The Republic of Letters 9780300240443

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The Republic of Letters

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The Republic of Letters MARC FUMAROLI

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LARA VERGNAUD

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN & LONDON

The Margellos World Republic of Letters Series is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-­speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange. English translation copyright © 2018 by Yale University. Originally published as La République des lettres. © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2015. Excerpts from The Complete Essays of Montaigne, by Michel de Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame. Copyright © 1958 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, renewed 1971, 1976. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher, Stanford University Press, sup.org. Excerpts from Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility & Gentility Being the Life of Peiresc, trans. W. Rand (Haverford, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2003). Used by permission of Olivier Thill. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-­mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Electra and Nobel type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963185 ISBN 978-­0 -­300-­22160-­2 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 PART I: AN IDEAL CITIZENSHIP



1. The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 13



2. Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc: Prince of the Republic of Letters 26



3. Conceptions of Europe in the Seventeenth Century: John Barclay, a Keyserling Predecessor 50



4. Rhetoric and Society in Europe 65



5. The Emergence of the Academies 82 PART II: CONVERSATION



6. Conversation and Conversation Societies 105



7. Savant Conversation 122



8. Parisian Conversation and Its Expansion across Europe 133



9. Fortin de La Hoguette’s “Testament” 149



10. The Erudite Origins of Classical “Grand Goût”: The Optimus Stylus Gallicus According to Pierre Dupuy 159 P A R T I I I : L E T T E R E D L E I S U R E A N D C O R R E S P O N D E N C E

11. Academia, Arcadia, and Parnassus: Three Allegorical Settings of Lettered Leisure 169

vi Contents



12. Marsilio Ficino’s De Triplici Vita: A Regimen for the Republic of Letters? 191



13. Venice and the Republic of Letters in the Sixteenth Century 201



14. The Genesis of Classical Epistolography: Humanist Letter-­Writing Rhetoric from Petrarch to Justus Lipsius 212 P A R T I V : L I V E S



15. From Lives to Biographies: The Twilight of Parnassus 229



16. The “Familiar Letters” of President de Brosses: A Voyage through Italy as an Exercise in Lettered Leisure 252



17. The Comte de Caylus and the “Return to Antiquity” in the Eighteenth Century 266



18. Seroux d’Agincourt and “Literary Europe” 293 Afterword: The Secret of the Republic of Letters 317 Notes 335 Index of Names 371

PREFACE

On the outside, I have been living in an era in which the expression “Republic of Letters” designates, more or less ironically, the small chessboard that is Paris and an increasingly frenetic festival circuit, whose chess pieces are the hundreds of new novels that appear every year, and the reward for winning the game is dozens of literary prizes. On the inside, however, I have spent over half a century, privately with a few friends and, for a somewhat shorter period of time, at the current Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres, within a European Republic of Letters of an entirely different category and era. Such has been my “engagement.” Extricating myself from my present-­day reality, but not ignoring it, I have sought to understand the vanished reality of a society of literary and solitary savants in which I reveled, whose evolution was quite strange, buoyed by a protective freedom of movement and thought within political and religious regimes that, going by current criteria, could be labeled as despotic. That strangeness or, if one prefers, paradox continues to fascinate me, even though I have gradually come to better understand the secret advantage enjoyed, in total awareness of its source, by my friends (and subjects): the knowledge of how to live in two planes of time, each reflected in the other. The first, Greco-­Roman antiquity, is timeless precisely because it is the ripe fruit of time; whereas the second exists in an entirely different historical period, nearing maturation in its turn, but this time without the reflective mirror of the “humanities” and, as a consequence, increasingly disoriented. In order to justify these unfashionable retreats into the world of scholars of classical centuries, forgotten or scorned for the most part, I felt compelled, thanks to the freedom provided me by the Collège de France, to finally attempt to describe the unknown facets of this society of lettered savants and to sketch portraits of a few of its most modest and often quite prodigious princes of the mind. Pierre Nora, whom I consider to be patience incarnated, has desired the publication of this book for a long time and granted it the honor of inclusion in his famous Bibliothèque des Histoires collection. Its publication owes much to our shared friend, Krzysztof Pomian, an author at the forefront of this subject, who allowed me to read his early university dissertation on the Republic of Let-

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ters, which he never wanted to publish. I also dedicate this book to him. The Republic of Letters also owes a great deal to the sorely missed Bruno Neveu, who knew better than anyone the joy felt by the researcher who chooses the literary republic of two classical centuries as his or her Montaignian arrière-­boutique, or “back room.” Various summaries of my lectures on the history, customs, and fecundity of the Republic of Letters of the ancien régime that appeared in the Annuaire du Collège de France have been assembled in this collection. But they were not presented successively and as a unit. These summaries are therefore introduced and flanked by other lectures, additional research, and essays published in diverse journals and collections, which complete or clarify on various points the broad panorama drawn by my lectures given at the Collège de France. The chosen order is neither chronological nor narrative, but more akin to a montage or cubist collage, juxtaposing fragments of different genres and perspectives (firsthand accounts, portraits, semantic analy­ses, close readings of key texts, and so on) adjusted to progressively initiate the reader into this ideal and nonetheless real society, which transcended the political and religious geography of humanist, classical, baroque, and finally neoclassical Europe up until the French Revolution, with antiquity as its legacy and uninterrupted focus. The intellectual prodigies included in this society of friends and equals were most frequently commoners or members of the noblesse de robe (nobles who acquired their rank by holding high offices) tacitly elected by their peers. I highlight a few of these figures from varying eras and nations. This invisible, though not at all clandestine, Republic had its own capital or capitals, which changed according to the period. I describe those shifts and hypothesize the concrete motives behind them. Indeed, within this montage, the reader will see the capital of the Respublica litteraria move from Florence to Rome, from Rome to Venice, and from Venice to Aix-­en-­Provence (where the great Peiresc lived the longest) and to Paris. Savant Europe found itself in business in the king’s library, where it was received by Pierre Dupuy, the “Pope of Paris.” That privilege endured until the end of the seventeenth century and the emergence of a rivalry between three capitals, Amsterdam, London, and a grand Paris in which Louis XIV was trying to monopolize the letters and arts by creating a Parisian system of prestigious royal academies around his Versailles sun: a kind of local Republic of Letters and Arts integrated into the royal state within the Palais du Louvre that hosted its companies. Many of the citizens accepted into the Republic of Letters traveled frequently, at least during their youth. In the background of this collection of essays,

Preface ix

the reader will discover great men of letters roaming across Europe, duly bearing or preceded by letters of recommendation, traveling either at their own expense, as diplomats, or under the pretext of preceptorship undertaken by young noblemen on their Grand Tours, and welcomed as colleagues in libraries, archives, collections of Greco-­Roman antiquities, gardens and menageries of rare species, and finally in priceless conversations with local savants. Each took care before his departure to ask among his peers for the names of notable and influential figures he would encounter in order to borrow and obtain the appropriate letters of recommendation. Then there are figures like the Comte de Caylus, who, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, having prematurely launched a military career, himself initiated his education as a future prince of the Republic of Arts with a modified Grand Tour that took him through Italy to develop a “connoisseurship” in painting, through Asia Minor to explore Greek antiquities, and through Holland and England to study sciences, philosophy, and a variety of collections. If I fail to extensively develop this highly ritualized and studious aspect of the peregrinatio academica specific to the Republic of Letters, my portraits of Peiresc, President de Brosses, and Caylus notwithstanding, it is to avoid duplicating Recherches sur le voyage savant au XVIIe siècle, the excellent and exhaustive analysis published by two experts, Paul Dibon and Françoise Waquet, to which I refer.1 I would have also liked to learn and share more about the postal systems (meaning both messengers and public transport) that facilitated the rapidity and security of increasingly regular communication over the last two centuries of the ancien régime, favoring in particular the wayfaring curiosity of the citizens of the savant Republic. If the German corpus on the unrivaled courier system supplied to the Hapsburg Empire by the Thurn und Taxis family (Italian by origin) is quite extensive, it is less comprehensive when it comes to the French royal postal system. The Thurn und Taxis family and their European communication network is incidentally the focus of an excellent recent work by British historian Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself, which I recommend to non-­Germanists. If some of my readers are amateurs of microhistory, they will find an abundance of material in the following works: Peter N. Miller’s Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century; Daniel Roche’s Les Républicains des lettres: Gens de culture et lumières au XVIII e siècle; and Laurence W. B. Brockliss’s Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-­Century France.2 Daniel Roche’s description of the activities of the Nîmes-­born eighteenth-­century Peiresc, Jean-­François Séguier, the longtime student and adoptive son of the Verona-­born savant, the marquis Scipione Maffei, as he made his way across

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Europe, and the even more meticulous account—­including statistics!—of the young Caylus of Avignon, the doctor Esprit Claude Calvet, by Professor Brockliss are particularly noteworthy. Each gives a precise sense of the development, both in terms of expansion and comprehension, that reached as far as the provincial middle class, of an encyclopedic solidarity of men of letters in which antiquarianism, numismatics, epigraphy, and archaeology occupied the highest ranks, and substantiate the progressive “return to antiquity” across Europe that triumphed in the 1750s. As for myself, I hope to have, at the least, whetted your appetite. Marc Fumaroli

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Diligently researching and frequenting the society of friends and equals that, within the hierarchical society of Europe’s ancien régime, called itself the Republic of Letters for over four centuries and in a variety of languages is inevitably a solitary and, even more so, narcissistic activity. This Republic boasts the surprising virtue of being able to recreate itself on a more or less modest scale around the researcher dedicated to its rediscovery. The development and completion of this book enabled me to once again benefit from that gift. I must first express my gratitude to my friend and editor, Pierre Nora, and to his primary collaborator in the delicate planning and realization of this work, the very wise editorial director Olivier Salvatori. Next, my appreciation goes to three friends and scholars who generously dedicated their time and unrivaled meticulousness to reading the first draft, already ably edited by Mr. Salvatori, offering translations and corrections as well as answers to my often thorny questions: the great Latinist Pierre Laurens, an honorary professor at the Sorbonne and my colleague at the Académie des Inscriptions; Krzysztof Pomian, to whom I have dedicated this book, a leading specialist in connoisseurship and private and public collecting during the ancien régime and one of the postwar reinvigorators of the theme of the Republic of Letters, along with Paul Dibon and Bruno Neveu; and of course Pierre-­François Burger, a former collaborator at the Centre national de la recherché scientifique (CNRS, National Center for Scientific Research) and an erudite connoisseur of Port-­Royal, but also de omni re scibili, including the correct language desirable for savant works. I can imagine the pleasure my friend Bruno Neveu, a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, whose knowledge and affinities made him a master of the Republic of Letters himself, would have felt upon seeing this book, which owes him so much. He left us too soon, shortly after embarking on a long-­planned trip to meet with Christians of the East, already under threat at the time. I am immensely grateful for the knowledge provided by Jean-­Robert Armogathe, a corresponding member of the Académie des Inscriptions, and to our mutual Italian friends, Tullio Gregory and Avvocato Gerardo Marotta and his Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples; as well as to Carlo Ossola, a fellow member of the Accademia dei Lincei; Roberto Calasso, my scholarly

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and brilliant Italian editor; and Lina Bolzoni, who, like my late friend from Turin, Franco Simone, is refining our understanding of the Italian Rinascita, so different from the French Renaissance that stemmed from it, at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. I learned a great deal from conversations with my English friends, notably Sir John Elliot, the eminent historian of Spain’s Golden Age, and Michael Screech, who popularized Rabelais and Montaigne in England through his translations and analy­ses; and with my American friends, Irving and Marilyn Lavin, Peter Miller, Anthony Grafton, and Bob Silvers; and with my Catalan editor Jaume Vallcorba, the late philologist dedicated to the savant tome; and finally with my dear student who kept all her promises and then some, Colette Nativel. I dare not forget to thank Jean-­Claude Casanova, Alain Besançon, Bernard de Fallois, to whom I am indebted, and the journal Commentaire, which published one of the texts included in this book. Finally, I must express my gratitude to the Collège de France, its successive administrators, and its assembly of professors, for having allowed me to so broadly extend the official title of my chair, Rhetoric and Society in the Seventeenth Century, notably to the eighteenth century. They greatly facilitated the success of the tasks linked to that chair by assigning two unparalleled associate professors to assist me: Francesco Solinas, an eminent art historian educated at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and Catherine Fabre, the heart and soul, along with my Dutch friend Professor Hans Bots, of the team behind the publication of the complete correspondence of Madame de Maintenon.

TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Ludivine Vergnaud and Adrien Chipret.

The Republic of Letters

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INTRODUCTION

In a landmark book published in Cambridge in 1979, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein wanted to show that the invention and expansion of the printing press had not yet been adequately recognized for what they were: a technological revolution that broadened and hastened the advancement of knowledge at the same time that it increased the individual’s intellectual autonomy and the breadth of his or her free and public expression. Inspired by the views of Marshall McLuhan—though not by the renowned Catholic theorist’s personal reservations regarding new, postwar technologies— Eisenstein, through this celebration of the revolutionary benefits of the printing press and the printed work, also laid the foundations for another argument, this time in defense of the new forms of media then emerging in the United States and of the internet, still a well-­kept secret in the 1980s. This American argument assumes that, its unceasing acceleration notwithstanding, human progress is the product of increasingly radical technological revolutions, which correspondingly free man from the limits imposed on him by nature, and create for his comfort and even happiness a second, artificial nature wherein his senses, intelligence, memory, imagination, as well as his physical health and life span are tremendously increased. This euphoric, quasi-­millenarian utopia of a people chosen for “manifest destiny” has expanded worldwide, more or less modified or in keeping with the model of the vast North American market. Neither the large-­scale massacres that have multiplied since the twentieth century, nor the successive economic crises forcing us to live in constant anxiety over the future, nor even apocalyptic predictions of the depletion of raw materials, global warming, and widespread air pollution can rattle this messianic faith in the god of Progress, which is one of the foundations of the “multicultural” American society. It seems to go without saying that scientific and technological genius will prevail over the by-­products and accidents of the ferocity, voracity, and recklessness of human nature on the (“overall positive”) road to progress. The remedy is, as it were, embedded in the disease. Less of an ardent believer in the benevolence, both retrospective and prospective, of the god of Progress than Elizabeth Eisenstein, I recognize, like her

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2 Introduction

and thanks to her, the indisputable advantages accorded humanity by the invention of the printing press through the transmission and accumulation of knowledge and consequently through its capacity to increase at the expense of both routine and ignorance. That said, I am surprised that Eisenstein glossed over Europe’s wars of religion, which, though perhaps a necessary evil and no doubt a ruse of Hegelian reasoning, were also horrific bloodbaths provoked in large part by the popularization of Bible reading, made possible by the printing press and the proliferation of sects attached to their idiosyncratic interpretations of Holy Writ. When, after lauding the positive impacts of the printing press, Eisenstein draws the conclusion that all subsequent revolutions in communication technologies will have as exclusively beneficial outcomes, I am inclined to adopt a stance of doubt and caution, echoing Plato, who feared that the invention of writing would atrophy living memory and the spoken word: all progress has collateral damage. America would not have taken the lead in this march to universal happiness without the enslavement of blacks in the South and the genocide of Native Americans in the West. The printing press had destructive side effects that were quickly noticed by humanists, though they had initially welcomed its arrival with open arms. So they did what was needed to preserve the integrity of the mind as much as was possible. Of course, they had suffered from the Roman Catholic Church’s establishment of the Inquisition and the Index Librorum Prohibitorum as much as they did from the fate reserved for authors presumed to be “heretics” by the new schismatic churches. But European humanists independently, without resorting to the police or the executioner, took what precautionary measures they could to prevent the harmful consequences of the widespread and cheap circulation of books and ensure that quantity did not outweigh quality. Following Erasmus’s example, they allied themselves with Europe’s most prestigious publishing houses and, like the author of Ciceronianus and Encomium Moriae, used irony and criticism to disqualify bad books and used praise to elevate good authors at the expense of bad ones. Any technological revolution in modes of communication, beginning with writing, which coincided with the first historical developments of administration and commerce, is a response to a practical demand. The invention of the printed book was no exception. It was carried and amplified by the development of states and city-­states whose intense urban, political, and economic life required educated actors and could no longer settle for either oral eloquence or handwritten correspondence. Of course, such practical advances inevitably provoke new problems, unprecedented dangers, and unexpected threats. When human affairs are involved, every rose has its thorn, and critical doubt must be the most attentive companion to even the most justified admiring gaze.

Introduction 3

The invention of the printing press, an unarguably promising advertising and commercial endeavor, arrived at just the right time. Many city dwellers could not exercise their professions without knowing how to read. That demand had to be met on a scale that was larger and cheaper than handwritten manuscripts, which was impossible without infringing on the power of ecclesiastical and even political authorities. No one was capable of foreseeing the unrest to come or of noting, once it erupted, the cause-­and-­effect link between the production of printed materials and mass movements of religious views. And yet, one century before Gutenberg, Petrarch had invented the best vaccine for the collateral damages of the printing press: he ensured the revival of the Greeks’ paideia, the Romans’ institutio, the education of a cultured and sophisticated elite that was capable of offsetting, as was the case in classical antiquity, the passion and violence of both the mob and the man behind the mob—the tyrant. Petrarch shared his ardent nostalgia for the classical age of the Greco-­Roman Empire and his desire to recreate the corps of science and wisdom that had nourished its great men with his disciples and readers, who would later be called “humanists.” According to the poet, the tragedy of Christian Europe was the work of barbarians, who, by destroying that literature, had also destroyed the progenitor of the critical mind and a civilized elite. For a thousand years, European civilization had in a manner of speaking atrophied, not due to Christianity, as Machiavelli and Nietzsche would later claim, but because the Christian laity of its libraries, academies, and cultura animi failed to develop the critical mind and temper pagan customs. There was a kind of preestablished harmony between Christianity and classical culture, as well as a complementarity between the contemplative lifestyle of Christian monasticism and the otium litteratum (classical lettered leisure, the life of the mind, which was forgotten or damaged by barbarian vandalism, but which could and should once again ennoble the active lives of lay Christians, aristocrats, or merchants.) Hence Petrarch’s contagious passion for unearthing and reconstructing the scattered and buried treasures of the classical humanitas and its urbanitas. How could Christian Europe be healed after its amputation? Petrarch and the first humanists set out to uncover, recopy, publish, and assemble masterpieces of classical moral literature abandoned and forgotten in monastic libraries, within their own collections. This recreated corpus was meant to be the new starting point for civilization. However, these new copies of handwritten copies, which often dated back to the Carolingian Renaissance, written on either papyrus or parchment, were obligatorily few and very expensive. So wasn’t the Renaissance inaugurated by Petrarch (who wanted to educate laypeople, and not in any way challenge the Roman orthodoxy and ecclesiology) itself vulnerable, sooner or later, to the same disaster that had abruptly interrupted the progress of the clas-

4 Introduction

sical world? It would have been easy, in the early fifteenth century, for barbarian invaders to set fire to the first large humanist libraries in Italy, as easy in fact as it had been in the West in the seventh century. It was not enough to recreate classical texts. They needed to be safeguarded from new destruction or mnemonic atrophy. Handwritten copies, despite being made more practical by the monastic invention of the paginated, softbound, or hardcover book, which replaced the classical volumen, remained too expensive to be made en masse and, therefore, to defend from attack. One can imagine Petrarch’s disciples, hunters of forgotten manuscripts of classical works, but also monuments to be restored in spirit and inscriptions to decipher, wondering: What equivalent could there be in engravings in counterrelief, marble, and stone for the classical inscriptions that had survived the passage of time, damaged but still legible, or the dedications in metal letters affixed to ancient temple pediments, like the one that adorns the architrave of the Pantheon of Rome or the one on the Maison Carrée of Nîmes? The Ancients had no way to hand down their legacy other than through tablets and rolls of parchment paper or papyrus, all too easy to torch. They also invented a primitive form of printing and engraving in order to consign short messages (brilliant pre–­text messaging shortcuts) to the gods and posterity: inscriptions. Unfortunately, the technique was cumbersome, stationary, and unsuitable for transmitting long messages. For Petrarch, and even more so for his enthusiastic spiritual successors, his friends, and disciples, it was vital that the legacy of Greco-­Roman antiquity then being reconstructed be definitively salvaged from oblivion and once again made fertile in an indefinite march of progress in order for Italy and Roman Christianity to be wrenched from the ignorance and barbarism they owed to their seventh-­ century invaders, as well as to avoid the disaster that came next, the rapid extinction of the Carolingian Renaissance. The humanists’ tasks were many: look to antiquity to shape and educate civilized and modern laypeople; reassemble the philosophical, scientific, oratory, literary, and artistic legacy of the Greco-­ Roman school so it could become productive again; and foresee any repeat of the catastrophes of transmission that occurred during the seventh century and, for different reasons, the ninth century. Was Gutenberg inspired, in the 1450s, by antiquarian humanists’ attempts to decipher the metal letters engraved and affixed to stone temple frontons when imagining the metal, movable, and raised letters of the printing press? Or did this shrewd technician look farther afield, inspired by and driven to improve the printing press of the Far East, with its engraved plates of unmovable symbols? Of course, Gutenberg would have needed to be sure that a market that could make his ingenious invention profitable was already in place.

Introduction 5

This clientele could not be built around the monks who controlled large parts of the niche market of copying manuscripts. Instead, Gutenberg’s first clients came from a lettered bourgeois audience capable of reading Saint Jerome’s Latin Bible or literate artisans capable of reading the first translations of Holy Writ into vernacular. We cannot say that the initial impact of the printing press was in the vein of progress, however. The circulation of printed materials served sectarian hatreds and national ambitions, multiplied sects, and amplified propaganda. Very quickly, however, Petrarch’s disciples, present in several regions in Europe, caught on to the merits of the printing press: its invention was a perfect response to their anxieties, as well as to their ambition to civilize Christian Europe through the study of science, wisdom, and the arts of antiquity. The multiplication in the thousands of the same edition of an important classical text published by an accomplished philologist would facilitate its dispersion across the globe and, thanks to the increase in the number of libraries throughout Europe, render its quasi-­disappearance in the event of an onslaught of vandalism impossible. At least that was the admirable sales pitch which was used by the great editor and philologist Aldus Manutius on his clients across Europe in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and which appears in the manifesto prefaces he included in his irreproachable editions of Greek and Latin philosophical classics, including works by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, as well as Tuscan texts by Catherine of Siena, and Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, written, as would be Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in an invented language: such texts, when written in ancient Greek, were copied at Manutius’s philhellenic academy and printed in Venice, with his own presses, using characters specially drawn and melted for him. It is hard to imagine a more abrupt divide, within a vastly hierarchical social universe, between the printing press’s dual applications as, respectively, the rediscovered spiritual legacy of a demanding and cultivated European elite, and the pamphleteering vehicle of scriptural controversy, theological disputes, or political propaganda on the scale of the urban masses. That “humanist” elite of culture, science, and taste did not wait until the invention of the printing press to gain self-­awareness, give itself a collective name, and, when the time came, assume its role in the printed book or page market. In 1417, Francesco Barbaro, one of Petrarch’s young, second-­generation Venetian disciples, named the international fraternity of missionary humanists, dedicated to finding and copying manuscripts of classical works ignored since Petrarch’s day, the Respublica litteraria—the “Republic of Letters.” Right on time. Thirty years before the invention of the printing press. What did the young Barbaro—at the time concluding his study of the

6 Introduction

humanities in the Florence of Chancellor Coluccio Salutati; his successor, Leonardo Bruni; and Poggio Bracciolini himself—mean by this expression? The humanist Renaissance, the renovatio litterarum et atrium launched by Petrarch, was above all characterized by a change in the dialogic model dominant among men of letters. The dialectical model of the quaestio and the disputatio that connected the scholastic edifice and the theological intelligence of clergy and monks gave way to a rhetorical dialogic model, whose key categories were the epistola according to Petrarch and its oral derivatives (or models), the “conversation” (sermo) according to Pontano, and the “essay” according to Montaigne. All these modes were private and very different from the public modes (the judicial, political, and epidictic discourse of pagan antiquity), which would serve as models for future magistrates, diplomats, and dignitaries of the modern forum, the court. Preachers too, stripped (or nearly) of the medieval-­ era income that had allowed them to harangue believers in Latin, were now forced, as well-­trained orators, to convince, plead, and move their listeners in regularized vernaculars. Epistolary or conversational dialogue between two or more people, distanced from the negotia of the classical political forum or modern monarchal court, fell under the category of otium operosum, “studious leisure,” based on its practitioners’ uninterrupted commercium with the dead, authors of antiquity whose written works and effigies kept them alive, fertile, and generous. Epistolary exchanges between the living, and literary exchanges with the dead, two superior and intimate forms of dialogue, created a distinct social link among humanists in an invisible republic whose shared foundation was a classical heritage being reread, reinterpreted, and expanded continuously. Was the Respublica litteraria a social network? Undoubtedly, though it operated between epistolary peers recruited through co-­optation, and not between internet interlocutors assumed by definition to be arithmetically equal. The citizens of this invisible republic were not the active cives of ancient republics, nor the passive members of modern monarchies, but the subjects of an unprecedented relationship with self, with the other, with knowledge, and with truth. Among those who held (and not just used) this privilege of literary citizenship, it was accompanied by the extension of lettered dialogue beyond the university sphere and also beyond privileged specialists, to men and institutions previously excluded from access to knowledge. Beginning in Italy’s city-­states, an urban public of lay readers formed a long time before the invention of the printing press. The use of private, familiar letters—a medium at which Petrarch excelled and whose tone and form were infinitely less predetermined than official medieval epistles—strengthened and intensified the dialogical relationship between author and reader. Writing personal letters led to learning to read in a personal

Introduction 7

way. Petrarch would have been the grand master and model for this friendly and intimate epistolary dialogue. Liberated from exterior decorum, these exchanges nonetheless had to adapt according to the person, circumstances, and location and had to respect a level of propriety that was quite variable and that assumed a subtle discernment of one’s interlocutor in space, time, and circumstances. Epistolary art (let’s avoid “epistolarity,” that monstrous product of modern-­day scholastic pedantry) had to be able to harmonize the personal expression of the person writing with an intuitive understanding of the recipient. It served as an education in urban and polite conversation, departing not only from the logical formalism of the scholastic disputatio, but even from the rhetoric of the three types of public discourse (judicial, deliberative, and epideictic) for reasons we have already glimpsed. If epistolary art was a form of rhetoric, it corresponded to private discourse, between peers, in leisure. And indeed it was a form of rhetoric, for the mastery of decorum in this type of private discourse required erudition and an oral facility that were all the more vast and refined because they had to remain invisible. The supreme art lay in hiding the artistry at work and appearing natural, for fear that too much art, misplaced within an urban, private exchange, would render one’s interlocutor suspicious. A Roman textbook for future magistrates and lawyers, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, rediscovered in 1417, would influence the rules and fluid forms of dialogue between men of letters more than any other classical text. For a long (or very long) period of time, the informal epistle remained clandestine and unpublished. Nonetheless, the Republic of Letters was not entirely immersed in the obscurity of the otium. It had its theater: the “querelle,” which could last several decades and involve dozens of scholars and savants across Europe, became a privileged rite of research beginning at the end of the fifteenth century. It would be absurd to reduce these debates to a purely formal game; it would be no less excessive to not acknowledge the rhetorical rules that moderated and nurtured them. The aristocratic Republic of Letters was modeled on the classical forum, but a forum whose citizens had first been co-­opted. This new kind of senate, tackling the relative chaos and violent confusion caused by the vulgarization of reading, strove to limit the fallout and to safeguard the chances of progress and the spread of specialized knowledge. A rediscovered mode of intimate dialogue between men of letters inevitably required new institutions. Beginning in the fourteenth century, long before Gutenberg, groups of friends and students formed around Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati; in fifteenth-­century Florence, on the margins of the studio, private academies assembled around the Byzantine Jean Argyropoulos and later the Hellenist Marsilio Ficino. Partly fictionalized “dialogues,” “correspon-

8 Introduction

dences” set down the forms and content of conversations, the medium of collective research endeavors, in writing. It was this first nebulous Florentine appearance of savant “companies” that almost immediately adopted the Latin name of Respublica litteraria. The term “academy,” which was also applied to the research groups united by the Republic of Letters very early on, referred to antiquity’s schools of philosophy, notably the most glorious among them—Plato’s, which was closed in AD 529 by Emperor Justinian after one thousand years of existence. The school also encompassed the rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. The humanists’ rediscovery of the art of persuasion was not a literary epiphenomenon, meaning a hollow and pedantic repetition of classical models, limited to praising princes or the sterile verbosity of court. Studied by savants, imbued with philosophy, it provided a discernible framework for a socialized mode of knowledge and understanding, which Descartes would define in Discours de la method (Discourse on the Method) in 1637. But Descartes did not invent this idea of a savant community that believed in knowledge, invisible to the common man, which persisted beyond the death, distance, and persecution of its members: it was a reality he encountered along the way, which transported him, and whose conventions, manners, rites, and norms he accepted. He even wanted to be its reformer, by proposing a shared method that would make collaboration between all savants in search of truth, in the service of a universal, common good for humanity, less tentative and more efficient. The philosopher had found a homeland and an audience within this community. And so this enemy of traditions respected at least one—that of the Republic of Letters, which he perceived in accordance with its Platonic origins and mission in Marsilio Ficino’s Florence. Though rhetorical by its procedures, the classic Republic of Letters was philosophical in the sense of its members’ collective search for truth, a calling to which Descartes was faithful by defining it as what it should be. By analogy, the literary republic served as a model for a Republic of Arts conceived of by its theoreticians, from Vasari to Quatremère de Quincy, as an ideal academy in which the most diverse talents would compete to serve beauty for its own sake and multiply the testimonials restraining artists and their public from deviating from probity in questions of taste and creativity. It was by serving this community of lettered men that the printing press and bookselling became agents of progress. A deep current of pure water, often suspected by the censors of the day and filtered by posterity, emerged among other impure and agitated currents, a considerable proportion of printed materials, untroubled by various censors, having disseminated works of regurgitation, ignorance, and poisoned malice.

Introduction 9

Though a self-­aware fiction, the Republic of Letters was nonetheless a democracy of peers, if not equals, that endured over several centuries of monarchism and aristocracy. Within a world of courts and intrigues, this ideal republic was a vast invisible and unshakable society, whose civic links were nourished by an uncompromising love for the truth, though tempered by friendship, and a respect for knowledge and talent. The exchange and circulation of books, as well as books themselves, fostered, much as the postal system did, the transnational expansion and fecundity of the Republic of Letters. But the book was not the Republic’s sole concern, even if countless notable publishers, from Aldus’s era to the present day, were often its most zealous senators and diplomats. The abundance of state and church censorship, commercial interests, political passions, religious fanaticism, and the tyranny of what was in fashion weighed upon productions of the mind, in the same way that publicity, pornography, and all manners of terrorism today weigh so heavily on the internet, the pedagogical realm of all dangers. In spite of that collateral damage, the internal solidarity of the Republic of Letters, its critical authority, the open debates it sparked between creative minds, and the respected journals and periodicals that it produced successfully established hierarchies, sorting the wheat from the chaff, and created a critical counterbalance to the inert and disproportionate mass of ink and paper. Unraveling the history of this singular and metamorphic institution means not only viewing Europe in an unfamiliar light, which is neither economic nor military, but also convincing ourselves that such a transnational critical authority is even more desirable in the century of Facebook than it was during the century of the invention of the printing press.

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Part I AN IDEAL CITIZENSHIP

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1 THE REDISCOVERED REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

Paul Dibon, professor of history and philology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, is responsible for reviving the concept of the Republic of Letters, which had more or less fallen into obsolescence since the early fourteenth century. Dibon was the first to show that this forgotten phrase signified both a program of research and a framework for understanding the European mind during the ancien régime. Through his personal contributions to that program, Dibon established that this idea of the Republic of Letters removed a number of epistemological, national, and disciplinary obstacles to historical research and illuminated the past in a way that sheds light on our responsibilities as Europeans today.1 In order to highlight the gentle revolution that Paul Dibon sparked within the field of European intellectual history, while limiting myself to previous French works, I will begin by briefly noting what was lacking from studies conducted by Dibon’s two most remarkable predecessors: Paul Hazard and my own mentor, René Pintard. In The Crisis of the European Mind, published in 1935, Hazard’s scope is unarguably European.2 But the subtleties and brilliance of the analysis notwithstanding, the history of ideas as viewed by Hazard is, strictly speaking, idealistic: he describes a battle of books, employing an allegorical drama within which the modern critical mind, emboldened since the Renaissance or the Reformation, undermined the conceptual edifice of tradition and faith, thus creating a favorable terrain for the rise of the Enlightenment and what is referred to as secularization. A simplification, both as pertains to the dramatis personae and the intrigue of Hazard’s account, pits the conservative mind in the service of the absolute state and the church, whose distinguished representative was Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, author of Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture, against the insidious and combined assaults of critical scholarship and science, symbolized by Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton. That dramatic backdrop is also apparent in René Pintard’s classic work Le Libertinage érudit (Erudite Libertinism), published in 1942, which in many respects attempted to substantiate Hazard’s theses by showing their earlier validity 13

14 An Ideal Citizenship

in the years preceding the “crisis,” 1617–1651. Thanks to a more archival and focused method, however, René Pintard does introduce nuance and a sort of new nominalism into the psychomachy of the principles of intellectual history so well illustrated by Paul Hazard.3 In his analysis, Pintard weaves individual portraits of complex and contradictory men of letters who were not all motivated by a shared philosophical and political cause against a shared adversary. Thanks to a kind of Proustian genius, quite different from Paul Hazard’s own theatrical talent, Pintard brings his philosophers and erudite savants to life in a society that was specific to them, with its own rituals and customs and a vivid awareness of its autonomy, even if profound and subtle doctrinal differences could at times divide its members. The central meeting place of this society of letters, which was presided over by the Dupuy brothers, also known as the “Adelphes,” was in Paris, in Jacques-­Auguste de Thou’s library on the rue des Poitevins, and subsequently in the king’s library, where the Dupuys entertained every day at the same time, from 4:17 p.m. to 4:53 p.m. This society had European offshoots as well, maintaining permanent correspondence and continuous cooperation with Aix-­en-­Provence, Rome, Stockholm, and Amsterdam. There is just one word missing from René Pintard’s comprehensive work, as well as from the countless unpublished texts on which he relied, which encapsulates the extraordinary endeavor of intuitive archaeology that, for the first time in the eyes of the Moderns, revived a European community of minds. The word (or rather two): Respublica litteraria.4 This game-­changing expression was brought back into scientific circulation in France thanks to Paul Dibon and his now-­classic articles, which were compiled in the masterful collection significantly titled Regards sur la Hollande du Siècle d’or (Reflections on Holland in the Golden Age). Rescued from oblivion and restored to its original meaning, the expression Respublica litteraria brings Pintard’s portrait to life, illuminates the drama staged by Hazard, and possibly, or especially, expands our retrospective gaze by extending its reach to Holland, England, and Europe. Paul Dibon has since provided inspiration for research projects, conferences, and studies conducted by his students and followers necessary to understand the European history of the mind in this new light. The expression Respublica litteraria, used by men of letters among themselves, perfectly sums up the keen awareness shared by Pintard’s protagonists, as well as by those authors cited by Hazard, that they belonged to a society within another society, a contemplative society within an active society, and a society united by letters, beyond death and distance, in the same intellectual adventure. In an article published in 1978, Paul Dibon outlines the general characteristics of this “literary republic of the seventeenth century.”5 In a way, he provides the key to

The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 15

the phenomenon observed by Pintard, who was unable to name it or determine its profound structure, and collectively extends it to the seventeenth century, echoing and expanding an intuition expressed by Annie Barnes, who, in 1938, entitled her classic work Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) et la République des Lettres (Jean Le Clerc [1657–1736] and the Republic of Letters).6 Paul Dibon did not go so far as to propose a genealogy for either the expression Respublica litteraria or the phenomenon itself as it could be observed during the seventeenth century (Dibon’s favored time period). We can gauge his academic reserve or caution through, notably, his studies on the epistolary networks that united—and, in many respects, constructed—Europe’s community of international men of letters at the time. Dibon nonetheless illustrated better than anyone the authority held by Erasmus and his works in Holland during the Golden Age.7 Implicitly, by examining Erasmus’s reception among the Dutch “citizens” of the Republic of Letters in the seventeenth century, Paul Dibon not only provided a glimpse of the Erasmian exemplum that oriented their thinking and shaped their lifestyle, but also suggested a genealogy and tradition specific to this lettered elite connected to its French, English, and Italian counterparts. It was therefore completely natural, in light of those propositions, to question whether the concept of the Respublica litteraria, documented in Erasmus’s correspondence beginning in the early sixteenth century, did not in fact exist even earlier. Without straying from the field of lexicography, and without asking, or at least only indirectly, all the questions prompted by the “long duration” of this four-­century-­old expression, it is clear that several occurrences of the Respublica litteraria make the case for more continuity than rupture, despite their intermittence over time. The first occurrence of this syntactic unit thus far identified dates back one century before its first use by Erasmus. We find it, as previously noted, in a July 1417 letter addressed to Poggio Bracciolini, known as Poggio, and sent from Venice by Francesco Barbaro, a young nobleman and a student of Guarino Guarini. Poggio was at that time in Constance, where he remained despite the council’s deposition of Antipope John XXIII, whom he had accompanied with a delegation of Florentine humanists. In a letter to Guarini, dated January 1417, Poggio enumerates his sensational discoveries of manuscripts by Latin authors, which he made during several “campaigns” to various monasteries across northern Europe. He compares himself to Virgil’s Aeneas, saving the Penates from the destruction of Troy, as instructed by Hector’s ghost, in order to bring them to a new Troy. The reconstitution of the Latin West’s dispersed and in large part forgotten

16 An Ideal Citizenship

legacy,8 carried out by Petrarch and Salutati’s disciples, therefore took place against a backdrop of division which was rattling the Respublica christiana and which the council of theologians gathered in Constance were attempting to repair via their own methods. At the same time, in pursuit of the same mission through different channels—the unity of Christian Europe—Poggio was reassembling a literary heritage on which “another Troy,” more promising and reconciliatory, could be founded in Italy. And so the last holdover of “barbarism”—­ theologians’ abstract sophism, the basis of disputes in Europe at the time—was erased in the light of rediscovered knowledge and eloquence from antiquity. Another “spiritual power” emerged in the very wake of the ecclesiastical “spiritual power” weakened by the Great Schism. Francesco Barbaro belonged to an illustrious Venetian senatorial family. Thanks to his childhood initiation into the Greek and Latin studia humanitatis, he joined the same family of men of letters to which his master Guarino Guarini belonged, as did Poggio Bracciolini, Niccolò Niccoli, Leonardo Bruni, and Pier Paolo Vergerio. Barbaro wrote to Poggio in the name of this community of Italian men of letters, whose ambitions extended to Christian Europe and whose shared cultura animi transcended its members’ civic or gentilic loyalties, in order to, as it were, render it written and public homage: Ignominia etiam notandi sunt illi Germani, qui clarissimos viros, quorum vita ad omnem memoriam sibi commendata esse debuit, quantum in se fuit, vivos diuturno tempore sepultos tenuerunt. Quod si impudenter factum est, quid neglegentius? Si ex sententia, quid crudelius? An quisquam ita invidus erit, ut vos nimium exornari a me censeat? Quos autem orno? Eos, nempe, qui huic litterariae Reipublicae plurima adjumenta atque ornamenta contulerunt. (We must also condemn those Germans who have for so long buried alive the exceptional geniuses whose memory should have been eternally precious to them. If that is the result of shortsightedness, what negligence is most to blame? If it is deliberate, is cruelty worse? Could there be anyone so jealous as to judge my praise excessive? But to whom is my praise directed? To those, is it not, who have contributed the most to the growth and ornament of the Republic of Letters.)9 Barbaro then defines a European and universal legacy, on a European, universal scale: Quid enim magnificentius, aut praeclarius assequi poteras, quam immortalia haec tua merita non latere in tenebris, non esse abdita, sed cum in luce Europae, tum in aulis Germaniae provinciae, atque in auribus omnium gentium et nationum esse posita? (What more magnificent,

The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 17

more dazzling reward can you obtain than to see your immortal merits, instead of languishing, buried in the shadows, shine under Europe’s light as in all the courts of the German province and reach the ears of all the peoples and all the nations?)10 I will not elaborate at present on the rhetorical architecture that gives sense and autonomy to this “society within a society,” which united members of the Roman curia, the Venetian Senate, and the Florentine Signoria in the same respublica, around a shared European heritage for which they took responsibility. All those elements can be found in a work by Angelo Decembrio, written around 1450 and published in 1540, entitled De politia litteraria. In this literary dialogue, which stars Leonello d’Este, Guarino Guarini, Pier Paolo Vergerio, Leonardo Aretino (Leonardo Bruni), and Poggio Bracciolini, Decembrio clarifies the categorical difference between politeia in the Aristotelian perspective (the temporal city) and politia as he viewed it (the republic of minds): Politiæ litterariæ commentarios [. . .] quam non a poli ciuitate græca deriuatione, sed a nostris, hoc est poliendo seu polite scribendo appellare libet. (These commentaries on literary politeness [. . .] which it pleases me to name as such, by deriving the word, not from the Greek polis, which designates the city, but from our Latin words, polio, which means to polish, or polite scribendo, write in a meticulous manner.)11 The politia litteraria—a “society of minds within political society” and a “pedagogical and erudite province” that transcended political regimes, changing them from the inside—had its own place within the permanent curriculum of urbana conversatio, which libraries would expand to include interlocutors from the farthest past, brought back to life through philology. Its mission lay in the transformation (cultura), or polishing (expolitio), of the “political” man to a man of the “mind” (elegantia). The term Respublica litteraria resurfaced in a more ambitious and less seemingly interior way at the end of the fifteenth century in the prefaces and dedications that appeared in Greek and Latin texts published by Aldus Manutius, though still based on the idea of a fertile literary heritage administered by a corps of philologists in the service of a superior and universal good. The expansion of that network of philologists and their influence now represented a tangible European strategy to expand libraries dedicated to learning and strengthened international solidarity between scholars. For Aldus, the ideal and essential library that his publishing house hoped to create, summarizing and perpetuating a century of classical “manuscript chasing” and philological

18 An Ideal Citizenship

progress in Italy, was both a heritage shared by all European men of letters and the “commonplace” of their solidarity and cooperation in service of the mind. I will limit myself to a few quotations, without foreseeing a deeper analysis that would even better highlight how this great Venetian editor viewed the Republic of Letters. First, it is important to precisely outline the meaning of the noun litterae or the adjective litteraria within the phrase Aldus borrowed from Francesco Barbaro. For the Venetian publisher, much more than for Barbaro, “letters” implied the preeminence of the Greek language (the ultimate vehicle for the philosophy and sciences invented in Greek) over Latin, the language of general culture. It is equally important to highlight how the idea of the respublica was expanded in Aldus’s writing, which utilized an even more resolutely European backdrop in which England, France, and northern Europe were linked much more explicitly than in Francesco Barbaro’s letter at the time of the Council of Constance. A semantic constellation12 radiates from the term Respublica litteraria throughout Aldus’s writing and transforms it into the banner of a program and a strategy: Studiosi bonarum litterarum, amantissimi bonarum litterarum, and academia universalis are all different definitions for the same community of philologists and readers, editors, and beneficiaries of texts published by Aldus thanks to the support of Alberto III Pio, the Prince of Carpi. In the dedication for Alberto Pio’s Astronomica, published in 1499, Aldus mentions two Englishmen (Linacre and Grocyn) who came to Italy to study “good letters,” just as Alcuin once left Ireland for the then-­barbarian European mainland. The two men would collaborate on the academia universalis, of which Aldus’s philhellenic academy was one single link.13 In a preface dedicated to Marco Musurus in an edition of Statius’s Silvae in 1502, Aldus mentions other collaborators attracted to Italy from various locations in Europe: Atque utinam plurimos id genus haberemus reipublicae litterariae benefactores! Quanquam plurimos speramus futuros non in Italia, solum, sed et in Germania atque Galliis et apud toto orbe divisos Britannos. . . . (If only we had a swarm of this kind of benefactors for the Republic of Letters! Which is what we hope for, not only in Italy, but in Germany, France, and as far as the Britons ‘who live at the end of the world.’ . . .)14 In the same year, in his dedication to Marino Sanuto in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Aldus writes: Sperabam equidem cum academicis nostris viris utriusque linguae perstudiosis, ut tecum inde reverso esse die, noctuque possemus atque de re litte-

The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 19

raria communicare. (As for me, I hoped, with our learned academicians knowledgeable in two languages, to share, upon your return, your company day and night to converse about literature.)15 For lack of a direct link between the scholar-­senator Sanuto and the philological community assembled in Aldus’s bottega, the Ovid text published by Aldus and dedicated to the senator, an enlightened patron of letters, serves to establishes a dialogue and exchange between the two, through its inclusion in the splendid library that the Venetian senator assembled at his home. The text bears witness to the gratitude owed the statesman by philologists for the printing privileges he obtained for them: Pro republica litteraria ex hoc amplissimi sapientissimique senatus consulto mihi omnium pene consensu decerneretur . . . (So that it is bestowed upon me, in the name of the Republic of Letters and with the consent of all, by a decree by this most august and wise senate . . .)16 In the dedication for Ovid’s Heroides, also dedicated to Marino Sanuto, again in 1502, Aldus clarifies his views on the polarity, which was not necessarily antithetical, and even less so antagonistic, between the “literary republic” and “political society,” between the spiritual and worldly: Vide quanta in te sit suavitas, mi Marine: equidem tecum esse, tecum vivere semper velim. Quod quia non licet; maximis utriusque nostrum occupationibus, meis quidem in republica litteraria, tuis vero in inclyta hac Republica Veneta, in qua ne hora quidem vacare potes a muneribus publicis. (See the effects of your kindness, dear Marino: I want to always be and live with you, a joy prevented by our respective occupations, for me in the Republic of Letters, for you in your glorious Republic of Venice, where not an hour frees you from your public duties.)17 In a Supplicatio to Leo X, published in the beginning of Omnia Platonis opera in September 1513, Aldus draws a parallel between, on one hand, the political and religious vocation of the new pope, who wanted to reestablish peace in Europe and propagate the Gospel throughout the world, and, on the other, his zeal for bonae litteraie (good letters).18 In this elegant manifesto, the sacerdotal power of the pope, head of the Respublica christiana, appears complementary to the similarly spiritual though distinct authority of the prince of the Respublica litteraria, which Aldus wished to become. The two authorities were contributing to the same goal: peace and unity in Europe. They could collaborate on a shared terrain: bonae litteraie, the Greco-­L atin literary heritage, a terrestrial source of faith, hope, and charity.

