20. Renaissance Florence

Istoria dim. Poggio Fiorentino : tradotta di Latino in volgare da Iacopo suo figliuolo / riueduta, e corretta nuouamente per M. Francesco Serdonati (Fiorenza : Per Filippo Giunti, 1598) (revised and amended from a Latin version in the Medici Library by M. Francesco Serdonati)

Published in Florence by the celebrated printing firm of Giunti, this Italian translation of one of the most famous of fifteenth century Latin histories of that city, by the humanist scholar and chancellor of the Republic, Messer Poggio Bracciolini, is dedicated to the Florentine aristocrat Piero Guicciardini by Filippo Giunti. His dedication bears the date 14 February 1598, which means that the book was in fact published early in 1599, modern style. It consists of 258 pages in all, including a contemporary index, and each new book within it has a woodcut initial letter. It would not have been a deluxe book in its day, Giunti having become by then booksellers with an international market. The binding is late nineteenth/ early twentieth century, in Richard Overell’s judgement, probably German.

Bracciolini’s Historia populi florentini, completed in 1457/58, is in effect an official account by a top civil servant of Florence’s hundred year struggle between 1350-1450 to preserve its independence and republican institutions against a succession of Italian princes, above all the Dukes of Milan. Iacopo, Poggio’s third son born in 1442, was himself an accomplished humanist scholar, who translated a number of important classical and contemporary Latin works into Italian, among them the present book, first published in Venice in 1476 and dedicated to the noted military commander Federigo da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino. There was to be another Florentine edition in 1492.The handsome editio princeps of 1476 is available in a facsimile edition (ed.E. Garin, Calosci - Cortona, 1980).

The Monash Istoria contains a long annotation after the dedication – apparently in a seventeenth century hand – which is a poignant reminder of the strange history and violent end of its translator just two years after the appearance of the first edition. This gloss tells the reader that “Florentine Histories written by the secretary of the Republic” reveal that Iacopo di messer Poggio, “being an ambitious young man and overeager for change (essendo giovane ambitioso et di cosse nuove disideratissimo)”, joined the failed Pazzi Conspiracy against the Medici family in April 1478 - in which Giuliano, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s brother, was murdered during Mass in the cathedral - and was summarily hanged along with others. The unfortunate Iacopo’s motives were almost certainly more complicated than the annotator’s words - which are a literal translation from the Latin of Angelo Poliziano’s polemical attack on the conspirators in his Coniurationis Commentarium of 1478 (ed.A. Perosa, Padua, 1958) - baldly state. Although closely associated with the Medici family for much of his life Iacopo, like some other contemporaries, may well have begun to identify its growing ascendancy over the Florentine republic with the tyrannical princely assaults on it from outside about which his father had written in the present work, and so joined the conspiracy for reasons of republican idealism as much as any other. The best account of his short life is by F. Bausi, “’Paternae artis haeres’. Ritratto di Jacopo Bracciolini”, Interpres, 8,1988, pp.103-98.

One of several twentieth century pencilled notes in the Monash Istoria continue the theme of the long after- life of Poggio Bracciolini’s critical analysis of late medieval tyrannical threats to the free state of Florence. Next to a reference to Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan’s almost successful invasion of Tuscany in1402, we find written “Hitler” (p.98). It was the émigré German historian Hans Baron who most famously made this comparison between Britain’s plight in 1940, waiting for Hitler’s army to cross the Channel, and Florence’s brave defense of its liberty against an earlier “totalitarian” invader ( The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, Princeton, 1955, I, p. 32). This modest sixteenth century book owned by Monash carries more ideological baggage than one might at first sight imagine.