BISTICCI, VESPASIANO da. — He is the most famous of the great cartolai (1421–98), as the Renaissance booksellers were called before the invention of printing; and his classical counterpart might be Atticus, Cicero’s friend.
As long as culture remained medieval—that is, confined within ecclesiastical circles—the copying and illuminating of manuscripts was the care and privilege of monks; nor did the scriptoria of the prolific Carolingian Renaissance constitute any great revelation. But once learning spread and became secularized through the cathedral schools and universities, the tools of learning were increasingly in demand. It was not a matter of seeking out new texts (though at all times the discovery of manuscripts amounted to knowing where they were and how they might be obtained), but of procuring new copies; and into the scene stepped the cartolaio. He was not the discoverer, but the disseminator of the discovery. A lord who wished to possess in his library an ancient work—sometimes in Latin translation if it was Greek—would turn to him. Thus Vespasiano saw many of the mighty of the earth pass through his shop (until the advent of printing displaced him); he was, in that field, the trusted man of the Medici; he acted as intermediary between the seekers and the distributors of wisdom (the scholars); and of many of these he left portraits in a deservedly famous and always readable book: *Vite di Uomini Illustri del secolo XV*. Humanism, with the religious reverence for wisdom that it infused into the world’s consciousness, shines forth here in pure and exemplary form. For the author of these pages, the light, the honor, the strength of the world do not reside in the powerful, but in the man of letters. Yet the latter attains his highest dignity not when he creates ex nihilo, but when he contributes to the recovery and restoration of ancient wisdom through translation and compilation (two verbs inseparable in Vespasiano’s prose, almost as if they were a hendiadys). And by “compilation” he means the rearrangement of florilegia drawn from ancient wisdom (and from these emerged the famous *trattati*). Pope Nicholas V, he says, having brought to Rome many learned men on very large salaries, wrote to Florence to Messer Giannozzo Manetti inviting him to come to Rome “to translate and compile.” Thus, by providing the instruments for the rebirth of wisdom, the good cartolaio sees himself as a humble helper of that Nicholas V who, in promoting this vast work of universal piety, is the greatest and most steadfast. Vespasiano writes: “If in the time of Scipio Africanus there had been no Livy or Sallust or other writers, the fame of so worthy a man would have perished with him, and with it that great example of virtue.”
The illumination of the world, which Vespasiano attributes 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, has seen emerge within the temple of wisdom. He knew them too intimately not to have noticed their weaknesses; yet he venerates them too deeply not to be naturally inclined to idealize them. Between these two extremes he moves with measure and grace; where they do not serve morality, he reduces them or banishes them from the temple.