteries had also lost the leadership in learning: cathedral schools, urban corporations, universities were copying books, perhaps more and better than we, and producing new ones, and this may have been the cause of many misfortunes.

In 1471, as the first printed volumes appeared in Florence, the poet and scholar Angelo Poliziano—Lorenzo de’ Medici’s librarian and tutor to his children—complained: “Now the most stupid ideas can, in a moment, be transferred into a thousand volumes and spread abroad.”16

This manuscript had been Abbi’s most precious possession, and was now mine. It had a richly illuminated frontispiece and finispiece. All one hundred and fourteen of its surahs were calligraphed in an early Abbasid script and decorated in gold leaf. The four quls were ornamented in gold filigree and the Chapter of Light and Verse of the Throne in silver.

His appraisal of the state of the world was a bleak one: “No one speaks truthfully anymore,” he writes. “Everything is deceit, lies, cunning, theft, sodomy, wickedness, with no fear of God or concern for the world. O miserable Christians, worse than beasts, where are you headed?

This “miraculous man”—Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg—was nearing sixty years of age. He had been born in Mainz, a town on the banks of the Rhine River with a population of six thousand, sometime in the mid- to late 1390s. Little is known about his early life, or, for that matter, about his middle or later years either. He moved 110 miles upstream along the Rhine to Strasbourg sometime around the late 1420s, probably as an exile following municipal disorders in Mainz that pitted the middle-class guildsmen against the upper class, to which Gutenberg’s family belonged. A good deal of what is known about him comes from his various legal scrapes. In the first of these, in 1437, he was sued for a breach of his promise to marry a woman named Ennelin zu der Yserin Tür (Ennelin of the Iron Gate); he was also sued for defamation by one of her witnesses, a shoemaker whom Gutenberg called “a miserable wretch who lived by lying and cheating.” Gutenberg was forced to pay the shoemaker compensation for the slander but appears to have avoided marriage to Ennelin.4 By this time he was a member of Strasbourg’s guild of goldsmiths, supporting himself by polishing gemstones and, together with a partner named Hans Riffe, manufacturing pilgrims’ mirrors in anticipation of the crowds coming to view the famous and sacred relics exposed every seven years at Aachen, such as the swaddling clothes of Jesus and the robe of the Virgin. These mirrors were used by pilgrims according to the religious practice of the day, capturing and “retaining” the divine reflection of these holy relics, after which they were proudly worn on the return journey as badges. The “miraculous man,” Johannes Gutenberg.

I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals, and illuminated manuscripts of the faiths.

Although the emphasis during the late Middle Ages was upon the provision of books for private patrons, many manuscripts were also made for public use.

The term International Gothic is applied to the arts in the early fifteenth century because there was so general an exchange of influences throughout Europe.

Although illuminated books were an expensive luxury, it would be a mistake to suppose that all the most elaborate ones were made exclusively for royalty or for the higher ranks of the nobility.

The style of the Luttrell Psalter is less polished than that found in the Queen Mary or St Omer manuscripts, but it surpasses them in vitality.

The majority of Gothic manuscripts provide some reflections of contemporary life, because the idea of representing even biblical scenes in any but the idiom of their own times was quite alien to medieval artists.

We do not know whether Jewish manuscripts were usually made by Jewish artists to order in Christian workshops, but they were certainly made in the styles locally current in their countries of adoption.

It should be understood that in medieval eyes an artist was simply a craftsman, his activities having little to do with the twentieth-century notions of self-expression, individual genius and 'artistic temperament' that nowadays cling to his profession.

The preparation of an illuminated book has always been a very expensive business.

A single illuminated book may contain several hundred paintings.

Some of these [coloured pigments] were commonly accessible in most parts of Europe but others travelled thousands of miles among the international trade routes from countries which were themselves on the brink of legend.

then gone to Rome to find employment in the Curia. Here he worked, unhappily and for little pay, dreaming of a life “free from the bustle of civilization,” with plenty of leisure for writing books and, even more, for collecting them.14 Another regular visitor to the shop in those early days was Poggio’s friend Niccolò Niccoli who, like Cardinal Cesarini, was always eager to help young students of modest means. Vespasiano met him as early as 1433 or 1434, when Niccoli was in his late sixties, a fat, handsome, fastidious man who dressed in a long plum-colored robe.

One of the first people to take an interest in Vespasiano, to draw him into this charmed circle of wise and valorous men, was a cardinal named Giuliano Cesarini. Vespasiano would have been about sixteen when the two of them met in Michele Guarducci’s bookshop.

