Like most of the matters reaching the Sacra Romana Rota, the case between Diego Colón and Isabel de Gamboa would have been referred to the court after she appealed on the grounds that the defendant was too powerful in his home territory for there to be any hope of a fair trial. This was undoubtedly the case here: Diego Colón was not only the Admiral of the Indies, governor of Hispaniola, and viceroy of Hispaniola, but also nephew-in-law to the Duke of Alba; Isabel, on the other hand, was a widow with children from two previous marriages in addition to the child fathered by Diego. She was not, however, as entirely powerless as Hernando’s mother had been in relations with his father. She was a lady-in-waiting to the rightful queen of Castile (Juana), which presumably was how Diego met her while at court in the winter of 1507; but more importantly, in this instance, she also had a relative, Berengario Gamboa, who was one of the powerful proctors in the Sacra Romana Rota. Diego, with a fecklessness that was clearly habitual, had chosen the wrong damsel to distress: he had jeopardized his marriage to the most powerful family in Spain by sleeping with a woman who might just be able to wrest the machinery of Western Christendom against him. Hernando made his first appearance in court on 28 September 1512 and settled in for a long and arduous process.7
But Hernando had no intention of allowing his time in the Eternal City to be swallowed whole by the court. As we know from his notes in the books he bought, which from September 1512 began to include the month as well as the year of purchase, Hernando must on most days have crossed the Ponte Sisto from Trastevere—instead of turning left toward the Vatican—and headed into the Parione district, home to the city’s book emporia. These cartolai would have been fairly familiar in style to Hernando (if wholly unimagined in scope): most of the books would be sold unbound—a cover was added later, according to the customer’s specifications—so the window of a shop presented a display of the title pages of the latest and most exciting works, with others inside on a browsing table known as the mostra. And just as book lovers today can spot certain kinds of books from a distance by their stylized covers, early-modern book lovers might be able to identify printers’ marks on title pages, of which the most prestigious by far was the dolphin and anchor of the great Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, printer of Erasmus and resurrector of classical texts thought long lost. While some bookshops were divided into rough sections, usually simply separating out the expensive law and theology books from the rest, the trained Renaissance reader would have been able to navigate the shop in large part by looking at the size of the books: large-folio volumes for heavy scholarly tomes, thin quarto pamphlets for plays and poetry, and the diminutive octavo “handbooks” pioneered by Aldus Manutius, who made his masterpieces small enough to be carried by men of power out into the world. Hernando would have found the Roman bookshops not simply places of commerce but centers of intellectual life, where devotees of classical architecture would meet to share their observations from walks around the ancient ruins, and thinkers were encouraged to use the books in their discussions of the latest ideas, even if they hadn’t bought them. Although Hernando must have known book collections in Spain, such as the library in Salamanca that had been frescoed with the signs of the zodiac on the orders of King Ferdinand, they were sedate places with strict policies on what got in and what did not, with the august volumes of theology and philosophy literally chained to heavy wooden benches. In the bookshops of Rome, however, he found a library alive with the newest publications, constantly shedding its skin and reinventing itself with new ideas and forms.8
It must have been difficult for Hernando to resist the temptations of the booksellers given that their district lay directly between his lodgings in Trastevere and the Studium Urbis, the Roman university that Hernando clearly attended in some capacity (official or unofficial) during his years in the city. While the university had been without a permanent home for the first two centuries of its existence, it had recently been given its own buildings near Sant’Eustachio. Though it was not the equal of the ancient University of Bologna, the elite of the Italian and European intelligentsia were drawn to it by the hope of finding patronage that might come from being near the Holy See. A rare surviving document from 1514 lists those lecturing at the time, and upon arrival in September 1512, Hernando stockpiled their books, in a fashion charmingly similar to the eager undergraduate of today. One of the lecturers Hernando might have been most excited to hear was Filippo Beroaldo, son of the famous scholar (of the same name) whose study of Apuleius’s Golden Ass—a Latin novel