Thomson I., Manuel Chrysoloras and the Early Italian Renaissance, 1966.pdf

(1690 KB) Pobierz
Manuel Chrysoloras and the Early
Italian Renaissance
Ian
Thomson
F
the eighteenth century, when scholars first began
to
discuss the "Italian Renaissance" as a cultural phenomenon,
the importance of Manuel Chrysoloras, the first notable pro-
fessor of Greek in Western Europe, has been widely recognized.
Writers such as Carlo Rosmini, Jacob Burckhardt, John Addington
Symonds, and Remigio Sabbadini have given him deservedly honor-
able mention as the teacher of a number of influential humanists,
whose interest in classical studies did much to bring about the Renais-
sance as a whole. It was not until
1941,
however, that Professor
G. Cammelli produced a full-length study of Chrysoloras' career and
its effect upon the early Renaissance.
1
This excellent work has made
information on the external events of Chrysoloras' life, especially for
the period
1397-1415,
readily accessible.
The purpose of this article is two-fold: first, to assess the extent of
Chrysoloras' influence on his pupils and the nature of their admiration
for him, with particular reference
to
Guarino da Verona; second, to
suggest a possible motive for his coming to Italy which has received
little or no attention from historians.
Chrysoloras was not without honor in his own lifetime, as is well
attested in the letters and orations of his pupils and friends.
2
Indeed, during the eighteen years between his arrival in Florence in
1397
and his death at or near Constance on April
15, 1415,
his consider-
able intellectual gifts and excellence as a teacher won him almost
universal respect and inspired in some of his pupils a sense of gratitude
that survived him for almost half a century.
ROM AT LEAST
G. Cammelli,
I
dotti bizantini e Ie
origini
dell'umanesimo,
I:
Manuele erisolora
(Florence
1941). Before 1941, the most important work was R. Sabbadini: "L'ultimo ventennio della
vita di Manuele Crisolora,"
Giornale ligustico
17 (1890) 321ff, which established the main
chronology of Chrysoloras' life from 1395-1415.
2
See Carlo Rosmini.
La vita e disciplina di Guarino Veronese
(Brescia 1805) I 3-8; II 29ff;
R. Sabbadini.
La scuola e gli studi di Guarino Veronese
(Catania 1896) 14-16, 213-20.
1
63
64
CHRYSOLORAS AND THE EARLY ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
His most direct contribution to the Revival of Learning was made in
the years
1397-1400,
during which he taught Greek to a small number
of humanists in Florence.
3
These men not only set the cultural tone
of their own city but were able eventually to make their influence felt
all over Italy. It should be noted that since Petrarch and Boccaccio
there had existed among the more intellectually radical scholars in
Florence and throughout northern Italy at least a theoretical desire to
learn Greek, but few of them did much about it.4 Guarino, we are told
by the so-called Anonymous Veronese,5 was "urged by the wise men
whose company he often sought" to learn Greek, but he was the first
important scholar intrepid enough to visit Constantinople for that
specific purpose.
6
Many scholars paid lip service to Greek as an in-
teresting and harmless bagatelle, but the majority of professors and
students were simply not interested or were actively averse. At the
end of the fourteenth century only Coluccio Salutati, Palla Strozzi,
Niccolo Niccoli and a few others-probably no more than ten in
number-were really enthusiastic about learning Greek. Mere num-
bers, however, are unimportant; what matters in cultural history is
breadth of influence and contribution ultimately recognized.
Leonardo Bruni, for instance, contributed to the spread of Greek
culture by a series of important translations.
7
He had cut his teeth as
a translator of Greek with Latin versions of Basilius'
Homilia
and
Xenophon's
Hieron.
By
1403
or
1404
he had produced a translation of
Plato's
Phaedon.