Besides helping to stock the library in San Marco, Vespasiano received another commission from Cosimo. Most of the codices were to be secured to their desks by chains attached to iron rails,

The English diplomat Andrew Holes had returned to England in 1444, following a dozen years in Italy. During his sojourn he had put together a manuscript collection so large that, according to Vespasiano, he was forced to send the books to England on board a ship. His successor as King Henry VI’s representative at the Roman Curia was the other expatriate English bibliophile, William Grey. Following his visit to Florence in 1442, Grey had pursued his humanistic studies in Padua, receiving his doctorate in divinity in September 1445, a few weeks before his appointment as the king’s proctor. He then left Padua for Rome, to which Pope Eugenius had at last returned in 1443 after having finally judged it safe to chance his presence among the unruly Roman mob. But first of all, Grey stopped in Florence on important business.

For hundreds of years, the transmission of knowledge had depended on carnivorous appetites and good animal husbandry. Large volumes with hundreds of pages required the skins of many animals. One goat was often needed for each page of parchment in a large liturgical book such as an antiphonary, while a Bible might take the skins of more than two hundred animals—an entire herd of goats or flock of sheep.

All evil is born from ignorance,” as Vespasiano wrote. “Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness.” This darkness he and his friends hoped to dispel by casting onto their fractured and unhappy times the pure radiance of the past, one scribe and one manuscript at a time.

Plato advanced into domains far vaster and more exotic than merely the pipe-smoke-garlanded realms of university philosophy departments. His ideas shaped countless cultural and intellectual trends: ideas of love, of magic and the occult, of art and imitation, of creativity through the divine frenzy of the “mad poet.” His theories on the structure of the cosmos influenced such pioneers of the Scientific Revolution as Johannes Kepler (who used the Platonic solids described in the Timaeus to determine the number of the planets and their distances from the Sun) and Galileo (who credited Plato with the theory of the common origin of the planets). His theories of the soul have been said to prefigure Sigmund Freud’s understanding of the psyche, while Friedrich Nietzsche argued in The Birth of Tragedy that Plato’s dialogues inspired the novel. Few things in heaven and earth were not dreamt of in Plato’s philosophy.

Ficino’s translations were the means by which for many centuries readers across Europe gained access to Plato. His complete Latin translation was republished twenty-four times over the following century.

Chasing Away the Darkness

The other is Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino’s friend and fellow Plato enthusiast: a tall, green-eyed intellectual virtuoso who can read, among other languages, Aramaic and Chaldean, and who can recite the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy both forward and backward. The awestruck Ficino regards him as a member of “a superhuman race.”5 “They wanted to see everything in our library,” Brother Gregorio later notes of his distinguished visitors.

But he didn’t share them, not before he said to Athalar, “Luna’s Horn was a weapon wielded by Pelias, the first Starborn Prince, during the First Wars. The Fae forged it in their home world, named it for the goddess in their new one, and used it to battle the demon hordes once they made the Crossing. Pelias wielded the Horn until he died.” Ruhn put a hand on his chest. “My ancestor—whose power flows in my veins. I don’t know how it worked, how Pelias used it with his magic, but the Horn became enough of a nuisance for the demon princes that they did everything they could to retrieve it from him.” Ruhn held out his phone, the picture of the illuminated manuscript glaringly bright in the thick shadows. The illustration of the carved horn lifted to the lips of a helmeted Fae male was as pristine as it had been when inked millennia ago. Above the figure gleamed an eight-pointed star, the emblem of the Starborn. Bryce went wholly still. The stillness of the Fae, like a stag halting in a wood.

They quickly selected the nobleman known as the “Cardinal of Venice”: Pietro Barbo, the forty-seven-year-old nephew of Pope Eugenius IV.

it happens, Bussi’s claim of a printed book costing a fifth of the price of a manuscript held true in the case of The City of God.

Pope Paul II died in the Vatican at the age of fifty-four in the summer of 1471,

Giovanni da Castro,

Federico da Montefeltro enjoyed a tremendous reception in Florence in the summer of 1472 following his brutal conquest of Volterra.

