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When Bracciolini first joined the Papal Court, Guarino of Verona, Aurispa and Filelfo were making continuous voyages to Greece in order to fetch home manuscripts of Greek authors yet unknown in Italy; at this time were found and first brought to the West of Europe the poems of Callimachus, Pindar, Oppian and Orpheus; the Commentaries of Aristarchus on the Iliad; the works of Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, Xenophon and Lucian; the Histories of Arrian, Cassius Dio, and Diodorus Siculus; the Geography of Strabo; Procopius and some of the Byzantine historians; Gregory of Nazianzen, Chrysostom, and other Greek Fathers of the Church.

The newly discovered art of printing was also liberally encouraged by Lodovico, one of whose protégés, Alessandro Minuziano, set up a printing press in Milan before Aldo Manuzio had settled in Venice, and in the course of the year 1494, published twenty-two books, including a Latin dictionary by Dionigi Este and complete editions of Cicero and Tacitus, Pliny and Suetonius, as well as the works of Filelfo and the Sonnets and Triumphs of Petrarch.

The five hundred gold sequins, which were to be counted out to him on the completion of the work, which it was calculated would occupy three years, was too tempting an offer; and yet the offer was not sufficiently liberal in his opinion: as we have seen, he suggested that it should be increased one-fifth; he was right; for in those days as much, and even twice as much, was sometimes given for a mere translation: Lorenzo Valla got five hundred gold sequins for his Latin translation of Thucydides; Filelfo would have received twice as much, and, in addition to the thousand gold pieces, a handsome town house in Rome and a good landed estate if he would have translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into Latin verse.

While Francesco was engaged with affairs of state, she directed the studies of her children, and gave her six sons an admirable training in learning and knightly exercises. "Let us remember," she said to her son's tutor, the learned scholar Filelfo, "that we have princes to educate, not only scholars."

He spent some years at the ducal court of Milan, but there is no indication that he frequented the schools of such famous Hellenists as Francesco Filelfo who, in 1471, was there lecturing on the Politics of Aristotle, and of Constantine Lascaris whom the reigning duke, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, commissioned to compile a Greek grammar for the use of his daughter.

This was also the case with the speeches delivered at weddings or betrothals, with the difference that they seem to have been made in the palace, instead of in church, like that of Filelfo at the betrothal of Anna Sforza to Alfonso of Este in the castle of Milan. It is still possible that the ceremony may have taken place in the chapel of the castle.

And as for the Frate, whatever we may think of his saintliness, you judge his preaching too narrowly. The secret of oratory lies, not in saying new things, but in saying things with a certain power that moves the hearers without which, as old Filelfo has said, your speaker deserves to be called, `non oratorem, sed aratorem. And, according to that test, Fra Girolamo is a great orator."

Yet the work done by the artists was the best work of the epoch, far more fruitful of results and far more permanently valuable than that of Filelfo inveighing in filthy satires against his personal foes, or of Beccadelli endeavouring to inoculate modern literature with the virus of pagan vices.

After a while the modern relation between author and publisher began to develop itself, and under Alexander VI, when it was no longer easy to destroy a book, as Cosimo could make Filelfo promise to do, the prohibitive censorship made its appearance.

"Nay, my good Nello," said Bardo, with an air of friendly severity, "you are not altogether illiterate, and might doubtless have made a more respectable progress in learning if you had abstained somewhat from the cicalata and gossip of the street-corner, to which our Florentines are excessively addicted; but still more if you had not clogged your memory with those frivolous productions of which Luigi Pulci has furnished the most peccant exemplar a compendium of extravagances and incongruities the farthest removed from the models of a pure age, and resembling rather the grylli or conceits of a period when mystic meaning was held a warrant for monstrosity of form; with this difference, that while the monstrosity is retained, the mystic meaning is absent; in contemptible contrast with the great poem of Virgil, who, as I long held with Filelfo, before Landino had taken upon him to expound the same opinion, embodied the deepest lessons of philosophy in a graceful and well-knit fable.