about the mysteries of Egyptian religion—Hernando likely owned before he came to Rome, and whose commentaries on the Roman historian Suetonius he purchased on arrival. In December, Hernando was making assiduous notes while listening to lectures on the Roman poet Juvenal, perhaps by Beroaldo or Giovanni Battista Pio, another rhetorician, whose elegies Hernando had bought in September. And if Hernando was not already aware of his fame before turning up in Rome, he would soon have heard the name of Tommaso Inghirami on everybody’s lips—or, more likely, his nickname, Fedra, which he had earned after a legendary performance (in drag) of the title role in Seneca’s play, staged at the palace of Cardinal Riario. Inghirami had published no great works, and it is even unclear what he would have been lecturing on at the Studium Urbis, but he was one of those familiar professors whose talent as a performer of genius diverts attention from any accusations of insubstantiality. His skills as an orator had paid huge dividends: he was widely seen as the heir to Pomponio Leto as the living spirit of ancient Rome, and since 1510 he had held the lucrative post of Vatican librarian, which did not necessarily demand much from its incumbent. Hernando also seems to have worked closely on Greek grammar and Greek and Roman history with Bartolomeo da Castro, a Spanish scholar of Aristotle who was in Rome at the time.9
Hernando did not, however, confine himself entirely to humanistic studies at the university: following the precepts of one of his first purchases in Rome, the Panepistemon of Angelo Poliziano, he showed an irresistible attraction to a more universal knowledge. He owned a volume by one of the medical lecturers, Bartolomeo de Pisis, and may have heard him speak on medical practice, and much of his time seems to have been given over to lectures on astronomy; several notes from the coming years record Hernando’s work with Sebastianus Veteranus, under whom he studied the latest theories on planetary orbits, a subject with immense implications for the measurement of time and space and which would come to be a linchpin of Hernando’s thought in the years to come. Given his later projects in his garden in Seville, Hernando may well have taken an interest in Giuliano da Foglino, who in 1513 was appointed to Europe’s first professorship of medical botany. One celebrity he certainly took pains to follow was the famous mathematical lecturer at the Studium, the mathematical mentor to none other than Leonardo da Vinci, Luca Pacioli, whose recent treatise De divina proportione, which offered to teach its readers to speak the language of proportion through which God had designed the universe, was illustrated by Leonardo and bought by Hernando upon his arrival in Rome. Less thrilling, perhaps, but no less important in its impact upon the world, was Pacioli’s other contribution made in his Summa arithmetica, which Hernando also bought that September: the first formal European treatment of double-entry bookkeeping. This accounting system, invented by the merchants of northern Italy, was designed to make the increasingly complex transactions of Renaissance finance manageable; yet it was such a powerful tool that it would come to shape profoundly the way in which Europeans saw the world, as a system of profit and loss, of credit and balance: life as a zero-sum game. It seems also to have suggested to Hernando a way to organize the hydralike monster of his growing library.10
It is an open question at what point Hernando’s lavish expenditure on books begins to turn into the idea of a library. It is possible to own a large number of books without their becoming a library: the library only comes into being when the books are put in relation to one another and to books and things not in the library. Or, as a seventeenth-century
scholar-librarian put it, even fifty thousand books without order is not a library, any more than a crowd of thirty thousand undisciplined men is an army. Rome would have presented Hernando with a number of prominent models of the library idea, including the Medici family collection, which had been brought to Rome by Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici in 1508. The blueprint created for this library, when it was founded by Cosimo de’ Medici, was followed by many Renaissance libraries. After inheriting the books of the great Florentine humanist Niccolò Niccoli in the 1440s, the merchant-prince Cosimo had become captivated by the idea of the perfect library and had commissioned one Tommaso Parentucelli to design it for him. The list of books drawn up by Parentucelli, known as the Canone, consisted of volumes considered indispensable to a learned library—thus creating the first “canon” of great books. Parentucelli’s list was groundbreaking in its inclusion of non-Christian learning, and it conceived of a library in broader terms than any before, explicitly including books in every faculty of the Renaissance university—an