Madison Sowell 556 VESPASIANO DA BISTICCI the VESPASIANO

Madison Sowell 556 VESPASIANO DA BISTICCI THE VESPASIANO MEMOIRS: LIVES OF ILLUSTRIOUS MEN OF THE XVTH CENTURY Translated by William George Waters and Emily Waters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 476 pp. In the late 1830s Cardinal Angelo Mai (1782-1854), renowned philologist and custodian of the Vatican Library, published the first complete edition of the memoirs of the fifteenth-century Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421-1498). (This was the same Angelo Mai to whom Giacomo Leopardi dedicated one of his most famous cantos, "Italo ardito, a che giammai non posi.") Written in Italian, these lives consisted of a series of short biographies of just over 100 men and the noblewoman Alessandra de' Bardi. In 1847 a copy of Mai's edition was loaned to the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, who was in Rome on a visit. Burckhardt read Vespasiano's Lives of Illustrious Men and decades later claimed that it had provided the initial idea for his seminal study, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860. That fact alone makes Vespasiano's biographical sketches a required reference for serious historians of the Italian Renaissance. The English translation by W. G. and Emily Waters was first published by Routledge in England in 1926 as The Vespasiano Memoirs. A Harper Torchbook edition appeared in 1963 as Renaissance Princes, Popes, and Prelates, with an introduction by the distinguished Harvard historian Myron P. Gilmore. The edition under review is a reprint by the Renaissance Society of America of the Harper edition but with the original Routledge title. It contains Gilmore's pithy introduction, which traces parallels between Vespasiano and Burckhardt. For example, Gilmore cogently and correctly notes that, like Vespasiano's practice, "Generalization based on a series of illuminating Madison Sowell 557 anecdotes about individuals is a large part of Burckhardt's method" (XV). The translators' introduction follows, which argues that Vespasiano's importance to the scholar of history compares favorably to Vasari's significance to the historian of art. (Vespasiano pretty much ignores painters, sculptors, and architects.) In sum, "Here is a rich store for the historian of statecraft, of warfare or of Churchmanship" (5). A brief discourse by the Florentine author then concludes the prefatory material. In his opening remarks Vespasiano states that his primary reason for writing about the illustrious personages he came to know, largely through his bookshop, is "to preserve their memory [...] that their fame may not perish" (15) and that his second motivation is to provide a vernacular model for anyone who desires to record these lives in the more noble Latin tongue. The biographies are divided into five general categories — popes and rulers, cardinals, archbishops and bishops, statesmen, and writers — followed by a proem, supplementary lives, and appendices on the government of Florence and popes of the fifteenth century. Thirteen black-and-white illustrations of only fair quality accompany the text, and occasionally the reprint fails to reproduce all the text, as in the table of contents on p. vii, starting with the name of Zembino of Pistoia. Printer's errors in the Torchbook edition are retained (e.g., "Santo Croce" for "Santa Croce" on p. 57), and the translation itself is rather dated (regularly using such quaint words as "thereanent"). The lives themselves balance eyewitness accounts and humorous anecdotes with hearsay reports and a very heavy dose of Catholic moralizing. The "illustrious men" of the subtitle include the powerful and famous (Alfonso, King of Naples, and Cosimo de' Medici) as well as the obscure and largely forgotten (Cipriano Rucellai and Cencio Romano). Some of the most valuable sections clearly relate to the book trade, which Vespasiano knew intimately, given that he was the most celebrated book and manuscript dealer of his era. Indeed, the search for Latin and Greek works, which could then be copied and translated, is a recurring motif in the lives of many of the memoirist's patrons. The section on the library of Federigo, Duke of Urbino, stands out as remarkable for its insights into how a distinguished Renaissance library was formed and what it consisted of (see pp. 102-5). While Vespasiano's colloquial style and moralizing tendency (not to mention the frequent dearth of dates in discussing events) make Lives Madison Sowell 558 of Illustrious Men a challenging tome to digest, this lengthy memoir remains a valuable primary source document in an age that has come to rely excessively on secondary sources for its inspiration. MADISON U. SOWELL Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah .

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