by Stuart Kells
For these and other reasons, the name Poggio carries baggage. Some modern authors have come straight out and called him a thief. Library historian Alfred Hessel wrote of Poggio, ‘When he could do nothing else, he copied texts, but he preferred to “save” them by thrusting them under his robe.’ This picture of Poggio resembles the nineteenth-century book thief James Halliwell, another bibliophile who famously ‘rescued’ books by stealing them. E. V. Lucas recalled of Halliwell, ‘If he ever chanced to see anything in anyone else’s house or in a museum that he thought he was more worthy to possess, he had no scruples about taking it.’
There are other reasons to doubt Poggio’s account. The story of the Tuscans’ discoveries has a familiar ring to it. There are many other early descriptions of encounters with books in strange and frightful circumstances. Together, these stories constitute a hoary genre in which the thoughtful, archetypical book-lover ‘rescues’ manuscripts from misuse and neglect. The genre depends on a difference in values for its dramatic force. On one side of the difference are those who recognise and appreciate rare manuscripts. On the other side are those who regard them without respect or sentiment. Often, the difference between these viewpoints is excruciating.
Take, for example, the ‘greatest coup’ of Milan’s Ambrosian Library, which, in the seventeenth century, swapped a selection of ‘more useful’ modern books for part of Bobbio’s ancient library. Bobbio at that time owned a magical and priceless collection—including most of those 666 books it had held in the tenth century, one of the very few substantial surviving groups of Italian pre-Caroline manuscripts—and it swapped them for the latest outputs of the printing press. Another seventeenth-century Ambrosian coup is also informative about the difference in values. Antonio Salmazia spent a year in Corfu hunting Greek manuscripts for the library. He succeeded in buying a total of 113 manuscripts there. In today’s interior-design magazines, suppliers advertise old leather-bound books at a price per metre. The manuscripts from Corfu suffered an even ruder slight: being sold by weight. Each Corfiote pound-weight of manuscript cost Salmazia five Milanese lire.
A classic of the ‘manuscript rescue’ genre is the description of Boccaccio’s visit to the monastery library at Monte Cassino. Boccaccio was escorted to a store of ‘noble manuscripts’ in a doorless loft that was reached by a ladder. Inside, he found books white with dust; books with whole sheets ripped out; books with their margins cut away. A weeping Boccaccio demanded to know how such precious volumes could be so ill-used. A monk told him that whenever his brethren needed money, they would cut out enough parchment leaves from a Bible to make a little psalter, then sell it. They also sold the cut-away margins.
Boccaccio’s visit brings to mind the emptying of the library of the University of Oxford—the predecessor to the Bodleian. In 1550, at the height of the Reformation, all the books in that library, including more than 600 manuscripts, were sold to bookbinders and other tradesmen for the value of the vellum and parchment. The Dean of Christ Church led the purge; he was intent on eradicating all traces of Catholicism, and all ‘superstitious books and images’. Six years later, Christ Church College bought the emptied bookcases. For the next forty-two years, individual colleges had libraries, but the university itself had none. Thanks to this and other disposals, bibliophiles made wonderful finds in unlikely locations. Sir Robert Cotton was at his tailor’s shop when he saw by chance an ancient document that the tailor was about to cut up and use as a tape measure. On examination, the sheepskin parchment turned out to be an original Magna Carta—one of as few as four that King John had signed in 1215—still with ‘all its appendages of seals and signatures’ attached.
Rafael Tabares left behind another account of manuscript neglect: the story of the Biblioteca Colombina. At the age of fourteen, Fernando Columbus—the son of Christopher Columbus and Beatriz Enríquez—had accompanied his father on his fourth voyage across the Atlantic. When ‘tall, most amiable and very fat’ Fernando obtained his maturity, he acquired a fortune in property and slaves that made him one of the richest men in Spain. In 1526 he built a house in Seville on the banks of the Guadalquivir. He planted the garden with American trees, and filled a large room with more than 15,000 books.