expanded horizon that caused many contemporaries to celebrate this library as equal to or even greater than the legendary Library of Alexandria—even if Parentucelli’s Canone contained a relatively modest 260 or so titles. When Parentucelli became Pope Nicholas V in 1447, he used the same model to lay the foundations for what was to become one of the world’s greatest libraries: the Biblioteca Palatina, or Palace Library, of the Vatican. It is unthinkable that Hernando would not have visited the public rooms of this library, as many other travelers did, given how much time he spent at the Sacra Rota in the same building. The library consisted of four rooms, though the public could only visit the first two—the Latin and Greek rooms, divided in the way Roman libraries were believed to have been—as the other two, the Secreta and Pontificia, contained the archive of the Vatican and were only accessible to members of the Curia (the Vatican establishment). The rooms were open to the public for two hours a day when the College of Cardinals was in session. The Latin room consisted of sixteen desks, in two rows of nine and seven, divided by a line of columns and presided over by a glorious fresco by Melozzo da Forlì of Pope Sixtus IV, who had given the library its physical space, and the first great librarian, Bartolomeo Platina. The Greek room was accessed through a door from the Latin and had a single row of eight desks. Each desk had an upper and a lower shelf, on which sat about fifty to sixty books, though the books had begun to overflow into a number of separate chests and cupboards.11
But while the Medici and Vatican collections offered Hernando models for his library, these were book temples that emphasized the sacredness of their contents by excluding all but the most prestigious texts—perfect libraries rather than universal ones, and perfect by means of this exclusiveness. The overwhelming majority of the books were manuscripts, and all but a small handful were in the classical languages of Latin and Greek: the newfangled products of the printing press, and books in vernacular languages aimed at a more common readership, were either ignored or consciously excluded. But Hernando’s appetites were already showing themselves to be much less confined than this. Far from restricting himself to prestigious, classical texts, Hernando’s appetite for everything Roman did not even confine itself to the formal bookstores and the rarefied environment of the university: for him, the library of Rome sprawled beyond the civilized displays of the cartolai and the Studium. Out on the street the street singers (cantastorie) would sing the latest ballads and sell copies of the lyrics from their baskets, and peddlers would hawk pamphlets alongside snake-oil cures, souvenirs, and trinkets. Hernando was later to express not just an acceptance of but a preference for little booksellers over the grand emporia who thought their own stock the be-all and end-all. It is not clear at what stage Hernando arrived at the radical conclusion these obrecillas—small, cheap works—were, if anything, more important than the heavy elite tomes collected by most bibliophiles and made plans to collect them systematically; perhaps to begin with he was simply indulging himself when he bought, in his first months in Rome, The Story of the Blonde and the Brunette, or Love Conquers All for a single quatrine, or the Matters of Love for five.12
Wandering the streets and buying from the hawkers would have immersed Hernando in the unending carnival of Rome’s lowlifes: this was still a city in which, as Juvenal had said in his Third Satire, it was careless to go out to dinner without making a will. The contemporary underworld was captured in delicious detail in a Spanish fiction called the Lozana Andaluza (The lusty Andalusian), a picaresque tale that reflects Hernando’s life as if in a fun-house mirror. The heroine of the story, Aldonza, is also born in Córdoba, the product of a love match, and similarly moves to Seville after being orphaned, before traveling the length of the Mediterranean and arriving in Rome at much the same time as Hernando. Unlike Hernando, however, Aldonza’s beauty and friendlessness make her the prey to masculine lust, and her experience of Rome leads her through the city’s cosmopolitan underbelly, doing her best with her body, her many languages, her cooking, and her drug making to navigate the communities of Andalusians, Castilians, Catalans, Genoese, Jews, and Turks who each in turn attempt to hang her out to dry. Touchingly, she and Hernando owned some of the same books—including one of the earliest printed cookbooks (by Platina, the great Vatican librarian)—and faced some of the same challenges as orphaned bastards, though there their similarities end. Hernando’s copies of these books allowed him to participate in elite, male discussions about the nature of things, whereas in Aldonza’s hands they were merely the tools of a lower-class woman.
