Magnum', published at Venice in 1499', while the printer was Zacharias Callierges (fl. 1499-1523), who, in the Callierges same year, printed the commentary of Simplicius on the Categories, and afterwards produced at Rome the second edition of Pindar (1515), and an early edition of Theocritus (1516), followed by his Thomas Magister (1517). Callierges was noted for his calligraphy, and his Greek type is as beautiful, in its kind, as that of Aldus Manutius'.

and esp. Legrand, 1 cviii-cxxiv, with portrait in vol. II, frontispiece, from Jovius, Elogia, p. 57; also in Didot, p. 300 (with page of autograph, opp. p. 500).

1 Facsimile in Early Venetian Printing, 123 (wrongly dated 1497).

"Stobaeus, in New Coll., Oxford, copied Dec. 1523, the latest definite date in his life.

Hody, 317; Ritschl's Pref. to Thomas Magister, p. xviii, and esp. Legrand, I 1-lvii. The Greek Immigrants are briefly sketched by Heeren, ii 199—221, Bernhardy, Gr. Lit. i 747—752a; Symonds, ii 246–250, 375–8, and by others; all previous accounts are, however, superseded by Legrand's Bibliographie Hellénique, 1—111 (1885-1903). Cp. Literature in Krumbacher, p. 502 f, ed. 1897.

CHAPTER VII.

THE ACADEMIES OF FLORENCE, NAPLES, AND ROME.

THE thirty years, during which Cosimo de' Medici was in power (1434-64), were separated by the five years of the brief sway of his son from the three and twenty years of the rule of Lorenzo (1469-92). Lorenzo was one of the most accomplished and versatile of men; astute as a politician, graceful as a poet, generous as a patron, and eager and enthusiastic as a lover of art and philosophy and classical learning. In his virtues and in his vices he was the incarnation of the spirit of the Renaissance.

The Academy of Florence

Ficino had translated ten of Plato's dialogues before the death of Cosimo; ten more had been translated before the accession of Lorenzo; the work was completed in 1477 and printed in 1482. The Introduction to the Symposium is one of the few primary authorities on the Platonic Academy of Florence. The ancient custom of celebrating the memory of Plato by an annual banquet had, after an interval of twelve hundred years, been revived by Lorenzo. Nine members of the Academy, including Ficino and Landino, had been invited to the villa at Careggi. At the conclusion of the repast, Ficino's rendering of all the seven speeches in the Symposium is read aloud, and discussed by five of the guests'. Of the nine that assembled at Careggi to discuss the Symposium, the only one unknown to fame, apart from Ficino himself, is Cristoforo Landino (1424-1504). A survivor from the age of Cosimo, he was destined to live to the age of eighty, and even to outlive the youthful Lorenzo. He had been associated with Ficino as Lorenzo's tutor; he had already lectured on Petrarch (1460), and, at a later time, he was to expound 1 pp. 373-440 of Basel ed., 1532.

S. 11.

Landino

6

Dante (1481), to annotate Horace (1482) and Virgil (1487), to translate the elder Pliny (1501), and to imitate the Tusculan Disputations of Cicero' in a celebrated dialogue, whose scene is laid at Camaldoli, near the source of the Arno. In that dialogue the life of action is lauded by Lorenzo, and that of contemplation by the widely accomplished Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)", who maintains the allegorical significance of the Aeneid, and finds affinities between the poetry of Virgil and the philosophy of PlatoR.

Ficino

Ficino (1433-1499), the true centre of the Academy, received holy orders at the age of forty, and spent the rest of his days in the honest and reverent endeavour to reconcile Platonism and Christianity. In the latter part of his life he translated and expounded Plotinus (ed. 1492). After surviving Lorenzo for seven years, he died in 1499, and is commemorated by a marble bust in the Cathedral of Florence1.

Among other members of the Academy was that paragon of beauty and genius, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), who first flashed upon Florence He was pos

Pico

shortly before the publication of Ficino's Plato. sessed by the great thought of the unity of all knowledge, and, while he was still absorbed in planning a vast work, which was to form a complete system of Platonic, Christian, and Cabbalistic lore, he passed away at the early age of thirty-one, on the very day of 1494, on which the invader of Italy, Charles VIII of France, marched into Florence'.

1 His lecture on the Tusc. Disp. is printed in K. Müllner's Reden, 118-129.

"Voigt, i 370-63; Symonds, ii 341-4; portrait in G. F. Hill's Pisanello, 192. At 20, he composed a Latin Comedy, which passed for a Classic (the Philodoxius of 'Lepidus Comicus', ed. Ven. 1588).

Portrait in group on p. 58 supra; another portrait in Alois Heiss, Les Médailleurs de la Renaissance, i 63.

4

• Reproduced in Wiese and Pèrcopo, It. Litt. 199; he is one of the group on p. 58 supra. Cp. Reumont's Lorenzo, ii 20-30 E.T.; Symonds, ii 324-8; Harvard Lectures, 89–94.

Roscoe's Lorenzo, 259f, ed. 1847; Reumont, ii 79-95; Symonds, ii 329-338; fine portrait in the Uffizi, no. 1154, reproduced in Armstrong's Lorenzo, and Wiese and Pèrcopo, 203; another portrait in the Uffizi, reproduced by Alois Heiss, .c. i 29.

Pico's friend and correspondent, Hermolaus Barbarus (1454— 1493), died only a year before him. A grandson

Hermolaus

of Francesco Barbaro, the Venetian friend of Poggio, Barbarus he had been educated at Verona, Rome, and Padua. He translated Themistius and Dioscorides, as well as the Rhetoric of Aristotle. He claimed to have corrected 5000 errors in the text of the elder Pliny'. In a memorable letter, Pico, while congratulating him on his Ciceronian style, ventured to ask whether the old schoolmen might not say to any one who now charged them with dulness, 'Let him prove by experience whether we barbarians have not the god of eloquence in our hearts rather than on our lips'. He is described by Politian as Hermolaus Barbarus barbariae hostis acerrimus; and he is declared by Bembo to have surpassed all former Venetians in Greek and Latin learning. He died in Rome in 1493, at the early age of thirty-nine.

'Urbs Venetum vitam, mortem dedit inclyta Roma,

non potuit nasci nobiliusve mori".

Politian

In the following year, at the age of forty, died a notable member of the Florentine Academy, Angelo Poliziano, familiarly known as Politian (1454-1494). Sent to Florence at the age of ten from his home at Monte Pulciano, he attended the lectures of Landino, Argyropulos, Andronicus Callistus, and Ficino. By the age of thirty, he was tutor to Lorenzo's children, and professor of Greek and Latin Literature in Florence. Among those from England, who attended his lectures, were Grocyn and Linacre. The authors professorially expounded by him included Homer and Virgil, Persius and Statius, Quintilian and Suetonius. He was one of the first to pay attention to the Silver Age of Latinity; and he justified his choice partly on the ground that that Age had been unduly neglected, and partly because it supplied an easy introduction to the authors of the Golden Age". It is as a scholar, and not as a

1 Castigationes Plin. 1492-3.

2 Ap. Politian, Epp. ix 4.

3. Misc. c. xc.

Jovius, Elogia, no. 36, with portrait on p. 69. Cp. Tiraboschi, vi 828 f; Roscoe's Lorenzo, note 329.

• Oratio super Quintiliano et Statii Silvis, in Opera, ed. 1498, signature aa.

philosopher, that he claims the right to expound Aristotle'. He was probably the first teacher in Italy whose mastery of Greek was equal to that of the Greek immigrants'.

A singular interest was lent to his lectures on Latin and Greek authors by his impassioned declamation of Latin poems composed by himself in connexion with the general subject of his course. The four extant poems of this type are known by the name of the Sylvae. The first in order of time is connected with the Eclogues of Virgil (1482); the next, with the Georgics and with Hesiod; the third, with Homer; and the last, apparently, with a general course of lectures on the ancient poets (1486).

Among the authors, in whose textual criticism he was interested, are Terence, Lucretius, Propertius, Ovid, Statius, and Ausonius, as well as Celsus, Quintilian, Festus, and the Scriptores Rei Rusticae. His copy of the editio princeps of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Statius, published in 1472, formerly in the Laurentian Library', is now in the Corsini palace in Rome'. He made a special study of the Pandects of Justinian, the celebrated MS of which was removed from Pisa to Florence in 1411. By the influence of Lorenzo, Politian was allowed to study the мs at his leisure, and was thus enabled to point out mistakes in the later MSS, and in the current editions of the work".

The most learned of his extant productions is his Miscellanea (1489). Among the many topics discussed in its pages are the use of the aspirate in Latin and Greek, the chronology of Cicero's 'Familiar Letters', the evidence in favour of the spelling Vergilius in preference to Virgilius, the details of the discovery of purple dye, and the differences between the aorist and the imperfect in the

1 Lamia, ib., signature Y.

2 Letter to Matthias Corvinus, in Epp. ix 1.

3 Text in ed. 1867, 285-427; cp. Symonds, ii 453-484; Harvard Lectures, 96.

Mähly, Angelus Politianus, 22.

Cp. Schanz, § 411, p. 146; Klotz, Praef. to Statius, Silvae, pp. 1—lxviii ; Sabbadini, Scoperte, 153, n. 71.

Misc. c. xli; Epp. x 4.

7 Gibbon, c. 44 (iv 468 Bury); Roscoe's Lorenzo, note 217; and esp. Mähly's Ang. Politianus, 61-7.