After Fernando’s death, the Biblioteca Colombina was moved to Seville Cathedral. In 1552 the books were installed in a cathedral annexe that was built into the wall of a former mosque. Two decades later, King Philip II of Spain ordered the earliest manuscripts to be transferred to the library of the royal monastery at El Escorial. Fourteen years after that, the Colombina collection came under the scrutiny of the Inquisition. The Basel 1528 edition of St Cyril’s Works, edited by the German Protestant Oecolampadius, had most of its second volume and the whole of the third removed. Other books were condemned to total destruction.
For the books that remained in the Colombina library at Seville, the seventeenth century was a period of prolonged contempt, with occasional moments of care, such as in 1683 when many of the books were rebound in vellum. The eighteenth century was a time of appalling neglect. Tabares, Colombina’s under-librarian, described how ‘in his youth he and other children were allowed to play in the room and run their fingers over the illuminated manuscripts and books of prints’. The building fell into disrepair; the gutters leaked and water ran into the library, drenching several volumes. Light, damp and misuse transformed other neglected volumes into ‘powdery nuisances’. Tabares helped set things right, but, in the nineteenth century, the losses mounted due to further damage and through theft and secret sales of books. As at 1970, only about 5500 titles of Fernando Columbus’s bequest survived in the Colombina. Almost 10,000 volumes had been lost.
Yet another example from this baleful genre has a picturesque setting. In 1801 Edward Daniel Clarke, a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, anchored his small caïque in the port of Scalea, on the Greek island of Patmos, and walked the four winding kilometres from the quay, past a concentration of ‘generally handsome’ local women, to the highest part of the island. There sat an Orthodox monastery, founded in 1088: the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian. Clarke was accompanied by his pupil and friend from Jesus, John Marten Cripps, and an interpreter called Riley. (On this tour, Clarke and Cripps had first set out from England in May 1799, initially with Malthus—the writer on population—and William Otter—a future Bishop of Chichester. Malthus and Otter ‘soon dropped off’.)
On Patmos, Clarke and Cripps carried impeccable credentials: letters of introduction from the Capudan Pasha, Grand Admiral in the Turkish Sultan’s government, commander-in-chief both of the fleet and of the army. At the monastery they were received by the abbot and his subordinate the bursar. Clarke presented a letter from the Capudan Pasha. It was written in Turkish, so Riley interpreted. Among other courtesies, the letter enabled the foreigners to order bread from the island for their voyage.
Escorted by the abbot and his colleague, the Englishmen were taken on a tour of the monastery. They were shown a small rectangular chamber lined with shelves and nearly filled with books. The shelves were packed with printed volumes, ‘for these, being more modern, were regarded as the more valuable’. The old parchment manuscripts, in contrast, ‘were considered only as so much rubbish’ and were heaped and thrown about on the floor, some with covers and some without, prey to damp and worms. A quantity of manuscripts had been cut up to serve ‘any purpose for which the parchment might be required’. At the end of the chamber was a pile of Greek codices, some of them evidently of great antiquity. The party asked the abbot what they were. Turning up his nose with an expression of indifference and contempt, he replied, ‘χειρόγραφα! Manuscripts!’
Clarke and Cripps calculated the number of volumes in the bookroom to be about 1000, of which more than 200 were manuscripts. After the Englishmen made plans for a rescue, Riley opened negotiations with the abbot, and Clarke and Cripps ‘fell on the contemned heap’ where, almost immediately, they discovered Arethas’s Plato. Neither the abbot nor the
bursar could read. They agreed to sell five of the manuscripts, so long as the sale was kept secret from the Patmosians, some of whom, the abbot feared, were spies for the Turkish government. Excited but apprehensive, the travellers returned to their boat and waited. In due course a monk appeared carrying the manuscripts in a large basket on his head. As he came alongside, he said aloud, so the nearby islanders could hear, that he’d brought the loaves of bread that the Englishmen had ordered via the Capudan Pasha.
Some of these stories of book discovery are surely apocryphal. There is considerable doubt, for example, as to whether Cotton really did find an original Magna Carta at his tailor’s shop. The abbot at Patmos might not have been as much of a philistine as Clarke related. Which brings us back to the question: were Poggio and Rustici telling the truth about St Gall?