20 An Ideal Citizenship

As clearly demonstrated by Fritz Schalk, nobody provided more public‑ ity for the expression Respublica litteraria than Erasmus. It is nonetheless worth noting that the phrase did not appear in his correspondence, or in that of his interlocutors, until well after his stay in Venice, in 1508, with Aldus Manutius. Again in 1515, Erasmus sent a famous letter of allegiance to Rome, the communis patria of men of letters around the world, addressed to Cardinal Riario. Within it appears the Manutian doctrine of a close alliance between the Respublica christiana, led by the pope, and the Respublica litteraria, which had its own structure but nonetheless benefited from pontifical patronage, whose endeavors mirrored that of the apostolic priesthood, and which participated in the same Roman universality.19 Beginning in 1517, the Manutian idea of a universal and autonomous community of men of letters continued to appear in various forms in Erasmus’s correspondence, although an alliance with the papacy and the communion with Rome were no longer evoked. Erasmus’s correspondents themselves designated him as the sole leader—the princeps—of a civitas litteraria that not only had its own structure but also an autonomous spiritual mission. Erasmus appeared to accept this role of “literary pope,” admonishing secular states, flagellating pontifical Rome, debating with Luther, and reigning at the “ceiling” of a violently divided European “parliament,” which did not know how to resolve its quarrels apart from using weapons or theological disputes. He wanted to be the custodian of a spiritual power that was more disarmed, but more authentic because it could be more unifying than other powers. Consider a few examples:

• (1517) letter to Budé: Erasmus mentions panegyricus eruditorum.20 • (1518) letter from Budé: He writes to Erasmus of a senatus doctorum

invested with the ultimate power to judge and glorify the merits of men.21 These are synonyms for the Respublica litteraria. • (1523) letter to Budé: Erasmus mentions the familia et natio litteratorum.22 • (1528) letter from Hubert Balland to Erasmus: The former qualifies his illustrious correspondent as antistes reipublicae litterariae.23 • (1530) letters following the publication of Ciceronianus: Erasmus repeatedly expresses his fear that he is not creating as great an uproar within the Republic of Letters as that provoked by the Reformation within the Christian Republic. Erasmus believed that while the two “Republics” were deeply analogous and could be compared to one another, one was superior to the other and should not allow itself to be divided against itself as the other had been.24

The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 21

To reinforce this needed unity among men of letters, the cornerstone of true European unity, Erasmus tirelessly advocated the cult of friendship, the social link distinctive to learned society and the counterbalance to the principles of division and hatred that were ripping other human societies apart. In his correspondence, Erasmus also specifies the conditions for admission to the Republic of Letters, notably for younger people: each must “unite good letters with good values, have an erudite culture in Greek and Latin (ultraque lingua doctus), be a gentle and brilliant conversationalist,” and above all have a “highly developed and zealous sense of citizenship oriented toward the common good: letters.”25 This same doctrine can be found throughout Adagia. Erasmus begins his commentary on the adage Dulce bellum inexpertis with the following phrase: “Neither the relationship of affinity nor of consanguinity binds congenial spirits with closer or firmer bands, than an union in one common pursuit of liberal knowledge and intellectual improvement.”26 For him and his correspondents, the res litteraria was the common ground of the Respublica litteraria. In a letter Budé sent to Erasmus, the great Hellenist Frenchman uses the following formula: “that ocean of antiquity which by natural law is common to all.”27 That was precisely the principle of unity missing from the Europe of theologians and which allied philologists had to restore amid a fissured world in order to teach it peace. But the Respublica litteraria, while a crusade for peace and unity, was also an army, which had to combat formidable and numerous unrelenting foes and which boasted its own generals and soldiers (militia). Philology itself was a war against a swarm of perverse enemies who wanted to maintain the authors of the res litteraria in silence and shadow in order to ensure they were not heard. Erasmus refers to his troops as “citizens in arms.” The legacy of medieval religious orders is also very visible in Erasmus’s vocabulary, as it is in Petrarch’s. Erasmus, whose Civitas sive Respublica litteraria resembled a chivalrous and monastic religious order, saw himself as the abbot of lettered men, chief of the devotees to bonae litteraie, which did not prevent him from imagining himself as the Muses’ grand priest.28 The savants of his Republic, like medieval clerks in the not-­so-­distant past, formed an aristocracy of the mind in the vanguard of a humanity still immersed in blindness. Borrowing Cicero’s theory that study constitutes a bond between men—“a kind of natural fellowship” that “most distances us from the nature of other animals”29—­ Erasmus writes: “Men devoid of those letters that, not without reason, we refer to as the classics scarcely merit the name of men.”30 This aristocracy of the mind recognized its leaders. In 1525, in a letter to Jean Lallemand, Erasmus evokes Principes reipublicae litterariae, meaning himself, Guillaume Budé, and Thomas More. Juan Luis Vivès, one of Erasmus’s Spanish disciples, wrote about vera academia, scilicet conventus et consensus hominum

22 An Ideal Citizenship

doctorum, pariter et bonorum. . . .31 Elsewhere, this same author wrote along similar lines, but while emphasizing the spirit of freedom that characterized men of letters: Erigunt enim sese apud nationes omnes clara, excellentia, liberaque ingenia impatientia servitutis, et jugum hoc stultissimae ac violentissimae tyrannidis ex cervicibus suis animose depellunt, civesque suos ad libertatem vocant, vindicabuntque totam prorsus litterariam civitatem in libertatem longe suavissimam, qua tot saeculis caruerunt. . . . (Bright, outstanding, liberal talents arising among all the nations are spiritedly throwing off the yoke of this stupid and violent tyranny from their necks, and exhorting their fellow citizens to freedom. The world of letters will finally achieve that sweet liberty which has been absent for so many ­centuries. . . .)32 That liberty placed men of letters in a critical position—in both meanings of the term—in relation to the state and the church. It allowed them to be the impartial conscience of institutions and societies. Francesco Barbaro was Venetian, Aldus Manutius moved to Venice, and Erasmus visited Venice. Clearly, the city of the doges played an important role in the elaboration of the concept of the Respublica litteraria.33 In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Historia sui temporis, which was written by Jacques-­ Auguste de Thou, a Gallican friend of Paolo Sarpi, the complete edition of which did not appear until 1734, when it was published in sixteen volumes in London, was the most complete portrait of the European Republic of Letters during the sixteenth century, as well as the first attempt to write European history from the critical perspective of the “Republic” of savants for which De Thou himself served as an authority. But Historia, which was written in Latin, and therefore whose circulation was long limited, still maintained the esoteric character of the expression Respublica litteraria within an aristocratic circle of learned men.34 It fell to Trajano Boccalini to ensure that the expression Respublica litteraria was widely circulated throughout Europe, starting in Venice, a city that played a decisive role before and alongside Paris. Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso, which was published in Venice in 1612 and in Milan beginning in 1614, was an immense literary success, first in Italy and then, following multiple translations into various European languages, in France beginning in 1616, England in 1622 and 1626, Spain in 1634, as well as Germany, in numerous and partial translations.35 Like De Thou’s Historia, Ragguagli (which is difficult to separate from another essay by Boccalini, Pietra del paragone politico)36 pre­sents a veritable

The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 23

political and autonomous view on Europe belonging to the Republic of Letters. Boccalini also offers his readers a well-­structured allegorical image of the Republic of Letters centered around its prince, Apollo, who reigns over republics and kingdoms from Mount Parnassus and takes counsel from a senate composed of classical and modern authors, living and dead, to render his political and literary judgments. No other work did more to solidify, in the mind of a vast international and interdenominational public, the concept of a kingdom of the mind and the transhistoric council of authors from which that kingdom drew its authority and the freedom of its judgments. Thanks to Boccalini, Mount Parnassus became an allegory for the Republic of Letters. However, Pierre Bayle;37 Vigneul-­Marville;38 Adrien Baillet;39 Daniel Georg Morhof;40 Gottfried Leibniz, who mentions orbis litterata (the lettered world) in his Acta eruditorum; and Denis de Sallo, who evokes the Republic of Letters in the introduction to the first edition of Journal des savants (Journal of Savants), published in 1665, brought the phenomenon considerable publicity and authority during the reign of Louis XIV.41 During this period, Europe could convince itself that it was harboring a power of the mind (studium)—alongside its religious (sacerdotium), political, and military (imperium sive regnum) authorities—which was highly organized and united and which assumed all the authority that the Middle Ages had reserved for its universities. Through his person and his work, Voltaire succeeded in encapsulating and exercising this power, which he would retrospectively praise: There never was a more universal correspondence kept between philosophers than at this period, and Leibnitz contributed not a little to encourage it. A republic of letters was insensibly established in Europe, in the midst of the most obstinate war, and the number of different religions; the arts and sciences, all of them thus received mutual assistance from each other, and the academies helped to form this republic. [. . .] The truly learned of every denomination have strengthened the bonds of this grand society of geniuses, which is universally diffused, and everywhere independent.42 In 1790, Nicolas de Bonneville wrote the following statement in Le Tribun du people (The People’s Tribune, no. IX), the organ of the Cercle social: “It is from the Republic of Letters that we expect the triumph of patriotism and liberty.” In September 1794, the Abbé Grégoire declared before the National Convention: “Without the efforts of the Republic of Letters, the French Republic would have yet to be born.”43 To understand Kant’s support of the French Revolution, and the Hegelian

24 An Ideal Citizenship

notion of Reason at work throughout history, it is essential to note the growing influence—beginning in 1684, the date when Bayle’s Nouvelles de le République (News of the Republic) were first distributed, through 1792, when the new studium made its first attempt to commandeer the French imperium—of a spiritual power independent from states and churches, which was presented more and more overtly by men of letters as European genius at work. Nowhere was this French concept described and analyzed with greater care and interest than in Germany during the reign of Louis XIV. I will limit myself to citing two Latin dissertations: the first by Christian Löber, which was defended and published in Jena in 1696; the second by George Prit, defended and published in Leipzig in 1698.44 In the latter, Prit reverses a fact established by Löber—that the Respublica litteraria is not a political society, but a private sodality—in its favor. According to Prit, the Republic of Letters was a political society superior to all others, thanks to its nature, origin, and form. Its nature reunited illam virorum doctorum societatem, quae circa bonas artes et scientias expolien das, promouendas, propagandasque est occupata; quae cum per universitatem orbis terrarum sit dispersa . . . (this society of savants, fully occupied with cultivating, promoting, and propagating the sciences and the arts, which is dispersed across all regions of the universe . . .). By its origin, which, according to Francis Bacon,45 was different from all the political city-­states, for it was born from the premise that the principle and means of repairing man’s descent into ignorance can be found in the history of man, the history of the Republic of Letters is therefore the infinitely more generous and redemptive other half of the violent, blind, political, and military history of nations. Finally, its form: the Republic of Letters was not restricted to any one territory but could exist anywhere that the degree of barbarism had not descended too far beneath animality. The Republic did not have a “head,” in the sense of an absolute sovereign, nor did it espouse religious or doctrinaire orthodoxy. Tolerance reigned supreme: nemo ad religionem cogi possit (no one can be forced into worship).46 The Respublica litteraria was predicated on equality (paritas) between its elected citizens and governed by universal suffrage, which determined the value of works and the merit of men in its ranks. It was a democracy, but one in which votes eadem non numero sed suo quodque pondere aestimentur (are estimated not by their number but by their weight).47 According to that definition, the French Republic could be viewed in Germany as the political triumph of an inherently literary ideal.

The Rediscovered Republic of Letters 25

Still according to Prit, the Republic of Letters reveled in a freedom of conscience, speech, and expression. Human error was allowed, though at times suppressed and ridiculed with critical irony. This freedom was not the same as freedom in the civic and political sense; it was freedom circa mentis sense, freedom “of thought,” related to freedom of both oral and written expression, and not the unlimited freedom postulated by Spinoza in chapter XX of Tractatus theologico-­politicus.48 In reality, Prit was picturing a Republic of Letters in the image of the Lutheran university in Leipzig where he presented his dissertation: an assembly both disciplined and liberal, cautious and open-­minded, good and sound, and frankly very different from the French version of the Republic of Letters, which since its debut had developed outside of the university system. That difference clearly escaped the author, who situated the two universes within the same ideal structure. To conclude, I propose two angles of research: the first lexicographical in the broadest meaning of the term, and the second more akin to a historical sociology that pays particular attention to the very different institutional and intellectual contexts in which the idea of the Respublica litteraria appeared over four centuries. An exhaustive list, as far as is possible, of the occurrences of the Respublica litteraria and the semantic field surrounding it is in itself highly desirable. It is equally important, however, to note that the history of this concept is punctuated by its use by leading thinkers, or by the reflections they dedicated to the “spiritual power” of learned men, who never expressly mentioned the Republic of Letters. Thus, for example, Samuel Sorbière49 was able to deduce a theory about the Republic of Letters from Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan, even though the concept itself was absent from the philosopher’s vocabulary. The Republic of Letters is often present in places where it does not visibly appear. Today, there is a great deal of discussion and writing on the sociology of intellectuals. Unfortunately, this recent discipline appears to ignore the fact that it is built upon a formidable tradition of learned men themselves reflecting on the specific society they were forming within Europe’s political and religious societies. The rediscovery of this tradition, building upon the political philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, though remaining clearly distinct from the history of political ideas, is perhaps the most promising field of research currently available to us. And for that we owe thanks to Paul Dibon and to what he refers to as his “discourse on method” in his article on savant correspondences.

2 NICOLAS CLAUDE FABRI DE PEIRESC: PRINCE OF THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

The entry for “Peiresc” in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (The Dictionary Historical and Critical) is brief, albeit extraordinarily dense and unusual in its enthusiasm: No man rendered more services to the Republic of Letters than this one. He was in a way its procurator-­general: he encouraged Authors, he provided them lighting and materials, he used his revenues to purchase or copy the rarest and more useful monuments. His trade of Letters spread to all parts of the World: philosophical experiences, rarities of Nature, productions of Art, Antiquities, History, and Languages were all equal objects of his care and curiosity. The details of all these things can be found in his Life, wisely and elegantly composed by Pierre Gassendi. It is not un-­useful to note that this man celebrated by all of Europe, whose death prompted so many Poets to weep, in so many languages, and caused the Humorists of Rome to go into ceremonial grieving, was unknown to many Frenchmen, men of merit and learning [Born on December 1, 1580]. He died on June 24, 1637.1 In his precious notes, Bayle quotes from the correspondence between Jean-­ Louis Guez de Balzac and Jean Chapelain to support his conclusions. Indeed, Balzac writes, “in a mediocre fortune he [Peiresc] had the thoughts of a great lord, and without the friendship of Augustus, he would not have become Maecenas.” Balzac continues, “Do you believe in the rest, that Monsieur de La Rochefoucauld had never heard of our Mr. de Peiresc, and that just as many other persons who are neither barbaric nor ignorant have no knowledge of him either?”2 While these seventeenth-­century accounts may justify my chosen title, “Peiresc: Prince of the Republic of Letters” (Bayle called him its “procurator-­ general,” Balzac referred to him as “Maecenas”), they also raise the question, Why was Peiresc relatively unknown in his own country, France, beginning in the seventeenth century? This question prompts two additional ones: Why did Gassendi, author of the laudable Life of Peiresc, which was published in 1641,3 26

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 27

write in Latin, thereby limiting the work’s circulation? And why, for that matter, was that Latin edition of Peiresc’s Life, which was republished several times in Holland and rapidly translated into English, not translated in France until 1770, and only then in an abridged form, which omitted a large portion of Peiresc’s scientific activities? Charles Perrault’s homage to Peiresc, in his Hommes illustres (Illustrious Men, 1697), reveals the detachment already felt by the “Moderns” toward this “Ancient” as strange and distant in their eyes as Varro or Pliny. Perrault does not mention (and had not read) Gassendi’s Vita. He somewhat confuses the magic-­imbued science of Giovanni Battista Della Porta and the much more critical science of Peiresc, who knew the polymath in Naples, but was one generation younger: It is difficult to find a time when the Person (our present subject) was a Child; for in the first Years of his Life, the desire of Learning, which was always very strong in him, made him despite all the Sports and Amusements of Childhood; and he took no pleasure, but in listening to what was told him either Useful or Curious. Wisdom came to him so early, that at the Age of 9 or 10, he tutor’d his younger Brother, who study’d in the same College, and who look’d upon him and hearken’d to him as his Father and Preceptor. At his leaving the College, they gave him Matters to teach him to Ride, to Fence, and to Dance; but as his whole Inclination was turn’d to Letters, he never did his Exercises but in presence of his Masters, employing the rest of his time either in Reading or Extracting Books, or in Composing. He set himself then to the study of Medals, of Inscriptions, of Tombs, and other Monuments; and in fine, of every thing which could afford an exact and particular knowledge of antiquity. In a short time, he surpass’d the most Able in that Science, and made a considerable store of such things as exercise and nourish with pleasure this laudable Curiosity. He study’d afterwards the Law under the best Masters of that time. And because it would be too long to report all the kinds of Study whereto he apply’d, I shall content my self to say, That there is no sort of Literature whereto he did not devote himself, and which he hath not in some manner exhausted; that there is scarce any Library in Europe, which he did not see and examine; no Men of Learning, whom he did not know, and to whom was not beneficial, in communicating to them, either his Knowledge, or his Books, or his Medals, or even his Purse; and if he hath receiv’d some good Offices from them, he fail’d not to return them with interest. His House was a kind of Academy, not only because of the great number of Men of Letters who came to see him; but only to consider it

28 An Ideal Citizenship

with regard to his Domestics, who knew all of ’em something with distinction, even to the Lacquys, whereof the least could serve as a Reader upon occasion; and had the Ingenuity to Bind Books, and to Bind ’em with a singular neatness. He had in the number of his Friends Baptiste de la Porte, most profound in the knowledge of the deepest Secrets of Nature, of whom he learnt every thing that he knew the most curious in those sort of Sciences. He convers’d with (in particular) the excellent Painter, Rubens, upon the knowledge of Medals, and upon his Art of Painting, whereof he knew all the Beauties, as also of most other Arts. He liv’d a long time with the excellent Monsieur du Vair, first President of the Parliament of Aix, where he was Counsellor, and join’d himself to him in so strict a Friendship, that when the King had given the Seals to Monsieur du Vair, he follow’d him to Paris, where he never made any other use of his interest with him, but for the service of his Friends, or to procure himself an easier entrance into the Libraries and Cabinets, where he hop’d to be able to satisfie his curiosity, Monsieur du Vair, who imparted to him his greatest Secrets, and took his Advice upon the most important Affairs of State, could never get him to accept of any Favour or Kindness of all those he offer’d him, but one very small Benefice. After the death of Monsieur du Vair, who left him Heir of all his Medals, he return’d to Aix to revisit his ancient Library. There with his Brother Palamede Fabri Sieur de Valance, he continu’d his Commerce of Letters and Curiosities, not only with all the old World, (which did not suffice to satisfie him), but with all the New; from whence was brought him, without ceasing, the marvelous Productions both of Art and Nature. He died in June 1637, aged 57 Years. He was of the celebrated Academy of Humorists of Rome, who render’d him the fame Honours which are done to the principal Officers of that Academy, altho’ he was but a plain Academic, his Merit prevailing upon the Custom. The Hall was hung with Black, and his Buste was set in an eminent place. James Bouchard Parisian, and of that Academy, made his Funeral Oration in Latin, a Piece of great Eloquence, in the middle of an infinite crowd of Men of Learning, and in presence of ten Cardinals, among whom were the two Cardinals Barberini. The Funeral Elogiums made in his praise are not to be number’d: There is compos’d a great Volume of ’em, in above 40 different Tongues. He is interr’d in the Church of the Jacobins at Aix; and these Words are read on his Tomb, where also his parents are bury’d, Tumulus Fibricorum.4

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 29

Amnesia had already largely taken hold. All Bayle could do with his Dictionary was set limits on how far that forgetting would extend. Although Peiresc’s immense correspondence had been written in French and Italian, he had nonetheless become the figurehead for the Latin Republic of Letters. He had been recognized and celebrated across Europe by a community of savants who considered Latin to be their language, both technical and literary. Even though Peiresc wrote and spoke in vernaculars, he viewed French and Italian as mere utilitarian languages to communicate and share information. If he had ever attempted to produce a formal scientific treatise or a literary work, he undoubtedly, like his friend Gassendi, would have chosen to write and publish it in a humanist’s polished Latin. But neither his place in the Republic of Letters nor his vocation as its modest and tireless servant allowed him to dedicate himself to the work of an author. He had a vision of his own role that was both too elevated and too humble. Peiresc, as Bayle accurately wrote, “encouraged his authors,” but he had no desire to become one himself. His conception of the office of the “prince of the Republic of Letters” was in this respect different from Erasmus’s, and even more so from Justus Lipsius’s, who though unquestionably a savant, and eminent among them, was an “author” above all and in the most literary meaning of the term, which included an author’s “self-­love.” Even figures like Joseph Justus Scaliger, Salmasius, or Mersenne were, in this respect, less “princely” than Peiresc, who modeled himself after Gian Vincenzo Pinelli and himself found a disciple in Rome in Cassiano dal Pozzo. He rigorously adhered to the noble and altruistic order of invention, inspired by an erudite and polymathic encyclopedia in the Aristotelian, Varronian, and Plinian vein, which he strove to nourish and which he rendered fruitful by coordinating European collaboration between specialists. But Peiresc himself was the opposite of a specialist, though he did specialize in numerous subjects simultaneously. He was content with his role as the pilot of a shifting mass of knowledge: he never needed to write either reports or specialized treatises himself. One of Gassendi’s objectives in the Vita of Peiresc was precisely to show that this absence of completed and published works was not due to intellectual sterility, and even less so to laziness, but to an excess of invention—a cornucopia of new and profound ideas, with which Peiresc generously advanced the science of his time. That altruism extended to a forgetting of the self was a capital trait of the scientific ethical code as understood by Peiresc. It mattered to him to set the example for others, in the name of primus inter pares. He was too endowed with a sense of scientific community, and the collective nature of its work and results, to allow himself to claim any personal ownership, which would have served his own fame. However, I reiterate and insist that if he had been guilty of such a sin

30 An Ideal Citizenship

of avarice, he would have done so in Latin. In writing his Vita, Gassendi became Peiresc’s posthumous spokesperson, draping him in a purple Latin robe that this great thinker had refused to don in his lifetime. To fulfill his exceptionally noble and humble role as the “procurator-­general” of letters, Peiresc contented himself with developing remarkable conversational skills with which he nourished his guests and his no-­less-­remarkable correspondence with savants all across the world, which fed their research and coordinated their efforts. Only one part of this magnum opus, the memory of which Gassendi’s Vita hoped to save, was ever published. And following Tamizey de Larroque, it fell to Agnès Bresson to bring what is perhaps the most memorable chapter of Peiresc’s opus to light, which she did with as much knowledge as devotion: the savant’s correspondence with Claude Saumaise.5 Peiresc’s best friends (and spiritual successors after his death in 1637) were the Dupuy brothers, Pierre and Jacques, two Parisians in continuous contact with Aix and Belgentier, where Peiresc spent most of his time after leaving Paris in 1623. Like both Gian Vincenzo Pinelli and Peiresc, the Dupuy brothers did not publish anything apart from their Traitez des droits et des libertez de l’Église gallicane (Treatise on the Rights and Liberties of the Gallican Church, 1639), written on Richelieu’s orders, and various “memoirs” about the French monarchy that directly reflected Pierre Dupuy’s responsibilities as a royal archivist before he handed his duties over to Nicolas Rigault. The brothers’ encyclopedic knowledge was not as extensive as Peiresc’s, however. But they too were situated at the center of a vast network of erudite correspondence, most often conducted in French. The library where they entertained everyday (first Jacques-­Auguste de Thou’s, followed by the king’s) was a “theater of memory” where conversation between Parisian savants or visiting foreigners, themselves “living, breathing libraries,” fostered a permanent council of minds. But when Pierre Dupuy died, in 1651, Nicolas Rigault, his lifelong friend, published a Vita Petri Puteani, which was accompanied by a mournful homage in the form of poetry and prose, most of which was written in Latin6 by regular visitors to the “cabinet Dupuy.” Even within this Gallican milieu, which included Guez de Balzac and which viewed the emergence of literature written in French with a highly favorable gaze, Latin was still the noble language shared by all European men of letters and the language of literary glory. In 1718, Pierre Daniel Huet was still publishing his Memoirs in Latin in The Hague, as Jacques-­Auguste de Thou did in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Yet that fidelity to Latin had been a lost cause for some time, especially in France, where the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” began in 1667 with Louis Le Laboureur’s Avantages de la langue françoise sur la latine (Ad-

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 31

vantages of French over Latin). When Gassendi published his Vita Peireskii in 1641, Descartes’s Discours de la method (Discourse on the Method) in Leiden, which was in French, had been published four years earlier; Mersenne had published his Harmonie universelle (Universal Harmony) in 1636 in French (the Latin translation would not appear until 1648). As steadfast as Francis Bacon in England, Descartes and Mersenne championed a “new science” in France, which broke with the neo-­Aristotelian encyclopedia emphasized by figures like Peiresc. This “new science” wanted to dispense with “ancient authorities,” in the same way that it could dispense with Latin. It found its own language in mathematical symbols. Liberated from the weight of philology and humanist erudition, the movement quickly attracted the sympathy of the “mondains,” new “men of letters” who read ancient classics in translations by Amyot or Perrot d’Ablancourt, and who knew classical philosophy thanks to Montaigne’s Essays. As Balzac wrote, quoted by Bayle, it was possible even during Peiresc’s lifetime to encounter “many persons” of letters in Paris, in that new, restrained meaning, who were entirely unaware of Peiresc’s rank and role within the Latin and international Republic of Letters. That explains why the Vita Peireskii was so quickly forgotten and ignored in France. Gassendi’s own philosophical and scientific works, written entirely in Latin, would have met a similar fate if one of his disciples, François Bernier, had not endeavored after his master’s death to publish Abrégé de la philosophie de M. Gassendi (Gassendi’s Abridged Philosophy) in 1674, for use by the “new [French] men of letters”: this assured the dissemination of Gassendi’s ideas not only in Paris, but in all of eighteenth-­century French Europe. Humanist Latin’s drop in prestige in France during the reign of Louis XIV would bring about a transformation of the Republic of Letters. A French Republic of Letters, of the Enlightenment, with many more citizens, began to replace the Republic of the Renaissance, whose origins traced back to Petrarch. Bayle, the author of the Dictionary Historical and Critical as well as the publicist behind Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (News of the Republic of Letters) understood that context better than anyone. In his Suite des réflexions sur le prétendu jugement du public (Continuation of the Remarks on the Pretended Judgment of the Public), he writes: [W]e live in an age where they read rather for amusement than in order to grow learned. If I had written my Dictionary according to the taste of Abbot Renaudot [who had banned the Dictionary . . .], no body would have printed it, and had any body run the hazard of putting it to the press, he would not have sold a hundred copies. [. . .] If I had written in Latin, I should have taken another method; and had the taste of the former age prevailed, I should have given a place in my book to nothing but litera-

32 An Ideal Citizenship

ture [meaning: historical and philological erudition for specialists]. But the times are altered. Good things alone do not take, but disgust. We must mingle them with others, if we would have the reader take the patience to peruse them. Veluti pueris absinthia taetra medentes, Cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum etc. [Like those who, healing children with bitter absinthe, before giving it to them dampen the cup’s rim] [Lucretius, De rerum natura, book 5, v. 11–12]. [. . .] [Henry] Valesius and the learned men of his rank deem that to be superfluous in a book which they know already, or do not hope to turn some day to their advantage. But they ought to sympathize with the necessities of the half-­learned, and the vulgar of the Republic of Letters. They ought to know that it is divided into many more classes than the Roman Republic ever was. Each class has its wants, and it is the part of compilations to serve them all, some one way, and some another. They are therefore mistaken notwithstanding their great knowledge, when they say absolutely, this thing is useful and necessary, that is superfluous. Are not these terms relative? Say rather, this is useful or useless to me, and to those that are like me, useful or useless however to a hundred other men of letters. It is not a just way of reasoning to say, such a book would better deserve the approbation of the most learned men in Europe, if it was shorter, therefore it ought to have been shorter. Softly, gentlemen; there is nothing useless in these volumes which you mention; for what may not serve you, may serve several others: and I am very sure that if all the citizens of the Republic of Letters were brought together, that each might give his opinion upon what should be taken away, and what should be left, in a vast compilation, it would appear that the passages which some would throw out, would be precisely those which others would retain. A hundred reflections might be made not only on the true properties of works of this kind, but likewise on the inseparable union of criticism and trifles. Many might also be made on the difference which lies between a good book and a useful one: between an author who only proposes to himself the approbation of a few scientifics, and an author who prefers the general benefit to the glory of meriting approbation, which is not less hard to attain than a crown.7 The decline of Latin as the official and esoteric language of knowledge was accompanied by that of the presupposed fundamental element of Renaissance-­ era humanism—antiquity as a reference for truth and topic of erudite research. The distrust of the Ancients’ erudition and authority that had aided thinkers like Francis Bacon and later Descartes gradually spread as the preeminence of

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 33

classic Latin diminished and the use of modern languages increased, in particular French, even within scientific disciplines. Leibniz lamented this evolution for depriving the Republic of Letters of a truly universal language, which he himself employed. Fortunately, great minds, conservative and modern alike, ensured a certain continuity during this slow “crisis of the European mind,” which was as epistemological as it was linguistic, by preserving the fundamentals of humanism of the previous centuries, as if on Noah’s ark. The most determined, and also the most precocious, of these “smugglers” was without a doubt Montaigne. In his Essays, which he began to write at the end of the sixteenth century, he condensed all the philosophical work of the “return to antiquity” accomplished since Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, and placed it within reach and in the maternal language of the “new men of letters,” which the seventeenth century would name “honnestes gens.” Pierre Daniel Huet was another of these “smugglers,” during the reign of Louis XIV. But no one was more efficient than Pierre Bayle: in his Dictionary intended for the public of the new Republic of Letters, he assembled, in French, the riches accumulated by the old republic, in the savant Latin of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that Bayle had himself renounced. The “Peiresc” entry in the Dictionary is characteristic in this respect: by summarizing in fifty lines Gassendi’s Vita of Peiresc, which had been “unfashionable” for quite some time and for various reasons, the article safeguards its substance for the centuries to come. But what a drastic abridgement! Requier’s limited version in 1770, which remained largely obscure, did little to rectify Bayle’s heavy editing.8 How odd and wonderful that today—an era in which the philosophy of the Enlightenment and even the “new” science of Descartes, Newton, and Darwin have become historical objects susceptible to deconstruction, and when French, a universal language not so long ago, is as menaced as Latin was in the seventeenth century—the Life of Peiresk written by Gassendi has finally been translated in its entirety, at the very moment when Agnès Bresson published the correspondence between Peiresc and Saumaise, itself forgotten for three centuries. The owl of Minerva, wrote Hegel, only flies at dusk. Let’s say, more prosaically, that the end of the belief in linear and irresistible progress has made us more indulgent toward the states of learning and forms of wisdom that positivist history had believed to be definitively “surpassed” by the irresistible progress of reason. It is interesting to note that the fate of Pierre Gassendi’s Vita Peireskii was very different in England, where the vitality of the English language was not linked, as in France, to the Moderns’ blinding victory over the Latin of the Ancients. In 1657, William Rand translated the Vita Peireskii into English under the title The Mirror of True Nobility, and Gentility, Being the Life of

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N. C. Fabritius, Lord of Peiresc. This Latin masterpiece of seventeenth-­century academic biography thus became a part of England’s literary heritage. Even better, in 1681 in London, William Bates published a collection of Latin Lives of the giants of the Republic of Letters, a veritable Parnassus of Europe’s great minds. The collection, of course, included biographies of great humanists and protectors of erudite, English humanism like Henry Chichele, the archbishop of Canterbury, who founded All Souls College in Oxford with Henry VI, and Thomas Bodley, the founder of the Bodleian Library. But it also prominently featured the humanist princes of continental Europe. Thus we can read, for example, in their original Latin texts, Beatus Rhenanus’s Life of Erasmus, Louis Le Roy’s Life of Budé, Paolo Gualdo’s Life of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, Leo Allatius’s Life of Julius Caesar Lagalla, with a dedication by Gabriel Naudé to Guy Patin, Nicolas Rigault’s Life of Pierre Dupuy, and his brother Adrien’s Life of Henri de Valois. At the same time, the “Modern” Fontenelle, in France, was inaugurating a tradition of “academic eulogies” for savants, the first collection of which, published in 1719, was significantly preceded by the Histoire du renouvellement de l’Académie des sciences en 1699 (History of the Reorganization of the Academy of Sciences in 1699). This French and “modern” tradition of academic eulogies, which would be continued by d’Alembert in the eighteenth century, broke radically with the literary genre of the Vitae associated with the former humanist Republic of Letters. Thus a new funeral rite spread across Louis XIV’s France within a new, and primarily French, Republic of Letters, whose central institutions were the royal academies. Little matter that the Protestant Pierre Desmaizeaux, a friend of Bayle’s and Saint-­Évremond’s, published in French, though in Amsterdam, the Vies of Saint-­Évremond (1711), Boileau (1712), and Bayle (1732) after the model of Latin Vitae established by the former Republic of Letters; his was a provincial effort. For that matter, Desmaizeaux never dreamt of translating Gassendi’s Vita Peireskii. In England, on the contrary, thanks to Rand’s translation as well as to Bates’s collection, the tradition of the Vitae endured, giving rise in 1792 to that masterpiece of philologist savant biographies—James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, which itself energized the genre of Life and Letters within nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century England. This quite selective literary genre served as a Mount Parnassus in Great Britain and even, in some respects, as the equivalent of the French Academy. The first complete translation of the Vita Peireskii into French by Roger Lassalle is therefore a recent reparation, and a Belgian initiative,9 for the long French injustice dealt one of the former heroes of the literary civilization of France and Europe. But what exactly was the Latin and European Republic of Letters in Peiresc’s

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 35

day? And how could this Republic, never mentioned by either political historians or historians of national literatures, have had plebian “princes”? As previously noted, the concept of Respublica litterarum or Respublica litteraria (the public service of letters or the literary state) appeared for the first time in 1417, in the correspondence between the young, noble, Venetian humanist Francesco Barbaro and the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini. It was shaped on the model of the Respublica christiana, which, in the Middle Ages, was the legal expression designating the Catholic Church as a universal institution that gathered and governed all Christians according to a constitution that was simultaneously monarchist, under the authority of a prince (the pope); aristocratic, as the pope was assisted by bishops, heads of monastic orders, and cardinals; and democratic, since all Christians, clergy and nonclergy, entered into the mystical communion of the church without distinctions of nationality, language, or rank. As a legal state, albeit based on canonical law, the Respublica christiana transcended the various temporal and purely human states of civil law. When the Italian humanists following in Petrarch’s footsteps wanted to give themselves, and their program of study (the studia humanitatis, or literary humanities), a quasi-­legal identity, it was entirely natural that they modeled their community and the laws governing it on the Respublica christiana. The Republic of Letters was perceived to be a studious order within the Christian Republic, and from its debut, the alliance between Respublica litteraria and Respublica christiana was very strong. If Petrarch and his successors opposed the scholastic science of Europe’s northern universities with their studia humanitatis, it was only to reform and reenergize the church through study of the church fathers of the first centuries, as well as by a cultivated resurrection of Christian antiquity, which was inseparable from the Greco-­Latin civilization of the Roman Empire. But once the Italian humanists’ grand aspiration to reconnect to the genius and faith of antiquity was transplanted to Europe’s Gothic and scholastic north, it took a turn that was infinitely more dangerous for the unity of the Respublica christiana and the Roman orthodoxy. Early on, northern humanism, which was much less attached to Italic tradition, began to lean toward freer thinking and a literary and scientific theological “modernity” that was difficult for the Roman Church to accept. Even so, an influential northern humanist, Erasmus, appropriated the originally Italian concept of the Respublica litteraria, which he made into a principle and symbol of unity for Christian Europe, and gladly accepted to be named its prince. In effect, he was the first prince of the Respublica litteraria of the north to be widely recognized. It is significant not only that this prince never wanted to break with the Catholic Church communion, but that he was a hair’s breadth away from receiving the title of cardinal from

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Pope Paul III Farnese. Pietro Bembo, prince of the Italian Respublica litteraria, became a cardinal in 1536. Popes had long understood the symbolic authority of the Respublica litteraria and had done their best to link it to the unity of the Roman communion. The Anglican, Lutheran, and Calvinist Reformations could have ripped apart the European fabric of the Respublica litteraria if the Republic had not, in accordance with Erasmus’s wishes, successfully maintained (in Latin) bonds of cooperation and mutual personal esteem between humanists of opposing faiths. Even more than the printed book, an easy target of censorship and repression, it was thanks to the more confidential vehicles of correspondence, conversation, travel, and private libraries that a program and network of savant cooperation throughout the sixteenth century could be maintained, in spite of partisan passions and sectarian persecutions. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the common reference, and the core of a relatively universal program of research, among Catholics and learned Protestants remained the great, unifying light of Greco-­L atin and Christian antiquity. Latin remained the language of research. No one did more than Erasmus, in his letters, to foster this feeling of belonging and cooperation in the savant’s quest for a common homeland of the mind. He had named the enemy, and it was less theological heresy than ignorance of antiquity and the “barbarism” that accompanied it. Erasmus’s militant Respublica litteraria, en route toward the rediscovery of antiquity’s forgotten wisdom, was forced to fight for survival on all fronts. Though entirely pacifistic, the Republic nonetheless voluntarily resorted to metaphors of war, as penned by its leader. In a 1525 letter to Willibald Pirckheimer, Erasmus writes: for we see two factions, which are generally at each other’s throats, unit‑ ing in a surprising coalition to destroy all that is elegant and refined in literature. One side has the impudence to proclaim that the sects are the children of the humanities, and the other includes among its members many who detest everything that has been a part of our human existence in the past. So that nothing may remain unchanged, they want to suppress all humane learning. But without this the life of man would be a poor and shabby thing.10 To prevent that vandalism, Erasmus multiplied his calls for resistance and cooperation—in Latin—to his peers, both Protestant and Catholic men of letters, writing as the head of “a studious Senate and people,” as the princips of the lettered Republic. In 1526, he writes to Conrad Goclenius, “I thought it would be useful to the Republic of Letters if fanfare of this kind encouraged you to lead

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 37

to the end the battle against both barbarians and non-­believers.”11 He never tires of reminding his interlocutor that that battle depends on an accord between the hearts, and the unity of views, of men of letters, whom he depicts as a council reigning in permanence, granting rewards to its best members, celebrating the dead, and always working in concert. Erasmus himself is qualified by his correspondents as, in turn, princeps scientiae, princeps litterarum sacrarum et profanarum, princeps eruditionis universae, heros, and princeps Musarum. Erasmus’s role as Apollo on Europe’s Mount Parnassus was challenged by Bembo in Italy, and Guillaume Budé in France, who was already asserting the universality and, in Budé’s eyes, unrivaled preeminence of the French Republic of Letters. But Erasmus’s spiritual empire, which was recognized by pope, emperor, and the English, German, and Flemish nobility, was not tied to one state or one national language. Peiresc’s seventeenth-­century principality was an admirable blend of the legacies of Budé, Bembo, and Erasmus; it was truly and exceptionally European. After Peiresc’s death in 1637, Europe would learn to rally behind a largely French Republic of Letters. The linguistic and national rifts dividing political and religious Europe were diminished within the Republic of Letters by the solidarity between lettered men against various barbarian forces. The question of who was the leader of this invisible state was one of the greatest uncertainties in intellectual politics during the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century. When a young Peiresc visited Padua and then Rome in 1599, France’s eclipse during the Wars of Religion was facilitating the emergence of two main poles of advanced humanist study, Brabant, in Holland, and Venice. At the time, three figureheads of the Republic of Letters could be identified: the first two, rivals in the north, were the Protestant Joseph Justus Scaliger,12 a professor at the University of Leiden, whose successor would be Claude Saumaise13 and later Pierre Bayle, and the Catholic Justus Lipsius, a professor at the University of Louvain; the third was the Italian Gian Vincenzo Pinelli. He was based in the Republic of Venice, in Padua, home to one of the most celebrated universities in Europe. In 1599, the situation was changing, thanks to the peace brought to France by Henri IV, who had just published the Edict of Nantes. In Paris, a prestigious parliamentary magistrate, Jacques-­Auguste de Thou, assembled an encyclopedic library in his residence on the rue Saint-­André-­des-­Arts, which, upon his death in 1617, became the headquarters of the “Cabinet Dupuy” and the increasingly uncontested center of the European Republic of Letters until 1651. Beginning in the 1630s, Pierre Dupuy was regarded as the “(Gallican) pope of Paris.” But Paris’s appropriation of the principality of the humanist Republic of Letters could never have succeeded so well if Peiresc, in the South of France, had not spirited

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Italy’s traditional literary principality away from it, using both shrewdness and unrelenting diplomacy. (Pinelli, Cardinal Bembo’s successor, had governed that principality until 1601.) Peiresc was very close to the Dupuy brothers, De Thou’s successors, and apparently a regular visitor to their “cabinet” during his stay in Paris between 1617 and 1623. His position was therefore quasi-official. Alongside the Keeper of the Seals Guillaume du Vair, he supported men of letters, had their works published, and endeavored to reinforce cooperation among savants. In a way, this era marks the first French golden age for the Republic of Letters. After his return to Aix, Peiresc remained the privileged correspondent of the Dupuy brothers. With his Parisian friends, Peiresc had constructed a role for France, now politically reconciled on the domestic front, as the geometric center of learned Europe through a two-­pronged, well-­coordinated motion based in two points in France: Aix, turned to the south, and Paris, turned to the north and the east. The Republic of Letters would experience both its peak and a radical metamorphosis in Paris. Returning to Peiresc’s debut, it is noteworthy (Gassendi’s Vita is extremely insightful and precise in this respect) that, from his first steps onto Italian soil, he was able to gain recognition abroad, from Scaliger and Lipsius, and earn respect in Italy from Gian Vincenzo Pinelli. It is no less significant that Peiresc designed his peregrinatio academica along two axes: the first leading to Italy, where he remained for three years, refining his erudite knowledge of antiquity and forging friendships with all the leading Italian humanists; the other to northern Europe, to England and Holland, where he had his all-­important meeting with Joseph Justus Scaliger, the philological genius of the sixteenth century, and finally Flanders, where he became friendly with the Duke of Aarschot, to whom Henry IV had granted the title of Duke of Croÿ. By the time Peiresc completed this voyage, nearly triumphal, in 1606, at the age of twenty-­ six, he was already a star in the international savant community, and according to Gassendi, had earned the title of princeps in Italy. That Italian recognition of a Frenchman marked the end of an era. It also revealed the extent of Peiresc’s conservative and traditionalist genius. Like Montaigne, he was much more concerned with synthesis than rupture. For his friends, as Peiresc writes to Du May on October 8, 1635: “The Muses seem to have abandoned the warm countries long ago, in search of cooler air in your quarters.”14 Though perhaps that was mere flattery. In fact, Peiresc did not appear entirely convinced of ultramontane inferiority, at least according to two letters written to Gabriel Naudé.15 His return to Aix in 1623 merely delayed Paris’s supreme preeminence by ten years. During that period, Paris, the capital of the Republic of Letters, had a kind of Mediterranean foothold not far from Avignon, where the great adventure of humanist letters began. After Peiresc, that link to Italy disappeared.

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 39

In Gassendi’s account of the young Peiresc’s time in Italy, each word counts. Everything is written for an audience of the initiated, in the language of the initiated: the Latin of savants. This account allows us to confidently reconstruct the rites of passage and recognition that, in accordance with a tradition that was already three centuries old, and which had reached its ultimate degree of maturity, could grant access to Europe’s literary principality. For that, and not his study of law, was the true objective of Peiresc’s long Italian stay. He went there to study antiquity in its museum, as it were, and to be crowned by the successors of Petrarch, Valla, and Bembo. When Peiresc left for Padua, he was carrying a passport duly issued by one of the great reigning figures of the Republic of Letters in northern Europe: Justus Lipsius. In his collection Lettres aux Français (Letters to Frenchmen), published the previous year, Lipsius included those he had addressed to Peiresc. In Italy, one of Justus Lipsius’s correspondents in Padua, Thomas Segetus, confirmed and attested to Lipsius’s distant recommendation: “To the Genius of Provence in France; to the wit and in unripe yeers ripe vertues of Nicolaus Fabricius, I consecrate this testimonial.”16 It was the type of endorsement that opened every door, even that of the most punctilious of savants. Another renowned Lipsius disciple, his spiritual successor Erycius Puteanus (Enrico dal Pozzo), then teaching in Milan, added his own comments to those of his master and Segetus. The doors to the sanctuary were thus opened to young Peiresc, notably to the home of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, who was at that time leading the Italian Republic of Letters, which also served as museum, library, and club of learning. In 1607, after Pinelli’s death, his student and friend Paolo Gualdo published his Vita,17 which would serve as a literal model for Gassendi thirty years later, but more immediately as an example, typus viri probi et eruditi, that Peiresc himself religiously imitated. Pinelli, who was on good terms with the popes and the Society of Jesus, had managed to maintain close links with northern, largely Catholic, but also Protestant, Europe. Thanks to his epistolary network and his library, one of the richest and most current in Europe, Pinelli’s home in Padua represented a principality benefiting from Venetian independence, shielded from the censorship of the Index and the Holy Office. A universal savant, Pinelli was abreast of most of the research being conducted in Europe and, as Peiresc would on a much larger scale, provided useful books, manuscripts, and documents to savants, using his personal treasury, while simultaneously offering his omniscient support. His conversation reflected both exquisite courtesy and stimulating vivacity. Thanks to his biographer, Paolo Gualdo, it is clear exactly what Montaigne meant when, in De l’Art de conférer (Of the Art of Discussion), after having praised the oral exercises of Athenians and Romans, he adds, “In our time, the

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Italians retain some vestiges of it, to their great advantage, as is seen by a comparison of our intelligence with theirs.”18 Here is how Gualdo describes the art of conversing with Pinelli: He was accustomed to immediately discerning the inclinations and moods of each of his interlocutors, not by relying on lessons learned from some physiognomist, but enlightened by his habitual commerce with so many men of exception. His manner of addressing others was his alone. It brought forth hidden treasures from the interlocutor, turning and returning them by diversified words, mixing the serious and pleasant. You would have said Proteus himself by his metamorphoses, and called them as divinely intuitive. Even for those he knew the least, he habitually forged names that were characteristic and precisely symbolic, which reflected with precision the shape of their soul, the conformation of their body, and other particularities inherent to them. He quickly distinguished the modesty and discreetness of the talkative and the vain, whom he avoided like victims of the plague and the contagious diseased. He was horrified by boors and the uncouth, against whom his deep and innate hatred emerged, or even simply people who were poorly dressed. You would gladly describe him as the father of elegances, such had the art of doing everything in harmony and according to just reason become second nature to him.19 We can compare this with what Gassendi wrote about Peiresc’s merits in the same art, thirty-­four years later. This amplified image of the Italian original offers more proof of the “Muses’ migration towards the North”: From what has bin said, we may understand how delightful his conversation must needs be to those in health; seeing he so well knew, what things were suitable to every ones Genius and Manners. For knowing so much as he did, it was easie for him to discourse of such things to every one as were to him most contentful; and being alwaies intent to learn, he would only ask such things, as he knew the party to whom he spake, would delight to relate. Whereupon, being frequently visited by travellers and curious persons, he would in the first place smell out, with what study they were most delighted; and then he would shew them only such of his Books, Rarities, and other things which they would be delighted to see; nor would he pre­sent any thing to them, which they did not affect to know. Then he would ask them, what Rarities they had seen, either in their Countrey, or upon their journey; and he had alwaies some like things either to show them, or to relate as having seen the same, or read thereof in his Books.

