Leonardo Bruni e Firenze: Studi sulle lettere pubbliche e private.

For the last decade the author of this collection of essays has directed scholarly attention to Bruni's public correspondence. This voluminous body of state letters, still unpublished, documents much of the famed humanist's activity as Florentine chancellor, that important civic office Bruni held for a few months in 1410-11 and then again from 1427 until his death in 1444. Eight of the chapters in this volume have appeared in print before, though most have been revised and in some cases substantially expanded. Seven appear for the first time. Several pieces take the form of brief research notes, including one previously unpublished study suggesting that the "Oratio in funere Iohannis Strozzae" may have been completed and delivered by Bruni as part of the public festivities of 16 May 1428 that ratified peace with Milan. Four longer chapters, of interest primarily to Bruni specialists, investigate the manuscript tradition of the public and private letters, including such issues as the preservation and contemporary diffusion of his chancellery correspondence, the character and contents of the letters composed in 1411, the problem of autograph mss., and the selection and organization of the private letters. Of more general interest are essays that consider Bruni's diplomatic correspondence in light of such developments as the war with Lucca, the exile and return of the Medici, and the efforts to have Florence named the site of the ecumenical council with the Greek Orthodox Church.

The reiterated theme through many of these studies provides the title to the first and longest essay in the book, here published for the first time, "Il primato di Firenze." With the aim of overview and synthesis, Viti argues that a substantial continuity exists in Bruni's political thought as humanist, historian, and chancellor, and that its fundamental core consists in his exaltation of Florence. From the early "Laudatio Urbis Florentinae" through the funeral oration for Nanni Strozzi, to his Historiae Florentini populi, to his diplomatic correspondence as chancellor, Bruni persistently evoked Florence as the ideal city whose historical achievements legitimated its autonomy, superiority, and even aggrandizement over the smaller Tuscan cities. While Bruni celebrated the geographical setting and the human-made environment of Florence as urbs, what mattered more was the character of the city as civitas, a human community, and even more the historical mission of the Florentine populus to advance the cause of libertas and iustitia in Italy. For Viti, Bruni's Laudatio emerges as his most revealing work. Newly reissued in 1434, Bruni employed, as Viti shows in his extended study of the chancellor's efforts to win support for Florence as the setting for the church council with the Greeks, the themes and even the language of this early work in his diplomatic correspondence in the 1430s urging the choice of Florence.

Viti's emphasis on the Laudatio echoes, of course, the attention Hans Baron first directed to this composition some forty years ago. That the Laudatio is fundamental to the Brunian corpus gains further credence in light of the evidence from the public letters Viti cites, even though Bruni himself at one point seemed to dismiss the work as a youthful rhetorical exercise. Less supportable is Viti's notion of an unchanging continuity in Bruni's political thought. Bruni's extensive engagement with the political and ethical thought of Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle in the decades after composing the Laudatio suggests instead an evolution in his civic humanist ideas. Particularly apparent is the influence of his translation of Aristotle's Politics, completed in the years 1435-37, especially in his subsequent characterization of Florence's constitution as a mixed polity as opposed to the democratic emphasis of the Laudatio.

CHARLES L. STINGER State University of New York, Buffalo