Alfred Hessel certainly did not think so. ‘In the customary manner,’ Hessel wrote, Poggio ‘uttered bitter complaints about the state of the libraries in these places and declared it his duty to free the treasures of antiquity from their bonds.’ And yet, in the centuries after Poggio’s arrival, other visitors to St Gall painted a similar picture of neglect. Johann Strümpf, for example, inspected Hartmut Tower in 1548 and found its manuscripts lying ‘in a disorderly heap’. Most damning for the monks of St Gall, though, is the appalling evidence that they committed book crimes far worse than neglect. The case of the Vetus Latina Gallensis is a tragic example.
An exceptionally early version of the Latin Bible, the Vetus Latina pre-dated St Jerome’s Vulgate Bible. When later and ‘better’ Bible texts came available, the monks of St Gall cut their Vetus Latina into strips of parchment and used them as reinforcement in the spines and covers of newer manuscripts. An early Vulgate manuscript at St Gall was also sliced up; a total of 110 fragments of that exist today. They date from the fifth century and together are the oldest ‘surviving’ (barely) translation of St Jerome’s gospels. Other equally significant St Gall manuscripts were similarly cut up, including an important Lombard law book.
Naturally for a place founded by an Irish monk, St Gall held early Irish manuscripts. Numbering fifteen volumes in all, they dated from the seventh to the ninth century, the foundation years of the monastery. Priceless artefacts from the era in which Irish and Scottish missionaries helped preserve and renew European Christianity, all fifteen were of worldwide importance for the history of religion, culture, language and palaeography. One of them, for example—the Grammatica Prisciana, c. 845—is today the main source for the philology of Old Irish. How, then, did the monks of St Gall treat the Irish manuscripts? Out of the fifteen, a total of eleven were cut into fragments. Apart from breaking and cutting up books, the monks at St Gall also washed and scraped manuscript leaves to remove the original ink so the parchment could be reused.
The library historian and bookman Anthony Hobson accepted Poggio’s and Rustici’s accounts as truthful, and it seems that the Tuscans were indeed telling the truth about St Gall. They were book heroes in a world over-endowed with book villains. St Gall’s Abbot Von Gundelfingen allowed the Tuscans to take away to Italy five gems of classical Roman literature: Flaccus’s Argonautica, Italicus’s Punica, Pedianus’s two commentaries and Quintilian’s Institutiones oratoriae. With characteristic drama, Poggio wrote of the Quintilian manuscript: ‘By Heaven, if we had not brought help, he would surely have perished the very next day.’ Poggio and his fellows had rescued this unique star of the Roman firmament ‘not merely from exile, but virtually from annihilation’.
St Gall was not the only abbey that Poggio visited during the Council of Constance. He called on other Swiss abbeys, as well as Swabian and French ones such as those at Reichenau, Weingarten and Cluny. Nearly everywhere he went he made spectacular discoveries. At Cluny, he found two orations of Cicero’s, previously only known in incomplete versions. At Monte Cassino, a manuscript of Frontinus’s late first-century De aquaeductu—a treatise on Rome’s waterways. At Langres and Cologne, Cicero’s Oration for Caecina and another sixteen Ciceronian orations, many of them hitherto unknown.
He also found works by Nonius Marcellus, Flavius Caper, Probus and Eutyches; Cicero’s Pro Sexto Roscio; Festus’s De significatu verborum; Manilius’s Astronomica; Ammianus Marcellinus’s Res gestae; the Silvae of Statius; and Apicius’s work on cooking. And he found Eden.
In 1416 Poggio travelled, ‘for the benefit of the waters’, to the opulent German bath town of Baden, ‘to which I am come to try whether they can remove an eruption which has taken place between my fingers’. From the town he wrote an excited letter to his friend Niccolò Niccoli.
Much is said by the ancients of the pleasant baths of Puteoli, which were frequented by almost all the people of Rome. But in my opinion, these boasted baths must, in the article of pleasure, yield the palm to the baths of Baden. For the pleasantness of the baths of Puteoli was founded more on the beauty of the circumjacent country, and the magnificence of the neighbouring villas, than on the festive manners of the company by which they were frequented. The scenery of Baden, on the contrary, has but few attractions; but every other circumstance relating to its medicinal springs, is so pregnant with delight, that I frequently imagine that Venus, and all her attendant joys, have migrated hither from Cyprus. The frequenters of these waters so faithfully observe her institutes, so accurately copy her manners, that though they have not read the discourse of Heliogabalus, they seem to be amply instructed by simple nature.