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 41

Whence it was, that every one was sorry to part from him, wishing that the hours and daies had bin longer. Yea, and he was far from making such as frequently conversed with him to be aweary of his company, or satiated with his discourse: for he was alwaies pouring forth new floods of Learning; and his expressions were so lively & ravishing that such as heard him, were always afraid, lest he should make an end too soon. And sometimes, he would pertinently interpose a jest, though very seldom; for his custome being to speak seriously, he poured forth his words with such eloquence, as needed not to be seasoned with Jests. Moreover, though his company was most acceptable to every one; yet he himself could not endure the company of such as loved only to hear, and speak, of vulgar and trivial matters. And therefore he was wont to complain that he was forced to lose such good hours, only in hearing and assenting that it was cold weather, or very hot; that the Sky was very clear, or cloudy; the Aire healthy, or unhealthy; and other such like things. And for this very cause he shunned the society of Women; because he could hardly get any good thereby; and he must be forced to talk to them only of toies and trifles. Nor could he endure with patience clamorous, brawling, contentious, and talkative People; yet could he best bear with the last, because amongst many vain words, some profitable matter might be intermingled, which he was wont to say, he picked, as Corn from amongst an heap of Chaffe. Howbeit, they must be sure to speak truth, which such talkative folk, are not much used to do; for he hated nothing more, then a man that he found in a lie. Wherefore, he was wont so to sift such kind of men, by asking them divers Questions, touching the circumstances of what they told, that they must needs have a good memory, if they told a lie, and did not contradict themselve. The like esteem he had of Boasters, and Braggadokies; save that he was sometimes delighted with some witty passage, which would now and then bolt out, among their Boastings. But nevertheless, he wonderfully hated all vainglorious boasters; for he was endued with so great modesty, that being more delighted with brave actions, then glorious speeches, he never was the man that thought, or spake proudly of himself. So that he might have taught such men better by his own example, who never heard his own prayse, but against his will, and rejected all ambitious Titles which were put upon him, and did so extenuate his own vertues, though very rare, that he was ever accusing himself of infirmity, or ignorance; giving evident demonstration, that nothing could be more desirable, then so great moderation of mind.20

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The parallel between Pinelli and Peiresc—and between Vita Pinelli and Vita Peireskii—can be expanded even further. Doing do reveals the extent of the debt the French savant owed to erudite Italian humanism and its forma mentis. Indeed, one can see the aura of moral prestige surrounding the illustrious and elderly Pinelli, successor to Bembo, Speroni, and Daniele Barbaro, in the young Peiresc’s mind. Pinelli, a model, in this respect and others, for Peiresc, preferred to be a gardener of minds rather than an author. The Paduan transplant, originally from Genoa, dazzled with an amenability and kindness that Peiresc would later display, and which was already being praised by Erasmus, even if those same qualities were harder to find in the Dutch savant, a combative and vindictive man of letters. Like Peiresc after him, Pinelli was a great diplomat rather than a militant of the mind. At the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, Pinelli’s name had great standing. Gassendi’s account of a scene, in 1601, in which we see a dying Pinelli “pass the torch” to a young Peiresc, like a knighting or Episcopalian ordination, is one of the most profound and secret pieces of information within the Vita Peireskii. Gassendi adds, “For he had so moulded himself according to the manners of Pinellus; he became so animated with the studie of noble and brave things, and advancing of good Arts, that he might justly be thought to have inherited his heroicall virtues.”21 Pinelli’s dying designation was, therefore, according to Gassendi, immediately confirmed by a consensus that had been growing for some time. Indeed, Gassendi had already quoted testimonials by Lipsius and Scaliger. He further quotes Paulo Gualdo’s Vita Pinelli, published in 1607,22 which stated that upon his arrival in Padua, Peiresc met Pinelli and joined his circle. Gassendi also quotes a testimonial by Erycius Puteanus, in a letter dated 1602, and finally a statement addressed to both Peiresc and Marc Welser, Pinelli’s alter ego in Augsburg: “[You] shall be what Pinellus was.”23 Whether accurate or embellished by memory, this translatio auctoritatis surely meant a great deal to Peiresc (Gassendi himself was certain of that). According to the biographer, Peiresc behaved like a great Italian humanist, beginning with his first trip to Italy, all while striving for recognition by the northern strain of reformed humanism, and notably, by the Calvinist Scaliger, whom he lavished with erudite gifts: Hebrew manuscripts, rare coins, rubbings from the tombs of his supposed ancestors in Verona. But Peiresc’s services first targeted and benefited all of Italy’s erudite elite: Pignoria, Aldrovandi, Della Porta, Tomasini. He was able to return to France to complete his law studies and join the Parliament of Aix. That magistracy, which he performed reliably and conscientiously, would for him only be a small part of the negotium that he conceded to

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society, and which would yield to the best part of his life: the otium studiosum of the lettered man, master of his oeuvre and patron of European erudition. The private nature of the office of princips of the Republic of Letters was almost as pronounced with Peiresc as it was with Pinelli. Even in Paris, alongside his friend and Keeper of the Seals Guillaume du Vair, it was in his personal name that Peiresc worked to incite and coordinate savant research and publications. Later, he was on excellent terms with the Cardinal Alphonse de Richelieu, the archbishop of Lyon and then Aix. It is significant, in my mind, that Gassendi fails to mention Alphonse’s brother, Cardinal Armand, who became Louis XIII’s prime minister in 1624, except in reference to the official honors granted Peiresc after his death. That omission, and the absence of a direct relationship between Richelieu and Peiresc, can be viewed as the simple result of the close and long collaboration that tied the magistrate in Aix to his former first president, Guillaume du Vair. In his Memoirs, Richelieu does little to hide the contempt he feels toward the, in his mind, politically incompetent Du Vair, whose reputation for eloquence and great virtue had long offended him. Peiresc, who retreated to Aix in 1623 and remained there until his death, found that in reality his withdrawal was not a disgrace but an emancipation from state affairs, liberating him to dedicate himself to matters concerning the Republic of Letters. In the meantime his friends the Dupuys in Paris were directly serving the cardinal-­minister’s plans, notably through the publication of archives justifying the French church’s “liberties” against Rome. It remains debatable whether Peiresc, another Frenchman and a great admirer of Michel de L’Hôpital, but on the best terms with the family of Pope Barberini, was sympathetic toward the imperious and aggressive character of the raison d’état dictating Richelieu’s domestic and foreign policy, notably toward Rome. A policy of governance through fear could hardly reflect the spirit of kindness and harmony that Peiresc constantly sought to spread around him. That spirit corresponded as much to Erasmus’s irenicism as to the traditional French notion of a Christian monarchy built on an edifice of love. For that matter, Peiresc’s kingdom was far too idealistic to concern Richelieu. The French statesman did not appear to pay much attention to Descartes, either, who incidentally is not mentioned any more than Richelieu in the Vita Peireskii. This can be explained with completely different reasons. Peiresc and Descartes, two great minds, evolved in incompatible worlds. As shown by Agnès Bresson in the introduction and notes to her edition of correspondence between Peiresc and Saumaise, Peiresc sought to recognize and share visible constants through his diverse encyclopedic study. That exploration of the harmonic unity of the universe behind an extreme diversity of appearances was not foreign

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to Descartes. But the philosopher’s blunt methods were aimed less at contemplation than at action, at more mathematics than general philology. For all that, Descartes’s science is not any “truer” today than Peiresc’s. One wonders if Peiresc’s conclusions went “out of fashion” the moment Discourse on the Method first appeared in Leiden in 1636, the same year of his death. Peiresc’s science belongs to the humanists. It was never as alive, inventive, or hopeful as during the first few decades of the seventeenth century. It would find an eighteenth-­ century successor in Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova (New Science) and a nineteenth-­century one in Mémoires de l’Académie des inscriptions (Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions). Peiresc’s science had as bright a future as Descartes’s did. A philologist deciphering the language and signs of God in nature, Peiresc was simultaneously an astronomer, cosmographer, physician, zoologist, and naturalist—and a philosopher in his study of antiquity. Not only did Peiresc pursue the discipline distinguished by Valla, Politian, Turnèbe, and Scaliger, but he enlarged it into a vast historical and comparative quest intended to make man, the image of God, a true observer of himself and his creator. This philological method is apparent in the words Gassendi attributes to Peiresc in his Vita: Yea, and frequently he brought such as heard him into admiration, when he shewed, that without the view and consideration of such things as these, the meaning of Authors could not be understood, seeing they make so frequent mention of Coines & Weights, as Talents, Sicles, Drachms, Denaries, Victoriates, Sesterces, also of the As or pound weight and its parts, and many other things; of which while he reasoned, producing a vast quantity and variety thereof, I have known many men astonished. And more especially when upon a time a multitude of Ounces being produced, differing one from another in weight and fashion, he was asked what meant those so different marks or tokens, which were upon them. For he said that a single Globe or little Boule was put, not only to signifie the number one; but that by the swelling and bunching thereof, which the Greeks term Oncos, an allusion might be made to the word Ounce. For the same cause, the most were marked with an Hook, which being called Uncus or Uncinum, it was intimated, that that was pondus unicale, or an ounce weight. But in some and especially those of Tuscanie, there was a Spear, which the Greeks tearm Lonche, that by leaving out l the same word once might be intimated: So, for the most part, the Moon marked on, did signifie an unity; not only because she alone does enlighten the night, with rare splendor; but, because from the word Luna, L being taken, there remains una, which signifies one. So upon some was marked that side of the Astragalus or Cock-­all which being cast

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uppermost makes one; and upon others that side was only understood, the opposite being expressed, called Senio, Sice or Six. The like things he declared in the other parts of the As or pound weight, as when in the Semissis or half pound, was marked an ear of Corn, because the ancients alluded to the words Seminis & Semissis; but thus much may suffice to have hinted, to shew how he by his study & industrious, & sagacious examination of these things, could interpret matters which no Books could shew; which therefore did so much the more astonish the hearers.24 “Letters” served as the bridge and unifying principle between critical “readings” of antiquity and of nature. Even Peiresc’s study of physical and astronomical phenomena, which became the object of collaborative research by a team of philologist-­savants, was governed by the discipline of ars critica applied to nature’s broad canvas. He applied selenography to the study of the Bembine Table of Isis in Turin, the Iguvine Tables in Gubbio, and the Florentine Pandect. In 1635, he commissioned from the engraver Claude Mellan a bronze engraving of the different lunar phases observed through the telescope—“superior in reach and perfection of scope”—sent to him by Galileo. With this map, an inscription in an unknown language, Peiresc attempted to imagine the optical techniques that could correct “visual errors” and permit the correct interpretation of this celestial mirror of the world. Gassendi writes: Consequent hereunto, he began seriously to think of (which he purposed long before) assisting Geographers, towards the finding out the difference of Longitude of several places. For he would have a certain method written, of observing Eclipses; and he was wonderfully industrious to procure, that the Eclipse of the Moon, which was to be in August next following, might be observed, both in Europe, and in divers places of Asia, and Africa. For besides our Countrymen, and those that live more Westerly be procured, that by the instigation of Cardinal Barberino, those learned and famous men Andrea Argolus at Padua, and Scipio Claromontius at Caesenna might observe the same; and by the intercession of the said Cardinal, he obtained two observations then made at Rome, and two at Naples, where the most exact was that which Joannes Camillus Gloriosus, a rare man doubtless, had made. In like manner he procured from Gran-­ Caire [Cairo] in Aegypt, an observation made by the foresaid Capucine Agathangelus, being assiste by Joannes Molinus Dragomannus a Venetian; also from Aleppo in Syria, an observation, made by another excellent Capucine, Michael Angelus, assisted by the foresaid Caelestinus a Sancta Liduina. All whose observations cannot be set down in this place, yet I must needs say, that Peireskius was herein satisfied by the Observa-

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tions aforesaid, that it was a clear case, that all Geographical Tables and Maps, do set those places of Aegypt and Syria at too great a distance from us, seeing they do all set Alepo almost three hours, that is to say, forty five degrees Eastward of Marseilles; whereas those observations have made it appear, that almost an whole hour ought to be abated, seeing they have reckoned no more then thirty degrees between the places aforesaid. Whereupon the business having succeeded so well, he took a great deal of pains, and procured Cardinal Barberino and the Generals of the Jesuites and Dominicans, to command such religious persons as lived in both the Indies, and all other parts of the world, carefully to observe all Eclipses, and things of like nature. Nor was there afterwards any Capucine or other studious person, that passed through Provence, intending to travel into the East, or any other way, or to settle his abode in any foreign part, whom he did not oblige by divers kindnesses, and to whom he did not injoyn the care of making such observations, giving them Books, Prospective-­glasses, and such like things; of the use whereof if any were ignorant, he took care before their departure, both to have them instructed, and that they might experiment their skill.25 Note in passing that this “first” in international scientific cooperation was made possible by the support provided by a cardinal-­secretary of the state, who had authority over religious missionaries spread throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East, to a grand prince of the Republic of Letters. The circumstances are all the more notable as they relate to a chapter of science during which Peiresc and Gassendi worked in strict accordance with views held by Galileo. For Peiresc and his friend, the Holy Office’s condemnation of the Florentine physician was a regrettable matter among theologians that in no way interrupted the historic collaboration between the two major unifying institutions of Europe: the Roman Church and the Republic of Letters. Cardinal Barberini held a similar view, though clearly Rome was, by principle, more favorable toward antiquarianism than toward astronomy and physics, subjects largely ignored by Holy Scripture. General philology, as understood by Peiresc, was as applicable to nature as it was to history and language. In terms of natural sciences, the discipline of philology echoed Gassendi and Galileo, and, though ignoring Descartes, it nonetheless reflected the most recent advances of the era. But it also remained faithful to the spirit of the humanists’ philology; its aims were contemplative and it in no way sought to make man into a “master and possessor of nature.” This form of contemplation was rational and methodical and on guard against sensory illusions, preconceptions, and common or lazy superstitions that came between

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 47

the mind and the secret truth of things and texts. It did not delude itself about the limits of the human mind, even the most methodical and best corrected by the confrontation of opinions and experiences. This general philology was above all a quasi-­redemptive and perseverant homage paid to the sublime divine genius that created man and the world, a continuous act of loyal conformity between the human mind and its creator. Ingenium, in other words, or what Pascal later called “esprit de finesse.” The study of philology was inseparable from spirituality and civil wisdom. According to Peiresc, savants, in particular the international community of savants as he saw it, did not only require civil peace and peace between nations to carry out their work; they themselves were a “force of peace,” a unifying principle from the top down in a Europe divided and ravaged by wars, a beehive of friends who together collected and produced, unbeknownst to the common man, the honey of wisdom and knowledge. Science according to Peiresc, in his quest for the divine mysteries of the world, and the elements that man could grasp, was itself a source of appeasement. Mersenne got it right when he placed Peiresc in the position of Apollo Citharoedus in his dedication to the French savant in Traitez des consonances, des dissonances, des genres, des modes, et de la composition (Treaty of Consonances, Dissonances, Genres, Modes, and Composition), book II of Harmonie universelle (Universal Harmony). This minor savant equates the Republic of Letters, which owed so much to its inexhaustible liberality, with Harmony: I do not want to speak of the favors and affections that savants receive at your home, since none can visit you without you obliging them to believe and confess that it appears that you prepared your cabinet only for him, and that all your goods are as common to all savants as the water and air to those who breathe: so that I am assured that they entirely approve the offering I am making you with this work, so that our century attests to the posterity that it gives a man who can serve as a model to all those who want like you to imitate the will of God, who never ceases to do right, and that the very Harmony that appears to offer you all that it has that is most excellent strives entirely to recite the praises of the one who gave it light and being [. . .]. And if these Compositions are not as charming as one could desire, due to their great simplicity, which it wanted to use to better bring art and science into the minds and ears of listeners, I am assured that their subject will be rewarding, as it is capable of delighting men and angels, to wit Misericordias Domini In Aeternum Cantabo.26 Peiresc was not a monk like Mersenne, or a canon like Gassendi, but the high-­ranking magistrate, like Guillaume du Vair, held an ecclesiastical position

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as the abbot of Guîtres. That detail explains many traits of his personality, which distinguished him from most of the purely secular savants who counted among his best known correspondents and friends, and who foreshadowed, much more than Peiresc, the modern intellectual, with his keen attention to what was appropriate when it came to matters of the mind. Indeed, Peiresc had that Salesian unction that was the fruit of a veritable oblation of the “me” to an order—of letters, in his case, which was in his mind as consubstantial with the Roman Church as the Society of Jesus could have been in the mind of a Jesuit. As a man of the cloth, Gassendi was better equipped than anyone to sense and share the cultivated spirituality in his friend Peiresc. He did more than make frequent allusions to Peiresc’s efforts to convert his heretical friends to Catholicism. The theological virtue of charity is apparent throughout the Vita Peireskii, both in the descriptions of Peiresc’s conversation as in those of his manners and where he lived. Imitatio Dei—love of God and his work—was an essential component of Peiresc’s “curiosity.” There was nothing anxious, bitter, or greedy about that curiosity, which was inspired by a kind of act of unflagging and contagious love. Peiresc’s residence in Aix, which served as a library, museum, astronomical observatory, and laboratory, was a mirror of the universe and antiquity. However, he transformed his home in the Belgentier countryside into a nature capsule, a rediscovered heaven on earth, where the abbot of Guîtres went to reinvigorate himself while observing animals, trees, and fruits, inhaling the perfume of flowers, and listening to birdcalls. Gassendi’s Epicureanism inspired him to incorporate accents worthy of the gardener from La Fontaine’s Fables into his descriptions of his friend’s hermitage, a veritable Wunderkammer of God’s masterpieces. Through contemplation of nature, Peiresc could rest and recover from his untiring work in the service of the Republic of Letters. These retreats were indispensably more therapeutic than prayer for this musical and fragile being, who was afflicted by the cruelest infirmities and literally consumed by his thirst for knowledge and for sharing knowledge. I want to conclude with the image of an ailing Peiresc, whose cruel physical burden was lightened by the joy of contemplation. In this beautiful passage by Gassendi, translated into English by William Rand, the savant is painted as one and the same with the poet saint, Francis of Assisi of the Laudi: Moreover, he preferred the singing of Birds, before the voyces of men, or any musical Instruments; not but that he was therewith also delighted; but because after the Musick which men made, there remained in his mind a continual agitation, drawing his attention, and disturbing his sleep; the rising, falling, and holding of the Notes, with the change of sounds and concords, running to and fro in his fancy; whereas no such

Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc 49

thing could remain after the Birds Musick, which because it is not so apt by us to be imitated, it cannot therefore so much affect, and stir our internal faculty. He would also for the same cause, continually breed up Nightingales, and such like small Birds, which he kept also in his own Chamber; and of which he was so careful, that he knew by divers signes and tokens, what they wanted or desired, and presently would see them satisfied: they therefore, as out of gratitude, would sing unto their benefactor, Hymnes of prayse; and whereas in his absence, they were for the most part silent; as soon as ever by his voyce of staffe, they perceived he was comming, they would presently fall to singing.27

3 CONCEPTIONS OF EUROPE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: JOHN BARCLAY, A KEYSERLING PREDECESSOR

From its earliest aspirations for political unity, Europe has asked itself, What do we do with our nations? In what respect were they actualities that, in the name of realism, had to be respected and even considered as one of the surest foundations of the new communitarian edifice? In what respect were they passions and ideologies to be critiqued, under the threat of seeing the tragedies that littered European history reproduced? Should Europe have donned the jester’s cap from Erasmus’s Folie (In Praise of Folly) and said, to one and to all: Nature has planted, not only in particular men but even in every nation, and scarce any city is there without it, a kind of common self-­love. And hence is it that the English, besides other things, particularly challenge to themselves beauty, music, and feasting. [. . .] The Parisians, excluding all others, arrogate to themselves the only knowledge of divinity. [. . .] And, not to instance in every particular, you see, I conceive, how much satisfaction this Self-­love, who has a sister also not unlike herself called Flattery, begets everywhere; for self-­love is no more than the soothing of a man’s self, which, done to another, is flattery.1 This irony voiced by the first truly European prince of the Republic of Letters both bemoaned and acknowledged a reality that political history cannot ignore: though derisory, in the eyes of the mind, the plurality of the peoples of Europe had already given rise to a veritable characterology of nations by the early sixteenth century, which would become more specific over the next two centuries. What Erasmus called “Self-­love” and “Flattery,” we now refer to as “nationalism” and “demagoguery.” Nonetheless, behind this deformation of self-­love, nations were also real entities. So how to make the distinction? Valéry said, “The very idea of a nation is not easily grasped.”2 The task seems to fall, by privilege, to historians. Europe is an old continent, whose present day can only be well understood if we acknowledge, in keeping with the image Fernand Braudel painted of France, that it is “the living result 50

Conceptions of Europe 51

of what the interminable past patiently deposited, layer by layer, just as the imperceptible sedimentation of the seabed.”3 The gentes et nationes of Europe are, like their languages, the products of a slow maturation of which they bear mere traces. They are, in other words, living, moving fingerprints. To understand and describe nations, and to disassociate them from their nationalism, would in theory make a wonderful project of historical analysis. Make that comparative historical analysis. The French school of history known as the “Annales” became aware of this somewhat belatedly and grudgingly, and only after long favoring vast transversal, economic, and social phenomena and regional evolutions ranging from the Mediterranean to Languedoc as objects as study. Starting with Alphonse Dupront, who was keenly aware of the symbolic register that the neopositivism or neo-­Marxism espoused by the Annales had long wanted to ignore, and who published an admirable monograph in 1972, in a volume of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade dedicated to “France and the French people,” under the title “National Sentiment.” Dupront did not have a large following, but he was respected. Fernand Braudel himself wrote an entire book titled L’identité de la France (The Identity of France), and Pierre Nora subsequently directed an impressive collection of essays about France’s “lieux de mémoire,” or “realms of memory.”4 I have yet to see similar, and similarly ambitious, attempts being made in other European countries or, for that matter, any beginnings of comparatism conducted on the European scale. In terms of what Marxists and neo-­ Marxists used to contemptuously categorize as “superstructures” and what I am no longer alone in calling “the symbolic”—an order of spiritual facts, or actualities, with its own autonomy, duration, and specific laws—one has to admit that after half a century of more or less improved or diminished dialectical materialism, we were still, in France, very recently stuck in the cave era. In The Identity of France, Fernand Braudel goes as far as to completely omit literature, arts, and manners from his final chapter, “Superstructures.” Not even an orthodox Marxist would have made so brutal an omission. If French historians are nonetheless a little less handicapped than others by this recent reemergence of the repressed “symbolic,” it is because they have at their disposal (after several centuries of benefiting from a cultivated state) a homegrown tradition of research and reflection on the characteristics of their own nation, as well as on its very definition. Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV (The Age of Louis XIV), Tocqueville’s L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (The Old Regime and the Revolution), Michelet’s Histoire de France (History of France), Taine’s Les Origines de la France contemporaine (The Origins of Contemporary France), Renan’s Sorbonne speech “Qu’est-­ce qu’une nation?” (What Is a Nation?), and even Julien Benda’s Esquisse d’une histoire des Fran-

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çais dans leur volonté d’être une nation (Sketch of a History of the French and Their Desire to Be a Nation) are the modern masterpieces of a historiographical genre whose brilliance was already visible by the sixteenth century, as demonstrated by Étienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France (Research on France), and which has since displayed, on multiple occasions, impressive philosophical vigor and originality in its methods. If we consider that, in parallel, the French school of human geography, notably the body of work by Vidal de La Blache being rediscovered today, transformed into science the meticulous and methodical knowledge of the French territory accumulated by French administrations, according to their respective competencies, since the seventeenth century, we can easily understand why the study of national identity could very well experience a resurgence in France, in keeping with deservedly prestigious models that, deep down, were never truly forgotten. For the moment, these models are rediscovering their erstwhile authority, though not without threat of anachronisms. They held such sway in the past that even France’s foreign allies and adversaries imitated them and turned them against France. In the interwar period, Ernst Robert Curtius’s The Civilization of France and Friedrich Sieburg’s Is God a Frenchman?, and, after 1945, Hubert Lüthy’s essay on France, Frankreichs Uhren gehen anders (France against Herself, 1955), attest to a genuine, inverted fascination for the science of one’s own nation long conducted by the French at a high degree of conceptual precision and literary elegance. To that list we can add the essay on national sociology that Tocqueville dedicated to America or the one Élie Halévy dedicated to England. Both are noteworthy derivations of experience gained in France through the reflexive study of national identity. In a way, these lateral productions were invented by Voltaire himself. His Lettres philosophiques (Letters on the English), which preceded Le Siècle de Louis XIV (The Age of Louis XIV) by twenty years, and Discours aux Welches (Discourse Addressed to the Welsh) by more than thirty years, is in reality an important monograph on the English nation and its distinctive traits. Unfortunately, when Voltaire tried his hand at comparatism on the global scale, in his Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (An Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations) even a notion as nuanced as mœurs, or “manners,” which drove his analysis, could not forestall what was an obvious failure. Voltaire compares—or more often, juxtaposes—entities that do not belong to the same category: large religious zones, civilizations, and nations. His internationalist ambitions surpassed his capabilities. Focusing on the European scale would have made for a more refined example and one within his reach. Montesquieu, who similarly claims to adopt an international perspective in Esprit des lois (Spirit of the Laws), in reality focuses all his attention on the

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“liberty of Europe” in opposition to the “slavery of Asia,” creating a near comparative genealogy of the “general spirit” of European nations, the broad backdrop to the parallel between the French and the English that so obsessed him. Kant’s Anthropology provides another good example of a comparative analysis of national characteristics in Europe. The subsequent drought of European comparatism beginning in the eighteenth century gave rise to one exception. Here, I want to focus on a book that, while unjustly forgotten today, was still enthusiastically read in postwar France: Das Spektrum Europas (The Spectrum of Europe) by the Baltic Count Hermann von Keyserling. (The original German edition was published in 1928.)5 Keyserling, who was neither a historian nor a professional philosopher, was a deeply erudite man with vast international experience, whose literary talent was nothing to scoff at. He deserves credit, if belatedly, for producing a comparative analysis in the last years of the Weimar Republic of the kind one would have expected of Voltaire in the eighteenth century and at which Montesquieu merely hinted. Like Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Kant, Keyserling did not claim to be an economic expert. On the contrary, like Thucydides in Ancient Greece, and like his Enlightenment predecessors, he believed that the “general spirit” or “character of manners” particular to each nation was a decisive actor in the historical European saga. Rather than creating sketches of European nations, as if for Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Dictionary of Accepted Ideas) or Proust’s Marquis de Norpois, Keyserling used climate, geography, sociology, and political, military, religious, and literary history to highlight the distinctive inclinations and contradictions, either dangerous or advantageous, that characterized them. These collective characters were gauged comparatively. After three-­quarters of a century, Keyserling’s diagnosis of France remains arrestingly original. He noted a deep contradiction between the French people’s general attachment to their hexagon-­shaped “garden,” which led in turn to a fear of seeing it invaded and disfigured, and the reckless or provocative vanity that led to a nationalistic view of France in terms of international “grandeur” and as a universal model. For Keyserling, the French fait, or “essence,” translated to a nation that was home to the oldest culture in Europe, a “literary nation” in existence for seven centuries, and the only nation in which the modern threat of the fight for gender equality found a powerful counterbalance in an old tradition of love, gallantry, and friendly sociability. Keyserling, who was born in Russian Livonia, married Bismarck’s granddaughter in 1919. He was therefore well situated to develop an insider and relatively impartial opinion on Germany. He undoubtedly did not foresee the crimes of Nazism, and his work does not rival the metaphysical level of Hannah

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Arendt’s post hoc analysis of the “banality of evil.” But Keyserling’s sharp criticism of the formidable disproportions between the scientistic “objectivity” and abstract idealism between which the “German character” oscillated nonetheless offered uneasy insight at the time. Even more so than Keyserling’s results, the methods and research plan of Das Spektrum Europas now appear more interesting than ever in terms of internal structure, even if the analysis itself can seem outdated. Keyserling studied each European nation, as did Renan and Dupront, as a symbolic structure that was both stable and evolving, which shaped its values, intellectual production, and general behavior. But while Keyserling compared these various structures, he did so from the loftier perspective of the harmony they could attain if they were to complement each other in a symphonic, European ensemble. This amateur’s attempt has lost none of its originality from a historian’s point of view, in terms of either its intentions or motivations. Indeed, authors like Naipaul, Enzensberger, and Kapuściński have recently imitated and reinvigorated the genre, though leaning more toward the impressionist aspects of Stendhal’s Mémoires d’un touriste (Memoirs of a Tourist). The genre embodied by Das Spektrum Europas has successors, but also ancestors. Comparative analy­ses were attempted, pre-­Montesquieu, as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Constructed around the topic of “national character,” these attempts were modeled after the admirable parallel drawn between the Athenian and Lacedaemonian natures by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War. It is important to note that the lieu, or “place,” of the French nation—its “Frenchness,” if you will—exclusively favored by the knowledge, talent, and continuity of countless French authors, is an egotistical derivation of the same theme on a comparative, European scale, which fell into disuse. The startling and lasting success of the national French lieu should not overshadow—and here, Keyserling can provide an opportune reminder—the intrinsic superiority and even chronological anteriority of a comparative and impartial reflection on all the “places” that made up or broke down Europe. The most convincing predecessor to Das Spektrum Europas may be Icon animorum (The Mirror of Minds), a Latin essay published in 1614 in both London and Paris by the Scottish publicist John Barclay. It was notably translated on several occasions in Paris, under the title Examen des Esprits, in 1617 and 1624. Like Keyserling, John Barclay was well traveled and highly cultured, and while he was not the first modern author to have collectively depicted the “characters” of European nations, he was the first to do so with the international experience and keen wit that would also distinguish Das Spektrum Europas three centuries later. Icon animorum was the work of a humanist and a diplomat. It sprang from

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a literary genre that had already acquired respectability by the early seventeenth century, and not solely for works by the Ancients, Thucydides and Tacitus. Icon animorum stands out within this humanist “art of memory,” which we understand much better today thanks to Frances Yates, Paolo Rossi, and Lina Bolzoni. The art of memory assembled information accumulated through the literary tradition of de omni re scibili et discibili in “places” organized in the same imaginary theater and in a way that could be easily accessed mentally. This mnemonic tool, which amassed what was already known and had already been said on every subject, was not aimed solely at creating an encyclopedic “interior museum”; it provided the mental resources necessary for creating new discourses adapted to new situations. When it came to describing “national characters,” “places” containing already known or stated information did more than serve as preparation for the creation of eulogies, an obligatory oratory rite for ambassadors being received at foreign courts. They were also used to guide a diplomat’s first steps in an unfamiliar milieu. The diplomat would be able to observe his new environment all the better by using his own experience, which, from the start, could be based on any general and accepted foreknowledge already stored in his mind. This interior museum was therefore both a source of formal eloquence and a principle of the “art of prudence.” As shown by Louis Van Delft in Littérature et anthropologie (Literature and Anthropology),6 early collections of “national characters” were limited to gathering and categorizing designations used by the writers of antiquity to define the particular nature of every people of the ancient world. In Specimen epithetorum, published in 1518 but expanded in later editions in the sixteenth century, Ravisius Textor instructs that the Gauls had been qualified as feroces, truces, bellicosi and the Romans as invicti, atroces, feroces, bellaces, truces, caerulei. In 1561, in his Poetics, Scaliger proposes a similar series of designations drawn from classical texts: Itali, cunctatores, irrisores, factiosi . . . Dei contemptores. These lists of traits, by no means intended as portraits, were limited to providing the Ciceronian orator, who hoped to dazzle with his Latin declamations, with classic argumenta and an eulogistic lexicon: “nations” and their “manners” (like age, gender, and temperament) were indispensable supports for the construction of an official and flattering ideal-­type. In vernacular accounts more closely based on firsthand experiences, descriptions of a nation’s distinct character (the “lieux des nations”) were filled with less archaic and less conventional details. In The Book of the Courtier, for example, published in 1528, Baldassare Castiglione, a prominent diplomat in the Duke of Urbino’s court, characterizes France by the prejudices of its established nobility: the French aristocracy, driven by honor, cherishes war and hunting and disdains letters, which threaten their valor. Far from contradicting the classic descriptors

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applied to the Gauls by Julius Caesar, this clever observation offered an updated variation, more in keeping with the concrete experiences of a circle of initiates who met and talked in private. In Examen de los ingenious (The Examination of Men’s Wits, 1575), Spanish doctor Juan Huarte’s accolade to Spain’s “national character” owes even less to the classical topic of gentes. Huarte relies instead on an analysis of human geography (climates, types of land) and a Galenic anthropology of temperaments in order to compare the different characters of European nations as they appeared to a contemporary observer. This comparative analysis concludes that due to Spain’s climate and land, favorable to dry melancholy—the temperament, according to Aristotle and Galen, most inclined to the most brilliant productions of the mind—the Spanish people were predisposed to advanced studies of theology and medicine. Spain was destined for truth and grandeur. Because of Italy’s climate and temperament, its people (to limit myself to this example) were viewed as less inventive and in particular excellent at rhetoric. The nation’s mild climate was less virile. Even in France, or rather especially in France, the “inherited enemy” of Charles Quint and Philippe II, the book met with lasting success and was translated on several successive occasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course, it was not the book’s conclusions that seduced members of the court, commoners, and true savants alike, but its method, easily altered to favor the French “national character,” and in particular its use of comparatism, which was highly useful in a cosmopolitan capital like Paris. The “topic” of national traits was useful not only for the diplomat, but also for the statesman, in terms of his strategy toward foreign courts, and the political philosopher who wanted to explain or evaluate the different types of European people. In Les Six livres de la République (Six Books of the Commonwealth, 1576), Jean Bodin creates a listing of peoples categorized by climate (Nordic, temperate, meridional) and the temperaments (Galen’s “krâsis”) favored by respective climates. He relies expressly on contemporary experiences and not obsolete observations made by the Ancients. Here, Bodin is already borrowing from Huarte. He notes that the different “ethnotypes” he describes could provoke fundamentally hostile “vexations,” between the clever and melancholy Spanish, for example, and the bilious and choleric French. They could also produce favorable combinations, as was the case for Italy’s character, which had some Spanish and French elements and was destined to act as mediator between those two opposed “natures.” Mazarin’s entire public persona is implicitly presaged in this too-­often-­overlooked text. Though written in elegant Latin for an international lettered audience, John Barclay’s Icon animorum nonetheless reflects the vernacular anthropological and sociological tradition of Castiglione, Huarte, and Bodin. Indeed, Barclay

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was well placed to do so. Born in 1582, he was the son of William Barclay, a Scottish noble and Catholic politique who immigrated in 1571 to France, where he pursued advanced law studies in Paris and Bourges and later became a professor at the Jesuit university of Lorraine, in Pont-­à-­Mousson. His treatises on the inviolability of the prince’s person, even when dealing with tyrannical monarchs, earned him the sympathy of James I. In 1603, his son John, a child prodigy, published a poem in Latin celebrating the coronation of James I, as well as a satirical novel, Satyricon Euphormionis, that recounted his father’s French misadventures. The younger Barclay traveled to Italy, became a novice with the Jesuits, left the order, married, and published a new edition of Satyricon in Paris considerably spiced up by his own quarrels with the Society of Jesus. Nancy, Rome, Venice, London, Paris: by 1605, John Barclay, an anti-­Jesuit Catholic, had become a supremely cosmopolitan, and already famous, citizen of the European Republic of Letters. In 1606, despite belonging to the Church of Rome, he was named a minor official in the court of James I. But it was in Nancy, during a trip to the court of Lorraine, that he would publish the second part of Satyricon, whose literary success had already spread across Europe and which had been added to the Index in 1609. James I also charged Barclay with diplomatic missions in Poland and Savoy and visibly appreciated his support during the heated controversy on the power of the popes, which pitted the erudite king against Bellarmine. In 1614, Barclay, who was friendly with Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, whom he had met nine years earlier in London, dedicated Icon animorum to Louis XIII, then thirteen years old, a prelude no doubt to an eventual move to Paris. However, Maffeo Barberini, who was Paul V’s legate in England and nuncio in Paris, persuaded him to move to Rome instead, where he was appointed to the chancery and granted a pension. The commentator and Latin novelist died unhappy in the papal capital in 1621, the same year Peiresc published Barclay’s Latin novel Argenis in Paris, which was destined to become another European best seller and was translated into several languages, twice into French. John Barclay’s international prestige was such that, despite Satyricon’s inclusion in the Index, the papacy had coaxed this dangerous Scottish Voltaire to settle in Rome, a move he bitterly regretted. The Icon animorum, quoted here from an English translation entitled The Mirror of Minds, published in 1633, was inspired by Barclay’s strong preference for France, a sentiment then shared by the European Republic of Letters. Ever since Henry IV’s reign and the Edict of Nantes, Anglican, Arminian, Gallican, and moderate Catholic men of letters had in effect viewed the French monarchy as the guarantor of the “philosopher’s freedom” in Europe and the sole arbiter capable of keeping the hegemonic ambitions of the papacy, Austria, and

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above all Spain at bay. This bias toward France, which saw its political expression in Barclay’s allegorical roman à clef Argenis, was nonetheless tempered in Icon animorum due to the author’s desire to display a greater impartiality more appropriate for a leading citizen of the Republic of Letters and a free mind who avoided flattery and depicted real life. The Mirror of Minds begins with a solitary, symbolic scene. Standing at an elevated point, north of London, Barclay is engrossed by the vast landscape unfolding before him: forests and hills, ships on the river and docked at port, an immense panorama of the English capital and its neighborhoods. He contemplates this prodigious variety of all things, arranged by nature and multiplied by the industry and commerce of man. Barclay concludes that man himself is “the greatest instance of this beauty of variety,” for “men have not onely in their bodies a difference of habits, and proportions; but their minds are fitted for so many things, that no picture can with more colours, or lineaments delight the eye of the beholder, then are drawne by the fates, in the minds of men.”7 Even if he is “born to liberty,” man is no less inclined to adopt “certain affectations and rules of living” that change according to environment, political system, and era, and which determine the form, capacity, and style of his mind. Barclay, like Bodin, omits the great symbolic system of astrology, though it silently persists in the guise of a “certain force” or “Fate” that governs historic mutations and sculpts the “molds” that differ according to place and time and imprint their forms on nations and individuals. “Nothing is more beneficial,” concludes Barclay, than deciphering this diversity, whose imprints pave the road of life with formidable hostilities or encouraging sympathies, teaching man what “to expect or fear” when necessary. But amid this troubling diversity also lies a promise of harmony.8 None of these “national characters” is perfect or complete; none can claim to be exemplary or to dominate others. The study of national characters teaches greater humility, whose effects can be beneficial: “A cessation of arms gave mutual traffic to all these nations, which as they differed in dispositions and language, so could they not be guided by the same arts.”9 For Barclay, that study of dispositions, notably in Europe, where the web of exchanges and rivalries was particularly fraught, was the discipline best suited to a general and pacifying diplomacy over the long term. This secular leap of faith in a European harmony was undoubtedly supported by Barclay’s experience with the Republic of Letters—a vast diplomatic corps of the international and interfaith mind, and an ideal model for political equilibrium on the European continent. Though it was that very familiarity with the pax litteraria, which transcended national and religious aversions, that ensured France’s place of honor in Barclay’s text. He begins his description in terms of human geography and political systems. France is a garden, whose

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generous fertility renders it nearly self-­sufficient, though its coastal borders also open onto every sea. It is also a kingdom, galvanized by the love of its princes. Barclay then turns to the specific traits of the French character, which he defines based on its most complete and natural representatives: its noblesse d’épée. Valiant in battle but inherently ill-­equipped to follow through on their victories, the French do not know how to win wars. In contrast, they have beautiful, grand manners, a luxurious sartorial elegance, civility, inimitable politeness, and natural grace. “The world can never be sufficiently thankful to the hospitality of France, which seemeth to open a temple of humanity, or sanctuary for the fortunes of all foreigners to flee unto. They consider not the country, but the worth of a man. . . .”10 The lieu of the noble French character, whose principal traits are summarized by Barclay, would alone merit its own genealogical monograph. Barclay, like Castiglione, saw dangerous weaknesses in the French nobility. Whereas Castiglione deplored its disdain for men of letters (no longer the case under the reigns of Francis I and the Valois kings), Barclay now notes their lack of perseverance in battle and a much more original trait that assumes the comparison with the English nobility: even in the most pressing circumstances, the French nobles staked their honor on not “undertak[ing] merchandise.” He writes, “merchandise is basely esteemed of there [in France], than befits a thing of so great utility, and which first did spread humanity through all the world.” He adds that in France, “the merchants themselves, as if ashamed of their calling, when they are grown rich, do bring up their sons in some other discipline. [. . .] But the high minds of the French nation are in nothing more perfectly discerned than the eager pursuit of magistracies, where the shameful sale of them doth exclude the needy, howsoever virtuous.”11 The nobles’ prejudice against commerce thus worked against them, as the rich merchants whose common blood they so distrusted were able to rise within their own ranks by purchasing venal offices. Young nobles in France gave the impression of vanity, insolence, and libertinage, or else that of a haughty countenance poorly masking impatience. But cheerful and capacious minds, which were therefore all the “freer,” could be found between those two excesses and best represented, among young people, the nature of the French character. Other regrettable shortcomings in the manners of French nobles included the mutual contempt they showed one another while traveling and the senseless rage of their duals. These alarming idiosyncrasies lay in total opposition to the good qualities found among the French: their outspokenness contrasting with their “wonderful courtesy, not feigned, nor treacherous [. . .] free from deceit and secret hatreds [. . .] and respective of all men according to their degrees and ranks.”12 This harsh portrait of France’s traditional aristocracy was a typical depiction

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by a citizen of the Republic of Letters (whose leader was now a Frenchman, Peiresc). This republic of minds had the expectation that Louis XIII, whom Barclay addressed as a preceptor, would impose political discipline on his nobles’ anarchic tendencies and the corruption they were introducing into the body politic and even the administration of the kingdom—an implicit program of “reform,” in other words, whose stages were outlined in Argenis, Richelieu’s bedside reading, under the cloak of fiction and allegory. The Republic of Letters needed France, but a France governed by an intelligent and vigorous state, which would discipline its nobility and find a solution to the venality of its offices, without affecting the nation’s noble and hospitable nature. Barclay—a Scot, a Gallican Catholic, the son of a jurist converted to Anglicanism, and a gentleman in the court of James I—supported the Franco-­ English alliance sealed in 1625 by the marriage of Charles I and Louis XIII’s sister, Henrietta. Barclay’s portrait of England, a profitably cultivated island-­ garden, further enriched by its maritime commerce, foreshadowed continental Europe’s discovery, in the eighteenth century, of the insular kingdom that passed from the Stuarts to the House of Hanover. Barclay looks favorably on commerce, a vehicle for and complement to the “commerce of the mind.” Defended from invasion and relatively peaceful domestically, England was blessed with near “felicity.” That “felicity” had two adverse consequences: a lazy and careless people, and its arrogance toward both foreigners and English nobility. Barclay notes the particularity of English criminal law and describes the traditional judiciary system and advisory political regime that prevailed in the kingdom. He further highlights the privileges and maritime interests of the high nobility, and bases England’s national character on its members: “The English are for the most part grave, of retired spirits, and fit for counsel.”13 Science, philosophy, and mathematics were highly valued by the aristocracy and universities, whose highly cultivated milieus were welcoming, as in France, toward foreigners. But “[the people] run ever into extremes” and were divided into numerous religious sects whose fanaticism disturbed Barclay. Caution was then mandated for any stranger traveling to this country where such a wide gulf divided the higher, learned classes from the masses. Barclay makes a careful distinction between England and Ireland and above all Scotland, whose national character mirrored that of France. In contrast to France and England, two nations hospitable to letters, Spain— named the homeland of science by Huarte only half a century before—had become, in Barclay’s eyes, the country where “the studies of learning shine not [. . .] when even that spirit of erudition which ought to fill all parts of the sciences did seem altogether lost and vanished.” He continues: “For in Spain neither eloquence in the Latin tongue nor the elegance of poetry nor that profit-

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able and solid knowledge of history and ancient rites is at all regarded. They keep their old and almost barbarous manner of attaining learning. Philosophy they study, they love divinity, and despise not the knowledge of the laws and canons, but cannot endure that those learnings should be dressed at all in the Greek or Latin elegancies, as supposing that by those adulterate varnishes (as they think them) the lineaments of manly learning would languish away.”14 The imperialism of Spain’s weapons and language in Europe was therefore a threat to the Republic of Letters. According to Barclay, war and corruption by gold from the Indies, shielded by “pretence of religion” and a supposed “God’s cause,” were the means to achieve Spain’s ambitions. Here, Barclay turns the “melancholy” national character attributed to the Spanish people by Huarte against them. He deems them arrogant, which explains why “they have grave minds and swelling high, but mixed with a kind of weightiness, which makes them not rashly carried upon divers things.” But, Barclay adds, this very consistency and tenacity, which bolsters their conquests formidably, is made “loathsome” when spoken of in the fables and boasts that intersperse Spanish conversation. By drawing, in Latin, the first outlines of the Spanish braggart, and by making Spain, isolated from the “commerce of minds,” an obscurant threat to all of Europe, Barclay laid the groundwork for Richelieu and the triumphant French propaganda that would be utilized during the Thirty Years’ War. Norway, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Hungary, and the Balkans are all featured in Icon animorum, alongside the Turks and a few others. However, they are foils, in varying degrees, to the principal actors of the stage on which the political and moral future of Europe was being decided—France, England, and Spain. That left Italy, whose legendary status, in Barclay’s eyes, was far removed from its piteous reality. He writes that its territory is often poor and savage, its magnificent cities and palaces impractical, and its sumptuous churches superstitiously dark. Italy then was the often flea-­ridden hostelry for Europe’s young and rich, “one common and extemporary home” where cosmopolitan friendships were nourished and which left all young travelers on their Grand Tour with nostalgic memories. Equitation, riding, fencing, music, and comedic spectacles, which dazzled in Italy, were all suited to the idle, golden youths who went there to complete their educations. Italians, politically discarded and partially conquered, were limited to playing the role of entertainers, teachers, and eventually mediators on the European stage. Barclay does not even mention the Holy See. The most noteworthy of these national dramatis personae, according to the very characters attributed them by Barclay, were personified in a tragic play, Europe, which Cardinal Richelieu, an avid reader of Icon animorum and Argenis, had staged at the Palais-­Cardinal on November 18, 1642, fifteen days before

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his death. This was his public legacy. It would therefore be a mistake to underestimate the “characters of nations”: even statesmen as powerful as the “Red Eminence” relied on them to develop their domestic and European strategies. Barclay’s Icon animorum is not limited to the comparative juxtaposition of “national characters.” This educational treatise destined for a prince continues with a “survey” of the types of individual “dispositions.” This analysis of the political reality of Europe therefore combines two parameters: general and specific, macroscopic and microscopic. The latter perspective introduces another theme utilized by the “moralists” (Hall, Gracián, La Rochefoucauld, and La Bruyère): the “places” of those singular dispositions supplied the memories, inventiveness, and caution of the preconceptions indispensable to making one’s way through the formidable maze of European political life. In 1614, Barclay was a trailblazer in this respect. His influence on vernacular literatures cannot be overestimated, and in fact would be duly recognized at the end of the seventeenth century by a leading German scholar, Daniel Georg Morhof, in a chapter from his Polyhistor (1694) dedicated to Mores gentium. In order to know a man, instructs Barclay, you must first study the style of his conversation. When encountering men who dazzle and seduce through quips and witty improvisation, Barclay advises, “Take them [. . .] from bandying of wit to an argument of longer discourse [and] then without doubt thou shalt contemn the barrenness of their empty minds.” But those who display “longer eloquence” and enjoy listening to themselves do not even notice that they are tiring their audience. The Senecan brevitas and Ciceronian copia can, each in its own way, indicate hollow and trivial minds in conversation. In Barclay’s text, rhetoric is framed as a hermeneutic of manners. “Tell me how you speak and I will tell you who you are.” Following this maxim, Barclay paints multiple portraits of paradoxical “dispositions” whose “elegance” dupes only the naïve: wandering “minds” useless to anyone besides themselves, but capable of successfully parading before listeners to whom they have adapted; “men of a dull and narrow soul” who are nonetheless capable of ripe contemplation and conception, better suited to writing than speaking; learned but pedantic men unable to accept “men famous for public virtues and born to govern people, if they be unfit (forsooth!) for the subtlety of learning.” These distinctions between temperaments, regardless of the nation in which one is born, were an art of “prudence and subtleties” quite familiar to the Ancients and which experienced a resurgence in Europe following the Renaissance. That art was not solely the province of specialists dazed by long study, but implied a gift from nature, a celestial attraction, as much as an experience meditated upon and illuminated by the divination of human beings and their circumstances.15

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Barclay further explains that the truth about different kinds of intelligence— that is, that the best equipped and the most eloquent are not the most fortunate—also applies to virtues. One must be able to decipher fear, timidity, or temerity in magnanimity, which can take on the most varied and deceptive guises. One must know how to distinguish all that is excessive and extreme in devotion, and capable of suddenly reverting to its just-­as-­extreme opposite, atheism.16 Finally, instructs Barclay, one should not rush to condemn feelings of love, like certain “severe men” (meaning the clergy of all faiths), even when this passion torments those who feel its sting: it is the ultimate social passion and the principle of all humanitas. Barclay considered love to be a pacifying and uniting force, superior even to the commerce of letters and to commerce itself. Even Socrates fell in love (Barclay thus absolves James I’s penchants, which were shared by Louis XIII). He writes: But the mind of that man whom Nature moulded for a lover is mild, expressing in the very countenance modesty and simple virtue; of a great but merciful spirit; not hard to be entreated to spare suppliants and condemn revenge; exceeding penitent when he himself offends; a great lover of offices of humanity; impatient of idleness and all occasions of sloth, unless forgetting the great benefits which he hath received from Nature, he corrupt the felicity of his disposition with lascivious wantoning and so idleness.17 It could appear that Barclay has abandoned politics for a reflection on an entirely private form of wisdom. Indeed, his lesson on “kinds of dispositions and affections” is followed by an initiation into the difficult discernment of physiognomy, gestures, and attitudes (“this great and troublesome knowledge of minds,” according to Barclay) that Giovanni Battista Della Porta and Giovanni Bonifacio attempted to reduce to a semiotic system during the same period. But the connecting thread of Icon animorum—the progress of humanitas in Europe—is not lost. For Barclay, France is the driver of this progress, and England is lucky to have a Scottish king, Scotland’s character being similar to France’s. In France, the monarchy, easily transformed into a ferocious tyranny, is protected from that fate by a prodigious legitimacy, an ancient mystery, which earned its kings the genuine, zealous love of their subjects. Love in France can be both a political bond and a private attraction. It attracts a large court around the king, which, when it does not degenerate into chaos, can serve as the ideal terrain on which to practice the art of memory, intuition, and diplomatic caution instructed by Icon animorum. Written in Latin, and intended for a French king who was still a child, as

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well as the Republic of Letters, Barclay’s book preceded vernacular moralist literature by several decades. Icon animorum belonged to an additional category as well, which was destined for a high society audience barred from the world of politics by absolutism. In a singular stroke and method, the work simultaneously introduced the main elements of European politics and the anthropology of individual traits. Barclay addressed an elite with high responsibilities and power in government and its advisors. Writing in Latin, he was able to show tremendous audacity in his analysis and a freedom of views reserved for the initiated. Ultimately, the most incontestable common element in the unlikely comparison I make between Icon animorum and Das Spektrum Europas is the aristocratic nature (in the truest sense of the word) of these two treatises on the art of politics and the interpretation of European manners. Barclay was noble several times over—by birth, by his rank and role in James I’s courts, and by an education and talent that made him a lord of the Republic of Letters. He was motivated to contribute to the education of Louis XIII, the reform of the French monarchy, and the growth of the French crown’s European authority by the ideal he held of a cultivated and free, as well as a more harmonious and peaceful, Europe—a political substitute for a religious Christianity that had collapsed. But this grand plan was interrupted by war, and a French victory, with the support of Stuart England, over the Spanish Inquisition and all forms and forces of aggressive encroachment. John Barclay’s name must be rehabilitated. He was, after all, one of the major inspiring forces behind the “European Equilibrium” created by the Treaties of Westphalia and the Pyrenees. He was also one of the keenest interpreters of the political, moral, and diplomatic “European education” that developed during the seventeenth century; he saw its golden age in the eighteenth century which, for the most part, remains to be rediscovered. The search for unity within the multiplicity of Europe, from Barclay to Keyserling, shares another trait: it bypassed religion, at least in appearance, looking instead to nature for the mysterious principle of harmony that would lead to reciprocal gratitude and goodwill.

