The Popes by Viscount John Julius Norwich

Author:Viscount John Julius Norwich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER XVII

The Renaissance (1447–92)

If, as has been suggested, Martin V was the first Renaissance pope, Eugenius was the second. He was not temperamentally a Renaissance figure – on his deathbed he expressed bitter regrets that he had ever left his hermitage – but his nine years with the Medici in Florence could not have failed to have their effect; and when he returned to Rome (accompanied, incidentally, by Fra Angelico) he devoted himself, in the four years remaining to him, to the continuation of Martin’s work on the city. To bring Rome up to the standards now set by Milan, Genoa, Venice and the other great cities of the north would have taxed the powers of Hercules; but Eugenius worked hard, and when his apostolic secretary Flavio Biondo dedicated to him his three books on the restoration work, Roma Instaurata, the compliment was not undeserved.

Artistically and culturally, however, Rome was still something of a backwater when Tommaso Parentucelli (1447–55), the son of a modest physician in Liguria, was elected pontiff in March 1447, taking the name of Nicholas V. Of the previous 140 years the popes had been absent for well over half, and thanks to the consequent chaos the flowering of classical and humanistic learning that had swept away the last vestiges of the Middle Ages from Tuscany and Umbria had left the city almost untouched. A Dante, a Petrarch, a Boccaccio – all of them Florentines – would have been unthinkable in Rome. Although both Boniface VIII in 1303 and Innocent VII a hundred years later had worked hard to give the city the university it deserved, they had had only moderate success.

With the beginning of the fifteenth century, however, there was a change in the air. First of all, Greek influence had begun to make itself felt. When in 1360 Boccaccio had wished to learn the language, he had had the utmost difficulty in finding anyone in Italy capable of teaching him; he had eventually unearthed an aged Calabrian monk of revolting habits, whom he had lodged in his house for three years, preparing one of the first – and worst – translations of Homer into Latin. But around the turn of the century there had appeared in Florence a first-rate Greek scholar named Manuel Chrysoloras. He taught there for the next fifteen years until his death, leaving behind him a book, the Erotemata, which – though not quite as exciting as it sounds – was essentially a Greek grammar, set out in the form of questions and answers. Among his pupils were two of the most distinguished early Italian humanists, Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, who both became members of the Curia and were thus able to inject some of the new learning into the papal court. Soon, too, Chrysoloras was joined by the impressive company of Greek intellectuals who accompanied John Palaeologus to the Councils of Ferrara and Florence.

These Greeks brought with them a new awareness of antiquity. For a thousand years the pagan splendours of ancient Rome had been ignored or forgotten, being of no interest to either pope or pilgrim.

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