• Humanism, Painting, and the Book as Physical Object in Renaissance Culture
• Craig Kallendorf (bio)

In a famous letter to his friend Francesco Vettori, Niccolò Macchiavelli (1469–1527) explains that after he has spent the day dealing with all the toils and tribulations of public life, he would return home, retreat into his study, and "step into the venerable courts of the ancients … where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives of their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. … I absorb myself into them completely."¹ This statement raises two problems for the modern reader: first, several of the assumptions on which it rests are no longer obvious in the way that they were five hundred years ago; and second, some of these assumptions can no longer be accepted at face value.²

For one thing, "converse" is a metaphor, activated by Machiavelli's desire to claim that he could recover unimpeded access to a culture that had died more than a millennium earlier. By "converse," he meant "read," so that this passage is about reading, with Machiavelli's conversation partners being his books—in particular, his Greek and Latin texts. Such texts, or at least some of them, had been read and valued continuously through the Middle Ages, but under the stimulus of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch, 1304–74) and his followers, the Renaissance humanists had expanded the canon of classical authors and given them a new prominence in the educational system.³ This led to an enormous increase in the demand for classical texts, which fortunately coincided (more or less) with the spread of printing.⁴ Books, in other words, were at the center of Machiavelli's leisure activities.

People like Machiavelli owned more books than their ancestors, but they also read them in a different way. Anyone who has looked at a large number of early printed editions of the classics knows that Renaissance readers read with a pen in hand, correcting the text as they went. Sometimes they did this by conjecture, using their knowledge of the languages, but they also compared the text they had with other manuscripts and printed books, in [End Page 1] a constant search for better readings. The philological techniques they used emerged in this period because, as Eugenio Garin has pointed out, the ability to see the people of the past within their own time and place depended on an accurate transcription of what they wrote.⁵ Good books, those whose texts were free of the errors that had accumulated over the centuries, restored the ability to see the ancients as they actually were and to talk with them.

This helps to explain why the "conversations" that Machiavelli valued took place in the study, not in the marketplace or on the battlefield. Anthony Grafton has argued that a number of key philological principles can be traced back to Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), a professor at the Florentine studio (university),⁶ but the other renowned philologists of the day—Niccolò Niccoli (ca. 1364–1437), for example, or Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536)⁷—also presented their work as done in private, free of the distractions of daily life. Initially they had to borrow or beg access to manuscripts, but when the printing press lowered the price of books, scholars could accumulate larger libraries,⁸ which increased both the number of conversation partners they could have and the quality of the conversations.

It is worth noting that most of these conversations took place among men: the books that were being read in this context were almost all written by men, and as the ownership notes in Renaissance editions of the classics confirm, most of the readers were male as well.⁹ The main reason for this is that more boys than girls went to school in the Renaissance and they generally stayed in school longer; what is more, education in Latin (and to a lesser extent in Greek) was almost exclusively a male preserve, to the extent that, as Walter Ong pointed out a good while ago, learning Latin served as a rite of passage for boys during this period.¹⁰ There were exceptions...

• 人文主义，绘画和书籍是文艺复兴时期文化的对象
• 克雷格·卡伦道夫（生物）

NiccolòMacchiavelli（1469–1527）在给朋友弗朗切斯科·维托里（Francesco Vettori）的一封著名信中解释说，当他花了整整一天时间处理公共生活的所有辛劳和磨难之后，他将回到家，退缩到书房，然后“踏入在古代人的古老宫廷中……我毫不羞耻地与他们交谈，并向他们询问他们的行为动机，他们出于人类的仁慈而回答我……我完全将自己融入其中。” ¹这种说法给现代读者带来了两个问题：首先，它所基于的几个假设不再像五百年前那样显而易见。第二，这些假设中的某些不再以其面值被接受。^2个

一方面，“逆转”是一个隐喻，由马基雅维利（Machiavelli）声称自己可以恢复不受阻碍地进入已经死于一千年前的文化的渴望所激发。他所说的“交谈”是指“阅读”，因此这一段是关于阅读的，马基雅维利的对话伙伴是他的书，尤其是他的希腊文和拉丁文。这样的文本，或至少其中一些文本，在中世纪一直得到阅读和重视，但是在弗朗切斯科·佩特拉卡（Petrarch，1304–74）及其追随者的刺激下，文艺复兴时期的人文主义者扩大了古典作家和作家的著作范围。使他们在教育体系中崭露头角。³这导致对古典文本的需求大大增加，幸运的是，它与印刷的普及（或多或少）相吻合。⁴ 换句话说，书籍是马基雅维利休闲活动的中心。

像马基雅维利（Machiavelli）这样的人拥有的书籍比祖先更多，但他们也以不同的方式阅读它们。任何看过大量早期经典著作的人都知道，文艺复兴时期的读者都用手握笔阅读，并在阅读过程中对文本进行了更正。有时，他们会根据自己对语言的了解，通过推测来做到这一点，但他们也将所拥有的文本与其他手稿和印刷书籍进行了比较，在[第1页]中不断寻求更好的阅读方法。他们使用的语言学方法是在此时期出现的，因为正如Eugenio Garin所指出的那样，能否在自己的时间和地点见到过去的人们的能力取决于他们所写内容的准确抄写。⁵好的书籍，其文字摆脱了几个世纪以来积累的错误，使他们恢复了看古人和与之交谈的能力。

这有助于解释为什么马基雅维利重视的“对话”是在研究中进行的，而不是在市场或战场上进行的。安东尼·格拉夫顿（Anthony Grafton）认为，许多重要的语言学原理都可以追溯到佛罗伦萨工作室（大学）的教授安吉洛·波利齐亚诺（Ango Poliziano，1454-94年），⁶但是当时的其他著名语言学家尼古拉·尼科利（NiccolòNiccoli，约1364年）例如–1437）或Desiderius Erasmus（1466–1536）⁷ –也介绍了他们的工作是私下进行的，不受日常生活的干扰。最初，他们不得不借阅或乞求获取手稿，但当印刷机降低图书价格时，学者们便可以积累更大的图书馆，⁸ 这不仅增加了他们可以拥有的对话伙伴的数量，而且提高了对话的质量。

值得注意的是，大多数此类对话都是在男性之间进行的：在这种情况下阅读的书籍几乎都是男性撰写的，而且正如文艺复兴版经典著作中的所有权记录所证实的那样，大多数读者都是男性。出色地。⁹这样做的主要原因是，在文艺复兴时期，男孩上学的女孩人数多于女孩，而他们上学的时间通常更长；更重要的是，拉丁文的教育（在较小程度上是希腊文）几乎完全是男性保留的，正如沃尔特·昂格（Walter Ong）不久前指出的那样，在此期间学习拉丁文是男孩们的通行仪式。时期。¹⁰有例外...