The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance
Ross King
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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”
“then gone to Rome to find employment in the Curia. Here he worked, unhappily and for little pay, dreaming of a life “free from the bustle of civilization,” with plenty of leisure for writing books and, even more, for collecting them.14 Another regular visitor to the shop in those early days was Poggio’s friend Niccolò Niccoli who, like Cardinal Cesarini, was always eager to help young students of modest means. Vespasiano met him as early as 1433 or 1434, when Niccoli was in his late sixties, a fat, handsome, fastidious man who dressed in a long plum-colored robe.”
“the visitors to Florence in 1439 found the city extraordinary, these exotic guests in turn made deep impressions on their hosts. The forty-six-year-old emperor in particular, the brim of whose remarkable hat thrust forward like the prow of a ship, bewitched the Florentines.”
“the Street of Booksellers was home to eight cartolai. They took their name from the fact that they sold paper (carta) of various sizes and qualities, which they procured from nearby papermills. They also stocked parchment,”
“one of the most compelling and creative theses in the history of modern historiography, virtually creating the “idea of the Renaissance.” 9”
“including the partial copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things—unseen by scholars for more than five hundred years—and eight previously unknown speeches of Cicero.”
“from an economic point of view was that manuscripts, from the outset, had not been planned or designed as commercial propositions. Copied for centuries by monks in their cloisters, often from materials manufactured on site—inks, pigments, the hides of animals—they were artifacts blissfully produced without consideration of profit and loss. Their migration from scriptoria to bookshops introduced the profit ledger and the need to find a supply of customers beyond the walls of the monastery library. A reclusive scholarly activity had become a business like any other, with a manuscript, no matter how exalted its contents, a commodity to be produced and exchanged on the market.”
“dwellings are prostrate; walls are toppling; churches are falling; sacred things are perishing; laws are trodden underfoot; justice is abused; the unhappy people mourn and wail.”
“cartolai offered far more extensive services than just selling paper and parchment: they produced and sold manuscripts. Customers could buy secondhand volumes from them or hire them to have a manuscript copied by a scribe, bound in leather or board, and, if they wished, illuminated—decorated with illustrations or designs in paint and gold leaf.”
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