The map of Florence, a bird’s-eye view from the north, shows the city embraced by a diamond-shaped circuit of walls and split in half by the River Arno, spanned by its four bridges. Many of Florence’s churches and various other monuments are shown inside the walls, all identified by inscriptions helpfully added by a scribe in reddish ink. The artist, Piero del Massaio, even included the copper ball that in 1471 Andrea del Verrocchio added to the lantern at the top of Brunelleschi’s dome. The map also shows, on the south side of the Arno, between the Ponte Rubaconte and the Ponte Vecchio, a handsome private home. The reddish ink clearly identifies the occupant: Domus Vespasiani—the house, that is, of Vespasiano. The inclusion of Vespasiano’s home in Via de’ Bardi indicates his friendship with Duke Alfonso, who must have appreciated this little in-joke, and who may have been a visitor to Vespasiano’s house during his stay in Florence. It also gives proof of Vespasiano’s eminence: his house, like that of Niccolò Niccoli many years earlier, had become one of the sights of Florence.

The ciarlatani likewise plied their trade in the streets—men who removed teeth and sold miraculous remedies (and who gave us the word “charlatan”).

Once you had your man, you let all your accomplishments go. You don’t sew or sing any more, you haven’t illuminated a manuscript in years—and

Priceless works of art, Arab mosaics, Greek and Russian icons, Western oil paintings, and other valuable articles, had been collected by curators as time passed and placed in the monastery. Only the Roman Vatican had a larger collection of illuminated manuscripts: 3,500 volumes written in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Slavic, Syriac, Georgian, etc.

illuminated Byzantine manuscript written more than four hundred years earlier.31 Working with a Byzantine monk from Constantinople, and with several Arab physicians, Ibn Shaprut supervised the translation of this pioneering work of botanical and medical science from the original Greek into Arabic. By translating this and other Greek and Latin medical books for the Caliph, he ensured that previously unknown medical remedies were made available in the correct idiomatic usage of Arabic Spain. Henceforth, Cordova and Palermo (which was then also under Muslim rule) became the leading medical centres of the early medieval

All of these works Poggio copied and sent to Bruni and Niccoli in Florence. The city was becoming renowned more than anywhere else in Europe as a place where ancient manuscripts were collected, where the classics were studied, preserved, and esteemed. Thus, by the time Vespasiano was born in 1422, all of this ancient knowledge, after its migrations around Europe, after flowing back and forth across the Channel and the Alps, after finding refuge in monasteries where new codices were produced, and after centuries of eclipse and neglect, of disintegration and loss, was finally coming to Florence. “How much the men of letters of our age owe these men,” Vespasiano later wrote of Poggio and his friends, “who shone such a light.”19 When he went to work in Michele Guarducci’s bookshop it was therefore possible, thanks to men like Niccoli and Poggio, to dream of the rebirth of the ancient world,

Another gathering spot could be found on the west side of the Piazza della Signoria, beneath the Tettoia dei Pisani, the Roof of the Pisans.

Niccolò Niccoli, the treasures of whose library offered Vespasiano his first exposure to classical manuscripts. Niccoli hosted what might be called a book club or reading group. Vespasiano later described how Niccoli liked to invite young men to his home and, as each arrived, hand him a book from his library and say, “Go and read.

Eugenius would remain in Florence for much of the next decade, ruling as pope in sumptuous lodgings prepared for him in the Dominican convent of Santa Maria Novella. His ejection from Rome was to have important consequences for Vespasiano’s career. Pious and unworldly, the pope was not a learned man. However, the Florentine residence of the papacy meant, crucially, that the Roman Curia also came to town—the papal bureaucracy staffed by highly educated diplomats, scribes, scholars, and experts in Latin, such as Poggio Bracciolini.

Poggio welcomed the chance to return to Florence after his long absence. Following his triumphant discoveries in Saint Gall and elsewhere in 1416 and 1417,

One day during Holy Week around the year 1400 Niccoli had gathered with some friends at his elegant home. One of his guests was Leonardo Bruni, a literary scholar and translator who would later write up the conversation of that day. Bruni was destined to become one of the most celebrated and influential of all of Florence’s lovers of wisdom. He had been born about 1370 in Arezzo, the birthplace of Petrarch,

Soon after Plato’s death, Aristotle attacked the theory in On Philosophy, later expanding his criticism in his Metaphysics. He denied that a form could exist without matter, and the realm of Forms possessed, he believed, no objective validity. Plato put forth nothing but words—what Aristotle disparaged as “empty phrases and poetical metaphors.

the visitors to Florence in 1439 found the city extraordinary, these exotic guests in turn made deep impressions on their hosts. The forty-six-year-old emperor in particular, the brim of whose remarkable hat thrust forward like the prow of a ship, bewitched the Florentines.