The public baths, ‘exposed to view on every side’, were frequented by people of all ages and of each sex. The male and female bathers, ‘entertaining no hostile dispositions towards each other’, were separated ‘only by a simple railing’; at other baths, the barrier was a flimsy partition with low windows,
through which they can see and converse with, and touch each other, and also drink together; all which circumstances are matters of common occurrence. Above the baths are a kind of galleries, on which the people stand who wish to see and converse with the bathers; for every one has free access to all the baths, to see the company, to talk and joke with them. As the ladies go in and out of the water, they expose to view a considerable portion of their persons; yet there are no door-keepers, or even doors, nor do they entertain the least idea of any thing approaching to indelicacy.
Men and women were separated in the water but they came and went via a common passage, the setting for frequent ‘very curious encounters’. Poggio was especially struck by the young women—‘good looking and well-born and in manner and form like a goddess’—and their mode of dress—‘linen vests, which are however slashed in the sides, so that they neither cover the neck, the breast, nor the arms of the wearer’. Thus attired, some of the young women played harps in the shallows.
In January 1417, in the monastery at Fulda in Germany, Poggio encountered Agrimensores—an illustrated ninth-century Roman manuscript on agriculture and land surveying. There he also made his most famous find: the only known manuscript of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (‘On the Nature of Things’). Written in Latin, the manuscript is a poem of 7400 lines, divided into six books and giving a full description of the world as viewed by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. John Addington Symonds’s 1877 book, Renaissance in Italy: The Revival of Learning, and Stephen Greenblatt’s 2011 book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, chronicled Poggio’s discovery of the Lucretius manuscript—and how it turbocharged the Renaissance, the Reformation and modern science.
Poggio assembled a priceless personal collection of manuscripts that was surpassed in Florence only by the superb collection of 800 manuscripts assembled by Niccolò Niccoli. Poggio’s books ultimately found a home in Florence’s marvellous Laurentian Library—the place where Michelangelo proved he was a genius of architecture as well as sculpture and painting.
Starting in 1523, Michelangelo planned and guided the library’s construction under the patronage of the Medici pope Clement VII. The artist’s bold and lively architectural innovations, which create the impr
ession of organic movement, mark out the library as an exemplar of Mannerism. Michelangelo attended to every aspect of the design, and made three-dimensional models so that the builders would realise his vision precisely. In January 1559 he sent a model and a letter to his collaborator architect Bartolomeo Ammannati:
I wrote to tell you I had made a little clay model of the Library staircase; I’m now sending it to you in a box, and as it is a small affair, I have not been able to do more than give you an idea, remembering that what I formerly proposed was freestanding and only abutted on to the door of the Library. I’ve contrived to maintain the same method; I do not want the side stairs to have balusters at the ends, like the main flight, but a seat between every two steps, as indicated by the embellishments. There is no need for me to tell you anything about bases, fillets for these plinths and other ornaments, because you are resourceful, and being on the spot will see what is needed much better than I can. As to the height and length, take up as little space as you can by narrowing the extremity as you think fit. It is my opinion that if the said staircase were made in wood—that is to say in a fine walnut—it would be better than in stone, and more in keeping with the desks, the ceiling and the door.
Michelangelo had to discard the idea of making the stairwell in walnut: the squeaking timber stairs would have distracted the monks. He and Ammannati made do with monumental marble. John Shearman wrote of the library in his 1967 book on Mannerist art:
The principal development here is an application of licence to all architectural members, major and minor. It is the first building that seems to have been turned outside in, for the massive treatment of the interior walls belongs by tradition to exteriors.
The walls feature purely decorative volutes that are oversized and‘seem to hang there like tongues’. James Ackerman noticed how, in the corners, the giant volutes ‘seem to mate rather than meet’.
