Quotes from Ross King

An old saying went back to the time of the Venerable Bede: "As long as the Colosseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, the world will fall."11 The Roman people seemed sorely neglectful of this vital harbinger of the world's fate. It was used as a limestone quarry, as an open-air market, and, in the case of the Frangipane and Annibaldi clans, as a fortified palace from which to wage violent feuds against their enemies.

Cesarini had suffered poverty in his student days. He had been forced to copy out his own textbooks because he could not afford to buy them and, when he served as tutor to the sons of a wealthy family, had collected the stubs of candles after their splendid banquets in order to prolong his studies into the evening—for the acquisition of knowledge in those days required not just books but also a good supply of candles to read by.

At the end of 1445, as winter gripped the Tuscan hills, Vespasiano departed for Lucca, forty-five miles to the west of Florence. His bona fides declared him the procuratore, or agent, of Cosimo de' Medici.34 This position was bound to open doors, and he was welcomed into the finest home in Lucca, that of Michele Guinigi.

Since books were not mass produced, each of these two hundred manuscripts was slightly different from the others, the product of an individual scribe at a particular point in time copying out the product of another individual scribe, and so forth. Manuscripts were often unreliable because of the errors and inaccuracies introduced over the centuries and then compounded as one flawed manuscript begat an even worse version.

Petrarch complained that, so sloppy were the scribes of his day, and so full of errors were the manuscripts they produced, "an author would not recognize his own work." 7

It was all too easy for errors in transcription to creep into manuscripts. To produce new copies, scribes needed to decipher handwriting that was sometimes several hundred years old and in a style very different from the one they knew.

Vespasiano's biographies were crucial, therefore, to the formation of one of history's most famous and endearing (if sometimes misleading) narratives: how the rediscovery of ancient books refreshed and "rebirthed" a disoriented and moribund civilization.

work contained biographies of famous men (and one woman) from the fifteenth century: everyone from popes, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops to assorted scholars and writers, including Niccoli and Poggio. What these illustrious figures had in common was that Vespasiano knew them all.

These men were manuscript hunters, teachers, scribes, scholars, librarians, notaries, priests, and booksellers—bookworms who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and tried to imagine and to forge a different world: one of patriotic service, of friendship and loyalty, of refined pleasures, of wisdom and right conduct, of justice, heroism, and political freedom; a world in which a life in a better society could be lived in the fullest and most satisfying way possible.

this series of biographies quickly turned his interests and attention from the visual arts to the vibrant intellectual life depicted in Vespasiano's pages: from paintings and statues to manuscripts and libraries. The journey through the century, with this well-connected, name-dropping bookseller as a guide, proved exhilarating. Vespasiano was, Burckhardt declared, "an authority of the first order for Florentine culture in the fifteenth century," 7

Under what circumstances was the wisdom of the ancient world lost? By what means, and from what sources, was it recovered? Why should Christian scholars have wished to recover pagan writings in the first place? And how did Vespasiano, a young man from humble origins with poor prospects and an apparently limited education, become so crucial to this story?

Female nudes were not meant to titillate the viewer with their sensuality but to give physical form to abstractions such as ideal beauty or chaste love.

Ah, the pleasant balm of routine" ~ Isaac Inchbold

Ancient Rome had ultimately boasted more than twenty public libraries. They were dotted around its hills and forums, housed in temples, palaces, and porticoes, even in the baths.

After all, no matter how elegant the script or how beautiful the illuminations and bindings, the pages had been made from the hides of dead beasts.

Most of the codices were to be secured to their desks by chains attached to iron rails, preventing readers from making off with the valuable volumes.

Seneca the Younger, who condemned collectors for caring more about the outsides of books than their contents, and for using books "not as the tools of learning, but as decorations for the dining-room." Petrarch had likewise criticized collectors who hoarded manuscripts as ornaments for their homes. "There are those who decorate their rooms with furniture devised to decorate their minds," he sniffed, "and they use books as they use Corinthian vases." 36

One day during Holy Week around the year 1400 Niccoli had gathered with some friends at his elegant home. One of his guests was Leonardo Bruni, a literary scholar and translator who would later write up the conversation of that day. Bruni was destined to become one of the most celebrated and influential of all of Florence's lovers of wisdom. He had been born about 1370 in Arezzo, the birthplace of Petrarch

His students were intended to become a caste of capable citizens and inspired political leaders, men who were, as he hoped, "fit for the management of public and private business."36 Above all, he wished to create what he called the vir bonus dicendi peritus, the "good man skilled in speaking"37—someone who was both articulate and virtuous, and who used his oratorical powers for the good of his society.

Top hats and frock coats were by 1863 a distinctly modern costume. The top hat had been invented in 1797 by the London haberdasher John Hetherington, who caused a riot when he stepped outside with one perched on his head: children screamed, women fainted, the arm of an errand boy was broken, and Hetherington was hauled before the courts to explain the meaning of his alarming new invention.

In Florence, more than anywhere else, large numbers of people could read and write, as many as seven in every ten adults. The literacy levels of other European cities, by contrast, languished at less than 25 percent.

Buttresses were one of the prime structural features of Gothic architecture: by accommodating the thrust of the vaults transferred to them from strategic points, they allowed for walls pierced by a multitude of windows to rise to spectacular heights, filling the church with heavenly light—the aspiration of all Gothic builders.

Sprezzatura is a style of elegant nonchalance.

Besides helping to stock the library in San Marco, Vespasiano received another commission from Cosimo. Most of the codices were to be secured to their desks by chains attached to iron rails