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Humanism and Modernity: A Reconsideration of Bruni's Dialogues*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

David Quint
David Quint*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

The spread of humanism in fifteenth-century Italy was extraordinarily rapid and complete, so much so that it could instill an uncritical complacency in its adherents and practitioners. By midcentury, humanist Latin had become the language of the Roman Curia, and it soon became the language of peninsular diplomacy. Humanists filled positions in the bureaucracies of princely courts and city-republics, and they took jobs as teachers and secretaries in the houses of the powerful. While humanists kept alive the bogeyman of the unlettered scholastic, whose barbarous Latin threatened a return to an age of gothic ignorance, there were, in fact, few obstacles which might slow down their cultural and professional advancement. The way to a career in the clerisy now began in the grammarian's classroom, and the successful humanist rarely cared to question the assumptions of the literary and educational movement to which he owed his livelihood.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1985 , pp. 423 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1985

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Footnotes

*

This essay was awarded the William Nelson Prize for the best article submitted to Renaissance Quarterly in 1984.

References

1 The emergence of humanism and the condition of humanists at the Roman curia have been studied by D'Amico, John F. in Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome (Baltimore and London, 1983)Google Scholar. For the social standing of Florentine humanists and the pattern of their careers, see Martines, Lauro, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists (Princeton, 1963)Google Scholar.

2 Eugenio Garin is particularly identified with the idea that humanism produced a new historical consciousness. See among his many seminal writings on this subject the introduction to Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civil Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (New York, 1965), pp. 1-17, and the essays, “Interpretazioni del Rinascimento” and “La storia nel pensiero del Rinascimento” in Medioevo e Rinascimento (1954; Bari, 1973), pp. 85-100, 178-95.

3 D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism, pp. 123-43, discusses Ciceronianism and its connection with the ideals and needs of the bureaucratic Papal curia. See also Sabbadini, Remigio, Storia del ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterarie nell'età della rinascenza (Turin, 1885)Google Scholar; Pigman, G. W. III, “Imitation and the Renaissance Sense of the Past: the Reception of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus ,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9 (1979), 155—77Google Scholar. On Valla's quarrel with Poggio Bracciolini which opposes Quintilian, the historically oriented grammarian, to Cicero the “timeless” model of eloquence, see Camporeale, Salvatore, Lorenzo Valla: umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972)Google Scholar, especially pp. 91-100. Poliziano's exchange of letters with Paolo Cortesi on the subject of imitation is printed in Prosatori latini del quattrocento, ed. Eugenio Garin (Milan and Naples, 1952), pp. 902-910. See Garin, , “L'ambiente del Poliziano” in La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (1969; Florence, 1979), pp. 335-38Google Scholar, and Grafton, A., “On the Scholarship of Politian and its Context,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977), 150-58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The issue of anachronism is discussed by Greene, Thomas M. in his study of Renaissance literary imitation, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London, 1982), pp. 28–53 Google Scholar.

5 I am citing the text of the Dialogues in Garin, Prosatori latini, pp. 44-99. There is an English translation of Bruni's work in Thompson, David and Nagel, Alan F., eds., The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, and London, 1972), pp. 19–52 Google Scholar.

6 The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (1951; revised edition Princeton, 1966), pp. 225-90. For the Laudatio, see pp. 191-224. See also the chapter on Bruni's Laudatio and the Dialogues in From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (Chicago and London, 1968), pp. 102-37; for the edited text of the Laudatio, see pp. 232-63.

7 The Crisis, p. 242.

8 Garin, , “A proposito di Coluccio Salutati,” Rivista crilica di storia delta filosofia 15 (1960), 73–82 Google Scholar, “La cultura fiorentina nella seconda meta del 300 e i ‘barbari britanni',” La rassegna della letteratura italiana 64 (1960), 181-95.

9 Seigel, “ ‘Civic Humanism’ or Ciceronian Rhetoric? The Culture of Petrarch and Bruni,” Past and Present 34 (1966), 3-48. A catalogue—which, as I shall demonstrate, is incomplete—of Bruni's echoings and borrowings from the De oratore is found in Sabbadini's review of Ernesto de Franco's edition of the Dialogues in the Giomale storico della letteratura italiana 96 (1930), 128-33.

10 Seigel, p. 15.

11 A thoughtful reading of the Dialogues which falls within the critical tradition is to be found in Marsh, David, The Quattrocento Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1980), pp. 24–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There are some exceptions to the scholarly consensus. As Seigel, p. 47, notes, Georg Voigt, in his pioneering study of Italian humanism, did not find Niccoli's recantation altogether convincing; see Die Wiederbetebung des dassischen Altertums (3rd edition; Berlin, 1893), pp. 383-84. More recently, E. H. Gombrich has doubted the sincerity of Niccoli's defense of the trecento authors in the second dialogue. My argument at several points coincides with his findings in “From the Revival of Letters to the Reform of the Arts: Niccolò Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi,” in The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Ithaca, 1976), pp. 93-110. Neal N. Gilbert, in an essay which examines the attitude of the Dialogues towards dialectic, notes that Niccoli's conclusion at the end of the second dialogue returns to the negativism he had expressed in the first. See Gilbert, “The Early Italian Humanists and Disputation,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron, ed. Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Dekalb, 111., 1971), pp. 201-26, p. 212.

12 On Domenico da Prato and Rinuccini, see Baron, The Crisis, pp. 279-331. On the dating of Rinuccini's Invettiva, see Witt, Ronald G., Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati (Durham, North Carolina, 1983), p. 270n.Google Scholar

13 Sismondi offers the classic formulation of this view in chapter 57 of his history of the Italian republics: “L'étude des langues mortes avoit tout-à-coup suspendu la vie chez cette nation… . “ Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge (Paris, 1826), VIII, 4.