The list continued to grow over the next three dec-
8
R. R.
Bolgar,
The Classical Heritage and its BenefiCiaries
(Cambridge [Eng.] 1954) 403, gives
the following list of Chrysoloras' pupils: "Guarino, Giacopo di Scarperia
(sic),
Roberto
Rossi, Niccolo Niccoli, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, Ambrogio Traversari
0),
Vergerio, Uberto Decembrio, Poggio." (On p. 269 he notes that Poggio "had not been pro-
perly speaking his pupil"). All but Guarino and Decembrio were pupils at Florence.
4
For the lack of response to Greek in Italy, see Denys Hay,
The Italian Renaissance in its
Historical Background
(Cambridge [Eng.] 1961) 86-88. As for Petrarch, there is no doubt that
he could have progressed beyond the Greek alphabet if he had really wanted to; see
D.
J.
Geanakoplos,
Greek Scholars
in
Venice
(Cambridge [Mass.] 1962) 21 n.27.
5
A pupil of Guarino, otherwise unknown, who delivered a spirited defense of the latter
in 1424. The speech was published by Sabbadini, "Documenti Guariniani,"
Atti dell'Acca-
demia
di
agricoltura
di
Verona
18 (1916) 232-242.
6
Other Italians before Guarino went to Constantinople to learn Greek. In Guarino.
Epistolario
ed. R. Sabbadini, I (Venice 1915-1919) 1, of
ca.
1405, we hear of two-Carlo
Lottino and "Marcellus, a man long versed in Greek"-who were resident aliens. Lottino
and Guarino exchanged letters in Greek to improve each other's grasp of the language.
After Guarino, a fair number of other scholars, such as Filelfo (1420-27), visited Constanti-
nople but did so only after the advantages of knOWing Greek had become obvious through
the success of such men as Bruni and Guarino.
7
Cf
H. Baron,
Humanistic and Political Literature
in
Florence and Venice
(Cambridge [Mass.]
1955) 114-125, "Bruni's development as a translator from the Greek."
IAN THOMSON
65
ades, and embraced versions of Aeschines, Plutarch, Demosthenes,
and Aristotle. Already by
1418
he was able to boast in a letter:
Tam
multa etiam ex Platone, Demosthene, Plutarcho, Xenophonte in latinum
traduximus.
8
His most important translations were those of the
Ethica
(before
1416),
foliUca
(1438), and
Oeconomica
of Aristotle, Book 1 of the
(pseudo-) Aristotelian
Oeconomica
being completed on March
3, 1420,
and Book
II
being added between March
25,1420
and March
24, 1421.
9
Roberto Rossi also translated Aristotle, although his work was not as
influential as Bruni's. The only extant version by Rossi is that of
the
Analytica Posteriora.
10
It
is worth noting, however, that in
1411
Guarino praised Rossi's translations of Aristotle and spoke of them
as being in use throughout the "gymnasia" of Italy (Guarino,
Epistolario
1.6.12-24).
Rossi may also have turned his hand
to
other
Greek authors, for in the dedication
to
the
Analytica Posteriora
he says:
Nec quod restet Platonis, com (sic) transtulerimus quaedam et alii alia, si
vita olim dabitur et transferendi facultas, negligemus. Tum etiam Thucy-
didem
...
atque dignissimos alios aggrediemur.
Rossi may therefore have
been somewhat more influential in his own time than has been sup-
posed, but his real Significance in cultural history rests upon his
collection of Greek manuscripts.
l l
In
1404
Pier Paolo Vergerio wrote his famous essay
De ingenuis
moribus et liberalibus studiis adolescentiae,12
the very title of which sug-
gested a break with the traditions of mediaeval education. Vergerio
proposed a return
to
the balanced, liberal curriculum of later Greek
education-in effect,
to
the so-called
enkyklios paideia,
although he
does not use that term-in which the individual's physical and mental
aptitudes were to be equally developed. By giving physical education
such prominence and by insisting that the cultivation of good morals
8
Leonardi Bruni Arretini Epistolarum Libri VIII,
ed.
L.
Mehus, vol. II (Florence 1741) 231
(Ep. X.26).
9
For the date of the
Oeconomica
see Baron,
op.cit.
