The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance, by Ross King
CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the Manuscripts that Illuminated the Renaissance
Ross King normally writes about well-known figures in the history of art – Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Monet.
The Canadian brings scholarship to a wide audience by not assuming any previous knowledge and writing about every aspect of the culture of the period, rather than just homing in on the particularities of one subject or person.
It’s a style of writing that I think of as particularly Canadian, perfected by
Robertson Davies, treating scholarship as something to be enjoyed in a very wide-ranging way and not too stuffily.
King originally made his reputation by writing Brunelleschi’s Dome: The Story of the Great Cathedral in Florence (2000). The Bookseller of Florence returns to the period of that first work of non-fiction. He has chosen as his subject Vespasiano da Bisticci – a well-established bookseller responsible for selling manuscripts from a bookshop in the Via dei Librai, halfway between the cathedral and the Piazza della Signoria, in the period before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.
It’s a good choice of subject, because Vespasiano knew everyone, was at the heart of 15th-century Florence and supplied manuscripts to Cosimo de’medici and his library at the monastery of San Marco, to King Alfonso of Naples and to Federico da Montelfeltro of Urbino. He lived through a period when Florence was very much at the heart of the political, as well as intellectual, universe.
All the scholars found their way to his shop and sat in the front room, where Vespasiano was able to give advice and supply manuscripts copied out by the scribes who worked for the notaries nearby, while the back room was used for binding and fitting manuscripts with chains.
It makes for a lively story, full of information about the way manuscripts had been preserved in monasteries all over Europe and in libraries in Constantinople and Baghdad. It tells of the admiration of scholars of the time for the writings of Cicero, the preparation of vellum and inks, the characteristics of handwritten scripts. He writes in detail and at length about the invention of the printing press.
He is particularly good at giving a sense of the physicality of transcription, the hard work that went into the writing of manuscripts and the labour of illumination. He also has a very good eye for the unexpected, oddball fact, the statistics of the number of manuscripts in circulation and the activities of, for example, Bartolomeo Serragli, the world’s first art dealer.
So we learn a gigantic amount about the times in which Vespasiano lived. The only problem is that Ross tell us relatively little about Vespasiano himself, who is lost sight of in the book as a whole.
One presumes that he was hardworking, was relatively uneducated and picked up knowledge in the way a bookseller does from his customers as much as from his reading.
But there is strangely little discussion or analysis of the thing other than bookselling that Vespasiano is well known for. That was writing, in retirement in the countryside – after he had sold up his lease on the bookshop and rented out his house on the Via de’ Bardi to a rich widow – Vitae of all the people he had encountered during his long life. The discovery and publication of these Vitae in 1839 was what inspired Jacob Burkhardt to write his Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. They surely deserved more discussion.
I enjoyed the book. It tells one a lot about Renaissance Florence and is full of information and perfect for lockdown. It’s a way of entering the world of Renaissance humanism and its fascination with the writings of the past at a time when these were still – but not for much longer – handwritten.
But I don’t feel I know a lot more about Vespasiano da Bisticci than I did at the beginning.
Charles Saumarez Smith was head of the Royal Academy, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery