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PIETRO BEMBO.

From Bartolozzi's engraving of a portrait by Titian (1539). Cp. p. 112f, (Print-room, British Museum.)

CHAPTER IX.

FROM THE AGE OF LEO X TO THE SACK OF ROME.

THE age of Aldus Manutius was succeeded by the pontificate of Leo X (1513-21). Under the care of Lorenzo the future Pope had learnt his Latin and his Greek from the best scholars of Florence. When he made his progress as Pope in the splendid procession from St Peter's to the Lateran, the streets of Rome were adorned with marble statues of the old pagan divinities, while a triumphal arch in front of the palace of the wealthy banker, Agostino Chigi, bore an inscription in golden letters recalling the times of Alexander VI and Julius II, and declaring that the reign of Venus and of Mars was over, and that of Minerva had begun :

'olim habuit Cypris sua tempora, tempora Mavors

olim habuit, sua nunc tempora Pallas habet".

Chigi set up a Greek press in his palace, where a celebrated edition of Pindar, the first including the scholia, was printed in 1515 by Zacharias Callierges of Crete, who produced an edition of Theocritus in the following year. The Pope himself established a Greek school and a Greek printing-press on Monte Cavallo. Under the supervision of Janus Lascaris, and Marcus Musurus', the scholia on Homer and Sophocles, and the Homeric Questions of Porphyry, were there published in 1517-8. A pupil of Politian, named Guarino of Favera, who had already taken part in editing

1 Casanova; cp. Gregorovius, book xiv, c. iii (viii 186, E. T.). 2 p. 78 f supra.

3 Also known as Varinus and Phavorinus and as Camers (from his birthplace in the March of Camerino). Cp. Tiraboschi, vii 1101f,

for Aldus in 1496 a collection of grammatical extracts, selected from the works of 34 Greek grammarians', and was afterwards to be the compiler of a Greek dictionary printed by Callierges in 1523, was made bishop of Nocera and custodian of the private library of the Pope. That library had been mainly formed from the Medicean collection, which had been dispersed on the entry of Charles VIII into Florence in 1494. The greater part of it was fortunately purchased by the monks of San Marco, from whom it was bought by the Cardinal Giovanni Medici and conyeyed to Rome in 1508, there to remain until the second Medicean Pope, Clement VII, restored it to Florence (1523), and founded, for its reception, the present building of the Laurentian Library. While the Medicean collection was still in Rome, Leo added to it the recently discovered мs of the first five books of the Annals of Tacitus, and it was under his patronage that the first complete edition of Tacitus was produced at Rome in 1515 by Filippo Beroaldo of Bologna (1472—1518), the nephew and pupil of the far more prolific editor bearing the same name (1453-1505). In a brief granting to Beroaldo the exclusive privilege of publishing this work (a privilege which was immediately infringed at Milan), the Pope insists on the importance of classical literature and expresses his earnest desire to continue to bestow honours and rewards on men of learning3. The publication of the editio princeps of the extant works of Tacitus was followed in 1516 by the appearance of the small but by no means unimportant treatise of Pietro Pomponazzi, De Immortalitate Animae*.

Study of Aristotle

Scriptores Grammatici Graeci ; ‘Thesaurus Cornucopiae et Horti Adonidis' (1496); cp. Roscoe's Leo X, i 349 f, 489, ed. 1846; Botfield's Prefaces, 205. This work is not really, as stated by Gregorovius, viii 346, 'the first Thesaurus of the Greek language', in the ordinary sense of that term. Guarino was aided by another pupil of Politian, Carlo Antinori, and by Politian himself; also by Aldus and Urbano da Belluno, author of the Aldine Greek Grammar of Jan. 1497.

2 Anziani, Della bibliotheca Mediceo-Laurenziana, 1872; Jebb's Introd. to plain text of Sophocles (1898), xxxiii.

The brief was written by Sadoleto (Pastor, Gesch. der Päpste, iv 483); translated in Roscoe's Leo X, i 357.

4 ♦ Bologna, 1516; Venice, 1525; anon. ‘1534'.

Pomponazzi

Its author, a native of Mantua (1462-1525), is a representative of one of the four varieties of the Aristotelianism of the time, namely that which accepts the interpretation of the opinions of Aristotle originally put forth by Alexander of Aphrodisias.

The Italian Aristotelians were either content to follow one of the three exponents of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas or Averroës or Alexander, or they studied the Greek text of Aristotle himself with or without the aid of the current Latin translations. Thomas Aquinas was the interpreter accepted by Aristotelians, who were in full accord with the normal doctrine of the Church. The teaching of Averroës had found a home in Padua in the first half of the fourteenth century, where it continued to flourish in the fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth, under Zimara (d. 1532) and Zabarella (d. 1589), until it practically came to an end on the death of Cremonini (1637). It had roused the energetic protests of Petrarch in the fourteenth century, the century in which it was represented at Padua by Jean de Jandun (A. 1322)1. It had also been represented in Northern Italy by Urbano da Bologna (A. 1334), and by Paolo Veneto (d. 1429), who, at a disputation held at Bologna in the presence of 800 Augustinians, had been defeated by Niccolò Fava (d. 1439), a friend of Filelfo2 and an early representative of that school of students of the Greek text which was to dethrone Averroes in the following century. Averroism of a much more moderate type than that of Paolo Veneto had been expounded at Padua in the fifteenth century by a member of a distinguished family of Vicenza, named Gaetano da Thiene (1387-1465). It was at Padua that, in the same century, the first printed edition of Averroës had appeared in 1472, followed by a new edition in 1552-3. Averroism was combined with varying degrees of orthodoxy. Even the celebrated Thomas de Vio (1469-1534), who became Cardinal Cajetan in 1517, used Averroës as his text-book at Padua, where he counted Pomponazzi among his pupils. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, the extreme Averroistic doctrine of the unity of the immortal reason in the whole human race had been professed at Padua by Nicoletto Vernias from 1471 to 1499, but, in the latter year, under the moderating influence of the bishop of Padua, Vernias had withdrawn from that doctrine, and had written in favour of the plurality of souls, and the immortality of each individual human soul. Four years before this public change of opinion, he had become remiss in his teaching, and he found himself opposed by a spirited rival in the person of Pomponazzi, who broke loose from the dry and dull routine of the traditional exposition of Aristotle and Averroës by adopting a more vigorous and varied style".

1 Renan, Av. 339–421.

2 Epp. i 29, 38 (1428).

Renan, Av. 352*.

3 Tiraboschi, vi 333 f, 343 f; Renan, Averroès, 344–61.

• Tiraboschi, vi 345; Renan, Av. 347ʻ.

• Jovius, Elogia, no. 71; Renan, Av. 353*.

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