14 See Garin, “Dante nel Rinascimento,” Rinascimento 7 (1967), 3-28, especially pp. 18-19. This essay is slightly abridged and translated in The Three Crowns of Florence, pp. 9-34. Garin follows in a general way the reading of Vittorio Rossi, who sees expressed in Bruni's Dialogues the mixed and contradictory attitudes of early humanism towards Dante and trecento culture. See Rossi, Il Quattrocento (1933; ninth edition, Milan, 1973), pp. 102-104.

15 The other internal and external evidence which Baron adduces to support his redating of the second dialogue has been criticized by Seigel, who also includes a short final excursus on the subject in pp. 44-48 of his article. Perhaps Baron's most persuasive evidence is the existence of several manuscripts which contain only the first dialogue, suggesting that it circulated as an independent work before the second was added to it. My aim is not to enter again into the question of how to date the Dialogues, though that question may be inevitable. I seek rather to show that, however they are dated, there is not a dramatic change in the attitude of the character Niccoli, nor of the author Bruni, from one dialogue to another. The republicanism upon which Baron insists is genuinely present in the Dialogues, but it is present in both of them. Bruni's republican thought was undoubtedly shaped by the historical and political events of the early fifteenth century, but it does not appear, from the evidence of the Dialogues, to have fallen neatly into pre-1402 and post-1402 stages. My further aim is to re-orient readings of Bruni's texts away from narrowly defined political questions to other issues at stake in early humanism. As the final remarks of this essay suggest, however, such issues of cultural history may not be separable from questions of social and economic class identification.

16 Gombrich, p. 96, speaks of the “ ‘father killing’ that we associate with new movements” in his discussion of Niccoli.

17 Petrarch, Familiarum rerum libri 23.19: ”… curandum imitatori ut quod scribit simile non idem sit, eamque similitudinem talem esse oportere, non qualis est imaginis ad eum cuius imago est, que quo similior eo maior laus artificis, sed qualis filii ad pattern.” Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco (Florence, 1933-42), IV, 206. The phrase is later echoed by Paolo Cortesi in his exchange of letters with Poliziano in the 1480's. See Prosatori latini, p. 906. See also Garin, , L'educazione in Europa: 1400-1600 (1957; Bari, 1976), p. 102 Google Scholar.

18 Seigel, pp. 14-is. See also Baron, The Crisis, pp. 229-30.

19 I am citing the text of the De oratore edited by Kazimierz F. Kumaniecki (Leipzig, 1969), p. 65.

20 For the text of the De tyranno, see the Tractatus de tyranno von Coluccio Salutati, ed. Francesco Ercole (Berlin, 1914), and, for an English translation, Emerton, Ephraim, Humanism and Tyranny: Studies in the Italian Trecento (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), pp. 70–116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Witt discusses this problematic work in “The De Tyranno and Coluccio Salutati's View of Politics and Roman History,” Nuova rivista storica 53 (1969), 434-74. Witt, pp. 472-74, suggests that Bruni is the inventor of a new, more systematic and historical concept of republican liberty—an invention which reflects the difference between the political and intellectual experience of his generation and that of the older Salutati. See also his comments in Hercules at the Crossroads, p. 386, on Salutati's later shift away from his endorsement of Julius Caesar's career and, pp. 396-401, on Bruni's relationship to Salutati.

21 Brucker, , The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1979), pp. 283–302 Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., p. 301.

23 See the essays of Garin cited in note 2, and also his “La nuova scienza e il simbolo del ‘libro',” in La cultura filosofica del Rinascitnento italiano (Florence, 1979), pp. 451-65. In the context of Brum's Dialogues, see Garin's remarks in “Dante nel Rinascimento,” pp. 17-18.

24 Gombrich, pp. 94-102.

25 Ullman, Berthold Louis, The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati (Padua, 1963), p. 47 Google Scholar and, for a discussion of Salutati's allegoresis in the De laboribus Herculis, pp. 23-26. But see also Witt, Hercules at the Crossroads, pp. 421-22, which argues that Salutati's reliance on allegory diminished during the last years of his career.

26 Baron, , The Crisis, p. 259 Google Scholar.

27 This is letter 4.20 in the Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. Francesco Novati (Rome, 1891-1911), I, 337-42.

28 Gombrich, p. 96.

29 See letter 14.19 in the Epistolario, IV, 1, 126-45, especially pp. 140-41. The letter is analyzed by Sarah Stever Gravelle in “Humanist Attitudes to Convention and Innovation in the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 11 (1981), 193-209, pp. 195-97.

30 For Niccoli's social position, see Martines, pp. 112-16. See also the pertinent remarks by Seigel on the difference between humanist professionals and amateurs in Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism (Princeton, 1968), pp. 239-41.

31 A precedent might be sought in the works of the very Petrarch whom Bruni's Niccoli rejects, in Petrarch's celebrated assertion of his estrangement from his own historical age in the Letter to Posterity. “Incubui unice, inter multa, ad notitiam vetustatis, quoniam michi semper etas ista displicuit; et nisi me amor carorum in diversum traheret, qualibet etate natus esse semper optaverim, et hanc oblivisci, nisus animo me aliis semper inserere.” Opere, ed. Giovanni Ponte (Milan, 1968), pp. 888-90. See Greene, The Light in Troy, pp. 100-101. There is a resemblance in structure of thought between Niccoli's attitude towards the great trecento writers and that of the Schillcrian sentimental poet who accepts his strength of self-knowledge as a trade-off in place of the creative power and native genius of the naive poet. I do not mean to suggest a link between early humanist thought and romantic alienation, each conditioned by different historical moments. But that later alienation grew out of a modern consciousness— a consciousness of modernity—that the humanists were the first to experience.