Quotes About Vespasiano

One of the first people to take an interest in Vespasiano, to draw him into this charmed circle of wise and valorous men, was a cardinal named Giuliano Cesarini. Vespasiano would have been about sixteen when the two of them met in Michele Guarducci's bookshop.

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.

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.

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?

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