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He should be able to say what the Holy See has done for learning and science; the place which these islands hold in the literary history of the dark age; what part the Church had, and how her highest interests fared, in the revival of letters; who Bessarion was, or Ximenes, or William of Wykeham, or Cardinal Allen.
He was more than a lover of Aristotle, said his enemies: he was the enemy of the divine Plato, an apostate among the Greeks, who had even dared to oppose their patron Bessarion. The Cardinal Bessarion was complimented as 'the most Latin of the Greeks'; he might have ruled as Pope in Rome, some said, if it had not been for Perotti refusing to disturb him in the library.
There Pius II. pronounced a Latin speech of welcome, while Bessarion delivered an oration when the precious member was deposited in S. Peter's.
Santa Croce was not singular in this respect, for San Lorenzo and many other Florentine churches have never been decorated externally. In 1442 Cardinal Bessarion, the founder of St. Mark's Library at Venice, was delegated to perform the ceremony of consecration.
The famous Greek, Cardinal Bessarion, in whom patriotism was mingled with a zeal for letters, collected, at a great sacrifice, 600 manuscripts of pagan and Christian authors. He then looked round for some receptacle where they could safely lie until his unhappy country, if she ever regained her freedom, could reclaim her lost literature.
By whose hands or at what place it was written, no one can tell. Some have supposed that it was brought from Constantinople to Rome, in the fifteenth century, by John Bessarion, a learned patriarch; some that it was written in Alexandria, when that city was the metropolis of the world's culture; some that it was produced in Southern Italy when that region was celebrated for its learning.
Theodore Gaza defended that great man with moderation; George of Trebizond with acerbity, and retorted on Plato. Then Cardinal Bessarion, another born Greek, resisted the said George, and his idol, in a tract "Adversus calumniatorem Platonis." Pugnacity, whether wise or not, is a form of vitality.
The same Paolino was commissioned by the Procurators of S. Mark to paint certain angular medallions that are in the ceiling of the Nicene Library, which was left to the Signoria by Cardinal Bessarion, with a vast treasure of Greek books.
From privacy your founder rose to a throne; but on the throne he never forgot the studies which had been his delight in privacy. He was the centre of an illustrious group, composed partly of the last great scholars of Greece, and partly of the first great scholars of Italy, Theodore Gaza and George of Trebizond, Bessarion and Filelfo, Marsilio Ficino and Poggio Bracciolini.
In her childhood, schools for the study of Hellenic literature still flourished in Rome, where they had been established by Chrysoleras and Bessarion. In the city were many Greeks, some of whom were fugitives from their country, while others had come to Italy with Queen Carlotta of Cyprus.
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