CHAPTER NINE

THE RETURN

“LUCRETIUS HAS NOT yet come back to me,” Poggio wrote to his Venetian friend, the patrician humanist Francesco Barbaro, “although he has been copied.” Evidently, then, Poggio had not been allowed to borrow the ancient manuscript (which he characteristically referred to as if it were the poet himself) and take it back to Constance with him. The monks must have been too wary for that and forced him instead to find someone to make a copy. He did not expect this scribe to deliver the result, important as it was, in person: “The place is rather far away¹ and not many people come from there,” Poggio wrote, “and so I shall wait until some people turn up who will bring him.” How long would he be willing to wait? “If no one comes,” he assured his friend, “I shall not put public duties ahead of private needs.” A very strange remark, for what is public here and what is private? Poggio was, perhaps, telling Barbaro not to worry: official duties in Constance (whatever they might be) would not stand in the way of getting his hands on Lucretius.

When the manuscript² of On the Nature of Things finally did reach him, Poggio evidently sent it off at once to Niccolò Niccoli, in Florence. Either because the scribe’s copy was crudely made or simply because he wanted a version for himself, Poggio’s friend undertook to transcribe it. This transcription in Niccoli’s elegant hand, together with the copy made by the German scribe, spawned dozens of further manuscript copies—more than fifty are known to survive—and were the sources of all fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century printed editions of Lucretius. Poggio’s discovery thus served as the crucial conduit through which the ancient poem, dormant for a thousand years, reentered circulation in the world. In the cool gray and white Laurentian library that Michelangelo designed for the Medici, Niccoli’s copy of the scribe’s copy of the ninth-century copy of Lucretius’ poem—Codex Laurentianus 35.30—is preserved. One of the key sources of modernity, it is a modest book, bound in fading, tattered red leather inlaid with metal, a chain attached to the bottom of the back cover. There is little to distinguish it physically from many other manuscripts in the collection, apart from the fact that a reader is given latex gloves to wear when it is delivered to the desk.

The copy that the scribe made and that Poggio sent from Constance to Florence is lost. Presumably, after completing his transcription, Niccoli sent it back to Poggio, who does not seem to have copied it in his own exquisite hand. Perhaps, confident in Niccoli’s skills, Poggio or his heirs deemed the scribe’s copy not worth preserving and in the end simply threw it away. Lost too is the manuscript that the scribe had copied and that presumably remained in the monastic library. Did it burn up in a fire? Was the ink carefully scraped off in order to make room for some other text? Did it finally molder away from neglect, the victim of damp and rot? Or did a pious reader actually take in its subversive implications and choose to destroy it? No remnants of it have been discovered. Two ninth-century manuscripts of On the Nature of Things, unknown to Poggio or any of his humanist contemporaries, did manage to make it through the almost impenetrable barrier of time. These manuscripts, named after their formats the Oblongus and the Quadratus, were cataloged in the collection of a great seventeenth-century Dutch scholar and collector, Isaac Voss, and have been in the Leiden University Library since 1689. Fragments of a third ninth-century manuscript, containing about 45 percent of Lucretius’ poem, also turned out to survive and are now housed in collections in Copenhagen and Vienna. But by the time these manuscripts surfaced, Lucretius’ poem, thanks to Poggio’s discovery, had already long been helping to unsettle and transform the world.

It is possible that Poggio sent his copy of the poem to Niccoli without having done more than look at it briefly. He had much to occupy his mind. Baldassare Cossa had been stripped of the papacy and was languishing in prison. The second claimant to the throne of St. Peter, Angelo Correr, who had been forced to resign his title of Gregory XII, died in October 1417. The third claimant, Pedro de Luna, barricaded first in the fortress of Perpignan and then on the inaccessible rock of Peñiscola on the sea coast near Valencia, still tenaciously called himself Benedict XIII, but it was clear to Poggio and almost everyone else that Papa Luna’s claim could not be taken seriously. The papal throne was vacant, and the council—which, like the current European Community, was riven with tensions among the English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish delegations—squabbled over the conditions that would have to be met before proceeding to elect a new pope.

In the long interval before an agreement was finally reached, many members of the curia had found paths to new employment; some, like Poggio’s friend Bruni, had already returned to Italy. Poggio’s own attempts were unsuccessful. The apostolic secretary to the disgraced pope had enemies, and he refused to appease them by distancing himself from his former master. Other bureaucrats in the papal court testified against the imprisoned Cossa, but Poggio’s name does not appear on the list of witnesses for the prosecution. His best hope was that one of Cossa’s principal allies, Cardinal Zabarella, would be named pope, but Zabarella died in 1417. When the electors finally met in secret conclave in the fall of 1418, they chose someone with no interest in surrounding himself with humanist intellectuals, the Roman aristocrat Oddo Colonna, who took the name Martin V. Poggio was not offered the post of apostolic secretary, though he could have stayed on at court in the lower rank of scriptor. Instead, he decided to make a very surprising and risky career move.

In 1419, Poggio accepted the post of secretary to Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. The uncle of Henry V (Shakespeare’s heroic warrior of Agincourt fame), Beaufort was the leader of the English delegation to the Council of Constance, where he evidently met and was impressed by the Italian humanist. For the wealthy and powerful English bishop, Poggio represented the most advanced and sophisticated type of secretary, someone deeply versed both in the Roman curial bureaucracy and in prestigious humanist studies. For the Italian secretary, Beaufort represented the salvaging of dignity. Poggio had the satisfaction of refusing what would have been in effect a demotion, had he returned to the Roman Curia. But he knew no English, and, if that did not greatly matter in the service of an aristocratic cleric whose mother tongue was French and who was comfortable in Latin and Italian, it did mean that Poggio could never hope to feel entirely at home in England.

The decision to move, as he approached his fortieth birthday, to a land where he had no family, allies, or friends was motivated by something other than pique. The prospect of a sojourn in a distant realm—much more remote and exotic than Tasmania would now seem to a contemporary Roman—excited the book hunter in Poggio. He had had spectacular successes in Switzerland and Germany, successes that had made his name famous in humanist circles. Other great discoveries might await him now in English monastic libraries. Those libraries had not yet been thoroughly searched by humanists endowed, as Poggio was, with a careful reading of known classical texts, an encyclopedic grasp of the clues to missing manuscripts, and remarkable philological acumen. If he had already been hailed as a demigod for his ability to resurrect the ancient dead, how would he be praised for what he might now bring to light?

In the event, Poggio remained in England for almost four years, but the stay was deeply disappointing. Bishop Beaufort was not the gold mine that Poggio, perennially short of money, had dreamed he would be. He was away much of the time—“as nomadic as a Scythian”—leaving his secretary with little or nothing to do. Except for Niccoli, his Italian friends seem all to have forgotten him: “I have been relegated³ to oblivion as though I were dead.” The English people he met were almost uniformly disagreeable: “plenty of men given over to gluttony and lust but very few lovers of literature and those few barbarians, trained rather in trifling debates and in quibbling than in real learning.”

His letters back to Italy were a litany of complaints. There was plague; the weather was miserable; his mother and brother wrote to him only to pester him for money that he did not have; he suffered from hemorrhoids. And the truly terrible news was that the libraries—at least the ones he visited—were from Poggio’s point of view almost completely uninteresting. “I saw many monasteries,⁴ all crammed with new doctors,” he wrote to Niccoli in Florence,

none of whom you would even have found worth listening to. There were a few volumes of ancient writings, which we have in better versions at home. Nearly all the monasteries of this island have been built within the last four hundred years and that has not been an age which produced either learned men or the books which we seek; these books were already sunk without trace.

There might, Poggio conceded, be something or other at Oxford, but his master Beaufort was not planning a visit there, and his own resources were severely strained. It was time for his humanist friends to abandon their dreams of stupendous discoveries: “you had better give up hope of books from England, for they care very little for them here.”

Poggio professed to find some consolation in embarking on a serious study of the Church Fathers—there was no shortage of theological tomes in England—but he felt painfully the absence of the classical texts he loved: “During my four years⁵ here I have paid no attention to the study of the Humanities,” he complained, “and I have not read a single book that had anything to do with style. You can guess this from my letters, for they are not what they used to be.”

In 1422, after ceaseless complaining, conniving, and cajoling, he finally secured for himself a new secretarial post at the Vatican. Obtaining the money for the voyage back was not easy—“I am hunting⁶ everywhere to find some means of leaving here at someone else’s expense,” he wrote frankly—but eventually he cobbled enough together. He returned to Italy, having uncovered no lost bibliographic treasures and having had no appreciable impact on the English intellectual scene.

On May 12, 1425, he wrote to remind Niccoli that he wished to see the text he had sent him some eight years earlier: “I wanted the Lucretius⁷ for two weeks and no more but you want to copy that and Silius Italicus, Nonius Marcellus, and Cicero’s Orations all in one breath,” he wrote; “because you talk of everything you will accomplish nothing.” After a month had gone by, he tried again on June 14, suggesting that he was not alone in his eagerness to read the poem: “If you send me the Lucretius you will be doing a favor to many people. I promise you not to keep the book more than one month and then it will come back to you.” But another year passed without any results; the wealthy collector seemed to feel that the best place for On the Nature of Things was on his own shelf, near the ancient cameos, the fragments of statues, and the precious glassware. There it sat, perhaps unread, a trophy. It was as if the poem had been reburied, now not in a monastery but in the humanist’s gilded rooms.

In a letter sent on September 12, 1426, Poggio was still trying to recover it: “Send me the Lucretius too,⁸ which I should like to see for a little while. I shall send it back to you.” Three years later, Poggio’s patience was understandably wearing thin: “You have now kept the Lucretius for twelve years,” he wrote on December 13, 1429; “it seems to me that your tomb will be finished sooner than your books will be copied.” When he wrote again, two weeks later, impatience showed signs of giving way to anger, and, in a revealing slip of the pen, he exaggerated the number of years he had been waiting: “You have now kept the Lucretius for fourteen years and the Asconius Pedianus too…. Does it seem just to you that, if I sometimes want to read one of these authors, I cannot on account of your carelessness? … I want to read Lucretius but I am deprived of his presence; do you intend to keep him another ten years?” Then he added, in a more cajoling note, “I urge you to send me either the Lucretius or the Asconius, which I shall have copied as soon as possible and then I shall send them back to you to keep as long as you like.”

But finally—the actual date is unknown—it was done. Released from the confinement⁹ of Niccoli’s rooms, On the Nature of Things slowly made its way once again into the hands of readers, about a thousand years after it had dropped out of sight. There is no trace of Poggio’s own response to the poem he had relaunched, nor is anything known of Niccoli’s reactions, but there are signs—manuscript copies, brief mentions, allusions, subtle marks of influence—that it began quietly to circulate, at first in Florence, and then beyond.

Back in Rome, Poggio had meanwhile picked up the familiar pieces of his existence in the papal court: conducting often lucrative business, exchanging cynical jokes with his fellow secretaries at the “Lie Factory,” writing to humanist friends about the manuscripts they coveted, quarrelling bitterly with rivals. In a busy life—the court rarely stayed in place for very long—he managed to find time to translate ancient texts from Greek to Latin, to make copies of old manuscripts, and to write moral essays, philosophical reflections, rhetorical treatises, diatribes, and funeral orations on the friends—Niccolò Niccoli, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, Leonardo Bruni, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini—who were passing away.

He also managed to father children, many children, with his mistress Lucia Pannelli: they had, if contemporary accounts are accurate, twelve sons and two daughters. To take the scan-dalmongering of the times at face value would be rash, but Poggio himself acknowledged the existence of illegitimate children. When a cardinal with whom he was on good terms reproached him for the irregularity of his life, Poggio conceded his fault but added acerbically, “Do we not every day, and in all countries, meet with priests, monks, abbots, bishops, and dignitaries of a still higher order, who have families of children by married women, widows, and even by virgins consecrated to the service of God?”

As Poggio accumulated more money—and his tax records suggest that he did so with increasing success after his return from England—his life slowly began to change. He remained passionately interested in the recovery of ancient texts, but his own voyages of discovery were behind him. In their place, he began to emulate his wealthy friend Niccoli by collecting antiquities: “I have a room full of marble heads,” he boasted in 1427. In that same year Poggio purchased a house in Terranuova, the small town in Tuscany where he was born and where he would over the next years gradually increase his property holdings. He raised the money for the purchase, it was said, chiefly by copying a manuscript of Livy and selling it for the princely sum of 120 gold florins.

Poggio’s debt-ridden father had once been forced to flee from the town; now Poggio contemplated creating there what he called his “Academy,” to which he dreamed of someday retiring and living in style. “I fished out¹⁰ a marble bust of a woman, wholly undamaged, which I like very much,” he wrote a few years later. “It was found one day when the foundations of some house were being dug. I took care to have it brought to me here and then to my little garden at Terra Nova, which I shall decorate with antiquities.” About another cache of statues he purchased, he wrote that “when they arrive, I shall place them in my little gymnasium.” Academy, garden, gymnasium: Poggio was recreating, at least in his fantasy, the world of the ancient Greek philosophers. And he was eager to confer upon it a high aesthetic polish. The sculptor Donatello, he remarks, saw one of the statues “and praised it highly.”

All the same, Poggio’s life was not perfectly settled and secure. At one point in 1433, when he was serving as apostolic secretary to Pope Eugenius IV (who had succeeded Martin V), there was a violent popular insurrection in Rome against the papacy. Disguised as a monk and leaving his followers to fend for themselves, the pope set out in a small boat on the Tiber to reach the port at Ostia, where a ship belonging to his Florentine allies awaited him. A mutinous crowd along the banks of the river recognized him and showered the boat with rocks, but the pope managed to escape. Poggio was not quite as fortunate: fleeing the city, he was captured by one of the bands of the pope’s enemies. Negotiations for his release broke down, and he was eventually forced to ransom himself for a substantial sum of his own money.

But somehow each of these violent disruptions of his world was righted, sooner or later, and Poggio returned to his books and statues, his scholarly translations and quarrels, and the steady accumulation of wealth. The gradual changes in his life culminated in a momentous decision: on January 19, 1436, he married Vaggia di Gino Buondelmonti. Poggio was fifty-six years old; his bride eighteen. The marriage was not contracted for money but for a different form of cultural capital.¹¹ The Buondelmonti were one of the ancient feudal families in Florence, a fact that Poggio—who wrote eloquently against taking pride in aristocratic bloodlines—manifestly loved. Against those who ridiculed his decision, he wrote a dialogue, “Should an Old Man Marry?” (An seni sit uxor ducenda). The predictable arguments, most of them charged with misogyny, are rehearsed and are met with the predictable replies, many of them equally dubious. Hence—according to the anti-marriage interlocutor, who is none other than Niccolò Niccoli—it is folly for any older man, let alone a scholar, to change his well-tried style of life for one that is inescapably alien and risky. His bride may prove to be peevish, morose, intemperate, sluttish, lazy. If she is a widow, she will inevitably dwell on the happy times she had with her late husband; if she is a young maiden, she will almost certainly prove to be temperamentally unsuited to the gravity of her aging spouse. And if there are children, the old man will experience the bitter pain of knowing that he will leave them before they reach maturity.

But no—according to the pro-marriage interlocutor—a man of mature years will compensate for the inexperience and ignorance of a young wife whom he will be able to mold like wax to his will. He will temper her impetuous sensuality with his wise restraint, and if they are blessed with children, he will enjoy the reverence due to his advanced age. Why should he assume that his life must inevitably be cut short? And, for however many years he is granted, he will experience the unspeakable pleasure of sharing his life with someone he loves, a second self. Perhaps the most convincing moment comes when Poggio speaks in his own voice to say, with unusual simplicity, that he is very happy. Niccoli concedes that there may be exceptions to the pessimistic rule.

As it turned out, in an age of what by our standards was exceedingly low life expectancy, Poggio flourished, and he and Vaggia had what seems to have been a happy marriage, one that lasted almost a quarter of a century. They had five sons—Pietro Paolo, Giovanni Battista, Jacopo, Giovanni Francesco, and Filippo—and a daughter, Lucretia, all of whom survived into adulthood. Four of the five sons embarked on ecclesiastical careers; the exception, Jacopo, became a distinguished scholar. (Jacopo made the mistake of being caught up in the Pazzi conspiracy to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici and was hanged in Florence in 1478.)

The fate of Poggio’s mistress and their fourteen children is not known. His friends congratulated the newly married Poggio on his good fortune and his moral rectitude; his enemies circulated stories of his indifference to those he had thrown off. According to Valla, Poggio cruelly rescinded the procedure by which he had petitioned that four of the sons his mistress bore him be declared legitimate. The charge may be a malicious slander, of the kind rival humanists took vindictive pleasure in, but there is no indication that Poggio went out of his way to treat those he had abandoned with particular generosity or kindness.

As a layman, Poggio was not obliged to leave the papal court after his marriage. He continued to serve the pope, Eugenius IV, through long years of bitter conflict between the papacy and the Church councils, feverish diplomatic maneuvering, denunciations of heretics, military adventures, precipitous flights, and outright war. On Eugenius’s death in 1447, Poggio continued on as apostolic secretary to his successor, Nicholas V.

This was the eighth pope whom he had served in this capacity, and Poggio, now in his later sixties, may have been growing weary. He was, in any case, pulled in different directions. His writing occupied an increasing amount of his time, and he had a growing family to attend to. Moreover, his wife’s deep family ties to Florence intensified the links that he had always carefully maintained to what he claimed as his native city, a city to which he returned at least once a year. But in many ways his service to the new pope must have been deeply satisfying, for prior to his election, Nicholas V—whose secular name was Tommaso da Sarzana—had distinguished himself as a learned humanist. He was the embodiment of that project of education in classical learning and taste to which Petrarch, Salutati, and other humanists had devoted themselves.

Poggio, who had met the future pope in Bologna and had come to know him well, had in 1440 dedicated to him one of his works, On the Unhappiness of Princes. Now, in the congratulatory epistle he hastened to send after the election, he assured the new pope that not all princes needed to be completely unhappy. To be sure, in his elevated position, he would not be able any longer to indulge himself in the joys of friendship and literature, but at least he would be able to “become the protector of men¹² of genius and cause the liberal arts to raise their drooping heads.” “Let me now entreat you, most holy father,” Poggio added, “not to forget your ancient friends, of which number I profess myself to be one.”

In the event, though the reign of Nicholas V was highly gratifying, it was not perhaps as perfectly idyllic as the apostolic secretary might have dreamed. During this period Poggio had his grotesque scuffle with George of Trebizond, complete with screams and blows. He must have been vexed as well that the pope, as if taking seriously the injunction to be the patron of men of genius, chose as another of the apostolic secretaries his bitter enemy Lorenzo Valla. Poggio and Valla promptly embarked on a vitriolic public quarrel, mingling snide comments about each other’s mistakes in Latin with still nastier remarks about hygiene, sex, and family.

The ugliness of these quarrels must have intensified the dream of retirement that Poggio had been toying with since he had purchased the house in Terranuova and begun to collect ancient fragments. And the retirement project was not only his private fantasy; he was at this point in his life famous enough as a book hunter, scholar, writer, and papal official to command the attention of a broader public. He had carefully cultivated friends in Florence, marrying into an important family and allying himself with the interests of the Medici. Though he had lived and worked in Rome for most of his adult life, the Florentines were happy to claim him as one of their own. The Tuscan government passed a public revenue bill in his favor, noting that he had declared his intention eventually to retire to his native land and to dedicate the remainder of his time on earth to study. Whereas his literary pursuits would not permit him to acquire the wealth that came to those engaged in commerce, the bill declared, he and his children should thenceforth be exempted from the payment of all public taxes.

In April 1453, Carlo Marsuppini, the chancellor of Florence, died. Marsuppini was an accomplished humanist; at the time of his death, he was translating the Iliad into Latin. The office was no longer the actual locus of state power: the consolidation of Medici power had reduced the political significance of the chancellorship. Many years had passed since Salutati’s command of classical rhetoric had seemed critical to the survival of the republic. But the pattern had been set for the Florentine post to be held by a distinguished scholar, including two terms by Poggio’s old friend, the immensely gifted historian Leonardo Bruni.

The remuneration was generous and the prestige high. Florence conferred upon its humanist chancellors all the marks of respect and honor that the buoyant, self-loving city felt were its own due. Chancellors who died in office were honored with elaborate state funerals, surpassing those of any other citizen of the republic. When Poggio, seventy-three years old, was offered the vacant position, he accepted. For more than fifty years, he had worked at the court of an absolute monarch; now he would return as the titular leader of a city that prided itself on its history of civic freedom.

Poggio served as chancellor of Florence for five years. The chancellorship evidently did not function entirely smoothly under his leadership; he seems to have neglected the lesser duties of the office. But he attended to his symbolic role, and he made time to work on the literary projects he had pledged himself to pursue. In the first of these projects, a somber two-volume dialogue on The Wretchedness of the Human Condition, the conversation moves from a specific disaster—the fall of Constantinople to the Turks—to a general review of the catastrophes that befall virtually all men and women of every class and profession and in all times. One of the interlocutors, Cosimo de’ Medici, suggests that an exception might be made for popes and princes of the Church who certainly seem to live lives of extraordinary luxury and ease. Speaking in his own voice, Poggio replies: “I am a witness¹³ (and I lived with them for fifty years) that I have found no one who seemed in any way happy to himself, who did not bemoan that life as harmful, disquieting, anxious, oppressed with many cares.”

The unremitting gloominess of the dialogue could make it seem that Poggio had entirely succumbed to late-life melancholy, but the second of the works of this period, presented to the same Cosimo de’ Medici, suggests otherwise. Drawing on the Greek he had first learned more than a half century earlier, Poggio translated (into Latin) Lucian of Samosta’s richly comic novel The Ass, a magical tale of witchcraft and metamorphosis. And for his third enterprise, moving in still a different direction, he undertook to write an ambitious, highly partisan History of Florence from the mid-fourteenth century to his own time. The remarkable range of the three projects—the first seemingly suitable for a medieval ascetic, the second for a Renaissance humanist, the third for a patriotic civic historian—suggests the complexity both of Poggio’s own character and of the city he represented. To the Florentine citizens of the fifteenth century the distinct strains seemed closely bound together, parts of a single, complex cultural whole.

In April 1458, shortly after his seventy-eighth birthday, Poggio resigned, declaring that he wished to pursue his studies and writing as a private citizen. His death followed eighteen months later, on October 30, 1459. Since he had resigned his office, the Florentine government could not give him a grand state funeral, but they buried him with appropriate ceremony in the Church of Santa Croce and hung his portrait, by Antonio Pollaiolo, in one of the city’s public halls. The city also commissioned a statue of him, which was erected in front of Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. When in 1560, a century later, the Duomo’s facade was refashioned, the statue was moved to a different part of the building and now serves as one of a sculpted group of the twelve apostles. It is, I suppose, an honor for the likeness of any pious Christian to function in this way, but I do not imagine that Poggio would have been entirely pleased. He was always determined to receive appropriate public recognition.

Much of the recognition by now has vanished. His tomb in Santa Croce has disappeared, displaced by those of other celebrities. To be sure, the town where he was born has been renamed Terranuova Bracciolini, in honor of its native son, and in 1959, on the five hundredth anniversary of his death, his statue was erected in the leafy town square. But few of those who pass through, on their way to the nearby fashion factory outlets, can have any idea who is being commemorated.

Nonetheless, in his book-hunting exploits in the early fifteenth century, Poggio had done something amazing. The texts he returned to circulation gave him a claim to a place of honor amidst his more famous Florentine contemporaries: Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Luca della Robbia, Masaccio, Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca. Unlike Brunelleschi’s massive cupola, the greatest dome constructed since classical antiquity, Lucretius’ great poem does not stand out against the sky. But its recovery permanently changed the landscape of the world.