From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance.

Peter Godman. From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. 9 illus + xviii + 366 pp. $49.50. ISBN: 0-691-01746-8.

The intellectual history of Florence between the death of Angelo Poliziano and Niccolo Machiavelli's maturity fails to present itself, in Peter Godman's view, as a narrative of heroic individual achievement. Rather, this tumultuous period produced a sequence of intellectual controversies, prompted by rival ambitions but also by competing responses to the intellectual legacy of Poliziano and his contemporaries as to the meaning and utility of the humanist program. Still, if there were no heroes, there was a revealing pivotal figure, largely lost to history, who provided a key link between the founder of philology and the shrewd analyst of political behavior. That figure, the focus for much of this book, is Marcello Virgilio Adriani, a Florentine Greek scholar who succeeded to Poliziano's Chair at the Florentine Studio in 1494 and who was named First Chancellor of the Florentine Republic in 1498, the same year Machiavelli became Second Chancellor.

For the whole of Machiavelli's public career Virgilio was his colleague in the Palazzo Vecchio. Yet unlike his daring and outspoken fellow secretary, Marcello Virgilio proved a nimble survivor, steering clear from the shoals of controversy and tempering his views to the times. He thereby managed to hang on to his posts through the political upheavals of the Medici return in 1512, while Machiavelli found himself banished to San Casciano. In his dual role as professor and state bureaucrat, Marcello Virgilio produced, in accordance with established expectations, a series of public lectures on ancient authors and orations for state occasions. Reticent about committing these texts to print (Godman has promised as a sequel to this study to rectify this lacuna with an edition with commentary on Marcello Virgilio's inedita), the Florentine First Chancellor published only one major work during his lifetime. That was, revealingly, a new Latin translation and elaborate commentary on the medical writings of Dioscorides that appeared in 1518, dedicated to the Medici pontiff, Leo X. By employing the technical philological expertise that was a legacy of Poliziano, and avoiding the dangerous grounds of political advocacy that so engaged his erstwhile colleague, Marcello Virgilio aimed to demonstrate for his hoped-for Medici patron the utility of humanist literary studies for deciphering the pharmacological remedies of a key ancient text.

A major strength of Godman's approach to the intellectual history of Florence in this period is to regard Florentine humanism less as a unified intellectual tradition than as an unstable composite of competing and in many respects incompatible tendencies. Thus Poliziano espoused the ideal of the unity of learning based upon comprehensive knowledge of the classical tradition, but in practice this emerged as philological expertise leaning toward preciosity, an exclusive and elitist form of "Alexandrian" erudition that was made possible by his position as an in-house Medici intellectual. In the view of his successor, the novus homo Marcello Virgilio, for the studia humanitatis to survive the Savonarolan critique required reintegration with civic life. He thus stressed, as he regarded the early Quattrocento humanists as doing, the utility of ancient poetry as a moralizing discourse for the sons of the Florentine elite, and cast himself as a Florentine Cato, assuming in fact the title of state censor. Such an app roach to classical studies, revealed in his lectures on Virgil, nonetheless made him vulnerable to charges of smug moralizing, the gist of Machiavelli's sallies against his colleague. After 1512, Marcello Virgilio hastily discarded any republican sympathies, yet by tying his hopes for preferment to Leo X and the younger Lorenzo, the Greek professor found himself outmaneuvered yet again by the exiled secretary, who found in another Medici, Giulio, an ally for his partial vindication. Machiavelli, in turning to history and to an analysis of the conduct of war, topics Marcello Virgilio eschewed, found a benefactor in Giulio, and the Istorie fiorentine were even issued under the aegis of the Florentine Studio, where Marcello Virgilio had held forth for a quarter century.

By considering Machiavelli's intellectual choices as polemical responses to contemporary humanist tendencies, Godman makes an important contribution both to our understanding of Florentine humanism in the early sixteenth century and to Machiavelli studies. This book presents a wonderfully nuanced scrutiny of a critical period in Renaissance thought, in which attention to the too easily disparaged Marcello Virgilio reaps rich rewards.