120, 167-8. Other translations by Bruni
were: Aeschines'
Pro Diopithe
(1406),
In Ctesiphontem
(1412),
De falsa legatione
(before 1421);
Demosthenes'
De Chersoneso
(1405),
De corona
(1407),
Olynthiacs
I-III,
De pace, De falsa lega-
tione
(last three before 1421) and two
Philippics
(before 1444); Plato's
Gorgias
(1409),
Crito
(1423/7), Apology
(1424/8),
Phaedrus
(part, 1424),
Epistulae
(1427) and
Symposium
(part, 1435);
Xenophon's
Hellenica
and
Apologia Socratis
(both paraphrased before 1440). See Bolgar,
Classical Heritage
434-5.
10
Sabbadini reports that this translation is extant in the Marcian Library at Venice (codex
Marcianus latinus 2.231) and dates it posterior
to
1406 (Guarino
Epistolario
III.13).
11
See R. Sabbadini,
Le
scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne' secoli XIV
e
XV,
I (Florence 1905)
15,63.
12
Translated by W. H. Woodward in
Vittorino da Fe1tre and Other Humanist Educators
(Cambridge [Eng.] 1905).
S+G.R.B.S.
66
CHRYSOLORAS AND THE EARLY ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
was the sovereign aim of education, Vergerio pointed the way that
Barzizza, Guarino and Vittorino were to follow. Admittedly so far as
intellectual training was concerned, his "revised" curriculum, con-
sisting of syntax, dialectic, rhetoric, poetry, music, mathematics,
astronomy, natural history, drawing, medicine, law, ethics, and
theology, is little more than a rehashed list of the subjects of the
mediaeval
trivium
and
quadrivium;
nor does Vergerio add any recom-
mendations as to how these subjects should be taught, or for how
long, or in what order. But he did show that a balanced education de-
signed to produce a whole man was desirable; and the inspirational
effect of this upon the great humanistic educators cannot be doubted.
What was implicit in Petrarch was explicit in Vergerio.
It is possible to argue, as Bolgar does
(Classical Heritage
258)
that
Vergerio' s treatise owes nothing to the teaching of Manuel Chryso-
loras and that "we may reasonably assume that he was putting on
paper the principles that had guided him throughout his career," but
there is no evidence to support such an assumption, except for a dis-
puted dating of the
De ingenuis moribus,13
Vergerio spent most of his
life teaching logic, and never opened an independent school in which
he could have implemented his ideas. It is more reasonable to regard
the
De ingenuis moribus
as Vergerio's reaction to the teaching of
Chrysoloras, especially since he is able to cite Greek authorities
directly.
It
is hard not to sense an echo of Chrysoloras in Vergerio's
citation of Aristotle,
Politica
8.3:
erant autem quattuor quae pueros suos
Graeci docere consueverunt: litteras, luctativam, musicam et designativam,
for these words contain in essence the Greek concept of education as
mousike
and
gymnastike.
Through Vergerio, then, Chrysoloras may be
said to have given educationalists in the West a new and clearer in-
spiration to implement the ideals of Greek education, which led to the
translation by Guarino in
1411
of Plutarch's
De liberis educandis
and the
remarkable experiments by Barzizza at Padua
(1408-1420),
Vittorino
at Mantua
(1423-1446),
and Guarino at Venice
(1414-1419),
Verona
(1420--1429),
and Ferrara
(1430--1460).14
C. A. Combi,
Epistole di Pier Paolo Vergerio Seniore
(Misc. Pub!. della R. Deputazione
Veneta di Storia Patria,
SER. IV,
V [Venice 1931] p.
xix,
dates it 1392. W. H. Woodward,
op.cit.
113, dates it 1404, and this is generally accepted.
14
These educators each interpreted Vergerio's general recommendations in his own way.
Barzizza and Guarino lectured on ancient texts from a linguistic and literary standpoint.
Vittorino attempted to cover all the subjects in Vergerio's list but did not teach all the sub-
jects himself. Barzizza neglected physical education. but all three sought to inculcate good
morals.
13

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin