BROWNING'S ITALY by HELEN A. CLARKE

Author:HELEN A. CLARKE
Language: deu
Format: epub
Published: 1907-03-14T05:00:00+00:00

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The Grammarian belongs to a later stage of development in Italian culture. Browning dates the poem "Shortly after the Revival of Learning," so we may consider that this learned man belongs to the rising or flood tide of humanism, before the appearance of those degenerate tendencies that self-seeking later brought upon it. The talks by Gemis-tos Plethon in Florence, already mentioned, are by some given as the date of the begin-ning of the Revival of Learning.

He certainly exerted a tremendous influence through Cosimo de' Medici, whom he con-vinced of the importance of the study of Plato, and who thereupon founded the famous Florentine Academy. Cosimo also appointed young Marsilio Ficino to the important office of translating and explaining the Piatonic writings. This Academy exerted a pro-found influence over the thought not only of Italy but of Germany, and so persistent was the influence of Gemistos that, as Symonds remarks, "Piatonic studies in Italy never recovered from the impress of Neoplatonic mysticism which proceeded from his mind."

But it must not be forgotten that there was already a Greek professorship in Florence, held by Manuel Chrysoloras, a Byzantine of noble birth. He came first to Venice on an

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important church mission, was visited there by the Florentines, Roberto di Rossi and Giacomo d'Angelo Scarparia. The latter went back to Byzantium with him, and Rossi, returning to Florence, enlarged so upon the erudite qualities of the learned Greek that the Signory sent him an invitation to fill the Greek chair in the university, which he accepted in 1396. Thus it was that Greeks came to Italy and Italians went to Constan-tinople to learn Greek. As Sedgwick puts it "The humanists played a part analogous to that which men of science play to-day. They devoted themselves heart and soul to the classics, as men of science do to nature. For some time they had had access to the Latin past through Italy, and now they also found their way to the far greater classic world of Greece. The one uninterrupted communication with that world was through Constantinople, which, like a long, ill-lighted and ill-repaired corridor, led back to the great pleasure domes of Plato and Homer, and all the wonderland of Greek literature and thought."

Although in the fourteenth Century great and general enthusiasm for classical antiquity burst forth, it was not until the fifteenth that new discoveries of manuscripts were made,

and the systematic creation of libraries begun by means of copies and the rapid multiplica-tion of translations from the Greek. Burck-hard declares that if it had not been for the "enthusiasm of a few collectors of the age,who shrank from no effort or privation in their researches, we should certainly possess only a small part of the literature, especially that of the Greeks, which is now in our hands." Many are the stories told of for-tunes spent and time devoted to the collec-tion of manuscripts. Pope Nicholas V, whom we have already mentioned, when only a simple monk, ran

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