The differences between Plato and Aristotle had already been much debated. The argument stretched back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle had criticized and corrected Plato, the teacher with whom he began to study in 367 BC, when he was seventeen and Plato around sixty.

The natural world we perceive through our senses is, for Plato, a defective and incomplete version of this more perfect and timeless realm in the same way that (in the famous metaphor from Book 7 of The Republic) the images seen by the prisoners shackled in their cave are the shadows of the real objects for which the prisoners, in their ignorance, mistake them.

In about 1305, Dante called him the “supreme philosopher” who “holds universal sway in teaching everywhere” and whose doctrines “may almost be called universal opinion.

Pletho, a neo-pagan, had an ulterior motive in pitting Plato against Aristotle. As an opponent of the proposed union between the Latins and the Greeks, he hoped to demolish the intellectual edifice of the Roman Catholic Church, which he quite rightly recognized had been raised, thanks to Aquinas and others, on Aristotelian foundations. Upending the traditional philosophical hierarchy, he depicted Aristotle as an atheist while stressing Plato’s piety. He pointed out that for Aristotle the Prime Mover—the primary cause of all motion in the universe—existed in only one celestial sphere, which undermined the Christian idea of a god who dwells in all things. He rebutted Aristotle’s attack on Forms by saying it was tantamount to denying the existence of eternal substances. Finally, Aristotle may have paid lip service to various divinities, but, Pletho claimed, he was ultimately an atheist. Plato, on the other hand, understood God as “the universal sovereign existing over all things … the originator of originators, the creator of creators.

Soon after Plato’s death, Aristotle attacked the theory in On Philosophy, later expanding his criticism in his Metaphysics. He denied that a form could exist without matter, and the realm of Forms possessed, he believed, no objective validity. Plato put forth nothing but words—what Aristotle disparaged as “empty phrases and poetical metaphors.”22 Reacting against Plato’s idealism, he advanced an approach to knowledge that was more scientific and empirical, and that concentrated on particulars rather than universals.

including the partial copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things—unseen by scholars for more than five hundred years—and eight previously unknown speeches of Cicero.

All of these works Poggio copied and sent to Bruni and Niccoli in Florence. The city was becoming renowned more than anywhere else in Europe as a place where ancient manuscripts were collected, where the classics were studied, preserved, and esteemed. Thus, by the time Vespasiano was born in 1422, all of this ancient knowledge, after its migrations around Europe, after flowing back and forth across the Channel and the Alps, after finding refuge in monasteries where new codices were produced, and after centuries of eclipse and neglect, of disintegration and loss, was finally coming to Florence. “How much the men of letters of our age owe these men,” Vespasiano later wrote of Poggio and his friends, “who shone such a light.

For Plato, of course, there existed beyond the realm of ordinary sense-experience the world of Forms, for which outward, earthly appearances—including symbols such as language itself—were mere and meager representations. Words were simply incapable of accurately describing or illustrating this divine realm. The logic and reason of the Aristotelians occupied its true home only in the sphere of sense-experience—in what Pletho had nonchalantly dismissed as the world of oysters and embryos. The Aristotelian philosophy on which western Christianity depended therefore offered a misguided point of departure in any quest for inexpressible truths and eternal verities. The clumsy wordings of dogmas, liturgies, creeds: such things were mere shadow puppets on the wall of the Platonic cave; debates framed by Aristotelian philosophy could never hope to approach or capture their proper forms. On the other hand, Plato’s philosophy, with its belief in a unity embracing scattered differences, offered a more promising chance to find a concord between the Greeks and the Latins. Bessarion and Traversari duly worked out a compromise on the fraught question of the Procession of the Holy Spirit. They came up with the argument that since the saints in both the East and West had been inspired by the same Holy Spirit, it scarcely mattered whether this Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son or simply from the Father. It was, after all, merely a matter of semantics—of whether one believed that “from” (εκ) and “through” (διά) meant the same thing. As Bessarion put it in the context of another dispute, the two parties “agreed in substance and differed only in words.

