BISTICCI, VESPASIANO da. — He is the most famous of the great cartolai (1421–98), as booksellers were called during the Renaissance before printing; and his paradigm in the classical world could have been Atticus, Cicero’s friend.
As long as culture remained medieval, that is, confined to ecclesiastical circles, the copying and illumination of codices were the care and privilege of monks; nor did the scriptoria of the highly fertile Carolingian renaissance represent any revelation. But later, with the spread and secularization of learning through episcopal schools and universities, its instruments were increasingly in demand. The issue was not the request for new things (although, at all times, discovering codices has amounted to nothing other than knowing how to find out where they were and how they could be reached), but obtaining new copies; and the cartolaro entered the scene. He is not the discoverer, but the disseminator of discovery. A lord wishing to possess in his library an ancient work in the original (or, at times, if Greek, in Latin) turns to him. Thus B. saw many powerful men of the earth at his shop (before the advent of printing dispossessed him); in this field, he was the Medici’s trusted man; he sat as intermediary between seekers and distributors of wisdom (the learned); and he left us portraits of many of the latter in a book deservedly famous and always enjoyable to read: Vite di Uomini Illustri del secolo XV. Humanism, with the religious feeling for wisdom that it instilled in the consciousness of the world, shines through there in pure and exemplary form. For the man who wrote those pages, the light, honor, and strength of the world is not the powerful man, but the man of letters. He, however, attains the height of his dignity not when he creates ex novo, but when he contributes to the recovery and renewed fruitfulness of ancient wisdom by translating and composing (two verbs inseparable in B.’s prose, almost like a hendiadys). And by composing he means producing florilegia of ancient wisdom (and the famous «treatises» emerged from this). Pope Niccolò V, he says, having brought many learned men to Rome with very high salaries, wrote from Florence to messer Giannozzo Manetti that he should come to Rome in order to «translate and compose». Thus, by providing the instruments for the rebirth of Wisdom, the good cartolaro feels himself the least of the coadjutors of that Niccolò V who, in championing this immense work of universal piety, is the greatest and most strenuous. B. says: «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 that great example of virtue».
The illumination of the world, attributed by B. to writers and historians, plainly means «salvation». In his book he wishes only to recount the «lives» of the great priests whom he, a poor sacristan, saw officiating in the temple of wisdom. He knew them too closely not to have noticed their weaknesses as well; but he venerates them too deeply not to be naturally inclined to idealize them: between these two extremes he proceeds with moderation and grace; where they do not serve morality, he diminishes them or drives them from the temple.