Giannozzo Manetti by David Marsh

Author:David Marsh [Marsh, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Renaissance, Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Italy
ISBN: 9780674238350
Google: a_uwDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2019-11-19T01:11:44+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Contemporary Reputation and Posthumous Fortune

EVEN DURING HIS lifetime, Manetti was the object of admiration in humanist circles. An important witness is offered by Francesco Filelfo’s Commentationes florentinae de exilio (Florentine Discussions on Exile) (1440), an anti-Medici dialogue that also features Palla and Nofri Strozzi, and other prominent citizens. (The Medici reprisals against the Strozzi clan would later arouse the indignation of Vespasiano da Bisticci, who repeatedly denounced such “ingratitude” in his biography of Manetti and in a separate treatise.1) Filelfo despised Poggio, and portrayed him as the butt of the jests and insults of the other interlocutors, including Manetti.2 By contrast, Filelfo’s portrait of Manetti, who appears in all three books of the dialogue, is positive, since he considered him one of his best students.3 He also considered him an ally as a learned Hellenist who translates Hesiod and Homer for the dim-witted Poggio in Book 1, and denounces Poggio’s ignorance in Book 3.4 By contrast, Manetti is portrayed as a scholarly gentleman who earns the respect of older Florentines like the philosophical Palla Strozzi in Book 2 and his old mentor Leonardo Bruni in Book 3, as we shall soon see. Twenty-five years after the composition of his dialogue, Filelfo wrote a letter to the Milanese humanist Lodrisio Crivelli (Epistle 26.1, 1 August 1465), in which he cites Manetti, together with Giovanni Toscanella and Lapo da Castiglionchio, as one of his best Florentine students, presumably instructed in Greek.5

As we have seen, Vespasiano wrote that Manetti claimed to have memorized three books—Paul’s Epistles, Augustine’s City of God, and Aristotle’s Ethics—and that he particularly admired Augustine as a theologian and Aristotle as a philosopher.6 We find confirmation of this in Filelfo’s dialogue. In Book 1, the humanist is praised for his Christian piety by Palla Strozzi:

Manetti. Certainly, Palla, all that you say is true, and your words provided me with marvelous pleasure. I am sometimes accustomed to marvel at the stupidity of certain persons who, upon hearing some example or saying drawn in timely and apt fashion from the Christian faith, change their countenance and avert their eyes as if offended …

Palla. You are helping me, Manetti, and rightly so. For he who shrinks from the sayings and examples of the Christian faith is assuredly no Christian.

(Manettus. Profecto, Pallas, vera sunt quae dicis omnia, meque tua mirifice delectat oratio. Soleo enim nonnunquam mirari quorundam inscitiam, qui cum aliquod aut exemplum aut dictum e fidei Christianae relligione vel tempestive apteque depromptum audierint, tanquam offensi et mutant vultum et avertunt faciem.…

Pallas.. Adiuvas me, Manette, et recte quidem. Nam qui abhorret a dictis atque exemplis Christianae fidei, is certe Christianus non est.)7

Later, in Book 3 Manetti’s subtlety as a logician is praised, by no less an authority than Leonardo Bruni, the translator of Plato and Aristotle:

Manetti. But, Leonardo, I think Xenocrates was more prudent in his division, since he used the singular number. For if he had used the plural, once things of different kinds were being referred to, his entire division would have been false.

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