He quoted Saint Jerome’s praise that learned men were like stars in the heavens, and the prophet Daniel’s that they shine like the sun. “All evil is born from ignorance,” he wrote. “Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness, especially those authors from ancient times.”35

In a way he could not quite describe (he was a bad talker, framing his ideas with difficulty) he was attached to his books, not only for what was in them, but as entities. He had written once in a manuscript book in which he sometimes wrote things, "I like the feel of them and I know the feel of them in the same way as one likes and knows the feel of a friend's hand. And I can look at them and read them without opening them in the same way as, without his speaking, one looks at and can enjoy the face of a friend. I feel towards them when I look at them in the shelves,—well, as if they were feeling towards me just as I am feeling towards them." And he had added this touch, which is perhaps more illuminating. "The other day some one had had out one of my books and returned it upside down. I swear it was as grotesque and painful to me to see it upside down as if I had come into the room and found my brother standing on his head against the wall, fastened there. At least I couldn't have sprung to him to release him quicker than I did to the book to upright it.

Since washing the body happened so seldom, it ceased to be a subject for painters. In place of the medieval woodcuts and illuminated manuscripts that pictured warmly sensuous bathhouse scenes came painterly odes to linen.

Sprezzatura is a style of elegant nonchalance.

1249 A.D. The Keeper pulled the illuminated manuscript from its hiding place and spread it on the stone hearth. The golden border caught the fire's light, and its reflection looked like an eye flashing open. At once the illusion vanished, but something else caught the Keeper's attention, and the shock of it took his breath away. Within the enlarged first letter, the miniature of the goddess unlocking the jaws of hell had changed; her beauty was gone, replaced by the cruel gaze of a Follower. Was this another change the Scroll had wrought upon itself, or had someone tampered with its magic again? The Keeper dipped his paintbrush in brown pigment and began drawing a tree on the parchment, curving its limbs over and around the calligraphy until the words were hidden in a maze of twisting branches. For centuries he had devoted himself to uncovering this forbidden knowledge, and now he had assumed the duty of protecting it. He wished he could follow the Path, but the Prophecy was clear; only the child of a fallen goddess and an evil spirit could follow the steps without fear of the Scroll's curse. Many had died trying to use its magic, but that wasn't the reason the Keeper now kept it hidden, denying its existence. A dangerous transformation had taken place. The Scroll had somehow come to life, as if the words written on the parchment had infused it with an instinct for survival. He could feel it now, alert and suspicious beneath his fingers. When it was no longer watching him, he dropped his brush, grabbed a reed pin, dipped it into the glutinous black ink, and wrote one final instruction on the last page. His deception awakened whatever lived within the manuscript. Intense light shot through him with deadly force, binding his existence to that of the Secret Scroll for all time.

He’d spent months tracking down the book, so tiny it would fit in a doll’s hands, but so precious it had cost him an indecent amount of money. A miniature illuminated manuscript, crafted by the skilled hands of the smallest of the lesser Fae—one of the first printed books in existence. It hadn’t been meant for reading—but he’d figured that someone who adored books as much as Nesta would savor this piece of history. Even if she resented all things Fae. He’d regretted throwing it into the river the moment it had vanished under the ice, but … he’d been foolish that night.

In Florence, more than anywhere else, large numbers of people could read and write, as many as seven in every ten adults. The literacy levels of other European cities, by contrast, languished at less than 25 percent. 1

The Street of Booksellers, Via dei Librai, ran through the heart of Florence, midway between the town hall to the south and the cathedral to the north.

the Street of Booksellers was home to eight cartolai. They took their name from the fact that they sold paper (carta) of various sizes and qualities, which they procured from nearby papermills. They also stocked parchment,

cartolai offered far more extensive services than just selling paper and parchment: they produced and sold manuscripts. Customers could buy secondhand volumes from them or hire them to have a manuscript copied by a scribe, bound in leather or board, and, if they wished, illuminated—decorated with illustrations or designs in paint and gold leaf.

Florence was celebrated in those days for its writers, especially for its literary scholars and philosophers (from philosophos, “lover of wisdom”): men who expertly sifted and scrutinized the accumulated wisdom of the ages, especially the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Many of these texts, lost for centuries, had recently been rediscovered by Florentines such as Poggio Bracciolini, who, amid much rejoicing, had recovered long-lost works by Roman writers such as Cicero and Lucretius.

Vespasiano’s biographies were crucial, therefore, to the formation of one of history’s most famous and endearing (if sometimes misleading) narratives: how the rediscovery of ancient books refreshed and “rebirthed” a disoriented and moribund civilization.