4 RHETORIC AND SOCIETY IN EUROPE

The expression “Republic of Letters” is still in use today. It appears in the majority of recent French-­language dictionaries and even at times in everyday speech or the media as a pompous and ironic circumlocution used to designate the literary Parisian “milieu.” That pejorative and archaist connotation is an impediment (as is somewhat the case for the term “rhetoric”) to the current focus of scientific research on the surviving expression’s former meaning and the notion of an international commerce of ideas that it represented to men of letters of the ancien régime. The recent nature of this scientific interest can be attested to by Paul Hazard’s famous Crise de la conscience européenne (Crisis of the European Conscience, 1934), which fails to mention the Republic of Letters entirely. In his chapter on Pierre Bayle, Hazard mentions Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (News of the Republic of Letters), the scholarly journal published in Amsterdam by the Calvinist thinker, with no apparent desire to explain the journal’s seemingly self-­explanatory title. Within intellectual history, the concept of the Republic of Letters was not itself a subject of study. It remained just outside the scope of a field dedicated entirely to a kind of chemistry of pure ideas, independent of the literary form that disseminated said ideas, not to mention the institutional circuits and forms of sociability and dialogue that “invented” and circulated those ideas and, most of all, the awareness that “savants” may have had of the solidarity unifying them as well as any meaning they may have attributed to it. Yet innumerable accounts, at least during the eighteenth century, reveal that for savants, also referred to as “men of letters,” the expression “Republic of Letters” solidified both the society that unified them beyond national borders and their highly articulated awareness of it. This “blind spot” in intellectual history is yet another legacy of a more classic literary history. Amid its descriptions of various fields of research, Gustave Lanson’s Manuel d’histoire littéraire (Manual of French Literary History), which has the great virtue of framing itself as a heuristic endeavor, says nothing about a Republic of Letters whose collective European foundations would erase the national, political borders of the literary history of France as perceived by Lanson. That was not its sole exclusion. The field of literary history was formed within the positivist cli65

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mate of the late nineteenth century, with a strong, polemical inclination against “rhetoric,” which was considered to fall within the purview of “grand, vague things” from which scholarly work needed to disassociate itself. That healthy reaction against pedantic, clerical, and fixed forms of rhetoric would be transformed into derision by romantic authors. However, that attitude also meant being doomed to abandon earlier forms of the art of persuasion and dialogue, in particular those that had supplied fertile theoretical frameworks for the activity and sociability of academies and savant societies and, in general, for the network of correspondences and the style of quarrels that formed the European tissue of the Republic of Letters of the ancien régime. In other words, this meant excluding from historical excavation the very foundations on which, following the Renaissance, a first “scientific community” had established itself with its own functions, conventions, public opinion, and mythology, as well as an epistemology for collective works extending across boundaries and generations, which shielded it to some extent from the control of political and religious authorities. Even René Pintard’s masterpiece—I repeat this with unceasing amazement—Le Libertinage érudit (Erudite Libertinism, 1943), which blends intellectual history and literary history, relies on the “psychology” of the “libertine” savant and his moral duplicity to describe the educated aristocracy of France, Italy, and the Netherlands, whose every member displayed his own individuality and lived symbiotically with the society and prejudices of the era, but which as a whole formed a backdrop coherent enough to facilitate a surprising autonomy of thought and behavior. The actual expression “Republic of Letters” does not appear in the book’s index verborum. That absence is all the more remarkable given that Pintard had provided the best description thus far of the Republic’s style of existence and collaboration that prevailed among the leading men of letters in the first half of the seventeenth century. He also gives glimpses, though never explicitly, of the institution that sheltered, in a very unique and unconventional fashion, the men who at that time referred to themselves either as “sçavans” (savants) or men of letters, and who recruited others according to a subtle and rigorous method of co-­optation. The conceptual limits of Pintard’s analysis are counterbalanced by the reach and precision of his historical inquiry and by its skillful presentation.1 And yet, as early as 1929, Max Kirschstein had revealed the importance (at least during the eighteenth century) of the phenomenon represented in the language of the time by the formula “Republic of Letters” in his thesis “Klopstocks deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik” (Klopstocks’s German Republic of Letters). In 1938, Anne Barnes’s French-­language work Jean Le Clerc et la République des Lettres (Jean Le Clerc and the Republic of Letters), introduced a perspective

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that Paul Dibon, in articles published in 1976 and 1978, would try to introduce into French research. In 1965, Krzysztof Pomian, in a thesis in Polish that unfortunately remains unpublished, and in 1977, Hans Bots, during a lecture given in Dutch, adopted a similar approach. In 1982, Wilhelm Kühlmann published a major work in Tübingen that stands a good chance of becoming the equivalent of René Pintard’s in the first half of that century. This time the idea of the Republic of Letters appears in the title (Gelehrtenrepublik und Fürstenstaat: Entwicklung und Kritik des deutschen Späthumanismus in der Literatur des Barockzeitalters), and the problematic of the book revolves around this central concept.2 The importance paid to Kühlmann’s work by the German Germanistik can be measured by an ambitious project organized by the research center of the Wolfenbüttel Library and published in August 1987 under the title Respublica litteraria: Die Institutionen der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit (in two volumes). However, the scope of these two works is limited chronologically to the “Baroque era” and geographically to Germany. The European dimension of the Republic of Letters phenomenon takes a back seat, and the genesis of the concept itself and its varied interpretations depending on location and era are unaddressed. Nonetheless, it is clear that Germany was experiencing a genuine resurgence, both reflexive and critical, of the kind of research that was extremely prevalent in Lutheran universities at the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, and which led to the publication of numerous legal theses or works of literary history dedicated to the Respublica litteraria. This collective effort within German academic circles was aimed at understanding and assimilating a development from which the Thirty Years’ War had temporarily blocked Germany. Incidentally, a good account of this historical aggiornamento can be found in Emilio Bonfatti’s work (La “Civil conversazione” in Germania) on one of the fundamental aspects of the “manners” of the Republic of Letters: courtesy, affability between men of letters, and the art of conversation, as invented by Italy and adopted and reinterpreted by France, which a savant Germany strove to belatedly study, translate, and systematize.3 Visibly, the history of the expression “Republic of Letters” was just as fertile in eighteenth-­century France, where it was used almost to the point of obsession. Without it, we would be unable to understand the meaning of Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Sketch of a Historical Tableau of the Progress of the Human Spirit, 1793), and even less so the odd hopes expressed by the Girondin Nicolas de Bonneville, who in 1790 wrote in Le Tribun du people (I cannot resist quoting this a second time): “It is from the Republic of Letters that we expect the triumph of patriotism and liberty.” A worse prophet would be hard to find.

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For a long time, however, in France, which played such a capital role in the history of the Republic of Letters, works about that network of savants betrayed enormous gaps, to say the least. There are nonetheless many points of reference for the seventeenth century, thanks to works and collections of letters between savants written or assembled by Paul Dibon, Hans Bots, Bruno Neveu, and François Waquet.4 The eighteenth century and the French Revolution remain, in this respect, less studied due perhaps to the fact that the lettered Republic grew both demographically and geographically and took on a critical guise detrimental to its former irenic nature. If we look back even farther to the sixteenth century, we are forced to make do with a German article about Erasmus, written by Fritz Schalk: “Erasmus und die Respublica litteraria.”5 It is too early for research on the exact nature of the institution and the structure of its concepts, as well as the legal and poetic ideals implied. But curiosity about the genesis and strictly semantic history of the expression itself is lacking. Indeed one credible historian of humanism wrote, not so long ago, that the expression does not predate Erasmus! And yet it is evident that even future studies on the French or German Republic of Letters in the eighteenth century, for example, could be greatly distorted by the lack of previous investigations on the origin and earlier interpretations of the term “Republic of Letters.” The stakes here are nothing less than the history of the emergence of a European “scientific community,” the “democracy” of judgment and criticism it implies, the institutional structures it created for itself, and the philosophical reflection put into it. Why would this line of research interest a historian of humanist rhetoric in particular? Let’s consider his or her working hypothesis: the humanist Renaissance—the renovatio litterarum et atrium launched by Petrarch—is characterized principally by a change in the dialogic model dominant among savants. The dialectical model of quaestio and disputatio that structured the scholastic system gave way to a model of a rhetorical-­t ype dialogue, for which the Petrarchan “letter,” and later the Montaignian “essay,” served as the original example. This was another branch of the subject of knowledge, of its relationship to the “other” and with truth, which had a much more diverse range of forms. But it was also an extension of savant dialogue beyond university walls, and beyond the exclusive privilege of specialists, to largely secular men and institutions that had been previously excluded from access to knowledge: artisans, merchants and squires, chancery secretaries and notaries. The rhetorical mode of savant dialogue was more “open” than the one it was attempting to replace but did not for all that lack its own brand of discipline, which imposed norms of speech and sociability on its participants, making collaboration and internal checks possible. Rhetorical dialogue had more in common with legal debates than it

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did with the logical formalism of the scholastic disputatio. This new mode of dialogue called for new institutions of dialogue: groups (cœtus) of friends assembled around Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati in the fourteenth century, and “academies” around Argyropoulos and Ficino in Florence in the fifteenth century. It was this nebula of savant “companies” that took the name Republic of Letters and which therefore enabled that society to exist within mainstream society. Such a phenomenon would naturally appear to be a major theme for the historian of the “art of persuasion.” He or she would then be primed to make the case that humanist rhetoric was not a “literary” epiphenomenon or a simple, pedantic repetition of classical and archaic models whose usage was limited to political and religious propaganda or verbose academicism. It also, and most importantly, paved the way for a socialized mode of “modern” discovery and understanding for which Descartes, echoing Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne, provided an accurate definition in the peroration of his Discours de la method (Discourse on the Method, 1637): I judged that there was no better provision against these two impediments [the shortness of life and the difficulty and cost of research] than faithfully to communicate to the public the little which I should myself have discovered, and to beg all well-­inclined persons to proceed further by contributing, each one according to his own inclination and ability, to the experiments which must be made, and then to communicate to the public all the things which they might discover, in order that the last should commence where the preceding had left off; and thus, by joining together the lives and labours of many, we should collectively proceed much further than any one in particular could succeed in doing.6 In Étienne de Courcelles’s Latin translation of this text, which was published in 1644 with Descartes’s authorization, the word “public” was replaced by the Latin expression Respublica litteraria. At this stage of research, the expression “Republic of Letters,” unknown during antiquity and the Middle Ages, looks to have appeared for the first time in 1417 in a Latin letter addressed by the young Venetian humanist Francesco Barbaro to Poggio Bracciolini, to congratulate him on the discovery of various manuscripts, including Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.7 The idea of a savant community that transcends borders and generations, and which owes a debt of gratitude to Poggio and is duty-­bound to honor him, appears throughout the letter, as it does in Barbaro’s later correspondence, in different forms: eruditi homines, doctissimi homines ubicumque (the erudite men, the savants of the entire world), united by necessitudo litterarum (the alliance of letters) and paying

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homage through Barbaro’s pen to Poggio’s pro communi utilitate labores (works of public utility). Here then are three generations, spanning from Petrarch to Poggio to Salutati, via a network that included Milan, Padua, Florence, and Rome, during which the renovatio litterarum created bonds of solidarity and collaboration between savants who had adopted it as their ideal. Soon enough, it would choose a name: Respublica litteraria. It is noteworthy that this moniker appeared in an “incunable” manuscript of academic eulogy nearly one century before academies governed by actual statues were formed. Where did this new expression come from? I propose that it is a variation of a much older formula: Respublica christiana. The two expressions actually appear together, in later occurrences, and are used interchangeably, or at least differentiated by an imperceptible nuance. Respublica christiana dates back to The City of God,8 in which Saint Augustine counters Cicero’s definition of the Roman state (from the dialogue De Republica, which had been entirely lost during the Renaissance) with his own definition of the state in general, which allowed him to contrast the earthly city and the city of God, as well as states both divided and united by the love of false gods and false things and the church (ea respublica, cujus conditor rectorque Christus est, “that republic whose founder and ruler is Christ”). During his reflections on the Ciceronian definition, according to which juris concensus and utilitatis communio establish unity among a people and the legitimacy of a state, Saint Augustine rejects the notion of law, an entirely human convention, and that of a community of interests, overly subject to selfish passions, and bases his definition of a political community on “an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by common agreement as to the objects of their love.” He replaces the order of law and interest with that of grace and love, with, as its opposite, its demonic caricature, the earthly city. These texts, widely read throughout the Middle Ages, were all the more omnipresent in humanists’ minds because they had Petrarch’s two heroes, Cicero and Saint Augustine, dialoguing with one another. In Barbaro’s letter, utilitas communis is an expression of Cicero’s as quoted by Saint Augustine. And the meaning the Venetian humanist ascribes to Respublica in this context is a blend of the two definitions discussed in City of God: a society united by love of the same things, and by law and common interests. The Respublica takes from both the Augustinian church and the ideal Roman state according to Cicero. The rational element Saint Augustine made sure to include in his definition is represented by the adjective litteraria, which simultaneously implies the eruditio of this republic’s citizens and the nature of the common good uniting them. Respublica litteraria broke away from the Respublica christiana, not to oppose it but to imitate it, in a way, on a literary level.

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Remember that the letter in which this expression appeared for the first time was addressed to Poggio while he was in Constance (1414–1418), where he had followed Antipope John XXIII, who was attending the council gathered by Emperor Sigismund to put an end to the Great Western Schism. Under those circumstances, concerns over the unity of the Respublica christiana were particularly intense, and the restorers of “good letters” (diplomats or chancery secretaries who had followed John XXIII) could very well believe in a perfect concurrence of their savant civicism and their Christian civicism. After the council deposed the three antipopes, including John XXIII, Poggio found himself with some leisure time, leaving him free to explore the libraries of German-­speaking Switzerland at length and to announce his discoveries to his Florentine friends. Contemporary theories of conciliar theologians, notably the Gallicans, strengthened by the tragedy of the Great Schism, insisted precisely on the notion of a congregatio et universitas fidelium (congregation and collectivity of the faithful): clerics and laymen called upon to establish the authority of a universal council that would surpass that of incompetent or abusive popes. Francesco Barbaro was a layman, who would quickly marry within his Venetian, senatorial milieu and assume a leading role in the affairs of the Serenissima. As shown by Carlo Dionisotti,9 a notable percentage of the doctissimi homines assembled by Barbaro in the “literary republic”—from Petrarch to Politian, and from Boccaccio to Castiglione and Bembo—enjoyed ecclesiastical benefits, held important posts within the pontifical curia, and desired or obtained a bishopric or cardinalship. The Republic of Letters would have to extend to northern Europe, incorporating Gallicans and reformists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and masons in the eighteenth, for this lettered aristocracy’s original relationship with the Roman church to weaken, though the notion of a mystical corps of savants working together toward a common good with universal meaning never disappeared entirely. In fifteenth-­century Italy, the separation between Respublica christiana and Respublica litteraria was not conceivable. The latter was still merely a metaphor for the self-­awareness of a group of important secular Italian men of letters within the Roman Church, who sought the church’s unity (at that time threatened by the Great Schism) and shared similar research aims and the same project of renovatio antiquitatis. However, this metaphor was sufficiently dynamic to engender social rituals for the group it was simultaneously constructing and defining: Barbaro’s eulogistic letter is the symbolic equivalent of a university laureatio, granted in the presence and name of the laureate’s fictitiously assembled peers. Its “epideictic” character implies the existence, well attested to elsewhere, of other forms of judicial or deliberative collaborations, true dia-

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logues, like Leonardo Bruni’s I dialogi ad Petrum Histrum, a collection of letters discussing various points of philology, morals, and so forth. Nonetheless, it is worth pausing on the adjective litteraria, which, following Petrarch, became (like the noun litterae)10 a way for Italian reformers of savant culture to recognize and acknowledge one another—a password, as it were. It is important to once again note its dual registers: one classic and pagan, the other Christian and medieval. For ancient grammarians, littera was the written notation of the smallest segment (elementum) of articulated speech. The man of letters, the savant, was above all someone who could read, who had a literary memory, and who was in a position to extract other words or expressions from his mental repository, which he would dictate, as writing was a task relegated to specialized slaves. Initiation into the world of letters meant elevation from the level of the rude; it meant erudiri, accession to humanitas and eventually urbanitas. There was a “mystery” in the knowledge of letters, and in the universe of books, that separated the ancient, medieval, humanist from his illiterate contemporaries as surely as, in Mallarmé’s eyes, the “mystery in literature,” known only to poets, separated the bourgeoisie and journalists in their philistine ignorance from the men of letters they imagined themselves to be. The divide was even more pronounced in the Middle Ages and left no room for illusions. Hence, the monk Nicolas of Clairvaux could write: Vetus enim proverbium est, et ore veterum celebrata sententia: quantum a belluis homines, tantum distant a laicis litterati. (It is an old proverb and one celebrated by the ancients, that as much as men are removed from the beasts, so are educated men removed from the illiterate.)11 Access to the world of letters, reserved to the “clergy,” provided a particular mastery of space and time, and an internal freedom difficult to violate. Freedom of space, as the man of letters was not confined to a single location and could communicate, through letters, with those absent and faraway, meaning the dead. Freedom of time, because the man of letters was alone capable of transforming otium, a misfortune for the common man (intervals between negotia, disgrace, exile, old age), into a source of productive happiness. For Cicero, the otium litteratum (lettered leisure) was the ultimate form of otium cum dignitate, but was above all, in his mind, a “rejuvenation” for the man of action temporarily absent from the political scene. In Seneca’s writings, on the other hand, particularly in his final works, the studiosum otium (studious leisure) became, for the first time in Rome, a superior way of life that was sufficient unto itself. Here, we are already on the path that led from the withdrawal of the philosophical man of letters to Christian monasticism. In De otio, Nero’s tutor even foreshadowed the Augustinian concept of two cities. Seneca writes:

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We should try to comprehend two commonwealths: one great and truly common to all, by which gods and men are held together and in which we should not look for this or that out-­of-­the-­way place but the boundaries of a city as measured by the course of the sun; and another in which we are included by accident of birth, which may be that of the Athenians or of the Carthaginians or any other city which does not reach out to include all men but only specific ones. Certain individuals give service to both commonwealths at the same time, to the greater and to the lesser; some only to the lesser, others only to the greater. We can serve devotedly this greater commonwealth even in leisure, or indeed probably better in leisure.12 For the citizens of the invisible Cosmopolis, according to Seneca, that leisure was fully dedicated to contemplative understanding, with books, of the immutable laws governing the divine order of the world. But that understanding was fixed and solipsistic, which in no way anticipated the collaborations and relays of the Republic of Letters as would be defined by Descartes, and for that matter depicted by the utopian cities of the Renaissance by figures like Thomas More and Campanella, with the aim of a theoretical, but practical, “common good.” If we know the fate of the otium litteratum in the Middle Ages, it is thanks to Pierre Courcelle’s works on Saint Augustine and Dom Jean Leclercq’s studies of monastic life.13 And yet Petrarch, the founder of humanism, directly linked his chosen way of life to monasticism: he longed to join his brother, a Carthusian monk, and was himself a cleric.14 Few publications were more influential on his work than two symmetrical treatises: De otio religioso, written for monks, and De vita solitaria, for men of letters like himself. The connection is evident in several respects, and it is clear that efforts to imitate the Ancients by the first humanists, Petrarch’s spiritual successors, were filtered through a thousand years of monasticism. In this way, the monastic elevation of writing to the level of a spiritual exercise15 freed it of the servile character attributed it by antiquity. In Petrarch’s Letters, the calamus, in his own hand, becomes an intelligent measure of his degree of availability and concentration. For example, he writes to the Dominican Giovanni Colonna: Only there [in solitude] and not elsewhere am I myself; there lies my pen which at present rebels everywhere I go and refuses my orders because I am preoccupied with burdensome matters. Thus, while it is constantly busy [negotium], when I have plenty of leisure [otium], it prefers to have leisure [otium] when I have much to do [negotium], and almost like a wicked and insolent servant, it seems to convert the fervor of the master into its own desire for rest. However, as soon as I get back home I shall

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compel it to take on its duties and I shall write about what you seek in a separate book, indicating what has been written by others and what are my own ideas. Indeed just as I am accustomed to writing these friendly letters almost as amusement in the very midst of conversations and bustle, in the same way I have need of solitary quiet and pleasant leisure and great and uninterrupted silence in order to write books.16 Many humanists were secretaries. Petrarch was himself solicited on multiple occasions to accept a pontifical appointment as a secretary of briefs. His method of forming letters, in imitation of Carolingian cursive, and breaking with the university and Gothic style, primed the development of a “humanistic” script by Poggio Bracciolini, who would not deign to copy manuscripts. Thanks to Petrarch, otium scribendi was transported out of the monastic scriptoria and became a spiritual exercise for all the lettered, secular clerics for whom he served as a model. Judging from the development of this new manuscript culture, one could hazard that it was preparing its agents to become the arbiters of a new world, which was highly polemical and dangerous, inaugurated by the printing press. To quote Paul Oskar Kristeller, the humanist of Petrarchist extraction, the agent of this new culture, appeared like a “transfer of the ideal of monastic life from the monk to the scholar.” The return to antiquity was first of all a return to the prescholastic period of Benedictine Europe, to sapientia scribae in tempore otii (wisdom of the scribe in ancient times [when one knew how to occupy leisure time]), which supported conventual theorica studia. This was Saint Bernard’s revenge on Abelard: shared meditatio and gustatio to God triumphing over logic-­based school exercises. The eloquent genres essential to monastic civilization—sermons and lyrical hymns, history, epistolography (the rotuli that made the rounds of Europe)—once again prevailed over theologians’ quaestiones disputatae. The difference between the monk and the humanist (and monks from Ambrogio Traversari to Battista Mantuano often enthusiastically embraced the “new culture”) was above all one of discipline: the monk was subject to the rules of his order and the authority of his abbey; the humanist, to borrow a Benedictine category, was a “gyrovague” (errare and vagare are key words of Petrarch’s correspondence). If he were to impose a discipline upon himself, to accept the rules of savant “civicism,” it would be of his own free will, for the love of letters, during an independent otium often funded by ecclesiastical benefices. The metaphor of the Respublica litteraria relates as much to the idea of order—though nonmonastic, transcending frontiers and generations, and based on a free implicit contract—as it does to the idea of the church and “mystical body.” Humanist circles were quick to respond to the biographi-

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cal and hagiographical activity of the great medieval orders with the elaboration of Lives, or cycles of Lives, which established a model of what a “savant” was and how he should behave. This began in 1341 with Boccaccio’s De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petrarchi. It became a cycle in the second half of the fifteenth century in Florence, with Vespasiano dei Bisticci’s Lives, and an academic genre in the sixteenth century with Paul Jove’s Vitae, the model for Vasari’s Vite of artists. If dialogi, epistolae, and diverse oratory forms of the “treatise” established collective standards of savant discussion and its epistemology, then Lives, as I previously noted, provided this developing and expanding community with moral examples and models of savant discipline. During the Middle Ages, the litterati were separated from the vulgus, and the clerici from the laici, not only by their ability or inability to read and write, or access or lack thereof to savant memory and spiritual and intellectual discipline, but also by use of different languages. The sermo litteratorum, the lingua litterata, was Latin; the sermo vulgi, the lingua vulgaris, was the multiplicity of vulgar idioms. As a grammatical language, Latin respected universal rules and was relatively stable. Vulgar Latin, composed of local, fluctuating dialects and devoid of grammar, had an inferior ontological standing. The Respublica litteraria, which inherited that medieval view, had a universal vocation insofar as its language was Latin. But which Latin? As soon as this question was raised—and indeed, this was the Republic’s seminal question given that the humanist man of letters was first distinguished by his rebellion against the “corrupted” university Latin—the fixed hierarchy that governed the interactions of Latin and vernacular, clerics and laymen, was shaken. A historical perspective on language was introduced. If the studia humanitatis were meant to overcome a “corruption of eloquence” that originated during the barbarian invasions, why was that mission not extended to the vulgar tongue, rather than being limited to savant Latin? This issue was raised beginning in the early fifteenth century within the humanist circles of the Florentine chancery and pontifical curia. For a figure like Leonardo Bruni, a vulgar, corrupted Latin had already existed in ancient Rome. The savant/vulgar language diglossia preexisted the barbarian invasions; it was a structural trait of Romania. For scholars like Flavio Biondi and Giovan Battista Alberti, that diglossia was a “medieval” phenomenon. Since Latin had been susceptible to “growth,” “corruption,” and “restoration,” as grammatical as it was, why wouldn’t the same hold for the vulgar tongue? This debate involved both a historical perspective and an inseparable rhetorical one. It was Latin’s rhetoricity and capacity for eloquence that had grown and that had been corrupted. In Bruni’s mind, those traits were not transmittable to vulgar Latin,

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either then or during antiquity. For proponents of the opposing argument, a Latin restored to its previous vigor, in thoughts and actions, had the historical function of serving as a living model and guide for the growth of vulgar Latin and its accession to savant and literary dignity. Henceforth, each generation of humanists would have its own debate over the future of that vulgar tongue. This prevented the emerging Republic of Letters from being a “closed society,” situating it instead in a perspective of expansion and dynamism, which was not limited to the good news of the “restoration of Latin eloquence.” That restoration was itself understood to be contagious, and also served as a model: what had been achieved in the case of scholastic Latin could also be achieved in the case of vulgar Latin—a corrupted Latin, yes, but a living, moving, and effective language, like the original Latin. The “question of language”17 quickly became, and remained, a driving force of the Republic of Letters, ultimately leading it in the eighteenth century to a conversion, itself controversial, to academic French as the “Latin of the Moderns.” Confined to networks of handwritten correspondence, the expression Respublica litteraria would not reach a wide audience until the end of the fifteenth century, via several incunable texts and, in particular, the admirable dedications (and veritable manifestos) that Aldus Manutius included in his editions of classical texts. In the meantime, another word, rare in the Middle Ages, entered the humanists’ vocabulary and became inseparable from the expression Respublica litteraria: academia. It first appeared in a purely Ciceronian sense in order to designate, in reference to Poggio Bracciolini’s home and later Marsilio Ficino’s, a villa in the countryside equipped with a library and, in Poggio’s case, a collection of antiques, where savant friends joined the master of the house for varied discussions. Friendship, which the Ancients had made the ultimate social connection, as well as the breadth of feelings and sociable attitudes that could be summarized by the virtue of humanitas, developed, in a kind of freely chosen withdrawal, among these groups of lettered men united by their affinities. These feelings, this politesse, created conditions favorable to dialogue and therefore themselves became an integral part of the new epistemology. But from the beginning, the borrowing of the word academia from the Ancients, Cicero and Pliny, was rich with latent semantic developments. The memory of the Platonic Academy, the only philosophical school of antiquity that lasted without interruption for one thousand years—a fact that continually amazes me—until its closure by Justinian I in 1529, was revived by Byzantine scholars, who first converged on Europe as diplomats and then as refugees beginning in the late fourteenth century, bringing with them from the Orient a zeal for Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition, alongside the Greek language

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and manuscripts. The garden of Akademos, the altar that Plato dedicated to the Muses, and the role played by dialogue, banquets, and music within the transmission of Platonic philosophy, formed a savant myth that would confer the prestige of a “rediscovered era” to gatherings of Italian humanists, from the meetings held by Marsilio Ficino at the villa of Careggi, which was founded by Cosimo de’ Medici, to Raphael’s Parnassus in the Signature Room at the Vatican. Well before academies had acquired legal status and became stable “guilds” in the sixteenth century, they emerged as the informal and common model of devout lay brotherhoods, referred to in Venice as scuole. These confraternities had an annual holiday for their patron saints, banquets, and charitable responsibilities shared by all their members. The members of these brotherhoods, according to statutes written and approved by civil and religious authorities, incidentally had their own professions, careers, and families. They dedicated only a part of their spare time to the confraternity. The humanists also lived double lives, in their own way: they had their officia, their negotia, and could only dedicate the best of their otium to solitary study and savant sociability. It was the model of the devout brotherhood, rather than the guild of artisans, that gave meetings between savants their regularity, festive rites, and a climate of literary zeal that warmed and familiarized those remnants of antiquity that seemed spectral or affected. At the villa at Careggi, as at Pomponio Leto’s villa on Quirinal Hill in Rome, they celebrated the birthdays of “saints” with a banquet. In Florence, the “saint” was Plato; in Rome, Romulus. In between, confabs, speeches, and concerts in Florence and Rome (where representation of plays by Plautus and Terence and shared pilgrimages were staged or held among the ruins or in the catacombs) nourished lettered piety and sowed the seeds of encyclopedism as well as the antiquarianism of the academies of the later classical era. Savonarola dissolved Ficino’s academy in 1494 and, by 1468, Pope Paul II had taken umbrage at the activities of the Academia romana of Pomponius Lætus (Pomponio Leto), notably Leto’s invented, self-­attributed title of Pontifex maximus and the classical pseudonyms the academicians insisted on choosing, and put an end to these enduring remnants of paganism under pretext of a plot. In Naples, on the other hand, the academy grouped around Antonio Beccadelli, which included the great poet and essayist Pontano (who adopted the pseudonym Jovianus), lived symbiotically with the court of Alfonso the Magnanimous and would only see its work interrupted in 1495 by the arrival of Charles VIII’s French armies. Five years later, in Milan, Louis XII disrupted a similar synergy between court and academy by sending Ludovic le More to France as a prisoner. In just a few years, presaging the sack of Rome, the fragility of the network of the first Italian academies had become

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apparent, as had that of the Republic of Letters that had injected all these companies with the sensation of working together in the same mind-­set and for the same renovatio spiritus of Latin Christianity. Here is where the advantages of the printing press, previously viewed by men of letters merely as a technique to supplement the dissemination of piety and knowledge, became apparent: the output of one century of Greek and Latin philology and the existing foundational works of Italian humanism found a “definitive” storehouse in the printing press. These works were circulated across Europe to create a network of libraries and spread the models of savant research and sociability developed in Italy. The expression “Republic of Letters” crossed the Alps, and academies appeared in Germany, France, Spain, and England. Erasmus was the principal beneficiary, and eloquent champion, of this translatio of the Respublica litteraria across the breadth of the Respublica christiana. But first we must give Erasmus’s predecessor Aldus Manutius his rightful due. His editions, with their anchor and dolphin emblem, are even today the pinnacle of all that remains of Europe’s great libraries and its high bibliophilia. From the earliest works published by Aldus, beginning in 1494 in Venice, his epistolary prefaces, addressed to studiosi bonarum litterarum (students of good letters) and amantissimi bonarum litterarum (devotees of good letters), made him the true spokesman for a Republic of Letters expanding across all of Europe and read like the editorials of an international “scientific program.”18 These addresses to a “savant public opinion” were not published in Venice by chance. Aldus was Roman, not Venetian. And at forty years old, he was not young by the criteria of his day. He could have, as his noble-­born student Alberto Pio, the Prince of Carpi, desired, established another small academy in his patron’s castle. He chose to become a printer, and a printer in Venice at that. The city was without a doubt the most favorable communications hub, in Italy at least, for circulating books, as it included countless printers. Venice also served as a refuge for Byzantine exiles; Greek was taught and spoken there, which made the printing of Hellenic classics less insurmountable. But it was also an aristocratic republic protected from the military campaigns ravaging the rest of Italy, thus giving rise to the savant myth of Venice as the land of political wisdom and liberty. The University of Padua was its “Latin quarter,” which attracted students from across Europe, where scholastic theology had a weak grip, and where Petrarch’s repeated visits a century earlier had planted the seeds for a conversion to philological and rhetorical humanism. The Roman Inquisition did not encroach upon this defensive republic. Strategically, the choice of Venice was the best one. But which strategy? Aldus, a friend of Pic de la Mirandole, a correspondent of Politian, and an admirer of Marsilio Ficino, saw what

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his lettered friends had not: the printing press could destroy their literary endeavor either by circulating texts adulterated by haste and the lure of profit or by spreading the Gothic heritage on a vast scale. On the other hand, it could also save it by circulating, and imbuing with prestige, the rediscovered and restored “common good.” In 1497, in the preface to his edition of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Physics, Aldus mentions the academy he assembled in order to ensure the critical exactitude of the texts he published. He lists his collaborators, all talented philologists, and makes no effort to hide the hopes he places in the far-­reaching dissemination of the fruits of the Italian Renaissance. At the beginning of his edition of Aristophanes, he writes: I hope that in a near future, when barbarism is destroyed and ignorance vanquished, good letters and true disciplines will be embraced not, as they are now, by a tiny minority, but by universal accord. In 1499, in another preface, this time to a collection of Greek astronomers, Aldus delights over the fact that the Englishman Thomas Linacre, Chalcondyle’s student in Florence, had uncovered some of the texts he had published. In 1502, in the beginning of his edition of Statius, dedicated to the Cretan poet and humanist Marco Musurus, the now successfully established Aldus writes: I have never failed to mention the name of a savant who contributed to uncovering the texts I publish, or who helped my enterprise in one way or another. He adds: May Heaven grant us even more benefactors of the Republic of Letters. In a dedicatory epistle to Senator Marino Sanuto,19 also in 1502, Aldus bemoans the infrequency with which he sees his friend, overburdened with public affairs, and that he himself is too busy with affairs of the Republic of Letters. The underlying opposition is of course between otium, related to private life, and the negotia of the forum. But by formulating this old Roman antithesis in a new way, at the beginning of a book that would circulate throughout Europe, Aldus conferred a public quality on the collective otium litteratum of the Republic of Letters, which made it a spiritual power comparable to civil power and elevated it to a community of judgment, distantly but directly foreshadowing the eighteenth-­century Republic of Letters. These prefaces themselves offer a hint, still conflated with the book itself, of the savant press that would emerge during the reign of Louis XIV. This is clear in the sweeping dedicatory epistle to Pope Leo X that prefaces the 1513 edition of Plato’s Complete Works. Part assessment,

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part forecast, this epistle is a true manifesto of the Republic of Letters. A strictly political reflection on the disasters that had struck the first Italian academies twenty years earlier prompted Aldus to seek an alliance between the Republic of Letters and the absolute sovereign that the pope was in the process of once again becoming. Thus began a course of action that, until the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, would guide the leaders of the Republic of Letters through a tactical alliance with strong political powers, which were capable of imposing that alliance on those opposed to the freedom of research and of endowing the savant world with lasting institutions. This strategy adopted by men of letters would benefit Richelieu and Louis XIV in particular. Conscious of the fragility of his own “academy,” too tightly linked to the fate of his printing business, Aldus sought to transform it into an official academy whose longevity would be guaranteed even after his death. He negotiated with both the pope and the emperor, though neither effort was fruitful. Nevertheless, several ephemeral branches of the Aldine Academy subsequently spread throughout Europe. Aldus’s project and output were given further momentum and another perspective by Erasmus’s visit to the publisher’s home in 1508. Erasmus would go on to create the northern pole of the Republic of Letters in Basel, alongside Frobenius and the Amerbachs. The group of young English humanists with whom Aldus collaborated, Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn, William Latimer and Cuthbert Tunstall, would help make the University of Oxford into a humanist academy crowning a pedagogical edifice inspired by the experiences of Guarino da Verona and Vittorino da Feltre, fifteenth-­century Italian Quintilians. (Their unique way of doing so made an indelible impression on the English history of universities.) Aldus foresees this turning point in the preface to Astronomica (1499): From the same England where barbarian letters lacking in erudition once reached as far as us and occupied Italy, where they still have a citadel [the scholastic “scotism”], we now receive good letters: they speak Latin fluently there, and it is with the aid of the English that we are chasing away barbarism and taking back possession of the citadel, so much so that the same spear that wounded us will also heal us. Note in passing the metaphor of militia litterarum, which would continue to be used to support the eloquence of the Republic of Letters until Voltaire’s time and beyond, making it into a savant church that was both militant and missionary. In a note added to his commentary on the adage Herculei lebores, which he wrote while visiting Aldus, Erasmus pays homage to the publisher while borrowing his language of the propagatio litterarum:

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I saw clearly that this was not work for one man, nor one library, nor for a few years—this work that I finished alone, unaided, in less than eighteen months, with the help of one library—though that was Aldus’s, and a large one, richer than any other in good books, especially Greek, and from this library as from a fountain-­head all other good libraries all over the world are coming to birth and increasing.20 And indirectly, thanks to two events—the French Hellenist Guillaume Budé’s visit to Aldus’s home in 1501, and the 1508 arrival in Paris of Girolamo Aleandro, one of Aldus’s most brilliant “academicians,” who taught Greek in the French city to resounding success, using texts printed in Venice—this great Italian bookseller of the Republic of Letters contributed, with Budé, to creating favorable conditions for the establishment of classical language chairs at the Collège Royal. The sixteenth century effectively saw the institutional consolidation of the Republic of Letters throughout Europe, whose scientific unity it would preserve despite religious schisms and international and civil wars. In large part, the Society of Jesus’s strategy following the Council of Trent consisted of imitating and attempting to adapt to, often successfully, the Republic’s network. It was the age of academies and, in both Italy and northern Europe, these seemingly disparate and often ephemeral institutions largely resisted the passions and violence sweeping the continent and maintained, with the “common good” of rediscovered antiquity, the criteria of judgment that ultimately prevailed over political and religious vicissitudes.

5 THE EMERGENCE OF THE ACADEMIES

In the previous chapter, amid a semantic study of the expression Respublica litteraria, or res litteraria, and its earliest occurrence in the early fifteenth century, I touched upon another concept, which was revived from antiquity at nearly the same time by Italian humanists: academia. I will continue that line of study here by analyzing the forms of sociability and collaboration between men of letters during the Renaissance, in Italy and France, to which academia referred and which it encapsulated. This does not entail, of course, diverging from our long-­term objective, which is to clarify the meaning, role, and history of the idea of the Republic of Letters in modern Europe. From what has previously been established, we can already determine that both Respublica litteraria and academia developed to characterize, from two different angles, the unique character of the “humanism” founded by Petrarch and spread by Boccaccio, in relation to traditional institutions of knowledge—universities. The Respublica litteraria transformed the lettered circles that privately, and beyond the limits of monastic discipline or a strictly university framework, dialogued—like Petrarch and Boccaccio—with antiquity into an “ideal corps” with a universal vocation. This “ideal corps,” which had no conception of itself outside of the church, and indeed whose very founding concept was a variation of another name for the universal church, Respublica christiana, had an implicit parallel to the idea of a “universal council,” which, through its knowledge, stood in for or supported the Holy See’s doctrinal authority over the Christian world. This analogy (natural in the early fifteenth century, in the context of the Great Schism and the Councils of Constance and Basel) should not be taken too far, however. The “society of lettered men” discussed by figures such as Francesco Barbaro and Aldus Manutius, whose “citizens” included laymen and clergymen, the living and the dead, did not claim an ecclesiastical status and refrained from infringing on the sacerdotal hierarchy’s territory: theology. If we can consider a “council of lettered men” when discussing the emerging Respublica litteraria, it is in the sense of an initially modest, and in any case quite indirect, contribution to a general and orthodox desire to reform the Church. Its program of restitutio bonarum litterarum (good letters forgotten or obliterated by time) was clearly aimed at contrib82

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uting to creating the epistemological and spiritual conditions of a “reformed” Christianity: that renewal translated to a return to the authors and models of the Greco-­Latin and Christian antiquity that preceded the “barbarization” of Europe. However, this endeavor concentrated on the roots and the trunk of the “tree of sciences” as it was taught in universities, meaning notably the subjects of the trivium, but also those of the quadrivium. The medieval “queen” of the sciences—theology, or studia divinitatis—remained beyond the reform’s initial scope. Focus was therefore placed on the artes sermocinales, the “arts of language,” specific to the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics); with rhetoric came eloquence, history, and poetry, revived by imitating the models and discipline of the Ancients. Dante entitled his tract on the vulgarization of the sciences, which hinted at the evolution of “humanism” three centuries in advance, Convivio (we’ll come back to that choice). But the “banquet” (convivium), at which he invited his readers to sit at his table (mensa) and share the “bread” of science with him, was in reality a lecture delivered in first person. The audience would narrow with Petrarch, who was concerned with restoring classic Latin, but the notion of convivium deepened. Contubernia of lettered men formed around the first “humanist,” around his disciple Boccaccio, and around their spiritual heir, the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati. This network was extended to absent friends through correspondence, and to the dead and living through the genre of dialogue borrowed from Cicero. These privately initiated “seminars of advanced studies” existed on the fringes of the studi, the Italian name for universities. When the word academia reappeared in the beginning of the fifteenth century, first in Poggio Bracciolini’s correspondence, the lettered societies designated by the term were not claiming to rival or substitute the studi; rather, they offered the cultores humanitatum a milieu and a style of research and dialogue highly preferable to that of the studi, “modern” institutions that could not for their part boast of classical precedents or models, or philosophical banquets and apostolic Suppers; nor could they revive the virtues of a golden age—gentleness, equality between peers, and timeless, joyful knowledge—the secret to which the humanists sought within “good letters.” The initiator of this movement to “reform studies,” which was fervently welcomed by the lay world of Italian merchants, notaries, jurists, and chancery secretaries, was Petrarch. From the start, the desire to legitimize “reformed” studies entailed more than just invoking the Ancients’ distant authority. It also sought an equivalent to the ranks or honors conferred by universities. Any study of the development of the academies should take into account an event often neglected by historians of humanism: the “coronation” Petrarch was intent on receiving on Rome’s Capitoline Hill on April 8, 1341. This “archetypical”

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event is in many respects constitutive of the European academic tradition that was parallel with, but distinct from, the university tradition. It was as a “poet” that Petrarch claimed his “crown” (“poetry” representing the pinnacle and encapsulation of the “reformed” trivium), an honor with few modern precedents: the “pre-­humanist” notary Albertino Mussato (1262–1329), friend and successor of the judge Lovato Lovati (1241–1309) in the quest for Latin classics, was “crowned” in Padua for writing the Senecan tragedy Ecerinis (December 3, 1315). On his deathbed, Dante was also crowned with a laurel wreath. But contrary to Mussato, whose laureatio was initiated by the University of Padua, and Dante, a poet of the vernacular, Petrarch earned his public coronation outside of the university sphere as the author of the Latin epic poem Africa, based on the Virgilian model and at that time incomplete, and not as the author of Canzoniere, which was written in the vernacular. Petrarch had received two simultaneous (and undoubtedly sought-­after) invitations: one from the president of the University of Paris, the other from the Roman Senate. Petrarch accepted the latter. He chose antiquity and its classical precedents over the scholastic “modernity” of the great northern university. But Petrarch’s choice also meant asking Rome for the equivalent of a modern licentia docendi, whose modernity Rome would eliminate by restoring its classical precedents—the laureationes (laurel coronations) historically bestowed by Roman emperors upon poets and orators. For want of an emperor, and for want of a pope (whose return to Rome Petrarch ardently desired), the poet was forced to make do with the authorities that served, in Italy at that time, as the Sacerdotium and the Regnum, and which were, despite everything, in a position to sanction the activities of the studium. And in reality, though this exceptional candidate claimed to bypass university intercession when it came to his “coronation,” the forms of conferring university degrees were respected. The “exam” was conducted in Naples, and the examiner was King Robert of Anjou. The laureatio took place in Rome, in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, which housed the senate. A Roman senator, Orso dell’ Anguillara, handed Petrarch both his crown and the diploma (licentia ubique docendi) authorizing him to teach “good letters,” the disciplines of poetry, eloquence, and history, wherever he saw fit. In return and as thanks, the poet made the first “acceptance speech” in European academic history. Citing verses by Virgil,1 Petrarch celebrated the privilegium laureate he had just received in three parts: he spoke of the love of glory and the arduous paths on which it led poets; he exalted the dignity of poetry; and he conducted an exegesis of the symbolic meaning of the laurels he had just received. Though Petrarch may have reproached himself later in life for desiring this coronation, and retrospectively deemed himself unworthy of the honor,2 he nonetheless garnered, for

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both himself and the long line of disciples to follow, a type of doctoral authority that the academies would later inherit and whose renewal they would demand in the form of a charter signed by a prince or a pope. The rites of co-­optation, recognition, and praise practiced by the Italian academies, which were derived from university rites and imitated various classical models, would expand the circle of renowned men of letters to all kinds of “savants” who had no place at the university, for example, musicians, painters, architects, sculptors, poets, and others whose methods or disciplines did not correspond to established programs of learning. Before the full semantic plasticity of the term academia could unfold, and the reformist fertility of these savant societies could be revealed, the term’s Ciceronian meaning (the “villa” where lettered friends gathered to collectively engage in “studious leisure”) had to be revived during the fifteenth century, followed by its Platonic and more generally Greek sense, that is, the school around a master who teaches through dialogue. The influence of Byzantine scholars, particularly visible after the Council of Ferrara-­Florence (1437), appears to have played a role in both the development of these “sodalities” and the kind of teacher-­student relationship that prevailed within them. The academy gathered by Cardinal Bessarion in his Roman palace (1400–1472), which assembled Greek and Latin manuscripts in one of the most extensive libraries of the Renaissance, was as evocative of the apostolic “Lord’s Supper” (through its debates about evangelical texts) as the Platonic “banquet.” This savant “sodality” coincided with the emergence of Ficino’s Platonic Academy in Florence, which originated with the meeting, at the Council of Florence, between Cosimo the Elder (Ficino’s Medici patron) and the Byzantine Gemistus Plethon, who in Mistra had initiated Bessarion to Neoplatonism. This style of cooperation, but also transmission of knowledge-­wisdom, simultaneously shaped sociability between men of letters and pedagogy itself. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century, academia was used to refer to both stable groups of established men of letters and schools where children were also taught. Take, for example, Vittorino da Feltre’s school in Mantua, in the “La Gioiosa” villa. A student of Guarino da Verona, who was himself a student of the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, Vittorino, surrounded by high-­caliber Greek masters like George of Trebizond and Theodore Gaza, taught Latin and Greek “good letters” to young people, adults, and also children. The presence of the sons of noble families (Gonzaga, Montefeltro) among his students indicates that those future princes were treated differently from how future clerics would have been in traditional schools. They had to be taught the liberal arts in a liberal manner, through persuasion and not violence, as if to adults in the making,

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and not as infirm bodies to be punished. In this respect, the idea of the academy (which, in the long term, allowed the “university” of knowledge to be extended to speakers of vernacular languages, “mechanical” artisans, and women) first enabled a kind of “adoption” of children. The humanists contrasted the “gentleness” of the academy with the asperity of the school, the cheerfulness and benevolence of lettered conversation against the severe despondency (interspersed with Basoche banquets) that reigned behind scholastic and university walls. Persuasive speech, derived from both the banquets of antiquity and the evangelical Supper, therefore claimed to have once again triumphed over the abstract and somber “sterility” of Gothic learning. Criticism of medieval “modernity” did not consist solely of reforming the methods and curricula of literary studies. The revival of antiquity also led to a genuine “conversion” of the man of letters through dialogue with ancient auctores, which in itself could give rise to a “conversation” between men of letters that awakened the mind’s fertileness without detriment to the convergence of souls. (In his sublime “Art de conférer” [Of the Art of Discussion], Montaigne cites his models as the “academies” of Athens and Rome as well as Italians “in our time.”)3 A savant reminiscence of the Golden Age, the academy, in its various forms, was the setting for this victory over a vanquished status quo: the collective enlightenment of letters (mediation toward a forgotten wisdom) restored a lost harmony. Two key words, which are a leitmotif throughout the humanists’ Neo-­L atin language, give us a glimpse at the symbolic order underlying and structuring lettered sociability, which we would be mistaken in calling “new,” as it itself claimed to be “renewed” or “rediscovered.” The first word is convivium, which evokes both the archetype of the philosophical banquet of antiquity and the evangelical and apostolic “Supper” (Wedding at Cana, the Last Supper, Supper at Emmaus, Pentecost). The second is conversatio, easily linked to the former through the metaphor (recurrent throughout Dante’s Convivio) of the auctores’ words as panis, cibus, and food, and their diffusion as the privileged object of a philosophical and spiritual banquet. In a posthumous work, the great philologist Leo Spitzer indirectly contributed to our understanding of the social ethos of the studia humanitatis through his study of the semantic history of the family of Latin words preceded by the prefix cum.4 His analysis, concentrated around consonantia, the word invented by Cicero to translate the Greek harmonia, establishes the semantic field in which to situate the terms convivium and conversatio, and the channels through which they were able to so fully penetrate philosophical, musical, and religious harmonics. Both convivium and conversatio echo consonantia (in addition to concordia, concentus, consensus, convenien-

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tia), whose meaning operates on two registers: the “contemplative life” and the cosmic music to which it provides access, and the “active life” and civil peace, good governance, to which it strives. These two terms express the Greeks’ sumpathéïa, or sumpnoïa, the happy convergence of minds, hearts, and voices. The word conversatio does not belong to Ciceronian vocabulary; when it appeared in Latin, a little later, it did not solely signify, as is the case today in French following a long erosion, “discussion of many,” but a society in which one has roots, habits, where one feels “at home,” among his “own.” It implied actions and gestures, an implicit way of “being together,” and excluded neither speech nor the celebratory convivium. We can therefore speak of conversatio amicorum, the company of one’s friends, and of conversatio castrorum, camp life. Synonyms include familiaritas, commercium, consuetudo, ratio agendi et vivendi, mores. Christian authors’ adoption of the word conversatio did not diminish its contagion by a philosophical vocabulary of harmony. On the contrary, the term grew semantically closer to the Christian word communio. Spitzer cites a passage by Saint Augustine (who, like Cicero, heavily influenced Petrarch) in which this Christian adoption of a vocabulary of harmony is particularly evident: Haec enim congruentia sive convenientia, vel consonantia vel si quid commodius dicitur, quod unum est ad duo, in omni compaginatione, vel si melius dicitur, coaptatione creaturae, valet plurimum. (For this congruity, or suitableness, or concord, or consonance, or whatever more appropriate word there may be, whereby one is [united] to two, is of great weight in all compacting, or better, perhaps, co-­adaptation, of the creature.)5 Augustine adds: “what I mean is precisely that co-­adaptation which the Greeks call αρμονια [“harmony”]. The “harmonic” link between convivium and conversatio can be further explained by the verbal root of the latter term versari, which refers both to that familiar gesture of participants of ancient banquets turning toward, or vers, and the concept of a habitual stay. Conversatio passed from the private sphere to the public one to translate the Greek politeia or politeuma, and to serve as a synonym for civitas and even respublica. Here we can see the point of departure for the semantic relationship between conversatio civilis and Respublica litteraria that appeared during the Renaissance. Christian authors had also adopted conversatio in this sense of civitas. The Latin Vulgate had Saint Paul say, Nostra conversatio in caelis est (Our city, our homeland, is in heaven).6 During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, numerous painters of the Italian Renaissance illustrated that phrase in a profound way, breaking with the juxtaposition of saints against Gothic altarpieces. Gathered in the same space, around the Vir-

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gin, and engaged in the same silent mediation, these saintly figures communing with one another without apparent subject or objective were given, with very good reason, the collective title of sacra conversazione. The visible, if enigmatic, “harmony” that united these groups in effect prompted the spectator to engage in an interior meditation, shared by all, on the same “harmony” that reigns in the celestial homeland. During the Middle Ages, a scribal error frequently shortened conversatio to conversio in a famous passage of The Rule of Saint Benedict, thereby accentuating the antithesis, implicit in the creator’s mind, between the monastic city and lifestyle, harmonized through observance of rule of law, and the sottish earthly city, the conversatio mundialis stultitiae, which surrendered to passions and illusions and lacked discipline. Petrarch’s attraction to the monastic way of life, and his detachment from “society” life at court, as well as from university “disputes,” foreshadowed the success of the conversatio civilis between Petrarchist men of letters during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Beyond the monastic mensa and its lectiones spirituals, the sharing of “good letters,” the restoration of a lost harmony, brought back Platonic banquets, dialogues suffused with exquisite urbanity in the way of Cicero’s De oratore, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistes, and Macrobius’s Saturnalia (in which sermo convivialis is mentioned). The theory of this conversatio civilis (for which prescriptive treatises would multiply in the sixteenth century) appeared in 1462 in De politia litteraria, written by the Milanese humanist Angela Decembrio. The politia of the title is a Latin transcription of politeia but serves as a synonym of conversatio. It of course refers to the “society of lettered men,” the Respublica litteraria, though viewed from the angle of its specific manners and its characteristic and essential sociability. The dialogue, explicitly modeled after Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, stages a group of men of letters “disputing” finer points of grammar and the interpretation of classic texts. But these “disputes” are a mere game to sharpen the mind; they support rather than break the concordia, the concentus animorum, the amicitia, that creates group harmony through the collective sharing of letters. The first printed edition of Decembrio’s treatise did not appear until 1540, in Augsburg, published by Henri Steyner. Its title page is embellished by a wood engraving of a literary “supper” around a table on which liturgical objects are present: an open book, an inkwell, quills. The perfunctory decor is that of a studio-­library, whose shelves are protected by curtains. Seated, in accordance to the legend portrayed in the engraving, several Italian scholars from the previous century are engaged in a friendly and animated discussion. (Note that a few figures depicted in the engraving are not present within Decembrio’s dialogue.)

