Bisticci, Vespasiano da

BISTICCI, VESPASIANO da. - He is the most famous of the great cartolai (1421-98), as the booksellers of the Renaissance were called before printing; and his paradigm in the classical world could be Atticus, the friend of Cicero.

As long as culture remained medieval, that is, confined to the ecclesiastical circle, the copying and illuminating of codices was the care and privilege of monks; nor did the scriptoria of the Carolingian Renaissance, fruitful though it was, represent a revelation. But afterward, with the spread and secularization of knowledge, through episcopal schools and universities, its instruments were ever more widely demanded. It was not a matter of asking for new things (although, in every age, discovering codices has been nothing other than knowing how to inform oneself where they were and how they could be reached), but of obtaining new copies; and the cartolaio entered the scene. He is not the discoverer, but the divulger of the discovery. The lord who wishes to possess in his library an ancient work in the original (or, sometimes, if Greek, in Latin) turns to him. Thus B. saw in his shop many of the powerful of the earth (before the advent of printing dethroned him); he was, in that field, the trusted man of the Medici; he sat as intermediary between the seekers and the distributors of wisdom (the learned); of many of these he left us the portrait in a book deservedly famous and always pleasant to read: Vite di Uomini Illustri del secolo XV. Humanism, with the religious feeling for wisdom that it infused into the conscience of the world, shines through it pure and exemplary. For the writer of those pages, the light, honor, and strength of the world is not the powerful man, but the man of letters. Who, however, reaches the height of his dignity not when he creates ex novo, but when he contributes to the recovery and re-fertilization of ancient wisdom by translating and composing (two verbs inseparable in B.'s prose almost like a hendiadys). And by composing he means to extract florilegia of ancient wisdom (and from this came the famous "treatises"). Pope Nicholas V, he says, having brought many learned men to Rome with very large salaries, wrote to Florence to Messer Giannozzo Manetti that he should come to Rome to "translate and compose." Thus, by offering the instruments for the rebirth of Wisdom, the good cartolaio feels himself the least coadjutor of that Nicholas V who, in championing this immense work of universal piety, is the greatest and most strenuous. Says B.: "If in the time of Scipio Africanus there had not been Livy and Sallust, and other writers, the fame of so worthy a man would have perished together with him, and with it would have perished that great example of virtue."

To enlighten the world, attributed by B. to writers and historians, means plainly "to save." In his book he wishes only to recount the "lives" of the great priests whom he, a poor sacristan, has seen officiating in the temple of wisdom. He knew them too closely not to have noticed their weaknesses as well; but he venerates them too much not to be naturally led to idealize them: between the two extremes he proceeds with measure and with grace; where they do not serve morality he reduces them or drives them from the temple.

Giuseppe Toffanin