The Florentine Niccolo Niccoli, a member of that accomplished circle of friends which surrounded the elder Cosimo de' Medici, spent his whole fortune in buying books.At last, when his money was all gone, the Medici put their purse at his disposal for any sum which his purpose might require.We owe to him the later books of Ammianus Marcellinus, the 'De Oratore' of Cicero, and other works; he persuaded Cosimo to buy the best manuscript of Pliny from a monastery at Lubeck.With noble confidence he lent his books to those who asked for them, allowed all comers to study them in his own house, and was ready to converse with the students on what they had read.His collection of 800 volumes, valued at 6,000 gold florins, passed after his death, through Cosimo's intervention, to the monastery of San Marco, on the condition that it should be accessible to the public.
Of the two great book-finders, Guarino and Poggio, the latter, on the occasion of the Council of Constance and acting partly as the agent of Niccoli, searched industriously among the abbeys of South Germany.He there discovered six orations of Cicero, and the first complete Quintilian, that of St.Gallen, now at Zurich; in thirty-two days he is said to have copied the whole of it in a beautiful handwriting.He was able to make important additions to Silius Italicus, Manilius, Lucretius, Valerius Flaccus, Asconius Pedianus, Columella, Celsus, Aulus Gellius, Statius, and others; and with the help of Leonardo Aretino he unearthed the last twelve comedies of Plautus, as well as the Verrine orations.
The famous Greek, Cardinal Bessarion, in whom patriotism was mingled with a zeal for letters, collected, at a great sacrifice, 600manuscripts 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.
The Venetian government declared itself ready to erect a suitable building, and to this day the Biblioteca Marciana retains a part of these treasures.
The formation of the celebrated Medicean library has a history of its own, into which we cannot here enter.The chief collector for Lorenzo il Magnifico was Johannes Lascaris.It is well known that the collection, after the plundering in the year 1494, had to be recovered piecemeal by the Cardinal Giovanni Medici, afterwards Leo X.
The library of Urbino, now in the Vatican, was wholly the work of the great Federigo of Montefeltro.As a boy he had begun to collect; in after years he kept thirty or forty 'scrittori' employed in various places, and spent in the course of time no less than 30,000 ducats on the collection.It was systematically extended and completed, chiefly by the help of Vespasiano, and his account of it forms an ideal picture of a library of the Renaissance.At Urbino there were catalogues of the libraries of the Vatican, of St.Mark at Florence, of the Visconti at Pavia, and even of the library at Oxford.It was noted with pride that in richness and completeness none could rival Urbino.Theology and the Middle Ages were perhaps most fully represented.There was a complete Thomas Aquinas, a complete Albertus Magnus, a complete Bonaventura.The collection, however, was a many-sided one, and included every work on medicine which was then to be had.Among the 'moderns' the great writers of the fourteenth century--Dante and Boccaccio, with their complete works--occupied the first place.Then followed twenty-five select humanists, invariably with both their Latin and Italian writings and with all their translations.Among the Greek manuscripts the Fathers of the Church far outnumbered the rest; yet in the list of the classics we find all the works of Sophocles, all of Pindar, and all of Menander.The last codex must have quickly disappeared from Urbino, else the philologists would have soon edited it.
We have, further, a good deal of information as to the way in which manuscripts and libraries were multiplied.The purchase of an ancient manuscript, which contained a rare, or the only complete, or the only existing text of an old writer, was naturally a lucky accident of which we need take no further account.Among the professional copyists those who understood Greek took the highest place, and it was they especially who bore the honorable name of 'scrittori.' Their number was always limited, and the pay they received very large.The rest, simply called 'copisti,' were partly mere clerks who made their living by such work, partly schoolmasters and needy men of learning, who desired an addition to their income.The copyists at Rome in the time of Nicholas V were mostly Germans or Frenchmen--'barbarians' as the Italian humanists called them, probably men who were in search of favours at the papal court, and who kept themselves alive meanwhile by this means.When Cosimo de' Medici was in a hurry to form a library for his favorite foundation, the Badia below Fiesole, he sent for Vespasiano, and received from him the advice to give up all thoughts of purchasing books, since those which were worth getting could not be had easily, but rather to make use of the copyists; whereupon Cosimo bargained to pay him so much a day, and Vespasiano, with forty-five writers under him, delivered 200 volumes in twenty-two months.The catalogue of the works to be copied was sent to Cosimo by Nicholas V, who wrote it with his own hand.Ecclesiastical literature and the books needed for the choral services naturally held the chief place in the list.