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This iconography, which reappeared on numerous frontispieces of savant works up until the end of the seventeenth century, was likely modeled after Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in Milan. It represents a private academy in action, the “banquet” where the bread is the book and which, via the book, expands the company of the living to that of the dead. All ages are represented, from extreme youth to extreme old age: it is also a banquet of generations. Seventeenth-­ century texts further attest to the persistence of this harmonic model. The “erudite libertine” Guy Patin (a professor at the Collège Royal beginning in 1655) observes, for example, “When I’m in the solitude of my office, I enjoy the company of the dead, I hear my books.” Patin also wrote the following account: Having returned home this morning, I found your excellent letter here, which provided me new satisfaction, and increased the joy I had yesterday, during my celebration of my deanship. Thirty-­six of my colleagues made good cheer; I have never seen serious men, including even our elders, laugh and drink so much. It appeared that the appetite of the young inspired others’ emulation and renewed their thirst. We drank the best old wine of Bourgogne, for I leave Champagne to those who live there, as I am greatly convinced that little is available in Paris, and that the little available is neither pure nor the true merum. I welcomed them in my chamber, where above the tapestry can curiously be seen paintings of Erasmus, the two Scaligers—father and son—Casaubon, Muret, Montaigne, Charron, Grotius, Heinsius, Saumaise, Fernel, the late Mr. de Thou, and our good friend Mr. Naudé, librarian for Cardinal Mazarin. [. . .] There were three other portraits of excellent men, the late Mr. de Sales, bishop of Geneva; the lord Bishop of Belley, my good friend, Justus Lipsius; and finally François Rabelais. [. . .] Were my guests not, then, in good company? Company that was all the better because, without denigrating the prepared celebration, it provided agreeable subjects of conversation. All were given accolades, and at times we noted the excellent qualities of their works. Thus the living spoke with the dead and the dead brought pleasure to the living.7 Here was a banquet on the margins of university life, though fully permeated by the model of the humanist academies’ “civil conversation.” It took place at the home of a good friend to the Dupuy brothers’ academy, amid portraits of the “princes of the Republic of Letters,” in the presence of which this erudite scholar usually wrote his correspondence. Two centuries before Guy Patin penned this description of a secular supper, Decembrio had dedicated De politia litteraria to the humanist Pope Pius II Piccolomini. The central character of his dialogue was the marquis Leonello

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d’Este, who died in 1450. The marquis’s tutor, the elderly Guarino da Verona, was equally prominent within this small private academy. The dialogue has no predefined order: the conversation is sinuous, cheerful, even capricious, although its object remains subtle questions of Latin grammar and literature. The prince himself does not claim any authority besides his literary arts, which he shares equally with the other guests. He is happy to set the tone and moderate the discussion: “Such was in his mouth the goodwill of his words, serenity on his face, good humor in his eyes, modesty in all his gestures, grace in all his attitude.” His clothing, adds Decembrio, worthy of a prince, was chosen according to a carefully premeditated cooptatio colorum, in accordance with the day’s planetary convergence. He therefore incarnates celestial harmony within the group. Decembrio also insists on the prince’s piety, tanquam sacer Monachus, “worthy of a monk.” Using these various facets (moral and oratory decorum, equilibrium of body and soul, cosmic harmony, Christian piety), the humanist sketches the portrait of the “academician prince,” which would reappear in Castiglione’s Cortegiano and be incarnated by those close to the Gonzaga and Este families and, in France, Catherine de’ Medici and her sons. Several passages of De politia litteraria are dedicated to reflections on the ethos of academic conversation, for which the dialogue as a whole hoped to set the example. Despite the presence of a princely moderator within the group, that ethos did not differ significantly from that revealed by Florentine dialogues of the same period, for example those written by Leonardo Bruni and Christoforo Landino. The bold separation Hans Baron8 attempted to establish between Florentine “civic humanism” and the “aulic humanism” of Italian courts in the north should be situated in regard to a political-­military context. The engraver of the 1540 edition of De politia litteraria, who introduced two Florentine humanists into the illustration of the Milanese dialogue—Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini—viewed the “common ground” linking academies to “republics” and academies to “principalities” more naïvely. The inventor of the expression Respublica litteraria, the Venetian Francesco Barbaro, was a citizen of a republic, but he had the same teacher as the marquis Leonello d’Este: Guarino da Verona. What initially stands out about this ethos is what one might be tempted to call “a lay spirituality of the library,” which, as shown by Guy Patin’s writing, cited above, was still very present during the seventeenth century. One of the speakers of De politia litteraria expresses it as follows: When I examine the shelves where my volumes are kept, when I take them in my hands (I have written each author’s name on the cover), I feel that I am in the presence of the saintly tombs of those who wrote

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them, where one can contemplate, not the remains of their bodies, but the repository of a part of their soul. Even if the best of them resides with the blessed, they also breathe in large part through their books, and that indeed is the benefit of letters.9 Quite naturally, the sacred emotion Decembrio attributes to Joannes Gualengius culminates in an effuse prayer: “O blessed body! O immortal souls!” The library-­chapel-­reliquary, where the voices of “author saints” from antiquity could be invoked and conjured from the other world at will by their learned devotees in this one, was destined to become the temple of a “supper” between men of letters that abolished time and transformed their dialogues into invocations of ancient masters brought to life, plunging its participants into a joy (voluptus, delectation) superior to all earthly joys. This “banquet” among books, around books, “portraits” of their authors’ souls, ideally extended to all men of letters. A communion of nonclerical saints, it embraced and encapsulated all the Respublica litteraria. As late as the early eighteenth century, the historian and librarian Muratori, a clergyman, described such a gathering as a universal “banquet”: The fact that so many academies, universities, and savant societies in Italy, France, Germany, and England are active, attests in an authentic manner to what point the growth of letters is aided by the union of souls, over which neither the distance between bodies nor the diversity of nations prevails.10 The “spirituality of the library,” exercised in solitude or in a group, made no separation between intellectual discipline (indispensable to the preparation and interpretation of classical texts) and the health and moral virtues that contact with these texts provided to men of letters, regardless of their social rank, in “active life.” However, this concordia animorum between men of letters, aware that it existed outside mainstream society, also had to pay attention to its connections with that society. Another passage of De politia litteraria11 casts a bright light on an additional aspect of the academies, and therefore the Respublica litteraria itself, beginning in the fifteenth century. The marquis d’Este himself notes that, like the classical orator, the modern man of letters often writes letters or speeches in the service of others, in which he reveals his “science” of good authors. However, he continues, “clients” exclusively appropriate the glory that these works should also and primarily bring their authors. What remedy could there be to this violent injustice (injuria)? It is at this point in Decembrio’s dialogue that the concept of the Respublica litteraria appears in the guise of the Consortium politiae litterariae. Solidary men of letters, grouped in a commu-

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nity whose members were publicly recognized, albeit in a private capacity, for litteratissimi et doctissimi, were in a position to ask their peers to give them their due and to ensure recognition of the glory some attempted to take from them. Politia litteraria did not only refer to the politeness, urbanity, friendship, joy of being together, and mutual respect inherent to lettered society. It was also, in regard to the “world” in general, the police force of literature, reestablishing its rights, dignity, and due glory, against patrons who were often quite predatory. And the concern, preventative as it was, that drove Petrarch to organize his own “coronation,” and therefore the authority of his name and work, is all the more visible in De politia litteraria when Decembrio has Guarino da Verona deliver a long, erudite commentary on the coronations of poets and orators in antiquity.12 The quasi-­liturgical script of the conversatio presided over by Leonello d’Este in the fifteenth century was destined to endure for some time, notably appearing in Erasmus’s Convivium religiosum (1526), whose seemingly entirely nonclerical setting evokes both the communion of saints and the banquets around Christ in the Gospels, and in particular the final of those feasts: one, the Last Supper itself, on the eve of the Passion, the other, said to take place at Emmaus, following the Resurrection. Shortly after 1611, building on The Supper at Emmaus, Rubens painted an almost Eucharistic convivium studiosum, which the painter assembled around a table-­altar. In the painting [The Four Philosophers], books are laid on the table underneath an overhanging niche in which a bust resembles the pagan and secular saint Seneca, a master in the art of living and dying. The living and dead around the table are absorbed in a shared lettered piety far from the reach of profane time. We see Justus Lipsius, the great spokesman of Neostoicism and editor of Seneca and Tacitus, who died in 1606, and who initiated Philip Rubens, the painter’s brother, into that Christianized science, before he himself passed into the other world in 1611. Jan van den Wouwer (Woverius in the Republic of Letters), who was very much alive when Rubens, also very much alive, painted this tableau, is depicted with another Lipsius disciple, also living at the time. The late master thus appears to be reunited with his dead disciple, Philip Rubens, and his two living disciples, Peter Paul and Woverius. The evangelist author of this conversatio in coelis, a young Peter Paul Rubens, depicted himself as an assistant self-­portraitist in the background of this secular scene, in the same way that Velásquez would later depict himself in the midst of silently immortalizing the august Spanish royal family in Las Meninas. With the painting The Four Philosophers, currently at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Rubens identified the profound structure of the Republic of Letters (nonclerical Christian or simply Christian) with that of the Republic of Arts, two communions

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of saints beyond death. He gave unprecedented meaning to the inexhaustible motto drawn from Horace: ut pictura poesis (painting is like poetry). Earlier, I highlighted another, entirely “modern,” model for the first Italian academies: confraternities of “laic” devotion.13 That model should also be taken into account when examining the consuetudo of fifteenth-­century Florentine academies (for example, those led by Jean Argyropoulos and Marsilio Ficino) and Pomponius Laetus’s academy in Rome. Their emergence was simultaneous with the writing of De politia litteraria. Moving forward, I will focus on the posterity of the Pomponian Academy, and then on the network of academies that developed in Florence during the reign of Cosmos I beginning in the 1540s. My aim is to interconnect the narrative of events, the portraits of the figures that shaped them, and the emergence of symbolic constellations that transcended both people and acts, resisted the succession of generations, and established a tradition. The family of words related to cum, previously discussed in relation to Leo Spitzer’s work, falls within that category. Salvaged from classic Latin or Christian antiquity, this word family supplied an ideal structure for the vastly varied and temporally and geographically disparate universe of the academies, to the point that each would reproduce it with their own variations and nuances. Following the example of the teachers of the Warburg Institute, who rightly accorded a primary importance to the myths of classic antiquity, which were reinterpreted by philosophy, linked to astronomy, and transformed, like classic Latin, into a stable system of symbolic reference, I would like to emphasize the link established during the Renaissance between the academic ethos and the myth of Parnassus: Apollo, god of light and music, soul of the world, the nine Muses, musical keys of the celestial spheres, and the dreamlike mountains of Parnassus or Helicon, on which occurs the mediation between the harmony of the universe and men of letters, savants or poets, called on to understand and relate that myth in earthly time and vicissitudes. Medieval iconography, loyal to authors of late antiquity (Martianus Capella, Augustine, Boethius, but also Paulinus of Nola), paid scant attention to the Muses, preferring to represent the encyclopedia with the allegorical features of the seven liberal arts, and the sciences they introduced. The revival of the Muses in fifteenth-­century Italy accompanied the “renaissance of the Academy.” And with the Muses, symbols of cosmic harmony, as well as of an encyclopedia reorganized around poetry, reappeared the lyre-­playing Apollo Musagetes. This portrayal of Parnassus, already reconstructed in The Divine Comedy, took on greater consistency in the philosophical and ethnical exegesis of Dante’s text prepared by Marsilio Ficino.14 It found its visual expression, archetypal for several centuries, in Raphael’s fresco of Parnassus, painted for Julius II in the

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Stanza della Segnatura (Signature Room) of the Vatican from 1508 to 1511. The theme of the room had been established by men of letters (secular humanists or theologians, like Cardinal Giles of Viterbo) who participated in the Roman Academy, the successor to Pomponius Laetus’s academy, and whose “prince” had been Tommaso Inghirami, Laetus’s student and heir, since 1495. The close links forged between one painter, Raphael, and the most preeminent members of the Roman Academy (Pietro Bembo, Castiglione, as well as Inghirami, whose portrait Raphael also painted) were certainly not out of the ordinary in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Numerous parallels (starting with that of Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, in Urbino’s lettered court) preceded that case. Indeed, it is evident that the “academy” setting was particularly inviting. It alone was able to foster close collaboration, which was in Raphael’s case one of almost equal footing, between men of letters and practitioners of the “mechanical arts.” The Sapienza, the University of Rome, where Pomponius Laetus and Tommaso Inghirami would nonetheless occupy the same chair in turn, was unable to create a similar milieu of rapprochement, collaboration, and dialogue. The rehabilitation of poetry and eloquence, for which the academies served as setting and safeguard, presupposed, in the more or less long term, the rehabilitation of practices excluded from the sphere of liberal arts by university teaching until that point. The quadrivium taught arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, but it ignored the musicians, architects, painters, and sculptors who put those savant disciplines into practice. The harmonic ethos of the academies repaired that cleavage and would go far beyond its classical model, incorporating the “mechanical” arts into the dignity of knowledge. Pope Julius II benefited from the collaboration between Raphael’s bottega and the Roman Academy: the Room of the Signatura (whose fame spread quickly through Christendom through engravings) opportunely celebrated the synthesis of sciences (theology, philosophy, and canon law) and humanist poetry, which was supported by the Holy See; in return, it advocated for the papacy’s universal authority. The context of the imminent Lateran Council, however, in no way diminished the enduring exemplary nature of Raphael’s masterpiece. Instead of allegorizing the sciences with isolated figures (which he did on the room’s ceiling), the painter represented them on the walls as “savant conversations,” whose debates evoked a greater harmonic truth. The spirit of the academic banquet was extended to theology and philosophy. It was epitomized by the fresco dedicated to poetry, the queen of the artes sermocinales, and elevated, beginning with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to scientia veneranda. An assembly of crowned poets, a timeless gathering of ancient auctores (Homer, Virgil) and humanists (Dante, Petrarch) with their successors at the Roman

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Academy, is reunited on Parnassus, among the Muses, surrounding the lyre-­ playing Apollo. A century and a half removed, in Rome itself, Raphael’s fresco was the culmination of the consecration Petrarch had sought for poetry in 1341. Erasmus himself, in a letter written in 1517 to Cardinal Riario, summarized the impression produced in Europe, at least in appearance, by this pontifical recognition of the studia humanitatis: Aliis alia patria est, Roma communis litterariorum omnium, et patria et ultrix et auctrix (Others can have another homeland, for all men of letters, Rome is the shared homeland, their citadel, their security). The 1341 ceremony had been repeated in 1512: in the gardens of the Vatican, at the foot of the Apollo Belvedere, Pope Julius II proceeded with the laureatio of a poet and an orator, with the emperor’s representative at the Lateran Council, Matthias Lang (the priesthood and the empire), at his side, and assisted by the “prince” of the Roman Academy, Tommaso Inghirami. The participation of Julius II’s successor, Leo X Medici, in academy banquets and discussions, which at that time assembled the elite of Italian humanism, both nonclerical and ecclesiastic, further confirmed the legitimization of the studia humanitatis and their savant societies within Christian studium as a whole. This did not, however, prevent Renaissance popes from paying particular attention to the university of the Sapienza and attempting to increase its prestige. In exchange for this official recognition, the Roman Academy found itself contributing to the pomp and ostentation of the Roman court. In its early days, as a private academy assembled by Pomponius Laetus, it was viewed with suspicion and even sparked a serious trial of heresy (1468). The academy’s annual banquet celebrating the foundation of Rome by Romulus and its pilgrimages amid the ruins and antiquities of Rome led to rumors of a conspiracy to restore paganism. Sixtus IV della Rovere, Paul II’s successor, put an end to this persecution. Henceforth, like the confraternities of “laic” devotion that organized representations of laudes or sacre rappresentazioni for liturgical feasts, Pomponius Laetus, his fellow academy members, and his disciples endeavored to stage comedies by Plautus and Terence, whose texts had been rediscovered in the beginning of the fifteenth century. In order to implement this revival of classical theater to perfection, the academy engaged in vast projects of literary scholarship. In 1486, Johannes Sulpitius (Sulpizio da Verolo), a professor, like Pomponius Laetus, at the Sapienza, but also a member of the Pomponian Academy, dedicated an edition of Vitruvius to Cardinal Riario, noting in his dedication that the book was intended to facilitate the reconstitution of the Ancients’ theatrical stage. Sulpitius also published an edition of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria and a treatise, De versuum scansione, intended to guide the correct interpretation, through movement and voice, of texts by clas-

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sical dramaturges. These efforts by the Roman Academy were limited to the private sphere until 1513, even though the performances they produced were welcomed by cardinals like Riario and attracted a growing public audience. In 1513, Leo X charged Inghirami and the Roman Academy with organizing a celebration in honor of the new pope’s kinsmen, Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici, who were being granted Roman citizenship by the Roman Senate. A large wooden theater (the first since the end of paganism) was erected on Capitoline Hill in accordance with Vitruvius’s instructions. Inghirami provided painters with a plan of the artwork that would decorate the external edifice and, along with the academy, guided the actors, dancers, and musicians performing in the production. The festival lasted two days. The stage would successively be transformed into a church choir area, where Mass was celebrated and sung; a public banquet room, animated by otherworldly interludes; a dance stage; and then a proper theatrical stage, on which Plautus’s Poenulus was staged. Erudition and philology, rhetoric and poetry came together, thanks to the coordination of Inghirami and the academy, with architecture, painting, music, choreography, liturgy, and even gastronomy at this encyclopedic spectacle where the guests of honor were both actors and observers, at least during the banquet. Indeed, the common thread was the banquet—the sacred banquet at Mass, the Ancients’ philosophical banquet, the literary banquet within the animated dialogue of Plautus’s comedy. Projected within a theatrical space, the voices rediscovered and heard in the humanist library were once again brought to life, made visible and present. And the enlarged circle of Muses—the most literary uniting with the most “mechanical”—contributed to this resurrection, which ignored all divisions between literary erudition and science, between belles lettres and beaux arts. The artistic fertility of academic “conversation,” breaking all kinds of barriers, received pontifical patronage on this occasion, a lesson that would never be forgotten by the sixteenth-­century Italian academies. But this lesson was not solely one of success, which would be repeated and amplified in northern courts, culminating in the invention of dramma per musica, the profane operatic genre, a combination of letters and the arts. The extroversion and extraversion of the savant’s library into the public space, for the greatest glory of the prince, was both accolade and danger. The threat had already been noted in Angelo Decembrio’s dialogue: the small private academy, in the presence of the marquis Leonello d’Este, called upon the lettered community to judge the powerful figures who appropriated the fame and glory due the men of letters working in their service. Within the public space, the prince snatched the “fruits” of the studia humanitatis—eloquence, poetry, history, and erudition—leaving the artisans of his glory menaced by anonymity. The

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Italian academies would defend themselves against this threat through the development of literary genres—Lives and “eulogies” of men of letters, modeled after Paul Jove’s Elogia—and the honors they accorded their members. Academies of painters and musicians did the same, and Vasari’s Lives provided artists the same benefits Jove’s Elogies did men of letters. However, a subtler danger loomed: the corruption of the private, curated, and “sacerdotal” character of the savant library, and the discussions for which it served as the temple. After all, wasn’t the contemplative essence of the politia litteraria, the rigorous mental discipline and spiritual happiness associated with it, compromised by the success of the forum, even, or especially, when it was a princely forum, built around an eloquence, poetry, history, and synthesis of arts intended for pomp and show? Erasmus, following a stay in Rome from 1506 to 1509, had been the first to detect and denounce the danger of extroversion, which his very success ensured for the pietas litterata. His symposiums, and above all his Convivium religiosum (1522), redirected men of letters toward a sociability specific to them, characterized by collective meditation and scholarly cooperation. Yet the Italian academies attempted to tightly hold on to both ends of the stick, so to speak. If we examine the development of the Florentine Camerata, we can observe the convergence between the profound philological erudition of Girolamo Mei and Vincenzo Galilei (father of the great astronomer) and the inventiveness and talent of musicians, simultaneous composers, instrumentalists, and singers, all of whom were inspired by the collective myth of Orpheus and a revival of the “music of the Ancients.” But this balance between the knowledge of some and the talent of others, and their consumption via fleeting performances in the service of the court, its prestige, and its diplomacy nonetheless also compromised the “spirituality of the library,” which northern humanism was so protectively attempting to maintain. The decline of philology in Italy during the sixteenth century was commensurate with its rise in France and Holland. But the brief history of the Lincean Academy in Rome (1603–1630) reveals that the danger was not ignored in Italy itself. Under the leadership of the prince Federico Cesi, a return to private and disinterested research, austere piety, and the discipline emblemized by the monastic or philosophical cenacle was inseparable from the early stages of the scientific method, as applied to natural sciences. Both the Lincean “laboratory” and library were maintained apart from celebrations and Roman patronage of the arts. Their mentor Galileo opposed the emerging “baroque,” epitomized by Tasso, preferring the joyful irony of Ariosto. He was also adopted by a northern Republic of Letters outraged by Rome, its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and its Inquisition court. In Italy, the expansion of the “liberal arts” to the “mechanical arts” through

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the intercession of the academies benefited various forms of festivities and celebrations. However, it also advantaged—here Galileo and the Linceans were slightly ahead of Francis Bacon and his Advancement of Learning—the natural sciences, experimentation, and new techniques. That development, particularly apparent in the seventeenth century, should not mask another consequence of the “harmonic” contagion fostered by academic conviviality: a return to the initial aim of Dante’s Convivio—the extension of the sciences and arts traditionally reserved for Latinists to the vernacular. This was the condition on which the “mechanicals,” as Vigneul-­Marville would write in his Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature (Medley of History and Literature, 1700), would “maintain their rank” within the Republic of Letters.15 The academies played a particularly decisive role in Florence, where local pride was linked to the “defense and illustration” of the Tuscan language as the literary language of all of Italy, in shifting the studia humanitatis from Neo-­L atin esotericism to “vulgar” exotericism. Lorenzo the Magnificent and Poliziano had already composed poetry in the Tuscan vernacular at Ficino’s Platonic Academy. In the following generation, the Venetian Pietro Bembo, who had been introduced to Ficino’s disciples by his father Bernardo, an ambassador of the Republic, published his Asolani with Aldus Manutius with a philological care until then reserved for the Ancients (Dante and Petrarch). Bembo, a Hellenist, Latinist, and Provençalist, was a simultaneous master of Ciceronian prose and Tuscan prose and established the doctrine according to which Tuscan, by yielding to the same rhetorical rules and the same models as Ciceronian Latin had, could become a “grammatical” and literary language worthy of its Roman ancestor (Prose della volgar lingua, 1525). The theoretical foundations were henceforth laid for the extension of academic “conversation” to eloquence, poetry, and history in the vernacular. Dialogues like Bembo’s Asolani (1504) and Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528) extended a politia litteraria translated into literary Italian, with the same ideal of gentle and respectful manners in dialogue, to women and gentlemen who, while no doubt erudite, were far from the doctissimi of the fifteenth-­century academies. The academy was veering in the direction of the lettered salon. But it remained an academy nonetheless: the salon, despite the Italian origin of the term, would not find its unique place and style until seventeenth-­century Paris and French. The transformation from savant academy to a vernacular or “vulgar” one in Italy took on a different meaning in the sixteenth century, as well as an entirely different level of productiveness. It marked a merging of bourgeois and popular culture, on the one hand, and savant culture, on the other. This cross-­ fertilization, which paralleled collaborations between scholars and “mechanical artisans” within academies of music and painting, was completely absent from

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the French salon, which was inspired by the nobiliary ethics of leisure and gallantry. The examples of the Florentine Academy and La Crusca, in Florence, are quite convincing. At first, the Umidi were a small society of merchants who cultivated the literary genres of their milieu and parish in their leisure time. It was the arrival of Benedetto Varchi and his student Ugolino Martelli, returning from Venice in 1543, that introduced this society (which was elevated by Cosimo I, for want of a better alternative, to a Florentine Academy) to eloquence, poetry, and history using classical models. This transplant was possible because the two humanists had already learned to practice “academic conversation” in the vernacular tongue while in Padua, at the Accademia degli Infiammati inspired by Bembo and guided by Sperone Speroni. That academy would reveal its raison d’être, in collaboration with the Accademia del Disegno, in the funeral services for Michelangelo (1564), who was renowned as a painter and sculptor but perhaps above all as a vernacular poet. Thus his Three Crowns became the glory of Florence—adornment for its young duke, Cosimo I. Within the Florentine Academy, a certain symbiosis was possible between the savant studia humanitatis, transposed to and translated into Tuscan, and the popular and bourgeois traditions of the vernacular’s “grand rhetoricians.” The same symbiosis would occur in 1582 when a few surviving members of the Umidi wanted to recreate a traditional confraternity under the name La Crusca. Inspired by the savant example of dictionaries written in Ciceronian Latin, these lovers of “indigenous” language and forms launched their own dictionary, this time strictly academic, which was completed in 1606 and was the first monument of this kind dedicated to a vernacular language. In 1589, Count Piero de Bardi, son of the founder of the Camerata, became the “arch-­consul” of La Crusca. The academy’s Dictionary project responded precisely, in its way, to the celebration of Tuscan on which the Camerata itself had embarked. Like La Crusca, the Camerata had combined savant disciplines with a love for the vernacular, elevating Italian song—reformed and perfected in order to rediscover the “true music of the Ancients”—to the grand art of recitar cantando, which would be put on triumphant display in 1600 in Peri’s Euridice and Caccini’s Rapimento di Cefalo during the Florentine celebrations in honor of the marriage of Marie de’ Medici and Henry IV. A comparison with France brings extensive similarities to light. They are apparent in Rabelais’s writing, in which both the utopia of the Abbey of Thelema and the recurring banquet theme summarize and celebrate a French renaissance of the academy. And study of the frontispiece of Dolet’s Commentarii linguae latinae (1531) and the plans (pictures and engravings) and frescos for the Palace of Fontainebleau reveals royal France’s adoption of the Parnassus myth,

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so frequently alluded to by Ronsard. The academies of the Valois court (whose origins can be traced to the circles of Jean Dorat, director of a school at the University of Paris) nonetheless illustrate the unique character of French humanism, which was far from limited to the importation of Italian “models.” This uniqueness owed much to the fact that humanism in France was confronted by the monumental edifice of the University of Paris, as well as by the problematic of the prestige surrounding a noblesse d’épée rebelling against humanist pedagogy. Academic mediation during the Valois dynasty was compromised by a desire for encyclopedism that was difficult to reconcile with a fear of vulgarization among an aristocracy scornful of all forms of clerical pedantry. The situation would change considerably, however, in seventeenth-­century France, when Jesuits and Oratorians succeeded in attracting and retaining young nobles at their schools. It is clear that though the history of academies in Europe may overlap at its debut, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with that of the Republic of Letters, it nonetheless has its own dynamic and significance. For that matter, neither can be isolated from the history of European universities, which, during the sixteenth century, began to claim the term academia, especially, and quite naturally, among authors like Petrus Ramus, who claimed to have extensively reformed university curriculum and methods in order to ensure they merited that title. But that title was equally sought after by the universities of Oxford, reformed beginning in the early sixteenth century, and Leiden, established with a humanist curriculum in 1575. The “territory” of the Republic of Letters included university professors, like Joseph Justus Scaliger and Justus Lipsius, even as it excluded a number of Italian academies shifting toward vulgarization, which included artists, musicians, and vernacular poets and orators among its men of letters. The Republic’s center of gravity had been moving since Erasmus’s era more and more openly to northern Europe. By the end of the sixteenth century, it could be defined by both its loyalty to the classical “golden age,” to savant disciplines and languages, which allowed it to interpret science and wisdom, and to an ideal of unity and harmony via a “return to good letters” that banished national rivalries and theological disputes. A network of personal and private connections between the “most learned” of men, typically heavily influenced by evangelism and Erasmianism, the Republic cannot be said to have had specific “politics.” At the least, however, we can ascribe it a keen political “sense,” which favored solutions of caution and compromise like, for example, the Edict of Nantes in France, Arminianism in the Netherlands, moderated Anglicanism in Great Britain, and a Catholicism liberated from pontifical restraints in Paulo Sarpi’s Venice and the Dupuy brothers’ Gallican France.

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All of this suggests a certain independence among an international elite of peers linked by a relay of correspondences and carefully considered publications, with regard to local political and religious authorities, that neither academies nor universities (even “reformed” ones), as collective bodies, could claim. This “parallel” diplomacy conducted by Europe’s leading men of letters cannot be confused with that operating in various courts, or with the invaluable prestige supplied to said efforts by eloquent, musical, or artistic academies.

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Part II CONVERSATION

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6 CONVERSATION AND CONVERSATION SOCIETIES

It was following the end of the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century that Paris metamorphosed into a literary, philosophical, and scientific capital. This rise in its intellectual standing accompanied the solidification of the Bourbon court in Paris and the decisive role it played, following the Catholic League’s defeat and the Edict of Nantes, in the military, diplomatic, political, and religious interplay of Europe. Even in Rome and Italy, and even more so in Protestant states, all those who remained loyal to the Erasmian brand of humanism within Europe’s religious schism counted on the French court to contain or divert the power of the Habsburgs of Austria and Spain. Many believed that the Hapsburg monarchy wanted to recreate, for its benefit, the medieval unity of Christianity, thereby threatening the spirit of a dialogue of opinions and probable hypotheses, which, along with the study of antiquity and unhindered commerce of books, constituted the very lifeblood of Erasmian humanism. John Barclay’s allegorical novel Argenis, written in Rome in humanist Latin and published in Paris by Peiresc in 1621 (before being translated into several languages) reveals the hopes pinned by the European Republic of Letters on English and especially French resistance to the Hapsburgs, the Inquisition, and a theological orthodoxy based on scholastic and Aristotelian logic and cosmology. Here, the philosophical stakes were inseparable from political-­military ones. Barclay also wrote The Mirror of Minds,1 a work in which he illustrates the fecundity, in terms of both knowledge and the joy of civil life, of the multiplicity of national characters and the diversity of individual inclinations, once accepted, recognized, and exchanged. Paris was on its way to becoming, under the regime of the Edict of Nantes, the home of a vast council of minds, in the sense employed by Jean Bodin, Montaigne, and Barclay. The French Catholic Reformation, despite its thirst for religious unity, which prompted it at times to support an alliance with Spain, had to adapt to its own plurality. The major currents within the spiritual revival of French Catholicism were nonetheless Gallican “lettered piety,” which was hostile toward Madrid and Vienna, and Christian humanism, whose figurehead was Francis de Sales, a fervent Italianist and propagator of “Christian civility” among the laity. Humanism prevailed. Figures ranging 105

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from the Calvinist Arminian Hugo Grotius, who escaped from the Loevenstein prison in Gomarist Holland, and the Dominican and possible heretic Tommaso Campanella, who escaped from the prisons of the Neapolitan and Roman Inquisition, could find both refuge and honor in Paris under Richelieu, who was allied with the Lutheran princes of Sweden and Germany against the Hapsburgs. The university was a limited factor in Paris’s growing appeal following the Edict of Nantes. Dynamic, active, and respected (enhanced and patronized by Richelieu), it endured via its esprit de corps and assertion of its privileges. Its faculty of theology (which safeguarded, from the Jesuits, its privilege of conferring degrees) took a vocal stance against atheism, heresy, and doctrinal, ultramontane, or Jansenist “innovations.” In response, and without attacking the institution head-­on as it had in the early sixteenth century, Parisian humanism organized itself into erudite, polite, and finally scientific societies, which were at first entirely private and which collaborated according to principles foreign to university teaching and the conservative knowledge of the university. Methods differed, as did adjudications: the “dispute,” based on syllogistic logic and reference to undisputed authorities, was challenged by humanist practices of conversation, conference, and correspondence, which implied critical distance and empiricism, and reference to a pluralist, dialogical antiquity, which was subject to self- criticism and whose authority was not above discussion. University arbitration found itself challenged by that practiced by men of learning for whom truth was in fieri, meaning it could always be corrected and reestablished, and even that of a “curious” public, which grew all the larger once the privilege of the scholarly language, Latin, yielded to the “bon usage” of French, shared by erudite humanists and the “curious.” Disciplines also differed: the university remained faithful to the traditional “tree of sciences,” whereas informal “collèges” worked within the scope of an encyclopedia that had been expanding and evolving since the fifteenth century. It featured classic philology, history, geography, experimental natural philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, but also poetry and classical and vernacular eloquence, all subjects alien to the university, which rejected both the philological and historical methods driving those disciplines and the reliance on experiments of the “mechanical arts” henceforth invoked by the natural sciences. The old trivium and quadrivium of the faculty of arts, the medical orthodoxy of the faculty of medicine, not to mention the law faculty, unconcerned with the critical history of Roman customary law, and the faculty of theology, unconcerned with “positivist” theology, were effectively overtaken by victorious fields of knowledge whose renowned masters were respected citizens of the Republic of Letters, beyond the reach of

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university scholars’ prosecutory reach. This Republic, of Italian origin, though its pride and glory was the Dutch Erasmus, now had its nerve center in Paris, in the Dupuy brothers’ “cabinet” or Mersenne’s circle. Even more disdainful of the university, as evidenced by their subjects, style, and audience, the polite “societies” in which gentlemen and women conversed, in French, with people of letters, cultivated linguistic arts ignored by the university and schools in general: grammar, rhetoric, and even a form of dialectics adapted to French and to speakers who were neither university scholars nor learned savants. The sophisticated French trivium had its masters: Malherbe for grammar, Guez de Balzac for rhetoric, and Nicolas Faret for the humanist form of dialectics called “civil conversation,” which was inseparable from a philosophy of manners. But these were “liberal” teachers who instructed through spoken influence and leisure reading and addressed an adult and often high-­ranking public. Beginning in the 1620s–1630s, a university of humanist “higher learning” took form in Paris, taking the reins without warning from the scholastic university. It was divided into “societies” that shared members and cooperated with one another of their own initiative, as amateurs, without conferment of diplomas, an institutional hierarchy, and any rules other than a freely accepted self-­discipline— an université libre. Sciences and literature were invented here, alongside the vast philological and historical endeavor of sixteenth-­century humanist “criticism.” Even the “reserved” domains of the faculties of medicine, law, and theology were slowly but surely appropriated by the new methods implemented by those “amateurs” of vast knowledge. Peiresc, preceding Claude Perrault, conducted experiments and research related to medicine; Gabriel Harvey’s discoveries on the circulation of blood, rejected by the university faculty, were verified and accepted by erudite and scientific circles free of any university allegiance. Blaise Pascal did more than contribute to the evolution of mathematics and physics outside of the scope of official education and recognition: through his Provinciales (The Provincial Letters), he enlarged a theological debate (a privilege, if it indeed was one, reserved for the doctors of the Sorbonne) to an enlightened “lay” public within the “pedagogical” milieu of humanist academies. This milieu stretched beyond the limits of an elegant or savant aristocracy. Under Louis XIII, the “Office of Addresses” created by Théophraste Renaudot (founder of the Gazette, with links to Jacques Dupuy and a close Richelieu collaborator) interested a large and “curious” public in various philosophical, moral, and scientific controversies (1633–1642). The project would be repeated in 1642 by an “academy” founded by Abbot Bourdelot, whose public “conferences” attracted audiences that could number as many as four hundred people. Paris’s rise to the rank of Europe’s intellectual capital (a position it had filled

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from the thirteenth to fifteenth century thanks to its single university) was due this time around to the bustling activity of its “salons” and erudite or scientific private “academies,” which were all concentrated in the same city and linked to similar circles dispersed in the provinces and across Europe, notably in Italy, England, and Holland, through correspondence, travel, diplomatic exchanges, and commerce of books. These diverse centers of Parisian research increasingly had a common denominator: the bon usage of the French language which, though established in polite society, was attracting scholars and savants for the first time thanks to its literary elegance and new “regularity.” The university was still present and active (it continued to train clergy). But it had to contend with, even when educating young people, the Jesuits’ Collège de Clermont, the Oratorians, the Ursuline and Visitandines female convents, and even, for a few years, the Petites Écoles de Port-­Royal. Its former students, and particularly its rivals’ students, often joined the ranks of “amateurs” contributing to new fields of knowledge, including the singular and extremely humanist “academy” formed by the “solitaires” of Port-­Royal, whose leader, Antoine Arnauld, was nonetheless a scholar of the Sorbonne. This free and spontaneous university would cautiously and progressively benefit from official recognition by the French court, thanks to the establishment of a series of royal academies granted legal status. But “amateurs” did not welcome that legitimization without reservations: among the “honnestes gens” of polite circles, and the “curious” or “virtuous” members of erudite or scientific circles, “honor,” “curiosity,” and “virtue”—in other words the natural and liberal desire for truth that led them to collaborate—had made them possessive of their freedom. And even the so-­called “rules” of royal academies would have little in common with university statutes; furthermore, the young age of these academies shielded them from overly restrictive traditions. They were easily and widely accepted and in no way infringed on the simultaneous rise of “salons” and private “academies” that so often served as their recruitment grounds. However, it is worth emphasizing this thirst for noble “freedom,” shared by gentlemen, magistrates, and secretaries of princes alike, which was, to them, inseparable from their desire for truth. If some of these figures can be characterized as “esprits forts” or “libertins” (in the nonvaudevillian sense), it is precisely because they staked their honor and “virtue” (in the Latin meaning of virtus, the Italian virtù: “self-­energy and will”) on their moral and intellectual autonomy and their libertine emancipation, in the tradition of Montaigne, from any tutelage that intimidated or enslaved the mind (libertinus is Latin for “emancipation from servitude”). It is surprising that this phenomenon, and its impressive panorama across

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Paris during the reign of Louis XIII, has not been granted more attention by the sociology of knowledge or historical sociology, which have preferred to focus on its subsequent phase of development in the eighteenth century. Scientific societies were the subject of an excellent book by Harcourt Brown, but it was published in 1932.2 Since then, the scholarly edition of Correspondance du P. Marin Mersenne (The Correspondence of P. Marin Mersenne) and works related to Pascal, Descartes, and Desargues have increased our understanding of facts, individual figures, and specific texts, but this sociability of “new science” has yet to prompt a new analysis. In contrast, erudite society is much better known, thanks to René Pintard’s Libertinage érudit (Erudite Libertinism, 1942). Books, monographs, and volumes of correspondences have since multiplied, but a new overview remains desirable. Finally, “salons” and polite circles benefit from a very large bibliography, albeit one dependent on the presuppositions of literary history. Norbert Elias’s work is much more applicable to the phenomenon of the court than that of conversations and private academies far from the monarchical agora. In none of the three distinctive chapters of his historical study of the seventeenth century are the conclusions integrated into a framework that would link intellectual history to social history. To an even greater degree, the coexistence and eventual symbiosis of the three types of conversation societies in Paris, and the way in which they collectively opposed the institutional structure of the university, is absent from this analysis, namely because the seventeenth-­century French university has itself been little studied. Nonetheless, and despite the profound differences distinguishing these three types of conversation societies (social recruitment, research objects and methods), they shared a humanistic ethical code and epistemology hostile to the scholasticism of traditional university learning. The form of collaboration they adopted—which we can categorize under the generic idea of “conversation”— harkens back, well before the establishment of royal academies, to the academic form invented by fifteenth-­century Italian humanists, and which, during the sixteenth century, still in Italy, was extended from Latin and Greek conversation to the vernacular. It was this form of collaboration between men of letters, outside university walls, and often under the personal protection of a prince or pontiff, that ensured the wide-­ranging success of the studia humanitatis in Europe. “Conversation,” a shared method of research, was also the gnoseological vector of the Republic of Letters and the heart of its debates and evolution. But that long-­dispersed effort would have to converge on Paris, home to the most powerful and prestigious university in Europe, which was more impervious than its counterparts (Oxford, Louvain, Padua, and of course Leiden) to the influence of the Republic of Letters, in order for a cumulative effect to take place, and a

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threshold to be crossed, in a symphonic movement that marked the end of the Renaissance. Simultaneously in Paris, the medieval encyclopedia endured, the humanist encyclopedia, in contact with Leiden, Rome, and Aix, was reaching maturity, and a new encyclopedia was developing, this time in French, a language that would benefit from this swell of intellectual competition for quite some time. Confronted by a rigid but always high-­caliber university orthodoxy, this vast collective endeavor carried out by “amateurs” invented a new trivium for the French language, gave philological and historical criticism renewed efficacy, and revived the classical quadrivium and natural philosophy by allying the experimental method and mathematical language. The humanist project, which had begun two centuries before in Italy, found its culmination and crisis point in seventeenth-­century Paris. What motives could have driven these members of high society, scholars, and savants to all participate in such a quest for knowledge? It is striking to note the personal disinterestedness of these “academicians” without title, among whom we must include France’s salonnières. Descartes, who addressed all these “amateurs” and curious individuals in his Discourse on the Method (preferably graduated doctors), recognized their “good sense,” which was “of all things among man, the most equally distributed.”3 In other words: a natural yearning for truth and the innately correct judgment to obtain it. This was the French formulation of a principle that had guided the humanists from the start: “Gothic” university science having corrupted “common sense,” it was necessary to find it once again while freeing oneself from the effects of that distorting training and reconnect with nature, of which the Ancients had been faithful followers. For Descartes, however, the detour via the Ancients had itself become an obstacle: one’s innate “common sense,” which the philosopher wanted to bolster with method, could be found there where the school, even the humanist school, had yet to redirect it—in a new public expressing its appetite for truth, and from which Descartes did not exclude women. Pascal made a similar gamble in his Provincial Letters. The “natural desire for truth” in itself, the “curiosity” (a medieval vice and a humanist virtue) to exert oneself, demanded that one be free—free from the scholastic mold, no doubt, but also free from the “servile” deformations that one’s trade, profession, business, and affairs imposed on the mind. For Pascal, the “natural desire for truth” was inseparable from an ethic of “generosity,” and thus of “noble life,” the only environment favorable to intellectual freedom. Populated by “amateurs,” by the “virtuous,” and even, as previously noted, by those curious individuals besotted with surprises and wonders, the polite, erudite, and scientific societies of the seventeenth century were societies of noble, and ennobling, leisure. Magistrates or officers of the court,

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men of the church or sword, and secretaries, lawyers, and physicians who participated in those societies did so outside of their professional lives, or outside of any professional life, during a time of leisure that, in their eyes, was the only one suitable to truly liberal and of course intellectual activities. In Latin, the term for mind (ingenium) is semantically close to ingenuus, “born free and honorable,” which is constructed from the same root as the verb gignere: “engender,” “produce,” “bring into being.” The freedom to “live nobly” was inseparable from the freedom of the mind. This could take quite diverse forms: the conversation of, respectively, salons, libraries, or scientific cabinets. It could seduce nobles by birth, healing them of a prejudice condemned by Castiglione and Guazzo among France’s noblesse d’épée, hostile toward “letters,” which they viewed as a servile “trade” of clerics and commoners. It also seduced the country’s newer nobility, the noblesse de robe, clerics and men of letters who sought the moral ennoblement provided by higher learning and scientific disciplines born of humanism. During the seventeenth century, the ideal of the noble man (as defined by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and in general by classical philosophies) merged with the social prestige of the hereditary nobility and with the monastic and humanist ideal of “lettered piety,” ultimately producing vocations of the mind, of conversation, and therefore of selfless and bold inventiveness in the fields of knowledge opened by humanism. The expected reward was undoubtedly “honor” and “glory,” but also “gentleness,” “eloquence,” and the eutrapelia (good humor) so dear to Francis de Sales, expected fruits of polite and savant conversation, both “civil” and contributing through dialogue to the enlightenment and harmony of the mind. Descartes’s accounts, in his letters to Princess Elisabeth, mirror Gassendi’s in Vita Peireskii and those found in scholarly and social correspondence at the time. The life of the convivial mind, in noble leisure, was not merely a question of honor, freedom, knowledge: it also equated to happiness and joy. In salons (by definition literary), women participated in a life of clever leisure. Some earned the insulting label of “precious.” The lady of society (Baldassare Castiglione’s donna di palazzo) had a place in the salon not by virtue of being a wife, mother, or the head of a household, but solely as a woman of merit (beautiful and pleasant) and intellect, equal to men or even allotted a gallantly recognized albeit fictional superiority. Beautiful and pleasant, she was decoration and magnet; spiritual, she stimulated conversation between “good company.” This freedom in leisure (which rendered enviable the state of widowhood) was relatively accessible to women of high-­ranking nobility, who retained in marriage the personal prestige of their birth and family name. It was harder to obtain for those of the noblesse de robe or the bourgeoisie, within whose ranks

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marital and paternal authority operated within a narrow domestic sphere, and for whom societal leisure outside of the family remained a masculine privilege. Erudite and scientific circles, which recruited magistrates and members of the bourgeoisie and the secular and regular clergy, were closed to women. In contrast, French-­language literary circles, which attracted the noblesse d’épée, were organized around one woman, and largely welcomed the fair sex. The nobility, a leisure class, had historically and naturally developed an erudite sociability of leisure during times of peace: hunting, tournaments, sports, dances, feasts. Literary sociability was just another liberal pursuit, though one to which wellborn women were the most closely associated. Preciosity appeared in the gap between the leisure enjoyed by the noblesse d’épée, which united men and women, and studious leisure, morally noble and reserved for men. It reflected the demand by women of the noblesse de robe and the literary bourgeoisie for access to a sociability of leisure, notably clever leisure. That sociability, which by necessity took the form of complicity between women, focused on “endogenous” subjects (precious “feminism”) deemed ridiculous by the “mixed” salons of France’s high nobility and its circles of erudite and “scientific” men. Precious affectation—which dates back to Christine de Pisan’s Cité des dames (City of Ladies)—was a feminine rhetoric, prone to metaphor and allegory and specializing in what Voltaire, in reference to Marivaux, named the “metaphysics of the heart.” Precious dialogue was a perpetual and luxuriously metaphorical “distinction” from the servile and humiliating “realities” of bourgeois marriage. When comparing this precious (and eminently literary) form of female leisure and the scholê of scholars and savants, the difference in subjects and rules should not mask their common denominators: the noble and ennobling use of leisure, the free choice of a clever vocation, and the social exercise of that vocation with chosen partners. The foil for all these societies was without exception the pedant (already evoked by Montaigne): a professional specialist, lacking humor and urbanity, this ancestor of the “philistine” despised by nineteenth-­ century artists was as reviled in precious and polite circles as he was in erudite and savant academies. A product of the university, this specialized doctor (the professor of Greek eloquence Pierre de Montmaur, ridiculed by Ménage and Guez de Balzac, served as the model pedant in the 1650s, well before Molière’s doctors) lacked the liberal grace that was both the source and product of intellectual activities. He was devoid of sociability’s inseparable virtues and charms. Madame de Staël defined French conversation as an oral exchange “between nobles and men of letters.” A valid definition, if we include women and members of the church as outsiders joining said exchange. Of course, we have to understand “letters” in an encyclopedic sense, which includes not only the arts

