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  • 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...

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