The lines of separation between the street and the sanctuary were not always so neatly drawn. The elite of the city mingled with the poor during the endless civic festivals, when everyone was allowed masks (though they were enjoined not to bear arms or throw eggshells filled with water, a form of holiday game that lives on in the Dominican Republic as the Juego de San Andrés). Many courtesans like Aldonza leveraged themselves into positions of immense power, perhaps most famously the woman known as Imperia, a favorite of the likes of Agostino Chigi and the cardinals: her apartments were so luxurious that the Spanish ambassador, when paying a visit, felt obliged to spit in the face of his servant as it was the only thing present that wasn’t worth a fortune. And erotic literature was not the sole purview of the street and the boudoir—one of Hernando’s most expensive purchases, which set him back two hundred quatrines in September 1512, was the mystico-sexual fantasy Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, printed with lavish illustrations by Aldus in 1499. And, conversely, the poetry of the street was not all just bawdy fun. Just around the corner from the Studium Urbis a broken classical statue set up in the Parione district had become a landmark for political opposition, with the wits of the city pinning to the statue (nicknamed Pasquino) unflinching satires of the pope, his cardinals, and the city elite. An enterprising—though wisely anonymous—printer had in 1509 begun to collect and publish the best of the poems pinned to the statue. Hernando bought the 1509 volume in his first Italian months and was to become a loyal collector of these in the years to come.13
The pope at which these first “pasquinades” took aim, Julius II, was in every sense the man called forth by Renaissance Rome. Giuliano della Rovere was practically weaned onto papal power in the circle of Pope Sixtus IV, publicly called his “uncle” but widely rumored to be his father, at whose side he was while the first great della Rovere pope worked to restore the Vatican to its former glory and position of political influence. In addition to Sixtus’s creation of an august space for the Vatican Library, his political appointments had swelled the College of Cardinals far beyond its traditional body of twenty-four, and he had instituted major works of building and renovation, bringing Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, Ghirlandaio, and Perugino in to work on the Sistine Chapel. But Giuliano’s ambitions were to dwarf those of his uncle. After signaling (somewhat scandalously) his intentions by taking the papal name Julius, this Caesar of the Church set about rebuilding the military and cultural power of Rome and of the Ch
urch, launching himself into the wars that had been raging in Italy since the 1490s in an attempt to limit the growing power of Venice and to resist French encroachments on the Italian peninsula. At the same time, Julius had broken ground in 1506 on both the new St. Peter’s and on the Cortile del Belvedere, two of the greatest building projects of the age. To meet the incalculable costs of these gigantic works, which were to earn their architect, Bramante, the nickname Maestro Ruinante (the Architect of Destruction), Julius issued a Jubilee Pardon in 1507, a document that promised forgiveness of the sins of those who purchased it, with the proceeds of the lucrative sales being used to plug holes in Vatican finances caused by these lavish projects. Rebuilding the center of Western Christendom almost in its entirety was not, however, enough to satisfy Julius: his terribilità—a new term that sought to capture at once the inspiration and domineering ambitions of Renaissance Rome—found its equal and its second self in the person of Michelangelo, whom Julius set to work building a tomb of immense proportions that was to be the crowning achievement of both sculptor and pope. A contemporary story told how, when Michelangelo pointed out that the roof of St. Peter’s would need to be raised to accommodate the tomb at a cost of one hundred thousand crowns, Julius suggested they round the figure to two hundred thousand and make sure the job was done properly. Many of the satirists pinning poems to Pasquino must have felt, like their Roman predecessor Juvenal, that in such an age “difficile est saturam non scribere”—it was hard not to write satire.14
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 15