Burckhardt was a Swiss professor of history who had spent the winter of 1847–48 in Rome. While there he read a book published from an old manuscript recently discovered by an Italian cardinal in the Vatican Library and first printed in 1839 as Vitæ CIII Virorum Illustrium, or The Lives of 103 Illustrious Men. The author of this work, according to the volume’s editor, was Vespasiano Fiorentino—“ Vespasiano the Florentine”—about whom, in 1839, almost nothing was known.

one of the most compelling and creative theses in the history of modern historiography, virtually creating the “idea of the Renaissance.” 9

The loss of so many ancient books could be blamed on something more than the apathy of feudal lords and the negligence and greed of unscrupulous monks. It could be blamed, too, on circumstances beyond the inevitable and indiscriminate destruction of floods and fires, or the pernicious appetites of mice, warble flies, and bookworms. All these things played their part, but there was another reason so few texts survived, and that was technology: how books were made.

The Latin verb “to fasten” was pangere, from which, via the Latin pagina, the word “page” descends. Suddenly it was possible to read a document by turning pages of parchment rather than unspooling a roll of papyrus.

Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini): a humanist on the throne of Saint Peter.

Today I bring you victory over the Turk,” the discoverer, Giovanni da Castro, announced to Pope Pius II.2 Mines quickly went into production, and alum was declared a papal monopoly (overseen by a three-man committee featuring the ubiquitous Cardinal Bessarion) whose profits were dedicated to a crusade.

All too often these walls proved minor impediments. Court records in Tuscany describe how men secretly entered convents to satisfy what one document called their “libidinous desires.” Included among them was a man who in 1419 managed to live for five months in a Dominican convent in Pisa, and a priest who, two years later, entered a convent of Poor Clares thirty miles west of Florence “and stayed many days, knowing carnally day and night one of the recluses who wore the nun’s habit.”17 The most notorious convent in Florentine territories was undoubtedly Santa Margherita in Prato, scene in the 1450s of the love affair between an Augustinian novice and a Carmelite friar: Sister Lucrezia Buti and the amorous painter Fra Filippo Lippi (the painter Filippino Lippi would be the result of the liaison).

The billows and swells of the Platonic revival generated in Florence soon became a deluge that washed across the European intellectual landscape. Plato would so dominate the Western philosophical tradition for the next half-millennium that in 1927 the British philosopher A. N. Whitehead could famously declare in a lecture in Edinburgh: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

The slaughter of so many people in the streets of Mainz in October 1462, followed by the exile of eight hundred more, is often seen as the catalyst for the spread of printing beyond the Rhine Valley—for an exodus of printers, the workshop assistants of both Gutenberg and Fust, who made their separate ways across Germany, into France and, ultimately, over the Alps to seek their fortunes in the lucrative Italian market. As a Carthusian monk in Cologne wrote, “printers of books multiplied across the land.”7 Gutenberg, Fust,

Federico da Montefeltro was the hereditary ruler of Urbino, a city-state of seven thousand inhabitants a zigzagging 125-mile journey from Florence through the hills and valleys of the Apennines. Federico was almost exactly the same age as Vespasiano. Born in 1422, the illegitimate son of Guidantonio da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino, he was at first welcomed by his father since the count’s twenty-five-year marriage had failed to produce a legitimate heir. However, he found himself shunted aside when Guidantonio’s first wife died and his second marriage resulted, in 1427, in a legitimate son, Oddantonio. Federico was educated in Venice and then Mantua, and as an adolescent he distinguished himself with a series of narcissistic poems celebrating his amorous achievements. Federico’s true destiny, however, involved conquests of a different sort. At the age of fifteen he entered the service of the warlord Niccolò Piccinino, commanding a cavalry of eight hundred horses and proving himself a brilliant warrior through such feats as capturing a hitherto impregnable fortress from the ferocious Sigismondo Malatesta.

Zanobi di Mariano.

Cosimo heard was the Philebus, in which Socrates, arguing against the hedonistic Philebus, declared that “wisdom and thought and memory and their kindred, right opinion and true reasonings, are better and more excellent than pleasure.”22 At which point, as Ficino wrote, Cosimo “was recalled from this shadow of life and approached the heavenly light.”23 At Cosimo’s bedside as he passed from the shadow of life was his grandson, the son of Piero, a fifteen-year-old boy named Lorenzo.

A historian has recently argued that by the 1460s Vespasiano’s bookshop was “a political nexus … and even a listening post for the subversive, the disaffected, or the potentially so.”31 A few years earlier his bookshop was said to have “Aragonese doors” whose threshold Angevin supporters dared not darken (though in fact many Angevin supporters, such as Piero de’ Pazzi, freely came and went). By 1466 there was a danger that the bookshop could have been perceived as a site of anti-Medici activity.