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of language, but also erudition and the sciences. It was in reality much more than a “diversion”: with its embellishments, the pleasure of variety, and the richness of a range extending from the savant “conference” to cheerful, casual discussion, conversation was a mode of liberal cooperation and collaboration that stood in opposition to the formalism of the scholastic dispute and which managed to unite activity of the mind and noble leisure. It was destined to serve as a milieu that would encompass Europe’s highest ranks of diplomacy. The new landscape of knowledge taking shape in Paris during the seventeenth century, which left the Gothic fortress of the university intact in the distance, emanated from salons that shaped its linguistic instruments, erudite libraries, and “cabinets” of scientific curiosities. It was predicated on a sociability of noble and clever leisure, an ethics of generosity and honesty, and an epistemology based on collaboration between a diversity of minds. I’ve chosen to explore three of the main private conversation societies during this period: the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the Dupuy brothers’ “cabinet,” and Habert de Montmor’s “academy.” These correspond to the three primary types of circles defined earlier: polite salon, erudite circle, and scientific circle. Each lies at the origin of one of the three main royal academies: the Académie Française, the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles, and the Académie des Sciences. To understand the role played by Catherine de Vivonne, the Marquise de Rambouillet and an ambassador’s wife, it is important to examine the model she was striving to incarnate in France: Castiglione’s donna di palazzo, a model broadened and fleshed out by multiple works that appeared in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, notably Dr. Huarte de San Juan’s Examination of Men’s Wits (1571, translated into French twice as Examen des esprits, 1591 and 1643), which we know, thanks to Tallemant des Réaux, was one of the books on the marquise’s bedside table. The subject of Huarte’s work, which had already been explored in John Barclay’s The Mirror of Minds, was an anthropological study of the diversity of “temperaments” and inclinations, and therefore of the different aptitudes for knowledge. Leading that taxonomic hierarchy was the man of the mind, the “ingenious” or clever man of a moderately melancholy temperament, apt to invent new links between things and ideas, and apt to detect and express truth in a succinct and striking manner. Madame de Rambouillet was also influenced by Stefano Guazzo’s The Civil Conversation,4 which introduced France to the notion of “polite discussion,” which would thereafter be applied to the word “conversation” and the ethical and rhetorical rules of that mode of collective knowledge. She read and studied Francis de Sales’s Introduction à la vie devote (Introduction to the De-

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vout Life), which viewed conversation, as defined by Guazzo, as one of the leisurely arts of society allowed a wife and a Christian mother. Finally, Madame de Rambouillet belonged to the first generation of readers of Honoré d’Urfé’s L’Astrée, a long pastoral novel that gathered all the literary myths of aristocratic leisure: Arcadia and its shepherds and shepherdesses, their poetic games and clever dialogues, their Platonic-­inspired meditative and contemplative “metaphysics of the heart.” The Forez depicted in L’Astrée is a relatively protected “island” within a fifth-­century Europe ravaged by violent wars and political ambitions. The Hôtel de Rambouillet, which neighbored the Louvre, wanted to be an Arcadia in the middle of Paris. According to accounts by her confidant Tallemant des Réaux, Madame de Rambouillet was quick to abandon the “throngs” of the Louvre and thought Louis XIII, the ill-­mannered warrior king, a brute. Assisted by her friends and her daughters, as well as by poets including Malherbe and later Voiture, she carefully selected her guests and made her reception rooms, designed to this end, into an “academy” for the court’s most distinguished nobility. Like other aristocratic Parisian residences under Louis XIII, the Hôtel de Rambouillet dazzled during times of peace and the season of peace (winter). It was deprived of gentlemen during times of war and military-­campaign seasons (spring–­autumn). To be a society of noble leisure, the “Chambre bleue” had to be nothing less than a “rhetoric chamber” whose members practiced oral improvisation (the height of eloquence according to Quintilian), the art of wit and repartee, and other techniques of advanced oral virtuosity. It was also an incubator of highly fertile literary inventiveness. But this workshop of the bon usage of the French language—gay and natural conversation between nobles and men and women of letters—was also a deliberate method to obtain harmony on questions of taste and inherently inventive collaborations: fixed-­form poems, jests, engaging fables and stories, and quips and bon mots, which were often anonymous, found their way, like letters or in letters, into written form. Manuscripts circulated, a large number of which were assembled by Valentin Conrart in his renowned Recueils preserved at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal: the first permanent secretary of the Académie Française thus played that same role for polite society. Similarly, Œuvres, by the ambassador-­poet Voiture, written off the cuff and inspired by oral improvisations, was only available in manuscript form during his lifetime. It was only after his death in 1648 that these texts were collected and published by his nephew Marc Pinchesne. Polite conversation, conducted entirely in French, thus became a kind of amphibious (both oral and written), multilayered, and collective literary genre, which associated linguistic and literary invention with an entire milieu, or society, of aristocratic leisure. As was so rightly observed by Sainte-­

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Beuve, a better sociologist than Proust, or rather born in an era closer to the ancien régime than the great novelist’s era, French literature and conversation became inseparable during the reign of Louis XIII, an affiliation that would only gradually dissolve after the Revolution. Every “conversation society” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had its own tone, themes, and preferred genres, and each merits individual study, which should not separate the nuance of sociability that characterizes each society from the works it engendered, and which often boast—as was the case for the collections of Maximes in the society that united La Rochefoucauld, Madame de La Fayette, Madame de Sablé, and Jacques Esprit—if not a shared author, at least a common, creative foundation. The uniqueness of the Hôtel de Rambouillet (which became a legendary model of Parisian sociability by the end of the seventeenth century, prompting imitators like the salons led by Madame de Lambert and Madame de Tencin) lies in its function as a recruiting ground for the first Académie Française, as well as for having served as the oral reference, for Vaugelas, for the correct usage of living language. For Jean Chapelain, the linchpin of the first Académie Française, the Hôtel de Rambouillet sustained a link, though it was tenuous, with the other most prestigious society of literary conversation under Louis XIII: the Dupuy brothers’ “cabinet.” According to accounts by Nicholas Rigault, Pierre Dupuy, the erudite Gallican, was very attentive and favorable to the blooming of the arts of the French language and to the contributions made to it by the high nobility, who were the best placed to “illustrate” the language of the kingdom.5 The “cabinet,” as it was called, if not the “Dupuy brothers’ academy,” gathered daily in De Thou’s library, and then that of the king, to whose guard Pierre Dupuy was named in 1640, the elite of Paris’s erudite humanists, as well as on occasion their counterparts from French provinces or foreigners passing through the capital. Neither women nor gens d’épée (except for Fortin de La Hoguette and the Comte de La Fayette) were included. Unlike female members of the noblesse d’épée, women belonging to milieus of new nobility or the lettered bourgeoisie did not have the freedom to escape the domestic sphere. If they were able to access a form of leisurely sociability, it was at polite salons rather than meetings between savants. Gens d’épée rarely overlapped with those who frequented savant libraries. Antiquity, historiography, philology, critical editions of rare texts, and natural and moral philosophy—all disciplines that required extensive linguistic and technical knowledge—were the main objects of discussion within the Dupuys’ circle. Extended and nourished by a vast epistolary network across Europe, theirs was a tireless and collective creative endeavor that became an intrinsic part of the memory of the humanist library. Optimal working conditions

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converged to facilitate its methods of exchange. Even a spectator who remained at the surface of things, like Fortin de La Hoguette, was aware of the joyful harmony of these savant voices and of the politesse that governed their meetings. In his Life of Peiresc, Gassendi describes the behavior and mannerisms of the learned magistrate, a close friend and diligent correspondent of the Dupuys.6 He does not hesitate to include in his portrait Peiresc’s “art of conversation,” which was careful to avoid leaving any room for boredom through the variety of subjects evoked and liveliness of expression. Jests and witticisms were interspersed throughout his conversation. These pleasurable flourishes concealed an ethic of savant collaboration, whose principles are described by Gassendi: He was never more eloquent, in his correspondence, than when warning men of letters against quarrels, sarcasms, and personal attacks, when inciting them to revere antiquity, and to never stray from one’s sentiments without forms of respect; to prevent them from hastily forming judgments when confronted by obscure and controversial questions, from embracing as certain that which is unresolved; and finally to encourage them to express their opinion without concern of reversing that of another. This was the definition of a community of research, with shared references (antiquity) and rules for collaboration and validation that its members had to respect in order for their dialogue to be fruitful. The Dupuy brothers shared and fostered the same discipline of conversation and correspondence and the same balance of sobriety and graciousness. Contrary to the Hôtel de Rambouillet, the Dupuy Academy does not appear to have found its public legitimization in a royal institution. In 1656, Jacques Dupuy died and the academy shut its doors. In reality, however, according to a neglected account by Abbot Claude Nicaise, in a deliciously erudite essay published in 1691, Les Sirènes, ou Discours sur leur forme et figure (Sirens, or Discourse on their Form and Figure), the Dupuy tradition continued under Louis XIV. Led in turns and without interruption by Abbot Jacques de La Rivière, guard of De Thou’s library, rue de Poitevins; M. Salmon, garde du rôle of the Officiers de France, rue Serpente; and finally by his son-­in-­law, M. de Vilvault, advisor to the king and master of requests, rue Hautefeuille, the Dupuy Academy never had any problems with continuity. It spanned generations and migrated from private library to private library after leaving the king’s library in 1656. In the interim, the Dupuy “cabinet” found imitators in Gilles Ménage and his Wednesday gatherings and Abbot Bignon (son of the attorney general Jérôme Bignon, one of the leading figures of the Dupuy “cabinet” under Louis XIII) and his Thursday gatherings. The Dupuy tradition would continue in its

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purest form, however, with M. de Vilvault. His residence was the setting, following a meeting of the Académie Française, of the dispute between Abbot Dangeau and Pierre Daniel Huet (regarding a passage by Virgil) on the form of the Sirens, daughters of the Muses, and the inspiration behind Abbot Nicaise’s essay. The latter did not hesitate to compare the Dupuy “cabinet” to the literary coterie of philologists hosted by the Museum of Alexandria and described by Strabon.7 It is highly likely that Abbot Brignon had both the Dupuys and Claude Nicaise’s essay in mind in 1701 when he reformed the “Petite Académie” to resemble the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles. What had begun as a simple commission of the Académie Française in service of the personal glory of Louis XIV thus became the encyclopedic headquarters of French erudition. With a delay of half a century, the Dupuy tradition finally received the official recognition of the court. My remit here was not to trace the origins and principles of the “new science” (for that I recommend reading Alexandre Koyre and Georges Gusdorf ) that attached itself, so to speak, to the humanists’ encyclopedia in the early seventeenth century, gradually weakening its unity. That said, my investigation does include closer study of one of the “scientific” circles that formed in Paris in the first half of the seventeenth century and was the basis of the royal Académie des Sciences. The Dupuy brothers’ “cabinet,” which was in constant communication with Peiresc, is characteristic of what we can call “the autumn of humanism”: it expanded on the encyclopedia of the now complete sixteenth century, but also enthusiastically welcomed two forms of research that would ultimately condemn it to specialization: French belles lettres, and natural sciences based on mathematical analysis and experimentation. These two disciplines were already the focus of specialized societies, which existed at the same time as the Dupuys’ “cabinet,” specifically “literary salons” (belles lettres) and “Mersenne’s circle” (natural sciences), the latter of which was situated at the Couvent des Minimes in the Place Royale and was a focal point and center of correspondence for all of scientific Europe, notably Descartes. Mersenne died in 1648, but his mantle was quickly taken by a high-­ranking magistrate, Henri Louis Habert de Montmor, who was born in 1600. Previously, France’s high magistracy—the De Thous (to whom the Dupuys were related), De Mesmes, Bignons, and Séguiers—had preferred to sponsor philological and historical studies associated with the French school of law, whose originality and stability, from Guillaume Budé to Jacques Cujas, has been underlined by Donald Kelley and George Huppert. Habert de Montmor was one of Guillaume Budé’s grandnephews and was allied with the most important families of France’s noblesse de la robe, magistracy, and upper government: the Lamoignons, Béthunes, and

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Phélypeaux. On March 26, 1637, he married Marie Henriette de Buade de Frontenac, whose brother Louis later become governor of La Nouvelle-­France in Quebec. De Montmor was a learned man, who assembled a vast library in his mansion on the rue Sainte-­Avoye (today 79, rue du Temple), constructed by his father in 1623. He was a member of the Dupuys’ “cabinet” and, like his peers, did not publish his works: in order to be truly noble, “studious leisure” could not give rise to any suspicions of professionalism. However, this man of letters demonstrated his interest for the French language, and the arts of language dedicated to it, much more staunchly than the Dupuys did. Master of requests for the King’s Council in 1632, he was elected to the burgeoning Académie Française in 1634, where he joined his cousin Germain Habert, war commissioner and poet, and Philippe Habert, another cousin and the abbot of Cerisy, who was also a poet. On March 3, 1635, Habert de Montmor gave a lecture at the academy entitled “De l’utilité des conferences” (The Utility of Conferences), which opportunely marked the epistemological importance he accorded to sociability and collaboration between men of letters. It is vital to understand “conference” in the sense given by Montaigne: the savant version of conversation, the mode of understanding through dialogue that the humanists placed in opposition to the scholastic dispute. Since the Académie Française did not yet have a fixed location, Habert received his colleagues in his home on the rue Sainte-­Avoye, most likely in the library, on April 30, 1635. But this scholar of the encyclopedic tradition also displayed his “curiosity” for “new science” and its representatives. According to Baillet, Descartes’s biographer, Habert offered him “full usage of his country home, at Mesnil-­Saint-­ Denis, which was worth 3000 to 4000 pounds in rent.” Descartes declined the offer, and Habert extended it again, this time to Gassendi, who had been named a royal professor of mathematics. On May 9, 1653, the canon of Digne moved into Montmor’s mansion and spent the month of August at Mesnil-­Saint-­Denis. There, he wrote Vie de Tycho Brahé (Life of Tycho Brahé), at the request of Habert, to whom he dedicated the work. Gassendi made Habert his executor, leaving him all his books and manuscripts, and the telescope given to him by Galileo. He died on October 24, 1655. Habert presided over his funeral services and, with the immediate assistance of François Henri, Samuel Sorbière, and Antoine de La Poterie, prepared the six-­volume edition of Gassendi’s Œuvres, which he had printed with his own preface and a copy of Sorbière’s Vie de Gassendi. This monumental edition would see classical epicureanism, which became so dear to Montaigne, earn its Christian legitimacy under the authority of a learned canon. Its impact would be felt notably in the following century. Gassendi’s presence at Habert de Montmor’s residence, from 1653 to 1655, gave momentum to the academy Habert had hoped to assemble around himself

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after Mersenne’s death. Its members included the astronomer Samuel Boulliau; the mathematicians Pascal, Roberval, Desargues, and Carcavy; and the traveler Monconys. After Gassendi’s death, weekly meetings were organized, and Samuel Sorbière drafted a nine-­article set of rules for the budding academy. He published it in February 1658 in the form of a letter addressed to Thomas Hobbes. The preamble and first article discuss “conference,” believed to contribute to the “public good” as well as to the participants’ “amusement.” The objective of that “conference” was “a clearer understanding of God’s works, the advancement of life’s comforts, in the arts and sciences that serve to increase them.” Their form: two reports per session, followed by prepared objections and an oral debate. Reports, objections, and responses had to be read. The oral debate was brief and submitted to the individual presiding over the session. Academy members were permitted to submit their opinions in writing when they could not attend in person. At the end of each session, academy members were expected to inform the assembly about news of any ongoing research or recently published publications they had gathered through correspondence with foreign scholars. Attendance at the assembly was tightly regulated: barring a vote by two-­thirds of those present, no one could be admitted after the session had begun, and only selected members of the academy, chosen among “individuals curious about natural science, medicine, mathematics, the liberal and mechanical arts,” could attend, with noteworthy invited guests duly announced and introduced. Scientific collaboration therefore required formalities and a level of discussion that had little to do with the rigor of university disputationes. It demanded premeditation, including the reading of preplanned texts, breaking from the oral improvisation and digressions of both erudite and polite literary conversation. From 1653 to 1663, these rules appear to have governed the weekly gatherings hosted and presided over by Habert, with Sorbière acting as secretary. In the absence of since-­lost session notes, numerous letters from Christiaan Huyghens, as well as his Journal de voyage à Paris et à Londres (Journal of Travel to Paris and London, 1660–1661),8 allow us to reconstitute the activities of this private academy. Jean Chapelain, a member, like Habert de Montmor, of the Académie Française, and a frequent habitué of the Dupuys’ “cabinet” and the Hôtel de Rambouillet (both by this point in decline or closed), was a frequent correspondent with Huyghens in Paris. The Cartesians Clerselier and Robault and the doctor Pecquet were among the academy’s core members. The Englishman Henry Oldenburg attended sessions regularly between 1657 and 1660; Huyghens came in person to solidify the relationship between Paris and his circle in Leiden; correspondence and travel (notably by the Italian Lorenzo Magalotti) established links between the academy and the Accademia del Cimento

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(1657–1665) in Florence, presided over by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold himself, which hosted collaborations between disciples of Torricelli and Galileo. Huyghens’s journal reveals that several members of Habert de Montmor’s academy, like Rohault, Thévenot, Petit, and Auzout, also held smaller, more casual gatherings at their residences, during which they and their peers conducted experiments of optics and mechanics or engaged in discussions of mathematical problems. The “new science” was not at all isolated but rather was part of what was named the Parisian “université libre,” as the presence of Chapelain, the new uomo universal of the Renaissance, at Habert de Montmor’s residence can attest. Huyghens himself was invited to join a “Cartesian salon,” led by Madame de Bonneveau, which signaled the expansion of polite society’s curiosity to scientific innovations: the femmes savantes would not be long in coming. The young Dutch prodigy frequented the circles of Méré and Mitton, where he would once again encounter Pascal. “New science” would find a response—simultaneously literary, moral, and religious—in the Pensées that Pascal had developed through his conversation with his peers, as well as with the “esprits forts” of high society and the hermetic Solitaires of Port-­Royal. Huyghens’s voyage (modeled after the peregrinatio academica of the Republic of Letters, on the margins of a Dutch diplomatic mission) continued in London, where his propitious timing enabled him to attend sessions of the one-­year-­old Royal Society. Energized by the news out of London, Habert’s academy wanted to become a serious rival. But Chapelain, who became one of Colbert’s most trusted advisors, was already envisioning a French establishment superior to the one the English had just placed under the nominal patronage of Charles II for the benefit of national agriculture, industry, and commerce (though with a budget that sustained its own members belonging to the landed gentry, such as Sir Robert Boyle and Sir Robert Moray). Samuel Sorbière himself, in 1663, read a Discours (quickly sent to Colbert) before the assembly gathered at Montmor’s residence, which recommended that the private academy be transformed into a royal academy. He noted that private resources (Montmor’s) were insufficient to successfully complete necessary experiments and procure the tools to carry them out. He emphasized the conflicts that had arisen between experimentalists and “philosophes” that could only be resolved by royal authority. That same year, Huyghens wrote to Sir Robert Moray to tell him that Habert de Montmor’s academy was over. It persisted, though quietly, until 1669. Beginning in 1664, the diplomat Melchisédech Thévenot assembled scholars disappointed by the quarrels of the Montmor Academy: the geometrician Frenicle, the doctor Steno, the physician Petit, and the mathematician and astronomer Adrian Auzout. Also in 1664, Auzout, with his book Éphéméride de la comète de 1664 (Almanac of the Comet of 1664), asked Louis XIV to

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transform the Compagnie des sciences et des arts into a royal academy supplied with the resources and instruments necessary for its projects, and therefore of great utility to France’s national well-­being and reputation. When Colbert, assisted by advice from Christiaan Huyghens, Carcavy, and the Perrault brothers, founded the Académie des Sciences in 1666, few members of Habert de Montmor’s academy were chosen to participate.9 One of the members of the Habert Academy, the abbot and doctor Bourdelot, former secretary for Christine de Suède, and secretary for the prince of Condé, had established his own academy in 1642, which he categorized as “public” and which gathered every Monday in his house on the rue de Tournon. Announcing its sessions through public postings, this academy gave the floor to undisputed savants, both French and foreign, and published its Actes. It endured until the death of its founder in 1685. In 1672, one of Bourdelot’s collaborators, Le Gallois (nothing to do with Gallois, the editor of the Journal des savants and secretary of the Académie des Sciences), published Conversations de l’Académie de M. Bourdelot, contenant diverses recherches, observations, expériences, et raisonnements de physique, chimie, mathématique (Conversations of M. Bourdelot’s Academy, Containing Diverse Research, Observations, Experiments, and Reasonings of Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics). The term “conversation” is quite fitting. It was intended to distinguish from “conferences” between peers. This then is an example of haute vulgarisation not unlike Renaudot’s “Office of Addresses” during Louis XIII’s reign. After an initial presentation by an invited savant, a debate between “academicians” would take place before a large public audience. In terms of the semantic field of the term “conversation” in the seventeenth century, it is particularly noteworthy that Abbot Bourdelot had each session introduced by a concert of instruments and voices, even for subjects of “new science,” meant to establish a harmonious environment desirable for both the subsequent debate and the convergence of minds. These sessions were followed by an evening meal as delectable as possible, supplied, in season, by deliveries of venison from the Prince of Condé, an avid hunter of Chantilly’s forests. Concert, conversation, banquet: Bourdelot’s academy therefore extended the spirit of classical and humanist convivia to the “diffusion” of knowledge and did not separate pleasure in leisure from a natural thirst for knowledge (Bourdelot was himself known for his accommodating and cheerful demeanor). The same concern for eutrapelia had privileged “gaiety” in “polite” society and “erudite” society. The Guy Patin text cited earlier10 would have us believe that university manners were themselves not (or no longer) impervious to humanist conviviality, which would see its final victory at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815.11

7 SAVANT CONVERSATION

During the classical period, correspondence and different modes of publicizing works through handwritten or printed texts played a critical role in communication between savants. But there is another mode of communication that we tend to overlook, notably because it can appear overly elusive—­ conversation.1 Erasmus defined correspondence as an “exchange between absent friends.” An admirable consolation prize, but a consolation prize nonetheless. That description essentially suggests that in-­person conversation between friends was the most desirable form of communication. By definition, it left no trace: verba volant, scripta manent (speech flies away, written words remain). This insurmountable obstacle for those of us who today deal uniquely with scripta also impeded sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century censors. Conversations between savants, held in their libraries, offices, and isolated gardens ideal for shared walks, were much better placed than letters and, to an even greater degree, printed works or manuscripts to escape surveillance and eventual repression by civil and religious authorities. These exchanges were secret, or in any case private, guarded, and far from public earshot. But while this secrecy might appear to contradict the publicity and need for communication so predominant in the unwritten laws of the Republic of Letters, it was in reality one of the fundamental elements of humanist knowledge. The humanist encyclopedia strove no doubt to be a collaborative and collegial exercise and required that any results or ongoing research be publicized. But it also adhered to the utmost caution: first, in regard to official orthodoxy, often ill-­disposed toward the libertas philosophandi that savants of the Republic of Letters granted themselves and each other; and secondly, toward mediocre and jealous individuals who at times revealed themselves to be indiscreet rivals, spies, or plagiarists. Possessiveness of intellectual property and fear of prematurely announcing a discovery to the public were more widespread in the seventeenth century than was the generosity of figures like Mersenne or Peiresc, who incidentally published little. Conversation between trusted friends, who were also peers, could maintain the secret of a discovery or object of research more easily than other, more exposed, forms of communication. In the Laudio funebris, included by Henri Valois in 122

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Nicolas Rigault’s Vie de Pierre Dupuy (Life of Pierre Dupuy), Valois notes the level of vigilance with which the older Adelphe excluded intruders and gossips (that is, potential traitors and nuisances) from the daily gathering held in De Thou’s library and later the king’s.2 The friendly harmony of conversation between confirmed and reliable savants relied primarily on a feeling of deep security, of being “among your own,” in accordance with the implicit rules of an ethical code of loyalty and trust. It is possible to think that those oral exchanges between savants, which we are unable to reconstitute verbatim, were a marginal aspect of their scientific lives. The solitary work conducted in their “cabinets” initially looks to have been more important. From this perspective, we can consider that savants’ correspondence, books, and manuscripts provide us with a sufficient amount of information about their work, freeing us of the obligation of tackling the false and unsolvable quandary of knowing what they may have been saying to each other. I have several reasons to believe that such an attitude is unfounded. Even assuming that conversation between savants was merely a way to relax, a quasi-­ therapeutic form of otium, it and the discursive modes used merit examination by the historian. Otium alone always has some connection with negotium, and even more so with otium studiosum, the savant’s professional mode. Literature on the nature of this oral relaxation, inseparable from otium studiosum, exists and should be taken into consideration. I am thinking notably about the anas [anecdotal or conversational texts], and more precisely the Patiniana, which demonstrates Guy Patin’s love for Rabelais, whose irony and at times scabrous wordplay set the tone of the academic banquets he organized with his friends. I am also thinking, in a more provincial style, of collections like Democritus ridens sive campus recreationum honestarum cum exorcismo melancholiae (Laughing Democritus on the Playground of Honest Men with Protection against Melancholy), published in Cologne in 1648 with interleaved white pages, which reflect the presence, right in the midst of the seventeenth century, of a humanist tradition dating back to Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae.3 Laughing Democritus is filled with racy stories, apt to spark a relaxing conversation between savants. This was the ironic and even erotic side of the serious savant or man of letters. And let’s not forget Nugae venales sive Thesaurus ridendi et jocandi ad gravissimos severissimos viros, patres melancholicorum conscriptos, Anno 1663. Prostant apud Neminem, sed tamen ubique (Trifles to Sell, or the Treasure of Laughs and Games Intended for Saddened and Severe Minds, Fathers Conscripted to the Melancholy Race). Using questions modeled after scholastic exercises, but with often cynical and bawdy responses, this small book hints at the substance of what could have been said, during meals or leisure

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time, between good-­natured German humanist scholars. But it is specific to scholars, students, and professors of Lutheran universities. Another collection of coarse humor intended for scholars or apprentices, an antidotum melancholiae jocoseriu (very pleasant antidote against melancholy), was published in Frankfurt in 1668. This literature merits thematic study and an extensive bibliography, which would undoubtedly add nuance to the at-­times-­rushed generalizations about “erudite libertinism.” That libertinism was, in part, an oral form of relaxation in which savants, outside their serious and taxing studies, indulged when concerned with their health and seeking to restore the balance of their humors through the conviviality of laughter and satire, starting with mockery of false science and pedantry. In the correspondence between Mathieu Marais and President Bouhier in the early eighteenth century,4 news and scholarly remarks are interspersed with the salacious accounts and sexual banter of a sermo discinctus between men who ignored the more civil graces of the gallantry of “polite” society and its female members. Of course those exchanges took place on the margins of more conventional savant conversation or else during moments of leisure. The essence of this scholarly discourse was inherent to knowledge itself, to study, to the working hours of otium studiosum. More than a mode of communication, conversation between savants was also an instrument of work and of shared work. The satirical pastiche of the scholastic disputatio found in Nugae venales (1663) is a belated, implicit hint at the secular ambitions of European humanism: replace the autistic dialectic of the school with an art of conversation used as a method of shared research. Since we are unequipped to recreate the content of this savant conversation between humanists, can we at least capture its spirit? Contrary to what one might think, texts are available. However, they reflect a variety of styles and genres and belong to distinct series, which have most often been studied independently from each other. In order for these diverse vestiges of the same seemingly elusive oral phenomenon to settle into a coherent order, we must first establish savant conversation as our object of study. Beginning with a series of texts that are the most obvious and easiest to consult: the Lives of savants. These works stretch as far back as the Lives of Petrarch, Budé, and Erasmus and the biographies of Vespasiano dei Bisticci, in Ficino and Politian’s Florence. But I will focus on a more recent series: Paolo Gualdo’s Life of Gian Vicenzo Pinelli, published in 1607, Gassendi’s Life of Peiresc, published in 1642, and Nicholas Rigault’s Life of Pierre Dupuy, published in 1652. In each of these Lives, it is worth noting that the biographer, invariably a close friend and peer, dedicates long passages to his subject’s conversational skill. This was considered to be an essential attribute of the learned nobility, to the same extent as the composi-

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tion of a library and encyclopedic collections, participation in international collaborations of philological and scientific research, and the intensity and regularity of diligent correspondence with other savants. Savant conversation was the social indicator of both a soul gifted with hospitality, kindness, friendship, and serenity, and a mind supremely equipped to argue and to persuade. In the conversation of the three savants mentioned above, as described by their biographers, the ethos and method of a life filled with work and study were projected in their relationships with others, distinguished by incomparable charm and fecundity. Thanks to their art of conversation, these three savants became beacons of irresistible sociability, the very nerve centers of the Republic of Letters. Even an amateur like Fortin de La Hoguette, who was exceptionally admitted to the “Dupuy cabinet,” marveled at the near Orphic “music” that the Adelphes ensured reigned within their society.5 Accounts by Gualdo,6 Gassendi,7 and De Rigault of their heroes confirm Fortin de La Hoguette’s observations. By comparing them, we find ourselves already on the path to a phenomenology of savant conversation in the seventeenth century, the vibrant and oral heart of the Republic of Letters. Daniel Georg Morhof’s Polyhistor (the most comprehensive attempt to describe the Republic of Letters in its twilight) offers us the most articulated account of the art of erudite conversation in one dedicated chapter. During the same period, the literature of the anas, a rather unique genre,8 considered, like Polyhistor, that conversation between savants, the traits of which are described in the anas, was a kind of esoteric instruction that surpassed what the public could learn from their printed works. The anas enabled readers to participate, more or less faithfully, in the intimacy of an erudite circle gathered around a teacher and to hear his spoken word, rather than his official, public, and written voice. Less dialogue than spoken monologue, this discourse incorporated both the sermo discinctus—naked, ironic, and uninhibited conversation—and reflection and solidly constructed analysis. These are undoubtedly only partial and at times unreliable records, but they attest to the importance and interest accorded during this time to the spoken word as the vehicle of great knowledge. Savant conversation further appears in these works as an art of living and of calmly coexisting, as well as a way to convey knowledge. Not only are the letters Guez de Balzac called “conversations by writing” undoubtedly the best accounts of savant conversation available, but they also contain many veiled references to that conversation. Jean-­Robert Armogathe conducted an analysis of Mersenne’s correspondence,9 which can be resumed, extended, and compared to other similar collections. But this collection of indirect accounts should not force us to neglect an-

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other more promising, albeit more severe source: theoretical treatises about conversation. It took me some time to realize their importance and therefore establish the tradition behind them, which is quite distinct from the rhetorical tradition of the great oratory genres. This unusual genre dates back to antiquity, and only true savants, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were in a position to observe all that separated it from the grand arts of eloquence. Only the most erudite observers, meaning the most accomplished philologists and men of letters, were capable of capturing the link between Plato’s dialogues, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, Macrobius’s Saturnalia, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, and Plutarch’s Banquet of Sages. All these Latin and Greek texts gave a voice to savants and men of letters, allowing them to speak to one another and to assemble and express seemingly incompatible qualities: the precision of memory and the rigor of intelligence at work, with literary charm. A theory of conversation can be found in the writings of Macrobius, an author popular among humanists: he distinguishes between two oral genres, sermones conviviales (related to leisure and rest) and disputationes matutinae et robustiores (which echoes the notion of “conference” as viewed by Montaigne). These two adjacent genres were destined to “contaminate one another.” The definition of the erudite sermo, according to Macrobius, is in fact applicable to both: concentus in dissonis, in unum conspiratio (agreement in dissonance and reduction to one).10 Yet, it was that same harmony of minds that the humanists, beginning with Petrarch, reproached scholasticism and its logic formalism for ignoring: scholastic science and its disputationes were abstract and “frozen,” to borrow Rabelais’s famous term, and relied on an arrogant and dogmatic way of thinking. Classical wisdom, notwithstanding that of the pure logician Aristotle and his stoic disciples, only accorded the exercise of scientific reasoning a very limited and relative validity: if it valued dialogue, however, it was because, within a dialogue, the weaknesses of individual reasoning could be compensated and reciprocally corrected in order to get as close as possible to the truth. The optimal conditions of the classical dialogue—leisure, friendship, the desire for truth and happiness— favored that exchange and cooperation, the secrets to the sages’ enlightenment. Rhetoric, the art of persuasion that could so easily transform during its public expression into demagoguery or sophistry, could, in this intimate exercise between friends, foster philosophical and scientific understanding. And so the history of erudite humanism is marked by great dialogues, which reflect conversations held in savant circles. Angelo Decembrio’s De politia litteraria (1415– 1466?) and Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes camaldulenses (1472–1474) are two justifiably famous examples. Savant conversation thus preceded courtly conversation, and erudite humanists paved the way for courtiers and diplomats,

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who, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, borrowed from them the ethos and conventions suitable to the relaxed speech of the otium, preparation for the fraught game of negotiation. However, I will not focus on that form of “polite” conversation, which is better studied and more visible than savant conversation.11 Treatises by Castiglione (1528), Della Casa (1558), and Stefano Guazzo (1574) are classic examples. Original-­language variations also exist, written in Spanish, English, and French (Gracián, Shaftesbury, Chesterfield, La Rochefoucauld, Méré, and Paradis de Moncrif ). At the end of the seventeenth century, Daniel Georg Morhof, a man before his time and the best retrospective “sociologist” of the Republic of Letters, reestablished the honor and historical precedence of savant conversation. He writes in Polyhistor: Musea et collegia [. . .] eam ob causam institui solent, ut ex conversatione eruditorum mutua res litteraria augmentum capiat. Conversandi ergo ratio quaedam habenda est, quae, ut in omni hominum societate indigentiam, ita in doctrinis ignorantiam nostram solatur. (Museums and colleges [. . .] are ordinarily formed so that the practice of letters finds a nourishing milieu in the words exchanged by men of learning. A rule of conversation is also needed so that, like indigence in civil society, ignorance can be eased.)12 An assertive apologia for savant conversation and its institutions can be found in Polyhistor, in which it is vigorously described as a collective remedy to the inevitable indigence of individual knowledge that is as a result riddled with ignorance. This conversation is founded on the principle of “know thyself,” thus making its interlocutors’ individual wisdom, modesty, and moderation the principle behind shared science and its “augmentation.” Further on, still in Polyhistor, Morhof writes: Nihil vero ad informationem commodius est, quam frequens cum viris doctis conversatio, quae est disciplina omnium optima, et in sensus magis incurrit, quam taediosa illa per lectiones et meditationes via. (Nothing does more to cultivate us than to confer often with savants: it is of all the disciplines the happiest and touches our spirit more profoundly than that dull path that passes by reading and solitary meditation.)13 Savant conversation was therefore the supreme method of sharing information and education, a “general discipline” to develop the mind, inseparable from its agrément. It is striking to find this man of letters, if ever there was one, making a judg-

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ment that could be easily attributed to a man at court, but which corresponds closely to Montaigne’s views on the superiority of “experience” and the “art of conversation” over book learning: Per conversationem in omni vitae genere plura disci, quam per lectionem librorum. Lectio tamen librorum non inutilis, si non habemus cum quo conversemur. Ideoque vel sola illa cum Bibliopolis et Bibliothecariis conversatio insignem nobis usum praestabit. (In all stages of life, we learn much more through conversation than by reading books. The latter is not without utility, if one has nobody to converse with. Moreover conversation with amateurs of books and librarians alone yields us exceptional benefits.)14 Morhof entrusts the reciprocal culture of the mind, the life and raison d’être of orbis litterarum, almost entirely to a conversatio that he considers more important than reading or solitary meditation, and in which he sees the connective tissue of the Republic of Letters. Naturally, he adds, thereby justifying the editors of savant correspondence: cum absentibus conversamur per epistolas (we talk to those absent through letters).15 In Morhof’s eyes, this epistolary substitute was so effective that, he notes, Casaubon and Scaliger never felt the need to meet in person. Their correspondence served as conversation. Conversatio erudita, to which Morhof dedicates an entire chapter, was nonetheless the original and essential social connector of the Republic of Letters. If the author of Polyhistor had been the only one to maintain that opinion, we could easily reject it. But he himself invokes influential past authorities, notably the same savant biographies cited above, from Louis Le Roy’s Vita Budaei to Paolo Gualdo’s Vita Pinelli, which served as the model for Gassendi’s Vita Peireskii. He notes that all these works dedicated long passages to the conversation of these great figures of the Republic of Letters, which were naturally prolonged by their diligent correspondence. So what did he, and the authors of these Vitae, mean by conversatio? It is important to avoid the semantic error of reducing the meaning of that word to “discussion” or “oral exchange.” Without entering into overly detailed analy­ses, I want to emphasize that the word conversatio, which appeared in Latin in the first century and had a long success in the Latin used by Christians, designated every aspect of a “collective existence,” meaning social and sociable cooperation. In reality, it also encompassed correspondence, which mirrored and depended on oral dialogue and whose moral protocol and discursive conventions rendered the “collective existence” of savants both fruitful and successful. Conversatio therefore implies a configuration that is very different

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from that of our modern “communication.” This is evident in the organization of the chapter Morhof dedicates to conversatio erudita. The German philologist begins by studying the moral standards that made erudite cooperation possible and productive, and which, in their absence, was merely an illusion. The first of these standards is the Greek gnôthi seauton (know thyself ): knowing oneself is the basis for knowing others, without which conversation is not possible. This supposes a humble evaluation of the reach of the individual human mind, even when it is superior. But it also implies the variety of minds, the singular inclinations that are inseparable from one’s limits.16 Physiognomy (taught by historians, playwrights, and poets) contributed to this science of men. As soon as more than two speakers are involved in a habitual conversation (familiaritas), the addition of a third implies agreement between the first two on the inclinations and qualities that will insure the newcomer neither disrupts nor bothers the fruitful harmony already achieved. The Republic of savants relied on an extremely cautious and selective recruitment process, which included much more than the evaluation of technical competence or specific expertise. The candidates’ affinities and levels of moral maturity had to be weighed with a practically semiotic care. (That word is used in Greek in the title of a work cited by Morhof, De conjectandis cujusque moribus et latitantibus animi affectibus sêméiotikê moralis, seu de signis [Semiotic of Characters to Discern the Morals and Hidden Sentiments of Each, or Treatise of Signs], published in Venice in 1625 and written by Gabriel Naudé’s good friend, Scipione Chiaramonti).17 The worst flaw that could be detected was pride, an insurmountable obstacle not only to true knowledge but also to any successful cooperation between savants. This assessment therefore could not be based on abstract or theoretical principles. It required experience, intuition, and tact and took into account the extreme and paradoxical diversity among men, depending on temperament, age, sex, fortune, nation, social condition, and proportion of virtues and vices. Great minds are invariably very different, but a great mind is necessary for the magnetism of erudite conversation to take effect. Thus participants in savant conversation were assumed to have freedom and independence in relation to any exterior and “common” interference. Morhof cites an example. According to him, Saumaise refused to write the history of Cardinal Richelieu requested by the French minister himself despite the promised remuneration: he did not want to be forced to equivocate with the truth. The moral requirements of the Republic of Letters did not separate between the ethical (character) and the epistemological.18 The second metric was knowledge: eruditio. This was not linked to the volume or profusion of a savant’s publications, impressive though they may have

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been, but to the wisdom inherent to his singular being (memory and ingenium). Mohrof writes that a remark made in passing by a true savant can put one more directly on the path to truth than lengthy works. Other values—modesty, affability, kindness, deliberation in speaking, moderation in curiosity, and lack of precipitation when making judgments—collectively formed the savant’s humanitas, which could be understood as the Stimmung, the most favorable to fertile conversation with one’s peers. The savant’s rhetoric was therefore, like that of Cicero and Quintilian (which is freely cited by Morhof ), tightly linked to a philosophy of morals, itself inseparable from an epistemology. After examining the conditions in which this rhetoric was exercised, Morhof studies its modes. The meaning of conversatio becomes that of the Greek suzêtésis, “collective research,” or even the French conférence, as employed by Montaigne. This is a blend of the Socratic method: libertas, varied rhythm, and even silences, and the exchange of arguments as explained by Aristotle in his Analytics, Topics, and Rhetoric.19 There is an art of asking questions without insulting the speaker and an art of dialogue, notably during a walk or stroll (peregrinatio),20 models for which can be found in the writing of Aulus Gellius and Petrarch. Morhof defines it as a Critica socratica, and he defines its simple and precise style by borrowing from the éidos socratikos proposed by Demetrius de Phalerum’s taxonomy of styles. He notes that Casaubon had announced a study of this genus orationis in his Animadversiones in Athenaeum. Morhof also refers to Tranquillo Ambrosius’s book Processus informativus.21 He further emphasizes that this oral exercise of sharing information and discovery had its written equivalent in correspondence. But fragments of that oral activity, the very heart of letters, had begun to be written down. Morhof cites the Scaligerana, Perroniana, Thuana, and Colomesiana, all published in the 1660s, as well as the Recueil de particularités (Collection of Curiosities),22 noting that this biography had since expanded considerably. Morhof reminds his readers of the questionable reliability of the anas and emphasizes the value of epistolary conversation, which, he writes, is sola ingenii similitudine homines conjungit (singly capable of uniting men through the unique force of intellectual affinities) and which often kindles feelings of affection more than conversation between face-­to-­face speakers does. Once again, he does not challenge the central, vital, and archetypal character of direct conversation between savants within the epistemic tissue of the Republic of Letters. His stance is surprising. One would not imagine a Cartesian, or at least not to this degree, placing conversation, even regulated, at the heart of cognition. It is important to note that, in this chapter of Morhof’s work, knowledge has none of the traits of Cartesian science. This “sociologist” of the Republic of Letters

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was more aligned with Montaigne and Bacon. His criterion was not mathematical certitude, but the degree of truth that the limited human mind is capable of attaining. The structure underlying his analysis is not a system of laws logically following one another, but an “open” and heterogeneous encyclopedic arena wherein the multiplicity of items of knowledge and their grasping “progress” triumphs over a truth that is by principle inaccessible. Conversation was admirably suited to this kind of encyclopedia, both as a kind of heuristic, inseparable from the variety and limits of talents and minds, combining their diverse capabilities, and an art de bien vivre, reuniting in the same relatively harmonious society (otium studiosum) the two most sociable vocations of weak humanity: the desire for knowledge and the desire for happiness. Viewed from Germany, where the Respublica litteraria of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was anchored in universities (the opposite of France and Italy), this European society of savants is described by Morhof as a Platonic notion of the ideal and perfect society, a humanissima et fecundissima conversatio between civilized men. An abstraction no doubt, but one that was nonetheless faithfully embodied by several of its earthly representations (and we have seen several): Petrarch’s Florentine disciples, the members of Aldus Manutius’s philhellenic academy, the Dupuy brothers’ “cabinet,” Peiresc’s circle of correspondents. This view was not shared by Pierre Bayle, though he was writing in a trade-­oriented and Latin- and French-­speaking Holland then considered to be one of the oldest and most welcoming homelands of commercium litterarium and savant conversation. Recall his famous definition of the Republic of Letters in the article “Catius,” Remark D, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (The Dictionary Historical and Critical): This Common-­Wealth is a State extremely free. The Empire of Truth and Reason is only acknowledged in it; and under their Protection an innocent War is waged against any one whatever. Friends ought to be on their Guard, there, against their Friends, Fathers against their Children, Fathers-­in-­law against their Sons-­in-­law, as in the Iron Age.23 After Morhof, another German professor, from Leipzig this time, Johannes Burckhardt Mencke, reader and above all emulator of Bayle (he took over management of the Acta Eruditorum from his father, Otto Mencke, who had founded them to great European success), thought it necessary to choose between Morhof’s highly civilized vision of conversation and the Homeric and mercilessly critical view held by Pierre Bayle. He published two successive Declamationes in 1713 and 1715, spoken in the university auditorium before his colleagues and their students, entitled De charlataneria eruditorum. This

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critical “journalist” and director of the Acta Eruditorium was careful not to use Bayle’s cold logic to fuel the scientific wars waged in the name of Reason and Truth. In Mencke’s mind, the true cause of breaches of basic civility and tact during conversation between scholars and savants was unrestrained pride. In this sense, Mencke borrowed heavily from writings by French moralists like La Rochefoucauld and Pierre Nicole. The charlatanry of publicity seekers was inevitable among false savants, but more often than not it also corrupted true ones, prompting them to fly off their theoretically stable handles, thereby exposing them to ridicule and even hatred. Both the past and recent history of the Republic of Letters provide countless examples of serious lapses in taste and even simple decency, which saw great minds reduced to the level of intellectual street performers. Mencke was the German Palissot, and his two “declamations,” dripping with a deliciously classical and humanist vein, were, with a head start of a few decades, the equivalent of the Comédie des Philosophes (Comedy of Philosophers, 1760), which would target Voltaire and the parti philosophique at their weakest points. It is regrettable that these two, perhaps overly rich, cultural consommés were never translated into any vernacular European languages. A lesson of such high quality is not as outdated as its excellent Neo-­ Latin might imply.

8 PARISIAN CONVERSATION AND ITS EXPANSION ACROSS EUROPE

One of the most singular qualities of Italian humanism, the program of “studious leisure” established for laymen by Petrarch (1304–1374) and adopted by the first Republic of Letters in the sixteenth century, was its gamble on the “restoration” of Latin. In his Convivio, which was not published until 1490, Dante had tried to make the scientific encyclopedia of his day accessible to laymen by writing it in Tuscan. Without renouncing Dante’s ambitions for an “illustrious vernacular,” Petrarch focused his own efforts on a “renaissance” of ancient Latin (this despite having achieved fame thanks notably to his Canznoniere and Trionfi). He was crowned a poet in Rome for the first verses of Africa (modeled after the Latin Aeneid), which he hoped to associate with a renaissance of ancient Greek. In Petrarch’s mind, Latin could no longer remain the modern language of the school, used only by clergymen, theologians, and men of science. It had to re-­become what it had been during the pagan and Christian Roman Empires: the language of persuasive eloquence and enchanting poetry. For that, Latin needed to renew its ties to rhetoric, poetry, and imitation of the Ancients. This rejuvenated Latin (Erasmus was entirely faithful to Petrarch in this respect) was meant to seduce a lay public, which medieval clergy had deemed ignorant, with savant “letters.” However, this “return to antiquity” (meaning both pagan authors and church fathers) harbored a contradiction that would become characteristic of Italian humanism and, to a large extent, of European humanism. This paradox was already visible in works by Petrarch and his favorite student, Boccaccio. It lies at the heart of what historians of sixteenth-­century Italian humanism named the Questione della lingua, which is indissociable in many ways from the Ciceronian quarrel over the best style of “restored” Latin. Petrarch—a philologist, collector and collator of manuscripts, and author of treatises and poems in “classic” Latin—also penned literary masterpieces in the vernacular or “vulgar” language, which would incidentally influence each of Europe’s “living” linguistic centers until the eighteenth century. Boccaccio, who became a European author thanks to his Decameron, written in Tuscan, finished his life as a student of the Latinist Petrarch by writing compilations 133

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in Latin (Famous Women, Genealogy of the Gods). These two kinds of works, which inspired humanism, led to two parallel but nonetheless strictly hierarchized developments: the Latin Republic of Letters, which made philology and antiquarianism its core subjects, which would foster the “humanities” and literary disciplines; and the variety of new national literatures, which had been in the shadows, for a more or less long time, of the Neo-­Latin literature endorsed by the Republic of Letters. Despite the success of Erasmus’s works, the Latin Republic of Letters could not reach the entire existing audience of national literatures. It could, however, inspire its respect thanks to this republic’s international authority, which was based on its mnemonic and linguistic links with antiquity, the shared treasure of Europe. This relative linguistic, philological, and scientific esotericism did not, for all that, renounce its aims of conquering a much larger public, or at least not until the first third of the seventeenth century. Following Petrarch’s example, it relied on accessible genres: eclogues, eulogies, utopian and allegorical accounts (More’s Utopia, 1518; Bartolommeo d’Elbene’s Civitas veri, 1609), and even allegorical novels (Barclay’s Argenis, 1621). But it was nonetheless the new national literatures (beginning with Italy’s) that attracted a larger and mostly noble public, of mixed gender and literate, though ignorant of the Latin used by humanists, and which had inherited, in its own language, literary traditions that dated back to the Middle Ages rather than to antiquity. Pleasure was on the side of poets, novelists, and essayists writing in the vernacular. Knowledge, based in antiquity, was on the side of the Neo-­Latin humanists. Translation bridged the two universes (the most famous example, in the sixteenth century, being of course the translation of Amyot’s Vies parallèles [Parallel Lives, 1565–1575]). This diglossia within European humanism had its roots in Italy, and would long influence northern Europe thanks to the prestige of the model suggested by Petrarch and successfully perfected by his many Italian successors. By the sixteenth century, however, signs of a rupture with the Italian-­humanist model had begun to emerge. The Latin Republic of Letters, which stretched to northern Europe, was applying philological criticism to law, history, and Holy Writ, and developing an entire range of disciplines (geography, cosmography, astronomy, zoology, phytology, and so on) on the basis of the best-­known texts of antiquity. This expanding encyclopedia was not adapted to “classic” and literary Latin, even if it continued to use it for its major publications. Beginning in the early seventeenth century, savant conversation and correspondence would resort to Italian or French. At the same time, the influence of the Latin Republic of Letters, which had managed to endure and grow until the 1630s, was in rapid decline, at least in France and England. The role played by France, and notably Paris, in this turning point for Euro-

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pean sciences and letters cannot be exaggerated. The “language question,” which was formulated differently in France than it was in Italy, was a major factor in this phenomenon. The Italian program of maintaining two literary languages (one rediscovered by humanist philology: the elegant Latin of the “Ciceronians”; the other, a literary Italian, written more often than spoken, and dependent on imitation of the former) was a conservative one. It restored distant forms of things. It relegated the mind to the margins, as Galileo saw firsthand, as strictly as inquisitorial censorship did. This loyalty to Cicero’s Rome slowed the use of Latin as a technical language and perpetuated within Italian letters an error already made by the French Pléiade: the “mannerist” and scholarly imitation of antiquity intended for a restricted public. Under Henry IV, France liberated itself from these dual constraints. In a few decades not only did the “King’s French” become a living literary language distinct from scholarly imitation of the Ancients, but it was adopted more and more willingly by “new savants” who themselves stopped relying on classical authorities: Mersenne, Descartes, Desargues, Pascal. But I prefer to avoid the term “rupture” here. In reality, the variety and complexity of the French landscape were such that it is easy to observe, for example, the extreme vitality of Neo-­L atin poetry in France during the seventeenth century or a stubborn loyalty to the Pléiade’s poetic program as late as Louis XIV’s reign. Neither Mersenne nor Descartes nor Pascal seized philosophical and scientific power overnight. The reigning discipline of the sixteenth-­century humanist philology would continue to occupy brilliant minds and produce high-quality works until the eighteenth century. Gassendi and Huet continued to publish in Latin. But a major obstacle—the Italian myth of uninterrupted continuity, from the peninsula, of antiquity to the Renaissance—had nonetheless been lifted in France. Why there? That Italian myth had always encountered resistance, even when it fascinated the most. An “arcanum” of the French monarchy challenged its docile reception. According to that competing national myth—translatio studii ad Francos (the transfer of studies to France)—the cycle of classical knowledge was over. Another cycle, fulfilling the first but to a superior degree, had originated in France. This myth was therefore also an act of prophetic and philosophical faith. It prompted, for example, the future cardinal of Bérulle to encourage a young Descartes, who intended to liberate Christian science from Aristotle’s yoke. But why was this act of faith so deliberately and widely shared? For now, let’s simply note that Mersenne, Descartes, Pascal, and Malebranche indeed unveiled an entirely new and open horizon of thought, finally giving form to the myth of translatio studii ad Francos. We can also postulate that the emergence of a “new public,” educated in excellent schools particularly attentive to their young stu-

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dents and centered in Paris, favored and supported this philosophical and scientific phenomenon. If this “new public” existed, it was undoubtedly because Paris had, under the Bourbons, truly become the political and military capital of the kingdom and the center of European affairs. The French nobility moved to Paris en masse. They constructed magnificent private mansions. They set the tone. These men and women were the “public” whose attention one needed to gain. But this French nobility, which was becoming, often unwillingly, a leisure caste, now prided itself on speaking French with the utmost elegance and wit. Even if they had pursued humanist studies, its princes and gentlemen hastened to play down that common stock. Traditionally, they had strived for valor (though their warrior vocation did oblige them to acquire some technical skills) and gallantry (which required an understanding of poetry and music). Now they wanted to be “esprits forts.” Montaigne had prepared the playing field for them, free of prejudice, on which Descartes and Pascal were waiting. Cartesian cosmology, which had already conquered Parisian salons at the time of Molière’s Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies, 1672), is the subject of a gallant dialogue in the park in Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 1686). “New science” and the “Moderns” literary party together played off the fear of being taken in or fooled, which characterized this intelligent and prestigious public of leisure. It was through that brilliant and idle public that the “universality of the French language,” which was then establishing itself at the expense of scholarly Latin, maintained its sway over courtly Europe. When Pierre Bayle wrote his Dictionnaire historique et critique (The Dictionary Historical and Critical), published in 1697, in which he summarizes in French the essence of three centuries of humanism, safeguarding it for the Age of Enlightenment, he took into account the recent expansion of the Republic of Letters in France. To those erudite humanists who reproached him for having made too many concessions to the curiosity of the ignorant, he responded with Suite des réflexions sur le prétendu jugement du public (More Reflections on the Pretended Judgment of the Public, September 17, 1697).1 In another essay that he would similarly append to subsequent editions of his Dictionary, “Dissertation sur le jour” (A Dissertation upon the Day), Bayle, in the guise of an erudite clash of opinions relating to the measure of time, dedicates most of his reflection to his own conception of “journalism” and modern science: knowledge would no longer be esoteric nor revealed once and for all at an arbitrary moment in time. He writes that truth had become the “fille du Temps.” Not that it was not dependent on the vagaries of opinion; revealing itself bit by bit, the object of a critical judgment in time, truth had to nonetheless work to garner an opinion that was, ultimately, its judge

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and jury. The Republic of Letters was no longer a hierarchical state divided between clergy and laymen, savants and the ignorant. It was a network of more or less erudite circles, whose center moved around over time, and which, from day to day, from crisis to crisis, worked to unveil and understand truth. The pride and independent-­mindedness of the Parisian public of leisure precipitated this metamorphosis. Apart from renouncing science, savants could not ignore this new configuration. As for Bayle, he had the feeling that by publishing a critical memoir of Europe in an abbreviated, and seemingly capricious, form, he was not only forming and feeding the judgment of the public but helping to give it a taste of critical thinking. He taught it to submit the legacy of humanist erudition to methodical Cartesian doubt. He preserved the gains of the old Republic of Letters, while making them intelligible and appetizing for a new public of amateurs, henceforth an integral part of a new Republic of Letters. Paris’s aristocratic “class of leisure” thus earned a “right of bourgeoisie” in the Republic of Letters during the seventeenth century. It became the arbitrator of all things related to the mind and, in exchange, provided that realm, previously reserved for men of the church or commoners, a freedom, authority, and vivacity that would have its members believe in the return of the Athens of Pericles and Plato. For the first time since Greek and Latin antiquity, the new French letters that succeeded the humaniores litterae of the old Respublica litteraria in the seventeenth century had the chance to rely on a literary and scholarly language that was also a living and spoken language. The gap between a written, savant language and “vulgar” tongues disappeared in the language of Vaugelas, Malebranche, and Bayle. The consequences of this French occurrence, both imperceptible and considerable, were also far-­reaching. The most obvious one was the changed center of gravity of the intellectual realm. The origin and object of knowledge were no longer timeless, situated in the fixed skies of ancient cosmology or in an antiquity offering two kinds of revelations: the “natural” and the “supernatural.” They now took the form of “innovations” developing from the critical reflection of the Republic of Letters, whose concentric circles encompassed savants, demisavants, and sophisticated “amateurs” who read and spoke the same language: French. The classical hierarchy of disciplines gave way to a liberal convergence, expressed by budding journalism and the proliferation of quarrels. Every day brought news and debates that sparked brief, brilliant essays, which allowed the “public” to participate in a current and evolving state of knowledge. Thanks to the linguistic homogeneity between savants and the public, between studious leisure and society leisure, the public not only gained access to scientific innovations and related discussions, it could also argue and openly choose a side. The Republic of Letters became part of a

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vast oral phenomenon, integrating a kind of public opinion that it would henceforth have to take into the utmost account. This was “French conversation,” whose encyclopedism and cosmopolitanism grew rapidly throughout the eighteenth century and whose authority and curiosity were concentrated in the Parisian salons dazzling all of Europe. The “disposition” of private mansions, that is, their decor and plastic and decorative arts, helped create, along with garden arts, a fluid, shiny, and pliable milieu for this grand French phenomenon of oral sociability. The importance gained by “French conversation” during the reign of Louis XIV is undoubtedly due, as previously mentioned, to the aristocracy’s newfound availability, the conversion of their leisure activities to the realm of the mind and heart. This noble spirit of leisure, first foreseen by Montaigne, was linked to the audaciously skeptical character and facets of modern knowledge. In an impressive essay, preface to his Nouveaux dialogues des dieux (New Dialogues of the Gods), entitled “Discours sur la nature du dialogue” (Discourse on the Nature of Dialogue, 1711), Toussaint Rémond de Saint-­Mard, a close friend of the Comte de Caylus and his charming mother, links this new mode of knowledge to the classical precedents of the Platonic Academy, the Ciceronian New Academy, and the irony of Lucien. But it would only reach its peak, according to Saint-­Mard, with Fontenelle, one of Descartes’s disciples: I do not know why a decisive air has become so fashionable. Perhaps people cannot imagine that it demonstrates both vanity and ignorance. When they consider an object, they are then audacious enough to judge it. They have turned it in every direction, they like to say, clearly seen its every facet. But who knows? Is it not possible that something escaped the mind? Who can know if the object does not have facets that were not given to be observed? The pleasure of study should suffice for our Reason. Mysterious and obtuse as it is, it is not suited to deciding. Enlightenment could thus only emerge when minds confronted one another: through their very limits and individual inclinations they contributed, as long as they did not claim to know everything, to as comprehensive a perspective as was possible. The art of conversation was therefore an effort to obtain generalized and liberal knowledge. While it may have been suited to an aristocratic and lettered leisure, to its noble temptations, like the prevailing “curiosity” in “vanity” and “idleness,” it was also in its own way a response to the prerequisites of modern research, to the methodical and critical doubt inspiring it, and to the dialectic of experience governing its stumbles and advances. Within the “new science,” journalism, literature, and conversation, to varying

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degrees of intensity, a certain cognitive harmony emerged: “new savants” recognized and claimed the generalized dialogism of the “new men and women of letters” of Parisian high society, replete with its irony and art of submitting all things to the intuitive and penetrating trap of the mind. Here, women played an essential and even decisive role in a fortunate reversal of the injustice that had deprived them of a humanist or scholastic education. In Recueil de ces messieurs (The Gentlemen’s Collection, attributed to Caylus),2 the author suggests that, in theory, the lack of interest in educating a young girl allows her every opportunity to “think on her own,” a chance refused, in contrast, to educated young men: She gathers her ideas on impressions of objects, she reflects; soon, she makes comparisons, then she draws conclusions, and her reason is formed. Her thoughts, emerging one after the other, are always just. One might say she of necessity observes objects of little importance; but I hardly know which ones are more important than others. What matters is seeing them as they are. For that matter, what is more important than studying men and knowing their character? To see the difference in education, it suffices to see a young man leaving his school in the presence of a younger sister. He knows neither what he says, nor what he hears, whereas his sister makes continual conversation, and sometimes is its very soul. Why? Because she never learned Latin. Why did the Romans, they say, have brighter minds than us? It is because they did not learn Latin, but since they learned Greek, the Greeks who had learned nothing had even brighter minds than they. Thus I conclude that one must love, esteem and respect women. It would even be best to love them all at once, if only to love the variability. Marivaux’s Marianne, quickly “adopted” by the habitués of Madame de Tencin’s salons (Madame Dorsin in the novel), echoes this definition of enlightened feminine naïveté, a model for the noble époché, itself spontaneously resonant with common “good sense.” With the linguistic and erudite barrier lifted, “French conversation,” an awakening to the enlightened “naïveté” of attic dialogues, united people of letters and people of “polite” society, the kaloïkagathoï (handsome and good)—though politically irresponsible—in an intellectual equality that enlarged the citizenship of the Republic of Letters to anyone who had received the “grace” imagined by Descartes in the famous hyperbole in his Discourse: “good sense [is] of all things among man, the most equally distributed.”3 However, French conversation’s influence over Europe and within the new Republic of Letters did not take hold in France itself without resistance. It

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was the subject of a fierce debate that lasted throughout the reign of Louis the Great (who did his best to firmly associate conversation with his court). This debate brought theologians, moralists, novelists, and playwrights into the fray. Though a unanimous consensus had been reached on the rules of civility, which applied uniformly and internationally to active life and leisure life, civilized conversation (linked in Paris to the idea of “living nobly”) was a passionate and controversial subject on which most of France’s greatest classical authors took a stance. Its staunchest defenders were of course Molière (from Les Précieuses ridicules [The Precious Ridiculous] to Les Femmes savantes [The Learned Ladies], peaking with Le Misanthrope [The Misanthrope]) and La Fontaine (Les Amours de Psyché et Cupidon [The Loves of Cupid and Psyche] and Discours à Mme de La Sablière [Address to Madame de la Sablière]). La Fontaine was linked to a French aristocracy particularly concerned with protecting its leisure time, its sole remaining freedom, from the “enslavement” of the royal court and army. He was friends with La Fare and De Chaulieu, the duchesses of Bouillon and Mazarin, Saint-­Évremond, and the Vendômes. He was the poet of conversation, an art of living and understanding that he associated with friendship, “idleness,” and dreaming. No one sensed better than he the deep kinship between “lettered leisure,” as reinvented by humanism for modern laymen, and “noble leisure,” as defined by an entire philosophical tradition reaching back to Aristotle. La Rochefoucauld’s maxims criticized “self-­love” but only to force it toward an “honesty” that would open the mind to the superior exercise of a dialogued and detached reflection on the human condition. This collective oral reflection in effect assumed a radical irony toward the isolated “me” and the emergence of an open-­minded “I” capable of arguing with others. La Rochefoucauld was close to Port-­Royal. Indeed, that link prompted the most strikingly decisive insight into nascent French conversation. In 1670, Pascal’s Pensées and the first series of Pierre Nicole’s Essais de morale (Moral Essays) were published. Pascal’s philosophy of ennui and distraction modernized commonplaces of Christian moral theology, applying them to a new object: the art of conversation as a way of understanding and a way of being “worldly.” This mode of being was, in Pascal’s eyes, an escape from human truth and, by definition, incapable of truth and therefore rest. Only conversion, which brought one face to face with human truth, could create the conditions for true conversation, and therefore for an authentic being and knowledge. Pascal, like Antoine Arnauld, author of Logique ou l’art de penser (Logic or the Art of Thinking), provided more insight than anyone else in the seventeenth century on the psychological conditions and argumentative tools of French conversation. Pierre Nicole, who coauthored Logic, combated the vanity of “ordinary” conversations in his Essays: “Ordinary

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discussion,” he writes, “is accompanied by two things: the forgetting of God and the application to worldly things, and these two things are the source of all temptations.” But, like Pascal, he was all the more driven to seek out, for those minds enlightened by the Christian faith, conditions more favorable to a dialogue with one’s self and others on matters of true import. Augustinian authors would only accept conversation after conversion. Chevalier de Méré took an opposing stance in 1677, in a collection of essays, Discours (De la conversation, Des agréments, De l’esprit) (Discourses on Conversation, Embellishments, and the Mind), in which he defines conversation as an art whose fleeting and challenging “perfection” was enough “to occupy an entire life.” For Pascal, conversation, minus the precondition of Christian conversion, masked an incurable and restless internal void. Méré viewed it as the vehicle to achieving a superior mode of being, “to be of good company.” That conversational being was both the point of departure and arrival for self-­mastery and the discovery of others, both processes endlessly replete with surprises and developments, a musical fugue continuously restarted, whose variations challenged and developed a harmonic genius that fulfilled man’s natural calling. In order to “please those who listen to you,” one needed to adopt a rigorous discipline of leisure. One had to have honed “great precision of taste and sentiment to discover the correct proportion,” different each time, between one’s own me-­ Proteus and others’. Such precision could not be sought out and even less attained except by those naturally blessed and with a “calling” for a higher state. The worldly art of conversation, like other arts, and indeed more than other arts, was not within reach of the common man. Méré writes: It is quite a rare secret to always sense what is most fitting. [. . .] It is a science that is learned like a foreign language [emphasis added], of which one first understands only a little. But when one enjoys and studies it, one quickly makes progress. This art seems to have some sorcery within it; it instructs how to divine and that is the way one discovers a great number of things one would have never clearly seen, and which can be of great utility.4 The case was closed, so to speak, and even Port-­Royal’s severe criticism of society life, which the Solitaires judged to be inattentive and indiscreet, did little but further distance the model of conversation espoused by Méré from utilitarian and frivolous conversation, which that master of society life himself had been the first to scorn. The ideal of French conversation was all the more attractive because it was rare, difficult, and practically required a rite of initiation. In 1688, La Bruyère dedicated a chapter of his Caractères (Characters) to it. Ac-

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cording to the doctrine expressed by Méré, French conversation distinguished society in general, separating the vulgar “monde” (which “the sage sometimes avoids for fear of boredom”) from conversation between friends and between peers, in which all parties know to respect this maxim: “The most delicate of all pleasures consists in promoting the pleasures of others.” The sociology of noble leisure during this period can undoubtedly not be boiled down to the philosophy of the conversation to which it was striving. But that ideal defined the sphere of authority which was attributed to it by the contemporary Republic of Letters and which was in fact concentrated among the elegant elite of Parisian society. Fontenelle was its Socrates for nearly a century (born in 1657, he died in 1757). A member of the Académie Française (1691) and the Académie des Sciences (1699), he served in turn as the oracle of the salons run by Madame de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, and Madame Geoffrin, all while knowledgeably and skillfully serving as the permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences, and writing admirable funeral eulogies for his deceased colleagues. His student Abbot Trublet (who frequented Madame de Tencin’s salon) published an essay on conversation, De la conversation (On Conversation), in 1735 in his Essais sur divers sujets de littérature et de morale (Essays on Various Subjects of Literature and Morality). Along with Moncrif’s essay Sur la nécessité et les moyens de plaire (On the Necessity and Means to Please, 1738), this is the best account of this “classic” period of Parisian conversation: 1730–1750. Abbot Trublet writes: Despite all the flaws that are attributed to the French people, it is in France, and unbiased foreigners agree on this, that one should seek out the talent of conversing. It is more common and more esteemed there than in any other nation. The same disposition that has them enjoy conversation, disposes them to be good at it. They speak easily [this is the facilitas according to Quintilian, the art of improvising as needed] as a result of this same vivacity, which rendering them dependent on themselves, has them seek out conversation to relieve this burden. This then is the principal employment of its honest unoccupied people [emphasis added]. Unlike the calmer and more serious Spaniard, the Frenchman cannot tolerate idle solitude, or be content, as it were, with himself, happy solely through rest. If he has nothing to do, he will seek out someone who will engage him in discussion or whom he will engage. He will find him easily among those people who are the most occupied, who are not always angry to be diverted from a boring and tiresome task for a few moments. “Diversion,” described by Pascal to better condemn it, was so successful that it subsequently became part of the definition of the French national charac-

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ter. But it remained the French leisure class, nobles and educated men and women gathered in Parisian salons, who represented the pinnacle, like an unrivaled team or national orchestra, of a French national disposition elevated to the level of a grand modern art: The pleasure of conversation among the French people blends with all other pleasures and sometimes seems to nearly exclude them. They go to the theater to talk, rather than to see the show itself. Those which they call parlor or society games are often merely a conversation held while holding cards. The same is true of their meals: The pleasure of conversing with agreeable guests is to them the spice added to good food. And the choice and assortment of guests play an important role in what they call the art of “donner à manger,” or knowing how to feed others. The pleasure of conversation mixed with that of good food is itself protection against intemperance. And indeed the French spend longer, and are nonetheless the most sober, at their meals than most other peoples. The Parisian parliament of French conversation gave rise to an oral literary genre. Abbot Trublet would go so far as to distinguish its “sub-­genres” with a subtlety of observation comparable to that of his friend Marivaux, who said of his plays and novels that they had to be the mirrors of conversation. Abbot Trublet writes: We must distinguish two types of conversation: one that is ordered and develops on one same subject [the successor of the “conference” as defined by Montaigne]; the other during which one speaks successively of several different things, as led by chance. The latter is the more common, and the most in keeping with the French genius. These oral miscellanea corresponded to the variety of news items published by journals. They also responded to the kind of publications favored by the public under the Regency and under Louis XV: Anas, Esprits (by De Fontelle, Voltaire, and so on), Essais, and Recueils, all “compilations” without apparent order, which included, on a superior level, Bayle’s Dictionary. But in order to gain a more precise understanding of the mobility and rapidity of which eighteenth-­century instrumentalists of French conversation were capable, we must examine—in addition to Watteau’s admirable “drawings of attitudes”—the oft-­forgotten masterpiece, to which I refer above, by Paradis de Moncrif, reader to King Louise XV: Essai sur la nécessité et sur les moyens de plaire. It should be studied in comparison with Rémond de Sainte-­Albine’s Le Comédien (The Comedian, new edition, 1749). A “gay knowledge” of “being together,” in other words the raison d’être of a society, takes shape in both the

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analysis offered by Moncrif of the man of leisure and conversation and the lively reflection on theater proposed by Sainte-­Albine. Moncrif’s text merits inclusion here in its entirety: This [the desire to please] gives the soul over to the most fortunate traits that we have acquired from nature or education, whether they relate to one’s physique or one’s character. Without it, men blessed with these advantages can in no way attain their true value. It suffices to consider them by their cause and effect to understand this is true. In general, there are, when we move, when we speak, certain bodily dispositions, certain expressions in the face, gestures, and voice, settled upon (it appears) for each nation, to render a given sentiment or thought, and we regard the best choice between these actions as the most natural, which form what we call an air of learning, a worldly air, in a word, which is appreciated on our exterior, and applauded independently of the regularity of one’s physique. In the person speaking, exterior grace depends on a certain balance between what he is saying and the action that accompanies it. One and the other must result from the same idea in the mind, and from that of the person listening and watching. And in the same way that the art of the best actors in their profession lies in capturing these happy actions, changing them only slightly, with nuance, in a way that accords the most precisely to the heart of the character and the current situation of the person they are playing, it is the greatest or least finesse of the mind and feeling that makes these actions more or less agreeable among worldly people. Moreover, one should observe that, in the same way that these settledupon actions, which distinguish each Nation, vary in a perceptible manner in persons of different situations, one’s facial expressions, gestures, and voice become a second language [this is nearly verbatim Méré] which has its own style and which marks, as do the choice of words and their pronunciation, a more or less refined extraction, or at least an honest or bad education. It is without a doubt an advantage that an exterior that pre­sents one favorably also accredits, in advance, those other qualities that may adorn us. We see people who, even when they are conversing on a subject of little interest, have the art of exciting, intensifying, capturing your attention, by the way they set their gaze on you, or by an immense grace in their actions, that inspires your desire to applaud them, and even to discover in them more wit and insight than initially appears.

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But, when this happy balance of gesture and thought, this eloquence of gaze, this grace in action, always desirable qualities, are merely a fortunate disposition of organs, when that which touches us in them has no other connection with us than the agreeable impression it offers our senses, then their effect on us is only discernible the first time we experience it. Soon habit renders us indifferent, unless a certain soul, which only sentiment can produce, maintains those qualities. To discern which is the soul that ensures the success of those qualities one believes must be successful on their own, let us return to the man I described with an exterior that plays so powerfully in his favor. If you seek the cause of the happy impressions he has on you, you will know they are born of an enthusiasm in him to occupy you, not from the vanity of being heard, but by a desire to attract your attention and your approval, which implies that he holds your esteem in high regard. All those who, like you, surround him will remain persuaded that this distinct enthusiasm, these obliging glances, though directed successively at all those present, were addressed to him or her in preference. This idea will be imprinted on each of them: he dreams only of pleasing me. It is therefore the disposition of the mind and not of the body that imports on our exterior. Embellishments of bearing and gesture, which exist only in the agreed upon regularity of movements, are purely arbitrary. What is graceful in this regard in Paris can be different in Madrid or London. But this air of attention, of enthusiasm, that satisfaction in seeing you, produced by the desire to please, is always successful, and distinguishes itself everywhere, even in men whose language we do not understand. It signals a will to get close to us, which flatters us, by praising us, and inclines us to applaud and like these men. “Savoir-­vivre,” extended to a heightened degree of self-­awareness and intuitiveness toward others, became both a philosophy and a dance of life. Mirroring this Parisian urbanity, the literature of the time (Marivaux, Crébillon fils) was capable of an analytical subtlety that would only be rediscovered by the “worldly” novelists of the 1880–1914 period (Bourget, James, and Proust). This literature happily interpreted the meaning of movements, facial expressions, attitudes, gestures, and vocal inflections: this implicit, evasive, and oblique “second language,” spoken entirely with “finesse,” was linked, according to a widely held belief at the time, to the language of plastic arts. This was the French version of ut pictura poesis. Speech had nothing to lose within this “interaction with non-­verbal signs.” Under Louis XIV, the Jesuit Bouhours5 and his disciples Montfaucon de Villars6 and Morvan de Bellegarde7 had established the prem-

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ises of a rhetoric specific to French conversation, a liberated successor to the classical sermo, which was distinct from similar and much more modest attempts begun by Italy8 and Spain.9 The theoretical contribution of Jesuit (or affiliated) rhetoricians to French conversation is impressive. Their fear of undoing the success the Provincial Letters had brought to Port-­Royal convinced them of the need to sacrifice, to a certain degree, their attachment to Latin and scholarly rhetoric. However, as relates to this theory of modern French dialogue, Port-­Royal’s contribution, despite its strong Augustinian suspicion of society life, was unrivaled. To Pascal’s deep musings on the art of persuasion can be added Arnauld and Nicole’s Logic, in 1662, and then L’Art de parler (The Art of Speaking, 1678) by Bernard Lamy, an Oratorian very close to Port-­Royal, whose text would continue to bear influence until the beginning of the nineteenth century. The two schools of the philosophy of conversation were very different, if not in direct conflict. For that matter, they were not the only ones. Bypassing for the moment educators like René Bary, an epicurean “school,” evoked (after Gassendi) by Molière, La Fontaine, Méré, and Saint-­Évremond, also contributed to the theoretical Parisian debate on modern knowledge equally reliant on oral and written dialogue. During this debate, which continued into the eighteenth century, the Parisian “monde” did not lack for masters of strictly French rhetoric. Michel Foucault and Gérard Genette were the first to draw attention to Dumarsais’s Traité des tropes (Treatise on Tropes, 1729–1730), since placed in context by a compilation by Françoise Douay.10 Pragmatic linguists discovered in their turn the canon Gamaches, author in 1718 of Les Agréments du langage réduits à leurs principes (Embellishments of Language Reduced to Their Principles), the third part of which was republished by Jean-­Paul Sermain.11 In his excellent preface, Sermain highlights the text’s “modernity,” notably common concerns with the most current linguistics of enunciation: “presupposition, communicational interaction, polyphony, integration of the other’s voice.” We can extract similar value from the previously cited text by Rémond de Saint-­ Mard. The great grammarian Dumarsais was a frequent and faithful visitor to Madame de Lambert’s Malebranchian and Fénelonian salon. And Gamaches, a member of the Académie des Sciences, like Fontenelle, was cited by Voltaire. Toussaint Rémond de Saint-­Mard was a frequent guest of both Madame de Tencin and Madame de Caylus. This phenomenon did not occur by accident or chance. Eighteenth-­century salons, far from mere anecdotal history, deserve to be the object of both social and philosophical history. In the upper circles of French conversation, literary leisure and aristocratic leisure composed—this must be emphasized—a veritable parliament of the new Republic of Letters that displayed a disconcerting

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creativity and vitality, and whose field of competence extended to moral philosophy, literature, arts, varied sciences, but also diplomacy. The links between major Parisian salons (led by Madame de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, and Madame Geoffrin, for example) and royal academies, and not merely the Académie Française, placed them at the intersection of the most difficult fields of knowledge in their most modern guises. Even the salon at the Château de Sceaux, between 1700 and 1715, which may appear to be the most dazzlingly short-­lived, counted academicians of sciences and inscriptions among its regulars. The Duchess du Maine received an excellent literary and scientific education from her teacher Malézieu. And at Châtenay, where Malézieu made astronomical observations using Cassini’s method, which would later become a discipline at the Académie des Sciences, the duchess was his assistant. While at Sceaux, she often received Madame du Châtelet, who with Voltaire introduced Newton to France. Both women were “geometricians.” The sciences and politeness and gallantry were not the only outlets of noble leisure. The mediator of Europe since the treaties of Westphalia, eighteenth-­ century Paris was the object of increased attention from other capitals. Ambassadors and foreign agents aspired to enter Parisian salons. And French conversation was a remarkable vector for diplomatic negotiations: information was exchanged firsthand, and valuable friendships developed. Grimm, the author of Correspondance littéraire (Literary Correspondence), was such a well-­ connected diplomatic agent that European courts fought over him. Parisian dialogue was also a delicate and effective instrument of European stability, whose pressure gauge was located in Paris and Versailles. London had its own Parisian salon under Charles II, led by the Duchess Mazarin, who was assisted by Saint-­Évremond. In 1709, Shaftesbury wrote an “Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour” (immediately translated into French and published in The Hague in 1710), in which he emphasizes that the foundations of “reason” are freedom of controversy and noble candor as expressed through conversation. David Hume, in his 1748 Essay on the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, avidly read in Paris, to which he traveled frequently, admits that while the French monarchy may be somewhat arbitrary in terms of politics, it is “civilized” and “tempered” by the influence of the conversation which it allows and which spreads the “politeness of manners” all while favoring the liberal arts. Hume nonetheless defends the English political freedom deprived the French aristocracy, which he nonetheless recognizes is less favorable to the gentleness of manners and arts. That admiration for the French “douceur” and feeling of political superiority were shared by Lord Chesterfield, a Whig who frequented the salons of Madame de Tencin

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and Madame Geoffrin, and whose antiquarianism and reputation as a literary and artistic “connoisseur” was rewarded by his election to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1755. After his death in 1773, his Letters from Lord Chesterfield to his Son, which he had sent to his son during his Grand Tour of Europe, were published. These letters written during the young man’s sojourn in Paris from 1755 to 1756 are among the best foreign accounts of French conversation during the reign of Louis XV, before Rousseau’s encyclicals condemning it in La Nouvelle Héloïse (The New Heloise) and Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (Letter to Monsieur d’Alembert on the Theater). The long-­distance education offered by Lord Chesterfield offers the most dramatic contrast there is to that described by Rousseau in Émile. Trained in sports and military arts at the Académie de La Guérinière, the young Philip Stanhope was sent to receive the final polish to his sentimental, diplomatic, and political education in Paris’s salons, under the guidance of the female heads of households who were friends with his father. He was to hone his literary judgment and artistic taste with French conversation, so intrinsic to the Republic of Letters and Arts, before joining the Parliament of London. At this turning point of the century (remember that Voltaire left the court of Versailles in 1750 to accompany Frederick II of Prussia to Potsdam and Berlin), the French “leisure class,” which had been integrated into the Republic of Letters and Arts, took on not only a Europe-­wide role of choosing talent and critiquing works, but also of educating the royal, political, and diplomatic international elite. But this class was deprived, barring carefully restricted exceptions at court, of any exercise of political power. It was deprived of economic power by the abuse of pensions and other forms of royal allowances and privileges, and by the prevailing prejudice that led to the derogation of any noble exercising a lucrative profession. Finally, it was deprived of any “mediatic” power by another insurmountable prejudice that barred its members from writing for the public or declaring oneself an author. Stripped by the monarchic state of all “vulgar” powers, all that remained to France’s leisure class was its badge of superior taste and manners. That would not be enough, however, for it to shield a discredited monarchy, which had been the first to condemn its noblesse d’épée to impotence.

9 FORTIN DE LA HOGUETTE’S “TESTAMENT”

The principal work published by Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette (1585– 1668?), Testament ou Conseils d’un père à ses enfants sur la manière dont il faut se conduire dans le monde (Testament, or Advice of a Father to his Children on the Manner in Which One Should Behave in the World, 1648), has long misled literary critics and historians. Its title can give the impression of a moralizing, pompous composition, in line with those strewn upon Paris by Puget de La Serre during the reign of Louis XIII. And a glance at the table of contents (“Duties towards God, towards oneself, towards man”) indeed does little to encourage the modern reader. But though its content can initially appear trivial, the form and notably the uncommon genre of Testament should at least merit our attention. When Fortin published this text, he was sixty-­three years old, his military career was over, and it was time to write his Mémoires. During the seventeenth century, the aristocratic memoir genre was also a moral “testament”: it often concluded with “advice” from the author to his descendants and its significance came primarily from a lineage whose noble titles it established and whose moral tradition it cultivated.1 This historical, first-­person narrative also offered, in the long term and in a much larger theater, an “authentic” and “first-­hand” account of the political and military affairs in which the author had been involved and which were important (for both the author and his gens) to make known for his own honor, and not according to the perspective of official historians, whose servile pens were invariably quick to flatter kings and their ministers at the nobility’s expense. Memoirs were therefore destined for publication but only at the desired time, when the subject’s family deemed it opportune, sometimes well after his death. Most of these characteristics are absent from Fortin’s Testament. Self-­published twenty years before the author’s death, the work has as little in common with a first-­person, historical account as does Montaigne’s Essays or Charron’s Wisdom. Fortin, an officer of modest rank, did not play an important enough role in the military or diplomatic affairs of his day to dream of taking a starring role in posterity. Any historical debate thus excluded, nothing was stopping the immediate publication of a book that provided an appraisal 149

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of one man’s experience, albeit as related to wisdom and not any political, military, or diplomatic “heroism.” That said, like Montaigne’s Essays, Fortin de La Hoguette’s moral reflections are based on a fragmented autobiography, and his general advice is often drawn from lived experiences recounted in the first person. Testament is not a self-­portrait, however. Fortin has neither Montaigne’s literary authority nor his flippancy. Neither memoir nor essay nor impersonal moral treatise in the style of Charron, in reality, Fortin’s work corresponds less to one genre than to many. It was conceived of by a highly cultivated writer with sufficient talent to pursue his own aims, befitting his own resources, using various freely “imitated” models. But in order for Testament to escape triviality, and reward the researcher, a few things had to occur: the progressive elucidation of Fortin de La Hoguette’s unpublished correspondence (begun in 1888 by Tamizey de Larroque);2 the patient reconstitution of his bibliography (an effort in which René Pintard played a decisive role);3 and finally a broad historical and philological endeavor, brought to fruition by Giuliano Ferretti (including, among others, the surprising and definitive attribution of the text Remonstrance au Roy [Remonstrance to the King, 1628] to Fortin).4 The author’s personality permeates the book and justifies an interpretation of it as less “conformist” than its appearance may suggest. Even (or especially) when he published his works, Fortin, a close friend of La Mothe Le Vayer and Peiresc and a frequent correspondent of the Dupuy brothers and other “erudite libertines,” was very prudent and forced his readers to pay close attention to the text. At this point, I propose a closer examination of Fortin’s chapter on conversation (part 2, chapter 32), which has been passed over by historians of ideas and manners. Now that we have a better understanding of Fortin de La Hoguette’s “double life” as a military officer in service to the king and a “citizen of the Republic of Letters,” this chapter also takes on a new depth and significance. It follows a list of Fortin’s recommendations on political behavior, also in part 2, to those who wish to “follow the court.” In 1648, when the Fronde was erupting, these strictly loyalist recommendations were an invaluable contribution to Mazarin and the regent’s cause. The success of Testament, which was republished continuously until the end of the century, proves that these recommendations of sacrosanct loyalty to the king and his favorites had an audience in a vast public disinclined to civil disorder. Like Naudé, and like many “erudite libertines” with whom he associated, even if he did not entirely share their daring, Fortin was on the side of a legitimate monarchic order, which guaranteed the political order, that opposed dissenters rallying the masses. Nonetheless, he was not interested in educating a “courtesan” or even a “man of court.” However,

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we have to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. . . . In other words, a poor nobleman could not build a career, arrange a good marriage, establish his “house,” and ensure the fortune of his children without a certain degree of success at court. That method was for that matter morally preferable to the manipulations and blackmail, so costly to the public good, on which relied France’s most rebellious lords and their loyal supporters, beneficiaries of the generous “accommodations” at court. But even along this honest and legitimate path, one must first and foremost “give to God what belongs to God.” Fortin adds: “and to oneself what belongs to oneself.” The table of contents of Testament is therefore not as didactic as it may seem at first glance. This “treatise of court” was in fact included in a book dedicated to duties “toward oneself,” which did much to place ambitious “engagement” into perspective. And it was preceded by an entire book dedicated to one’s duties to God, which further increased the interior detachment of the king’s loyal subjects from their own ambitions and the court in which said ambition claimed to manifest loyally and naturally. According to Fortin, such moral conditions make success improbable. The piety he recommends— unscathed by superstition, zealotry, and theological disputes—respectfully adheres to the outlines of the Catholic faith. But this was a religio laici: evangelical and Erasmian, and imbued with the piety of Socrates and classical philosophers, and all the more jealously protective of one’s interior autonomy, a “backroom” where freedom of judgment is whole. How would such a sage then allow himself to be taken in, during the very era in which he “followed the court” and managed his affairs there, by the illusions, intrigues, and servile passions of the courtisanerie? Fortin was no Baltasar Gracián, however, and did not offer his “children” the “solipsistic” tension of the Spanish “hero” or “man of court.” If he sought freedom, as far as it could go, he also wished it to be shared with his spiritual brothers. Lecture, meditation, and prayer supported, in solitude, those who participated at court without dedicating their hearts to it. But other recourses were still indispensable: “The diversion the most ordinary and the most honest in life is conversation.” In this instance, “diversion” is not at all used in the sense ascribed it by Pascal. Rather, it should be understood with the valorizing meaning of the Greek scholê, the Roman otium cum dignitate. Far from “diverting” from salvation, it was one of the paths that led to it. As for “conversation,” the term retained its Latin meaning, conversatio, in the seventeenth century, though it was already becoming specialized. It therefore referred to both “discussions” and, more generally, the friendly and private society in which they took place, as well as its manners, fashions, and style. It was still synonymous with societas and civitas, though limited in the sense

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of a “haven.” For Fortin, the first merit of this “conversation” could be found in the middle ground it occupied between two evils, one potential and the other real. Retreat offered a way to escape the “monde” and society in general: this solution, by condemning man to complete solitude, despite his natural need for speech and therefore society, thus entailed, in the eyes of our humanist, “something quite awful.” Monastic and even cenobitic life, scarcely less reviled than acedia, horrified Fortin, as it did the entire humanistic tradition behind him. For that matter, the “monde” in its most perilous guise was, to Fortin, the “mob,” whose “tumultuous” agitation shattered the soul and scattered it far away. Court caused similar tumult. “Conversation,” on the other hand, involved the selection of “a few particular persons with whom one communicates to avoid the boredom of solitude or the despair of the multitude[s].” Gatherings of trusted friends on the margins of public life were frequent in Paris during the reign of Louis XIII. But let’s limit ourselves for now to discussion of Marolles’s circle, which was mentioned in his Mémoires,5 Conrart’s circle, mentioned by Pellisson in his Histoire de l’Académie française (History of the French Academy),6 and the circle memorialized in Nicolas and Henri de Campion’s Entretiens sur plusieurs sujets (Discussions on Several Subjects).7 These were all societies of men, nonclerical or otherwise, that united friendship and letters according to a classical ideal embodied by the “islands of the Happy” described by Aristotle in his Politics,8 villa dialogues during times of otium, as viewed by Cicero, and Plutarch’s Banquet of Sages. “The art of discussion,” according to Montaigne, provided another model for these confraternities. But Fortin celebrates them by placing them in opposition to the crowd or mob, ruinous to the sage’s autonomy: The faces that meet there make as little impression on us as those who see themselves in dreams. The sound of their words is often hardly better articulated than the noise made by a falling torrent. In this tumult the soul finds nothing to sustain it. Using a comparably forceful style (reflecting an extensive knowledge of Latin texts, notably by Seneca), Fortin names the other dizzying destructor of equanimity as solitude: “The soul stuns itself in its own circuit.” The strong, independent soul can therefore only truly find relief (which implies it has a veritable social eros) in the “presence of a single friend or several.” This relief also comes, as we have seen, from diversion. The “conversation of several friends” (the classical form of friendship being the link between these selfless and peaceful gatherings) “desires,” writes Fortin, “a far greater reach of our soul” and, to the benefit of that “abstraction from us to them,” operates “a much

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greater diversion from our unhappiness.” This cure to the melancholy of the lonely, or those scarred by the vulgar “war of passions,” is also the gentle fulfillment of the natural desire of the human soul: trustingly opening up to someone, confidences, the exchange of good faith. In other words, one of the forms, along with domestic affections, of happiness. But what was true for men was also beginning to apply to women. The Hôtel de Rambouillet granted women access to its “conversation” at nearly the same time (1608–1617) that the Hôtel de Thou became the refuge for a savant academy. In this century of religion and philosophy, negotia, matters of public life, and in particular of court life, weighed and cost all the more because they were conducted with a heightened sense of duty—officia. And what Corneille’s hero would call “politics,” with such distance, did so little to sustain the soul that only the compensation of an intimate circle, in the otium, in private life, and in friendship, could make it bearable for society women and men of letters alike. In a letter written in Saint-­Jean-­de-­Luz in 1661, Mademoiselle de Montpensier tells Madame de Motteville: One also needs all sorts of persons to be able to talk of all sorts of things in conversation, which, to your taste and mine, is the greatest and almost the sole pleasure in life, where I am concerned.9 This parenthetical is all the more significant as the princess and her correspondent were participating at the time in the Franco-­Spanish festivities surrounding the wedding of Louis XIV and Marie-­Thérèse. Though she may have been quite concerned, out of honor and stately duty, to appear in her proper place within this multitude and tumult, La Grande Mademoiselle nonetheless expresses her conviction that “true life is elsewhere,” in a smaller and selective circle of high-­society women. She even dreamt of a conversation society far from the “monde,” of retreat, calm, and shared contemplation.10 For that matter, her correspondent Madame de Motteville constructed her Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’Anne d’Autriche (Memoirs of Madame de Motteville on Anne of Austria and Her Court) on the opposition between the interior circle created by the pious queen, which, with her confidante and rare trusted friends, periodically retreated to feminine cloisters dominated by secular conversation, and the tumultuous court in which the regent exercised his political duties as an actor of the state who demanded a respite from prayer and intimate discussion. For our “soldier philosopher” Fortin de La Hoguette, as for those influential women, the “pleasure of conversation” was not simply an ideal; it was an experience he knew firsthand. In one of the autobiographical glimpses in Testament, Fortin describes the charm and harmony he encountered within the “Dupuy cabinet,” the exclusively male erudite society in which he had partici-

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pated since 1622. It was the oldest and also most exclusive of the secular and literary “confraternities” that flourished in Paris under Louis XIII. (It was also the model that inspired them.) Before it was “animated” by the Dupuy brothers, this private academy11 already boasted a tradition created by Jacques-­Auguste de Thou, himself a leading authority in the Republic of Letters until his death in 1617. When Fortin described this “club” in 1648, which had marked the intersection of French and European higher learning, it was nearing its decline. Pierre Dupuy, “the Pope of Paris,” as Fortin calls him in his correspondence,12 died three years later, in 1651. Nicolas Rigault, who had time to write a Vita of his friend, published in 1651, would pass away soon after, in 1654. The second Dupuy brother, Jacques, passed away in 1656, and the king’s library, which they guarded, stopped supplying its books to their erudite academy. One would have preferred that Fortin supply us with a more precise and lively account of those daily meetings. For want of that detail, the author of Testament goes straight to the essential: the spiritual exercise the Dupuy society represented to him. He writes: God graced me, while I was at Court, with having been received for thirty years in a society of two brothers, of one name, of famed merit and life, who are the Messieurs Dupuy. Each word matters: the religious vocabulary; the implicit opposition between the “confraternity” and the court, between society prestige and true greatness; the quasi-­holy secrecy surrounding the two Adelphes. The “grace” mentioned by Fortin is not so different from that discovered, among the Philotheas of the seventeenth century, society women on the sidelines of an agitated world, as recommended by Saint Francis de Sales in his Introduction to the Devout Life, by habitués of the salons of Madame de Rambouillet and Mademoiselle de Scudéry. But the Dupuys’ Gallican “parlor,” off-­limits to women, was to the Benedictine convent what Artenice’s intimate circle was to the female convent: a secular “conversation,” a product of the Renaissance and the Abbey of Thelema, imbued with pietas litterata, and untouched by all rules except Rabelais’s “Do what thou wilt.” Jean Chapelain, who was also active at court, evolved comfortably in these two “friendship societies,” the most intense in Paris at the time. He was equally at home in the scientific conversation of the Hôtel de Montmor. Fortin pre­sents the “Dupuy cabinet” quite simply: Every day, in the evening, there was a certain concert of friends, in which all things passed between them with such harmony, and with such gentleness and discretion, that I never had a trouble on my mind that was not dissipated within this company.

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To describe this society’s inherent “genius,” Fortin turns to chamber-­music metaphors (“concert,” “harmony”), which connected the voices, gestures, and good literary company (gathered in President De Thou’s library on the rue de Poitevins, then, after 1645, in the king’s library on the rue de la Harpe) of those “meetings of [musician] friends” commemorated in a painting by Le Sueur and the famous manuscript La Rhétorique des dieux (The Rhetoric of the Gods), both linked to the lutenist Denis Gaultier.13 Of these great men of letters— who shared news learned through correspondence with their absent friends, discussed recently published or received books, or took from the shelves a work marked with the arms of De Thou or the king—Fortin retained a penetrating and soothing Stimmung, whose therapeutic and regenerative power made this temple of knowledge a sanctuary of serious and fertile joy for the mind and heart alike: Such conversation not only calms our passions, it also brightens our understanding. For it is very certain that meditation would vainly fill the rooms of the mind if not expressed through words. This is why we often see good reasoning lose its force and grace when clear enunciation is lacking, and this enunciation depends only on a certain way of shaping the notions in one’s soul, and placing them in the correct order before expressing them. Conversation gives them shape through words, and we can envisage them much better than when they are shapeless in our imagination. And it is for this reason that we almost always speak aloud what we read and write: words can be judged much more clearly than can thoughts. The historian may have hoped for a “petit fait vrai”: Fortin returns to this savant company’s principles of music and musicians. According to Fortin, each member boasted a perfect balance between “interior speech” and “pronounced speech,” an exact articulation of one or the other. This implied, in the calm of passions, a method of meditation and reading that organized thoughts into language—voces (words and voice)—meaning in the desire to be spoken and accepted by the other, in the call to dialogue. Conversation, like correspondence, was therefore the touchstone and the locus for a collaboration of thought, the closest man could get to his calling to logos and polis, to thought-­speech and to sociability. The gathering of learned friends was after all a concert whose harmony banished both the mutilated silence of the solitary and the vain noises of the crowd. These were the muses that reigned in the otium studiosum and the Republic of Letters. This concertante metaphor is not unique to Fortin. In his Histoire de l’Acadé-

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mie française (History of the French Academy), published in 1653, Paul Pellisson, a good friend of superintendent Foucquet, does little to hide his nostalgia for the private meetings held at the home of Valentin Conrart before it was commandeered by Cardinal Richelieu to be made into the very official Académie Française. Within the relationship established between “meditation” and “enunciation” by Fortin (who was far from a poet), we can once again spot his debt to Montaigne’s Essays. In “De l’institution des enfants” (Of the Institution of Children), Montaigne (relying on the distinction established by Philo of Alexandria between logos prophorikos [external, exteriorized logos] and logos endiathetos [internal, immanent logos]), speaks of “heads full” of “unfinished matter” and “shapeless conceptions,” but that a force of the mind that “untangles and clears up within” must still “set forth,” in a greater effort of “delivery” than of “conception.”14 Fortin prefers to speak about enunciation, rather than delivery, emphasizing, much more than Montaigne does, qualities of elocution, word choice, syntactical and argumentative order, and even vocal articulation. One can never be demanding enough when it comes to the conditions of this “enunciation,” as the only possible encounter and cooperation between minds depends on it. The Hôtel de Rambouillet was also very punctilious in this respect, though the object of conversation there was “agreement” in matters of taste, not truth. Malherbe was in love with Arthenice, just as he had been a friend of Peiresc. If the Chambre Bleue welcomed poets and lettered men of the vernacular (whose art was inseparable from polite conversation), the “Dupuy cabinet,” as evidenced by Rigault’s Vita eximii Petri Puteani15 and the esteem the Adelphes held for Guez de Balzac, was particularly attentive to the development of French prose, notably its potential to become the instrument of philosophical and erudite collaboration. But even more so than to Malherbe, Fortin refers heavily to Montaigne, borrowing the latter’s philosophy of “discussion.” Individually infirm, human reason finds strength, grows, and learns through dialogue and collegiality. Fortin tempers that reason with the lesson, which gained ground both at the Hôtel de Rambouillet and the Hôtel de Thou, of moral and oral “gentleness” (eutrapelia and euphony) taught, inspired by Cicero, by the Italian trattatisti of urbanity, Castiglione and Guazzo. What was once a duel, a strong and harsh joust, in Montaigne’s essay on “discussion” became regulated and civil, collaboration rather than confrontation, and even loyal, within the Adelphes’ society. If Fortin remains allusive and general on this point in his evocation of the “Dupuy cabinet,” it is because he is addressing, in principle, young gentlemen who would have had limited opportunities to join this scholarly circle or any

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other manifestation of the Republic of Letters. In the Testament, an esoteric work, the homage paid to the Dupuy brothers and their guests, renowned for their discretion and taste for secrecy, had to be subtle. And the experience of a “soldier philosopher” admitted into a milieu very difficult to access was what the Greeks called a “hapax.” The nobility, even educated, was typically attracted to polite conversation societies, products of the Hôtel De Rambouillet. Fortin did not frequent such locales. Nonetheless he felt compelled to reduce the distance between salon conversation and that of the erudite library. Both had shared roots (Renaissance humanism) and shared traits, which Fortin highlights easily. These societies of “liberal leisure,” gathered in private homes far from court, business, and action were all founded—and it is on this critical point that Fortin chooses to conclude his chapter—on the mutual sympathies of their interlocutors and on the harmony established between their individual qualities. Whether savant or polite, conversation assembled elements that were inherently similar, creating a “concert” out of seeming diversity. The result: a “world” that escaped the chaos of the world, a victorious circle prevailing over the confused masses of ordinary society and the weight of pride and ego. From a terrestrial perspective, this was the ideal society, a return to the golden age, be it De Thou’s version or Rambouillet’s. In fact, Fortin concludes with the natural movement of eros that ensures that “eye meets eye, hand meets hand, mouth meets mouth.” He adds: There exist nonetheless between minds several similar elements that feel such affection for one another, that by the mere difference of their assortment, and whatever diversity there may be overall, we can make a certain judgment of a man according to the conversation he finds pleasing. The serious seek out the serious, the mad the harebrained, gentle spirits the calm of a ruelle, but the wisest seek out a society that is innocent, and pleasing, which shapes the mind, and diverts it. It is only the minds of a few friends who all exercise an honorable profession that can meet all these conditions. There were therefore several groves in Epicurus’s garden (the anthropology underlying this text is borrowed from Virgil’s Bucolics: Trahit sua quemque voluptas).16 But the most accomplished group was the one that reunited friends, in the manner of the ancient academy, and following the example of the grand dialogues of antiquity and the Renaissance: Cicero’s Tusculanae, Macrobius’s Saturnalia, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistes, Erasmus’s Convivium religiosum. Each work is reflected in the conversation of the Academia Puteana. So, one wonders, is Fortin de La Hoguette, in this chapter, a witness to the twilight of

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the politia litteraria of the Renaissance and of the dawn of the polite civilization of classic France? The latter, at the least, borrowed its “password” from the former: “conversation, the greatest and possibly the only pleasure in life” according to Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Fortin’s Testament is one of several bridges that enabled if not the fusion, then at least the encounter between two traditions of humanist otium: the “polite” and the “savant.” One particularly clear example comes from Madame de La Sablière’s salon, in which La Fontaine played Voiture’s role and Bernier expanded the gospel he learned from Gassendi, and which saw the spirit of the “Tetrade” and that of the Chambre Bleu coincide during the reign of Louis XIV. This conversation, which combined “erudite libertinage” and “Marotic jesting,” served as the backdrop for La Fontaine’s Fables. In reality, the Adelphe tradition did not disappear with Jacques Dupuy in 1656. In 1691, when (as I noted previously) Abbot Claude Nicaise highlighted, even more explicitly than Fortin did thirty years earlier, the “glory” of the Adelphes in printed form, he did not consider their society to be an extinguished light. In a deliciously erudite essay entitled Les Sirènes (The Sirens) dedicated to Chancellor Boucherat, Nicaise attributes the origin of his essay to a conversation held at a “cabinet” that was still very much alive, and still faithful to itself, despite deaths and changes in location.17 Maintained, as we have seen, by Jacques de La Rivière, the Salmons, and the Vilvaults, this old alliance of higher learning and exquisite urbanity endured on the Left Bank. It traversed generations and overcame various trials and tribulations. In the meantime, the “Dupuy cabinet” had been imitated by Gilles Ménage and his Wednesday meetings in the cloister of Notre Dame, by Abbot Bignon and his Thursday gatherings on the rue Saint-­Jacques, and by private academies, which were also active at the time of Nicaise’s writing and assembled by Abbot de Dangeau and Monsieur d’Herbelot. Nicaise cites others in passing, including François Ogier, Valentin Conrart, Henri Justel, and Abbot Bourdelot. But the spirit of the Adelphes, in its unique and original tradition, was preserved by Monsieur de Vilvault, successor of an uninterrupted lineage dating from 1617. Savant conversation, which was subsequently placed under royal protection,18 would brilliantly resist the disdain shown it by polite and “philosophical” conversation throughout the eighteenth century. For a long time it would help maintain, during the century of “Enlightenment,” a strictly erudite spirit of moderation and joyful harmony that owed everything to the Renaissance. The ultimate embodiment of this civilization of leisure through the arts, and notably the arts of shared discourse, was Antoine Watteau’s Conversations dans un parc (Conversations in a Park).

10 T H E E R U D I T E O R I G I N S O F C L A S S I C A L “G R A N D G O Û T ” : THE OPTIMUS STYLUS GALLICUS ACCORDING TO PIERRE DUPUY

Seventeenth-­century French literature still contains vast terrae incognitae. Countless unpublished manuscripts (correspondences, memoirs, and treatises) slumbering in deep archives across France and Europe are waiting to be discovered, categorized, and published. That said, those works that have been published are far from having revealed all their riches, in spite of efforts by Roméo Arbour1 and others. Research endeavors continue to all too often don the blinders of an educational model that, quite naturally, only wants to study those authors likely to fit into its “program.” We can therefore find entire neglected zones in the gaps between those authors, populated by their closest rivals and “literary groups,” that could help to better understand and situate them. This is clearly the case when it comes to Neo-­Latin literature, which, due to the limited interest it has historically aroused, has led researchers to ignore a phenomenon as important as the Respublica litteraria within the landscape of seventeenth-­ century letters, privileging instead the polite and aulic aspects of French literature during the Grand Siècle. We are few in France, despite the example set by Jean Lafond, Pierre Laurens, and Roger Zuber, working to direct a specifically literary focus on this collection of nonetheless printed and accessible texts, a more systematic study of which would offer new perspectives in understanding this period. The example of John Barclay is indicative in this respect. Here we have a prince of the Respublica litteraria who wrote, in the form of an allegorical novel, one of the most profound political texts about France under Henry III, Henry IV, and Louis XIII. His Argenis, published by Peiresc in Paris in 1621, counted among Richelieu’s favorite books. He also wrote Icon animorium, one of the more obvious points of departure for France’s “moralist” literature. Yet the bibliography on Barclay and his works is scant. But there are other examples. Memoirs written in French have become the subject of conferences, articles, and books, which indicates considerable progress. However, Neo-­L atin autobiographies and biographies by viri docti, distinguished members of the Res159

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publica litteraria, have yet to receive anywhere near the same levels of attention. Gassendi’s Vita Peireskii (1641) is in every respect the masterpiece of the biographical genre in the seventeenth century.2 It is rivaled only by Adrien Baillet’s Vie de Descartes (Life of Descartes, 1691), which has the advantage of being written in French, but which has primarily been studied by historians of philosophy as a source of information and not as a noteworthy literary work. Vita Peireskii has been even more excluded from literary history, to the field’s great detriment: the English translation of this Neo-­L atin masterpiece, which was quickly relegated to obscurity in France, first appeared in 16573 and established a canon across the Channel of the “life of the great man of letters,” whose influence can still be seen in James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1792). The seventeenth century saw other high-­caliber Vitae as well, which supplemented the laudationes funebres of savants renowned in their day. These were read across Europe, creating a European corpus through which Italian, Dutch, and English authors erected a veritable Parnassus doctorum illustrium. This was a genre in itself, with its own rules, history, and more or less impressive successes. It also wielded a major influence on the emerging genre of academic eulogies and Lives written in French. Nonetheless, this chapter of literary history has been widely overlooked up to now. Among the Vitae virorum eruditissimorum ac illustrium written in the seventeenth century, which would be assembled by William Bates in a collection published in London in 1681,4 one of the shortest examples is Nicolas Rigault’s Vita eximii Petri Puteani,5 published in Paris in 1652, which foreshadowed the format of the academic eulogy at which Fontenelle excelled. The relative brevity of Rigault’s Vita, in comparison with Paulo Gualdo’s Vita of Pinelli (1607) or Gassendi’s Vita of Peiresc (1641), is all the more striking given that it was published in the same elegant quarto format as Henri de Valois’s Oratio in obitum,6 and was approximately the same size. However, the ratio genre had much stricter rules than the Vitae and, by measuring itself, at least theoretically, by its readers’ attention span, kept to the same limits as a university prolusion or a lawyer’s oration. The modest dimensions of Rigault’s Vita eximii Petri Puteani, however, can be explained by entirely external reasons. Namely haste. As we well know, thanks to René Pintard’s Erudite Libertinage, Pierre Dupuy was the presiding Parisian authority of the Respublica litteraria and Jacques-­Auguste de Thou’s successor, first carrying on his legacy closely with Peiresc, until his death in 1636, and then alone, with the assistance of his brother Jacques. This prince, who left no successor of his own (Jacques’s days were numbered and he died five years after his older brother), needed, and quickly, a monument worthy of his name. Rigault wrote his Vita in the span of a few months. Jacques Dupuy,

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assisted by his friends, assembled all the elements of this laudatory volume. In addition to the Vita and Oratio, it includes Greek and Latin epigrams by Henri de Valois, an Extemporalis oratio in obitum Petri Puteani by Bernard Médon,7 various poems in French and Latin by Gabary de La Luzerne, letters in French from Guez de Balzac to Jacques Dupuy accompanied by a Latin poem by the author of Socrate chrétien (Christian Socrates), a consolation by Pierre Hallé, an elegia by Nicholas Heinsus (addressed to Jean Chapelain), Carmina by Jacques Auguste Perrot, an epistola from Gabriel Naudé to Gilles Ménage, an epicedion by Jacques d’Auvergne (a royal professor), an epigramma by Ismaël Sarrau, and French sonnets by Jean Chapelain. At the end of the work, to illustrate the extent of Pierre Dupuy’s greatness, his friends reprinted the Tumulus written by his father, Claude Dupuy, which was assembled and published by Paul II de Reneaulme in 1607, and Tumulus by his Jesuit uncle Clément Dupuy, which was likely a reprint as well. This jumble of “short forms,” combining prose and poetry, reveals a desire to expand this reverential text without weighing it down: it justifies and erases the editors’ haste by making brevity the unifying principle behind these varied eulogies. But it is just as important to take the element of fatigue into account. Nicolas Rigault was born in 1577. In 1651, he was seventy-­four years old. He died three years later. During his lifetime and Jacques Dupuy’s, the Respublica litteraria, for whom Erasmus had served as the first Neo-­Latin beacon illuminating northern Europe, was on its way out, and the Republic knew it. At his age, Rigault was no longer capable of exerting the same effort Gassendi did ten years earlier when writing his Vita of Peiresc. Instead, he had to settle for writing a short biographical portrait of his friend. The subject, as it happened, lent itself less to a long, wide-­reaching Vita than Gassendi’s. Indeed, Peiresc justified his biographer’s expansiveness: the short life of this grand figure of the European Respublica litteraria, originally from Aix, was truly remarkable, and distinguished by the breadth and variety of his activities and their impact across Europe and even the Middle East and the Far East. Pierre Dupuy preferred to stay home, though he was an indulgent host at his Parisian residences. He was above all a great librarian and an incomparable archivist. His research, far less encyclopedic than that of Peiresc, concentrated on legal and historical works in the Gallican tradition. This steady, austere lifestyle, though enhanced by a model of sociability dazzling in its own way, boasted none of the bright colors that the southern-­born Gassendi was able to highlight to such effect in the extraordinary traveling life of his friend from Provence. The heart of European letters, which Peiresc had been able to maintain in the Midi region for some time, through his talent and an alliance with the Barberini family, had definitively moved to

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the north—a region by definition less flamboyant, more reserved, and more economical. Here we are hitting upon the most intimate and profound reason for the brevity adopted by Nicolas Rigault when memorializing the traits of the deceased Adelphe. His succinctness was as much a response to the genius loci as to a required format, itself mandated by the ethos of his subject, both a scholar and a strict Christian. We do not need random speculations to determine the motivations behind Rigault’s adopted style. Like all great texts, this Vita reveals the reasons behind its own form. They do not appear in parentheticals or digressions; Rigault did not have to stray from his subject in order to express an ideal of the optimus stylus that he shared unreservedly with Pierre Dupuy. The form he adopts and its theoretical definition are a double, truthful homage to his friend’s great soul and a double, essential contribution to his intellectual, moral, and religious portrait. Nicolas Rigault analyzes Pierre Dupuy’s literary taste, as well as his own, on two occasions in this Vita which is dedicated to Mathieu Molé, the first president of the Parlement of Paris, and which vibrates with the emotions rampant during the Fronde. Somewhat paradoxically, in a Life written in Latin, the biographer initially focuses on Pierre Dupuy’s choice of the French language for his publications and educated opinions. He writes: And since he dedicated the best of his work to French matters, and therefore to the interests of the nation, he judged it appropriate, in order to be more easily and rapidly understood by our fellow citizens, to conceive of and deliver his works in our language, words in the Latin tongue, long hidden and revived through old monuments, proving to be incapable, due to their foreignness, of effectively reaching less accustomed ears. And in this he relied on the common sense of all peoples.8 Applying all his knowledge to the grandeur of France (the Vita contains a Tacitean portrait of Richelieu, who never ceased to invoke the wisdom of Pierre Dupuy, the royal archivist), Dupuy was therefore committed to ensuring his writing had an attentive French audience, whose influence had been diminished by reliance on the savant and artificial language of scholars. That rhetorical imperative had the same effect as patriotic fervor. Rigault does not hide that in the short term; this choice (which, as Descartes did in Discourse, dealt a fatal blow in the long term to the old European Respublica litteraria) did much to upset the habits of the erudite world, notably wounding savants’ pride in expressing themselves in humanist Latin, not to mention the point of honor they granted to interspersing French prose with Greek and Latin quotes. He continues:

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I remember, during our conversations on the subject, having unreservedly agreed with my friend’s decision, and having added that they needed to betray their own minds, referring to those who, by an affection of science, persisted in treating modern and French subjects in the style of antiquity and the language of Rome. They therefore made themselves uselessly unbearable and tiresome to themselves and others. Moreover a hateful habit had ingrained itself in both the Church and the Parlement, among predicators and lawyers alike, which was to pervert their discourse by interspersing sentences in the Latin or Greek languages. This care to insert these phrases, which may appear compelling, in reality compromises what is natural, forgets the laws of true eloquence, weakens its power, and ultimately extinguishes the judgment, attention, and docility of auditors, who, for the vast majority, do not know the savant languages. And finally the greatest orators of antiquity, both Greek and Latin, and with whose writings we can never be satiated, never mixed their discourse with any quotation taken from a foreign language. The Latins did so only in their letters, and the Greeks never did so, not even in that literary genre. When Plutarch mentions the verse of Horace dedicated to the magnificence of Lucullus, he faithfully translates the thoughts of the Latin poet into Greek, and carefully avoids citing the Latin text. Perhaps the only acceptable excuse today, for those of us who belong to the Roman sphere (Romanensibus) and make use of a language derived from both Greek and Latin, when we are called upon to evoke the memory of our authors, and quote them in their own words, is that it is natural that we hesitate to appear ungrateful. This represents a minuscule portion of the work that inspires the most powerful regret in us at the loss of Pierre Dupuy.9 This is the most complete and concise account of the “quarrel of quotations” that upset the world of savants and pedants in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.10 Along with Guillaume du Vair, Rigault and Dupuy retrospectively appear to have made the “right choice” in this quarrel, bringing all the weight of their authority as mentors in the Latin Republic of Letters in favor of the “seamless robe” of exclusively French prose. The presence of Guez de Balzac, and two of his letters in French, within this homage by men of letters to one of their leading figures confirms the irreversibility of that choice at that solemn moment. Three arguments, closely connected to each other, were fundamental. First, the rhetorical principle of aptum: one speaks and writes in order to be understood and to persuade. Denying the reality of the French public, and ignoring “languages,” meant condemning one’s own discourse to remaining a pointless and

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ineffective fiction. Next, the rhetorical principle (the lex) of the harmony of discourse, similar to a homogeneous and living body: the half-­measure of wanting to be eloquent in French while riddling one’s discourse with Latin and Greek quotations merely produces contorted “monsters.” Granted, loyal “recognition” of the auctores of our antiquity—Rigault introduces this uniquely humanist nuance, which is ignored by Descartes—authorized recourse to quotations in the original text, but only in a very limited number. The determining argument was ultimately love of France, and therefore love of the French language, which was the best suited to serve its national interests and enlighten the French people as a whole. Rigault develops this point later in the text, when analyzing the “best style” on which Pierre Dupuy based his apologist Gallican writings: Furthermore he relied on a genre of writing that appeared improvised and seemed to come naturally (promptus et facilis). His primary concern was in fact to formulate his thoughts in a way that was both striking and perfectly clear (significanter et dilucide). Indeed this is the trait preferred by wise men (prudentes) in their opinions and replies: they teach, explain, and demonstrate, through reasoning and examples. And within this genre of expertise that touches upon important matters, and even decides them, they do not allow either tropes or rhetorical figures. He spared none of the brilliance (nitor) unique to the French language. In his opinion, it was no small honor of this century that gave birth to exceptional men who cultivated elegance, wit, and eloquence (elegans, facetum et disertum). And one marveled to see at what point he appreciated the erudite urbanity of points of humor and wit, given that they avoided impiety and ­denigration.11 Reflections on aptum (directed not toward the public, but toward the subject at hand), invariably presented with concision and asyndeton, are intermingled with judgments on the genius of France and its national language. Rigault images a kind of preestablished harmony between the virtues of the true savant’s style and the inherent principles of the French language. A learned man and a sage, like Pierre Dupuy, hewed, in the simple style that suited his words, to the economy and clarity to which the French language was destined. However he also allowed for, and here Rigault is clearly thinking of Guez de Balzac, an “epidictic” component of the French style, which highlighted its potential brilliance, elegance, and wit, in the “average style” of prose, and even via jabs and parries (salibus et aculeis) in the course of a brilliant conversation between cultivated men and women and good company. For all that Nicolas Rigault, a former student of the Jesuits, became a leading authority on Gallicanism,

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he had at his disposal specific rhetorical categories with which to interpret the French taste (le goût), which was both narrow and refined, and highly attentive to the dangers of “baroque” rhetoric. As underlined by Henri de Valois in the Oratio in obitum for Pierre Dupuy, the Academia Puteana, which assembled the cultivated elite of Paris and even Europe around Jacques-­Auguste de Thou’s erudite successor, was a school of vis judicii—“vigor of judgment.” This should be understood in the sense of strictly critical meticulousness, intellectual vivacity; but it should also be understood in the sense of a practiced, demanding, and mature taste, which was quick to recognize, in the bending and dips of form, insecurities about knowledge and flaws of the mind. To conclude, I will limit myself to two remarks. The first in homage to the sorely missed Jean Lafond, who so regularly focused our attention on the element of “brevity” in the French and classical optimum stylus: that brevity, limited only by the need for clarity, established a movement of “Atticism” that aimed to precisely reconcile words and things, the enlightened judgment of those who know and the yearning of the ignorant. In other words, the Delphic “rien de trop” (nothing in excess) that became the French motto. The second remark is directed at a specific tradition of French literary history that, since Magendie,12 has overly privileged the role of salons, polite coteries, and court life in the formation of classical France. It is out of the question to deny that role. But, once again, it must be understood in its due measure. Malherbe, the “grammarian of court,” was above all a “poet on a mission,” whose mandators, ultimately, were Guillaume du Vair and Peiresc. The Dupuy circle belatedly acknowledged a similar role for Balzac. In the background of Pascal’s Provincials lie the solitary savants of Port-­Royal; in the background of Corneille’s theater, the pedantic humanism of the collège and Jesuit monasteries; in Racine’s theater, the Petites Écoles, which taught Quintilian and the Greeks; in Molière’s, Chapelle and Gassendi. And La Fontaine himself, a friend of Maucroix, de Huet, and de Ménage, was perhaps, more than we may have thought, a “poet on a mission” in the world, whose spiritual legacy came from the savants and masters of the French memoir. We should also be careful to pay greater attention, in the study of classical literary forms and tastes, to the viri eruditissimi who have until now only captured the attention of historians of ideas and philology. The growing influence of the Dupuy Academy on Parisian literature from 1617 to 1656, in liaison and discreet disagreement with the Collège de Clermont, and in association with the Grande Robe du Palais, was perhaps as important as that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. In 1643, Balzac wrote to Pierre Dupuy: “It is at Monsieur De Thou’s home that the true and legitimate Senate, which has the right to judge our matters of books, gathers.”

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Rallied by national pride to the rise of French literature, the viri eruditissimi of the French Republic of Letters were also, ultimately, the best connoisseurs of the Greek and Latin auctores on whom the inventiveness of French writers still largely depended. Writers themselves, in Greek, French, and Latin, authors of poemata, carmina, elegia, epicedia, and epigrammata, but also Vitae, Commentarii, Praefationes, Epistolae, and Laudationes, these men counted among the seventeenth century’s artists of the most exquisite literary form. The laboratory of the most exigent French taste emerged among these scholars and savants, who have perhaps been too often overlooked as the result of an overwariness of the satirical attacks they launched against the “pedant”—Balzac’s “Barbon,” Ménage’s Parasitopaedagogus, Pierre de Montmaur—the first campaign of a long war waged by Boileau, Molière, and La Fontaine against the Vadiuses and the Trissotins of the reign of Louis XIV. In Henri de Valois’s Oratio in obitum, we expect a piercing echo of this battle of the seventeenth-­century Aulus Gelliuses against the eternal pedant: And we retain in our memory that this occurred several times to a famous parasite of our time [to be barred access to the door to the Dupuy Museum]. Pierre would immediately go to meet him, and he never allowed this man [Montmaur] to go any further or to join this very selective gathering.13

Part III LETTERED LEISURE AND CORRESPONDENCE

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11 ACADEMIA, ARCADIA, AND PARNASSUS: THREE ALLEGORICAL SETTINGS OF LETTERED LEISURE

In his history of the Florentine Platonic Academy,1 Arnaldo Della Torre refers to Giovan Battista Alberti, author of Discorso dell’origine delle Accademie publiche e private, published in Genoa in 1639.2 Della Torre’s historical positivism leads him to seek information in Alberti’s work, without taking into account its literary genre and oratorical nature. This Discorso is a eulogy for the Italian Republic of Letters, inseparable from those written for its governing institutions (universities and private academies), and in itself typically academic. Its intention was not to provide objective and critical knowledge, but to celebrate, exalt, and therefore further bring to life, through this spoken mirror, an Italian community whose common denominator and socializing principle was letters. Historical narration no doubt has its place in Alberti’s Discorso, but only to supply genealogical proof of the nobility of Italian letters and, of course, of the literary institution that characterized it and whose model subsequently spread throughout Europe: the private academy, which was distinct from the university of medieval origin. Alberti traces academies back to classical Phoenicia, where writing was invented, making it the first civitas litterarum. He maintains that an uninterrupted tradition links contemporary Italian literary institutions to that source. As a result, Alberti creates an Italian myth striking in its difference from the prevailing French one during the same period, a translatio studii (movement of knowledge) from the Mediterranean south to the Parisian north,3 which was already insisting on both the ruptures and continuities with classical antiquity. This Discorso can therefore teach us nothing about the origins of the use of the word academia in the Renaissance lexicon. It is even likely that it will mislead us about the realities of the Florentine Platonic Academy. However, Alberti’s text does teach us a great deal about the conception held by Italian men of letters (let’s call them that rather than “intellectuals”) of the seicento of their country and community within the European landscape of the time. The genealogical myth constructed by Alberti claims the privilege of studium on behalf of Italy’s men of letters, which France had long asserted to have wrenched away from them and which coexisted in Italy with Europe’s other spiritual authority, the 169

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sacerdotium of the Holy See. Barbarian powers in the north may have been encroaching on the imperium, but the best part of the empire remained in Italy, with its mother church and civitas litterarum—humanist universities and private academies that were direct descendants of Phoenicia, Attica, and ancient Rome. This apologetic, if not the mythical construction Alberti uses to support it, has deep roots in the Italian humanist tradition. Consider, for example, Petrarch’s famous letter to Urban V,4 utterly disdainful of France, or the preface to Valla’s Elegantiœ,5 which claims that Italy is the only nation to excel at Latin, Europe’s universal language. Alberto’s Discorso developed that traditional topos and transformed it into a myth that bears all the markers of ultramontane Tridentinism. However, that genealogical and pseudo-­historiographical myth was blended with others. Parnassus, for example: Le Accademie rassomigliar possono a quella agata preciosissima che nel suo anello Pirro Re di Epiroti havea, in cui con prodiggioso scherzo garregiando con la Natura e l’Arte, si vedeano impresse le Nove Muse e Apollo. (The Academies can be compared to the very precious agate that Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, had on his ring, and on which, Nature victoriously competing with Art, that prodigious tour de force, one sees the nine muses and Apollo engraved.)6 The Italian academies were the Parnassus of Europe, cultivating the encyclopedia of the liberal arts symbolized by the nine Muses.7 In addition, according to Alberti, the greatest men of letters of other nations came there to improve themselves in search of Apollo’s laurel wreath, which would publicly and eternally consecrate their knowledge and talent. Transported from Phocis to Italy, the idealized mountain on which Trajano Boccalini’s Apollo reigned, beginning in 1611, was the center and the summit of the Italian literary universe.8 If Giovan Battista Alberti’s mythical historiography points the arrow of time at Italy, his no-­less-­mythical geography organizes space around the peninsula, the center and pinnacle of letters. The myth of Parnassus naturally prompted a corresponding one: Arcadia. The latter appears implicitly in Discorso when Alberti maintains that the homeland of all men of letters benefits from an eternally gentle climate and steady light. In that endless spring, favorable at all times to the otium litteratum, we can recognize the kingdom of the god Pan, nymphs, and shepherds, which, beginning with Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen,9 and by way of Sannazaro’s Arcadia, was in fact, for all of Europe, the continued metaphor of literary Italy, both as it wanted to see itself and as it had partially succeeded in being perceived beyond the Alps: a golden age as much as a temple of arts and letters.

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Alberti thinks and writes using commonplaces and formulas, leaving the reader hard-­pressed to find a factual narrative within this encomium. That said, it would be equally absurd to reject his Discorso as a work of “literature” of no interest to the historian and reserved for specialists of “baroque” rhetoric. The commonplaces and formulas on which our rhetorician constructs his eulogy long had, and will continue to have, their own basis in “reality,” bolstered by literary Italian opinion. If the allegories Alberti uses to describe Italian academies teach the reader nothing about the “facts,” they nonetheless reveal an imaginary and mnemonic universe that is as critical to an understanding of lettered societies as myths can be in understanding the rites of religious societies (notably medieval brotherhoods). These purely literary myths, which I prefer to qualify as allegories, transcend the texts that bring them to the surface. They had a relatively independent existence that determined not only their use by men of letters in their works, but also by lettered society itself. They had an ancient prehistory, a humanist birth, a maturity that spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a long twilight in the nineteenth century. The continued metaphor that, in Alberti’s writing, compares literary Italy to Parnassus and Arcadia invites us to reach back to the roots of the Italian Respublica litteraria. By determining the history and exegesis of these commonplaces and formulas, we can reconstruct, from the inside, the categories of thought, imagination, and sensibility through which a lettered society was built, perceived, perpetuated, and established in relation to other political, legal, or religious institutions. This reconstruction is not incompatible (on the contrary) with the strictly archival and prosopographical form of research used to establish the specific history of a certain academy or academician or to reestablish the context of a given work of poetry or discourse. But, in its own way, methodical attention to the allegories and symbolic narratives that structured the imagination of lettered sociability and established it as tradition is just as legitimate. This endeavor allows us to make connections between individual biographies, the texts that interspersed them, the diverse circumstances that shaped them, and the symbolic heritage that united them, gave them a sense of community resistant to the effects of time, and endowed them with a lasting spiritual landscape. This history and exegesis of places and myths specific to literature can be easily linked to the research program defined by Ernst Robert Curtius in La Littérature européenne et le Moyen Âge latin (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages): the transhistorical analysis of literary topoï, or commonplaces. This analysis can play upon the double phenomenology of literary works (eulogies, poems, blends of prose and poetry, like Sannazaro’s and Crescimbeni’s respective Arcadias, essays, like Boccalini’s “Ragguagli del Parnasso,”

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dedicatory epistles, and so on) and visual representations (portraits, allegorical paintings, heroic or pastoral landscapes). These two modes of expression, one literary and the other iconic, overlap for that matter in the genres of symbols and maxims, which had been deliberately cultivated by Italian academies since the time of Paul Jove.10 While still noting periodic convergences, circumstances, and singular events that determine the sense of these symbolic forms in a particular text or visual representation, it is important to take their relative transcendence into account. They had the power to lastingly stabilize institutions and morals, gain them recognition in the eyes of others, and legitimize and interiorize them for their own members. The three allegorical systems that emerge in Alberti’s Discorso—Academia, Parnassus, Arcadia—influenced and strengthened each other. Both poetic and philosophical, they sprung from the same moral commonplace: the otium litteratum sive studiosum, the bios theoretikos (contemplative life) suited to the humanist man of letters. Three figurations existed, each situated in a different locus amœnus (welcoming place)—the wooded mountain, the pastoral landscape, the garden—which could be easily superimposed on the library, the studio, or the gallery. Literary conversation, and its rites of passage, communion, collaboration, and commemoration, localized their ideal or real sites in these three types of locations, which communicated with one another. The symbolic traits unique to each traveled from one destination to another: Parnassus had its laurel trees, but the laurel, braided into crowns, reappeared on the temples of shepherd-­poets or conversing men of letters, at their tables or in their libraries. When speaking of the meeting room of the Tuscan Accademia della Crusca,11 Giovanni Pozzi was able to show how a game of symbols, cleverly deduced from Virgil’s Georgics, and therefore related to the bucolic world, ensured, via the maxims of the “Cruscanti,” the continuity and identity of that literary society.12 This allegorical and mnemonic configuration’s force, fecundity, and faculty of adaptation, its universal status in the lettered imagination, especially in Italy, are particular visible in the seventeenth century, when the system, without losing its vitality, arrived at maturity. At this point it had reached its conventional phase. However, its origins stretch back to the dawn of the Renaissance of studia humanitatis, three centuries before Alberti’s Discorso, in the foundational oeuvre and biographic model created by Petrarch and Boccaccio. In his two treatises, De vita solitaria and De otio religioso, as well as in his correspondence, Latin and Italian poetry, and the Lives dedicated to him, by figures ranging from Boccaccio to Tomasini,13 Petrarch sketched, through writing and example, a moral theater for the man of letters and a life of letters. But he also established the groundwork for the figurative justification that would

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celebrate, symbolize, and extend that theater. The fertility of that theme and those figures was not solely discursive: it supported and structured the future of a lettered community, whose outlines had already emerged within the networks Petrarch knew to assemble around himself everywhere this worried traveler settled. The Petrarchist trope of lettered life remained linked to the one highlighted, for monastic clerks, by Dom Jean Leclercq in his noteworthy L’Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu (The Love of Learning and the Desire for God).14 Petrarch had been tempted by that otium religiosum, subject to monastic rules. He celebrated and recommended it. But his own path was different. Because secular freedom was not governed by obedience or monastic vows, Petrarch had to orient it using purely internal markers. These were all the more necessary given that the freedom adopted by Petrarch for a life of letters necessarily included, in some way, the vita activa, with all the doubts, anxieties, temptations, and “vicissitudes of fortune” that came with it. According to Petrarch, the otium litteratum, an adventure of mental freedom “in the world,” had to construct a hermitage and inner landscape. That ideal hermitage is incarnated in the poet’s biography by concrete and highly varied representations, ranging from Fontaine-­de-­Vaucluse, in the Comtat Venaissin, to Arquà, in Veneto. But the idea of that hermitage was already present in De vita solitaria, via architectural metaphors: arx, portus (fortress, port). Petrarch also situated his hermitage in allegorical landscapes closed in on themselves, protected from the masses but open to infinity: forest, mountain, cave. In these favored places, a mind dedicated to learning could feel at home. It could withdraw to these locations at any moment, even if, physically, it was forced to be a part of urban chaos, the vita activa. The citadel, port, and loci selvatici (forest spaces) had already been inhabited by an entire line of hermit saints, beginning with the Baptist in the desert, and including pagan wise men and even lettered statesmen like Caesar and Antoninus Pius, “shepherds” due to the periods of contemplative life they allowed themselves. The seeds of Arcadia exist within that hermetic landscape for reflective laymen, in the same way that this myth is present in the backdrop of the “spiritual chase” for the elusive Laura in The Canzoniere. It is also present, without being named, in the classical decor of the Christian eclogues of Bucolicum Carmen. This ideal hermitage constructed by literary memory could also serve as a “port”; it did not condemn the mind that sought refuge to idle immobility. According to Petrarch, the man of letters completed an internal and perilous voyage, which was simultaneously reminiscence and ascension, transported by images of the mountain and the obstacles it imposed. In his famous letter from Mont Ventoux, Petrarch qualifies this mountain, through antonomasia,

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as Helicon. In letters evoking his poetic coronation on Capitoline Hill in 1341, the entire symbolic edifice of the humanist Parnassus, an allegory for initiation to the aristocracy of letters, was already clearly visible. Finally, even if the term academia was not part of Petrarch’s usual vocabulary, his biography, first reflected in his correspondence, established the philosophical foundations of future lettered societies. The bios theoretikos, according to Petrarch, was not solely an inner depth in which the solitary man of letters could meditate and grow spiritually wherever he found refuge. It also radiated outward through example: friendship, quite selective, was based on an ideal shared by men of letters, rendering it contagious and sociable; Petrarch’s wandering internal hermitage attracted disciples and friends, whom the spiritual teacher befriended through conversation, the exchange of officia (good offices), and literary cooperation. If Petrarch’s various dwellings were already academies (he qualified his hermitage in Fontaine-­de-­Vaucluse as such in Trionfo della morte), then the network created by his European correspondents already possessed the traits of the future Respublica litteraria that the humanist scholar would inspire. Petrarch’s disciples would develop, amplify, and name the budding concepts visible in his biographical example and oeuvre. In De genealogia deorum, Boccaccio details and organizes representations of Parnassus at which Petrarch had merely hinted. In De laboribus Herculis, Coluccio Salutati, the Petrarchist chancellor of the Florentine Republic, develops a comprehensive theory of the Muses, whom he viewed as the successive degrees of a philosophical and moral ascension.15 In his Latin correspondence, filled with reflections on the otium, Poggio Bracciolini uses the word academia for the first time in a letter to Cardinal Prospero Colonna in 1457, thereby designating the circle of men of letters in the Roman court that had educated him and in which a great debate was raging over the choice between the Epicurean and Stoic otium.16 In 1417, in a letter to Poggio, Francesco Barbaro evokes the Respublica litteraria for the first time to designate the men of letters impacted by Poggio’s manuscript discoveries, men who regarded him as their great benefactor.17 By the time Sannazaro entitled an allegorical account of his literary life in the Pontanian Academy in Naples Arcadia, the experiences of the lettered coteries that had been expanding for a century and a half in the wake of Petrarch’s disciples had led to the development of their own symbolism. Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504) was nearly simultaneous with Raphael’s Parnassus in the Signature Room (1510). By this time, the Pontanian Academy had been a stable institution for several decades,18 in parallel with the Pomponian Academy of Rome.19 In De vita solitaria, Petrarch recounts the fable of the shepherd who, forced to go into town, gives a dazzling account of his trip to his companions upon his

Academia, Arcadia, and Parnassus 175

return. Petrarch contrasts this blind shepherd with the metaphorical shepherd, in other words the true man of letters, who, without leaving town, lives, though internally, in Arcadia, unmoved by the attractions of the world and in the privileged company of his peers.20 This fable provided the chreia, in the sense of Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata, that would be expanded by Sannazaro in his Arcadia a century and a half later. Bucolic poets were not lacking in fifteenth-­century Italy, nor in Florence, Sienna, or Naples, but pastoral allegory was at that time a disguise for contemporary political events.21 Sannazaro, who grasped the meaning of the semen orationis (seed of discourse) scattered throughout the works of Petrarch and his literary successors, was the first to deploy the pastoral allegory to its full modern extent. He transposed into Arcadia, using allegorical language, the literary experience in which he had participated at the Panormite and Pontano Neapolitan Academy. He had himself hosted the academy in his villa Mergellina. This pastoral fiction is no substitute for a history of the Pontanian Academy or as a biography of Sannazaro and his friends—far from it. But it has its own merits, different from that of the information found in Alessandro d’Alessandro’s Dies geniales or Minturno’s Poetica.22 Like a contagious dream, Sannazaro’s Arcadia circulated, in its readers’ minds, the Petrarchist Stimmung that unified Naples’s men of letters and governed their literary exercises. Against Arcadia’s ideal landscape, which mirrored the Bay of Naples and the slopes of Vesuvius, the long and winding group walks, narrated by Sannazaro, and interludes at court, during which poetic competitions took place, encapsulated and celebrated the kind of altered state of invention and passionate meditation aroused by the erudite culture of letters among enthusiastic and gifted young people. That altered state became infectious, thanks to Arcadia and its poetic evocative power: Sannazaro’s work offered a model, and it was imitated. In France, that model was even amplified to the proportions of a sweeping novel by Honoré d’Urf, L’Astrée (Astrea). But it was also imitated in real life. It sparked what could be called academic momentum throughout much of Europe, driving men of letters to gather and collaborate and to construct, on the margins of their “active life,” the milieu and mores of an otium litteratum. Sannazaro’s fiction, or mythos, therefore did more than just produce similar mythology; it introduced its imitators to shared rites and exercises, and to a shared lettered sociability that, on each occasion, in the guise and allegorical role of the shepherds of Arcadia, constructed a literary academy in the literal sense. In the seventeenth century, Nicolas Frénicle published two pastoral collections in Paris: Les Églogues (The Eclogues, 1629) and L’Entretien des illustres bergers (Meeting of the Illustrious Shepherds, 1634). As in Arcadia, these poetic

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exercises are set within prose narratives, situated in the woods of Boulogne, on the banks of the Marne, in the surroundings of Saint-­Germain-­en-­L aye, or on the banks of the Seine: an Arcadia in Île-­de-­France. Similar works, using coded language to narrate the “honest exercises” shared by a network of young men of letters, multiplied in Europe and include Montemayor’s Spanish-­language Diana (1575),23 The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia by the Englishman Philip Sidney (1593), L’Astrée by the Savoyard Honoré d’Urfé (1607), and Arcadia by the Italian Crescimbeni.24 Locations and character ranks vary, as do language, style, and poetic meter, but these works all share the theme and poetic essence of the otium litteratum established by Petrarch, in both Canzoniere and De vita solitaria, and united by the myth of Arcadia, which became the foundation of both a literary genre and a “way of life” for the man of letters. One feature shared by these pastoral narratives and the literary academies that at times borrowed their decors, costumes, and manners is the use of pseudonyms. This characteristic dates back to Petrarch himself but was firmly established with Sannazaro’s Arcadia. In the first eclogue of Bucolicum carmen, Petrarch adopts the classical pseudonym Parthenias; he uses Silvius and Stupens in other eclogues.25 Coluccio Salutati took the pseudonym Pierius, meaning both “son of Pierre” and “disciple of the Muses.”26 Pomponio Leto was so strongly associated with his own Roman pseudonym (Pomponius Lætus) that we do not know his real name. These fictional names, which were typically neo-­Greek or, more often, Neo-­L atin, are the foundation for the “noms de plume” used by modern writers. They symbolized a true change of identity and accompanied a kind of rite of passage within a society that was superior to ordinary, common society. Pseudonyms attested to the abandonment of the “old man” governed by the passions of the vita activa and the emergence of another persona, whose meaning was provided by a different kind of society governed by the freely chosen laws of the philosophical and poetic vita contemplative, according to the mode of the otium litteratum defined by Petrarch. The use of “classical” pseudonyms was also the secular and literary equivalent of the change in name and personality, during a ceremony of monastic vows, that accompanied an initiate’s entrance into a new community which he chose by breaking with the “world.” “Arcadian” or “pastoral” pseudonymity (whose Greek roots borrowed from Virgil’s Eclogues: Daphnis, Tityre, Damon, and so on) indicated a personal conversion, entrance into a contractual society, and acceptance of literary and moral conventions, that is, the rules of behavior implied by the “Arcadian” and “academic” contract. More prosaically, the -­us latinization of common surnames would become a form of ennoblement, across northern Europe, through a family’s entrance, even if only to a modest degree, to the lettered class.

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In Italy, entering “Arcadia” under an “Arcadian” name also meant entering the “academy.” It implied that one was willing to follow rules of conduct, yield to literary exercises, and voluntarily participate in a shared studious program. In Sannazaro’s Arcadia (which excludes all reference to the active “real life” of the stulti, Naples’s ignorant citizens), Pontano is Meliseo, Barcinio is Cariteo, Summonzio is Summonte, and Sannazaro himself is either Ergasto or Sincero. Those names defined them as “shepherds,” meaning academicians, in the Neapolitan and literary Arcadia invented by these humanists and chosen as the ideal homeland for their otium, “literary life,” poetic exercises, and contemplative life. It mattered little if this Arcadia was outside of Naples or superimposed on Naples. It was not a geographical location in either the country or the city, but a state or degree of the intellectual life shared by fraternal spirits. This required a true spiritual reversal among these “shepherds,” in relation to urban, aulic, and active life. Lettered leisure, insulated from any impure combination, rendered emotions more vibrant, deeper, and more inspired, and predisposed them to receive the form of song. When Sincero-­Sannazaro has to leave Arcadia, his departure is emotionally wrenching.27 He wakens literally from a dream, like the monk who has to leave the contemplative stability of the convent, to attend to affairs of the “world.” The small community of pastors, which make up the Arcadian coterie, is linked by a friendship unknown to the common man. It fights against melancholy (a disease that afflicted men of letters in the same way that acedia did monks) through conversation, oratory and poetic jousting, shared walks in the loci amoeni of the Arcadian-­Neapolitan countryside, and pilgrimages to temples decorated with paintings (opportunities for ekphraseis [descriptions of works of art] according to the principle ut picture poesis). This journey is not unlike Francesco Colonna’s voyage through the enchanted park of Hypnerotomachia, interspersed with stops in front of ancient edifices or constructions. Sannazaro’s Arcadia was of course equipped with a Parnassus, where itinerant shepherd-­poets found themselves in the company of Apollo and the Muses, emblems of inspiration and literary glory. His text marks the first appearance of Parnassus as an edifice erected in a park.28 During their walk, Sannazaro’s traveling “shepherds” stop short before a tomb, among cypresses and pine trees: the sepulcher of the shepherd Androgeo.29 The shepherds observe a funeral ceremony, an Arcadian transposition of the grieving rites practiced by academies which were followed by funeral orations and chanted poems. This general theme can be summarized by the motto Et in Arcadia ego, which was the primary inspiration for the scene illustrated in famous paintings of the same title by Guerchin and Poussin.30 These paintings were undoubtedly destined for eminent members of Rome’s or Bologna’s literary academies, the Umoristi or the Gelati.

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But other highlights of academic life are metaphorized in Sannazaro’s Arcadia as well: celebrations, anniversaries, literary competitions, and awards. The pastoral eros is also present and offers, as in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, a continuing metaphor of the unbiased quest for beauty, a quest that was no longer solitary but communal and that was supported and stimulated by the friendly emulation that reigned within circles of academicians-­shepherds. They competed with, comforted, and encouraged one another, thus forming the first enthusiastic and informed public for their own literary compositions. Within this youthful yet wise united brotherhood, whose secrets were alternately hidden and revealed by the Arcadian allegory, the topos of puer senex (the child / old man) found one of its most subtle expansions. Two centuries later, in 1711, in Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni’s Arcadia, it would no longer be hidden in the backdrop. But the Arcadian allegory itself remained as vibrant and available as ever to celebrate the rites and ethos of an Italian Academy (on this occasion, the Roman Academy of Arcadia), which reunited, under unshakably neo-­Greek pseudonyms (Niso, Urania, Telene, and so on), all those whom Italy counted among its men of letters.31 If most elements of the allegorical syntagma of Arcadia, from Sannazaro’s time to Crescimbeni’s, can be traced to antiquity, and though its principal literary source can be found in a veritable gospel of European letters, Virgil’s Bucolics, the syntagma itself, with its complex structure and use of allegorical chronicles, is a modern invention, which owes much to medieval allegorism, the medieval songe genre, and the millennia-­long experiment with monasticism. The gradual elaboration of the Arcadian myth, following Petrarch, coincided with the ideal of the secular otium litteratum, which defined itself in the margins of the monastic otium litteratum and in large part to compensate for the latter’s decline. Thanks to Arcadia, the former was adopted by countless laymen and provided recognizable markers and a contagious apologetic. The same is true for Parnassus, whose sweeping and coherent depiction in Raphael’s fresco, a burlesque letter from Aretino to Monsignor Leonardi, or Boccalini’s Ragguagli is nowhere to be found within classical texts. These symbolic concretions, collective works of the humanist community perfected from generation to generation, were progressively completed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If Arcadia symbolized a kind of poetic sociology of lettered societies, Parnassus provided its philosophy and police, situating the society of humanist men of letters in a Platonic and Augustinian vertical order. That order was both cosmic (its model can be found in Plato’s Timaeus and Cicero’s Dream of Scipio) and epistemological (modeled after Plato’s Ion and Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury). Be-

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yond Petrarch, the first modern incarnation of Parnassus was, of course, in The Divine Comedy. In his dream ascension, on the slopes of his cosmic mountain, Dante encounters the Muses and then Apollo. But in Dante’s writing, Parnassus was merely the first stage of an edifice whose summit was theological: Paradise. In Petrarch’s hands, Parnassus had become a mountain leading upward by a different path than that of studia divinitatis. It was no longer a simple, intermediary step on the road leading to perfection. Liberated by Petrarch, the studia humanitatis obtained, thanks to him, relative autonomy from theologia poetica. From then on, the revived liberal arts offered the humanist men of letters who chose them a path of sui generis spiritual ascension and immortalization, which boasted its own richness, as untouched by the “world” and vita activa as monastic spirituality may have been at its best. At Parnassus’s summit was its own divine judge, Apollo, weighing souls, along with its own angels, the Muses, welcoming the chosen ones. To speak of “secularization” in this respect would be violently reductive. Rather, it was a question of the “laicization” of monastic spirituality. The liberal arts, as conceived of by Martianus Capella and the medieval university, were able to grow by maintaining within one encyclopedia, capable of including the old “mechanical arts,” painting, sculpture, and art by architects and instrumentalists, who could also align themselves with the Muses, figures less rigid and fixed than the university allegories of trivium and quadrivium. The laurel crowns awarded by Apollo and symbolizing terrestrial glory served as saints’ halos; they adorned the heads of “geniuses” in both letters and modern arts, to whom they granted the right to enter into a new “communion of saints” with the poets, musicians, and immortal painters of pagan antiquity. Parnassus was not trying to rival Golgotha, Tabor, or Mount Carmel. It coexisted with these holy mountains, at a respectful distance. But it also belonged to another region of spiritual geography. Slowly but surely, Parnassus, a mountain both ancient and new, took on a seemingly familiar character in the interior landscape of Europe, where it evolved into a cliché and commonplace as ordinary and frequent as the great ecclesiastical symbols. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Italian Republic of Letters adopted it as its own emblem. Parnassus also appeared everywhere that people claimed to represent or have depicted the humanities. In addition to the mountain where Apollo reigned as a harmonious judge amid a choir of muses, the following figures also appeared: the horse Pegasus, symbol of the “sublime”; the Hippocrene spring, symbol of the literary vocation; and a range of flora symbolizing literary inspiration and glory (oak, laurel, cypress, ivy) and fauna symbolizing literary invention and genius (bees, cicadas, swans). It was on this difficult-­to-­access mountain that dead auc-

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tores, ancient conquerors of time, encountered the living: entrance into this glorious dialogue became access to a kind of literary paradise, which coexisted as peacefully as possible with theological Paradise. There was therefore neither strait nor frontier between Parnassus’s mountainous kingdom and Arcadia’s gentle hills. Both allegorical places represented different features of lettered society; the first, Parnassus, situated that society parallel to the church, offering itself as an ascension mentis per litteras (elevation of the soul through letters), parallel to the clerical vita militans; the second, Arcadia, set lettered society parallel to the royal court, and offered itself as the otium litteratum, parallel to the courtier’s vita activa. But in Italy neither would ever forget its Petrarchist and Raphael-­esque roots. They did not challenge the church and its clergy or life at court. They favored a margin of mental and spiritual freedom from those two authoritative and active bodies. But they also sought a peaceful and diplomatic compromise in order to be made acceptable to these two centers of “active life.” Born within the quasi-­secret intimacy of humanist circles, these allegorical places left the enclosure of the academies in the sixteenth century, offering a public demonstration of the comfort and glory of lettered leisure. For ecclesiastic powers, this emergence of Parnassus and Arcadia attested to the loyalty of humanist studies to the church and their link to exercises of the Christian faith. As for royal courts, these visible symbols of literary leisure became proof of “good governance,” bearing witness to the spiritual grandeur of the prince capable of seeking rest in learning and among the men of letters he protected, as well as of maintaining or reestablishing the peace suited to those exercises. As a result, both symbols were incorporated into public celebrations and the decoration of palaces and castles, and had garden fabriques, or ornamental structures, dedicated to them. They spread the prestige and “mystery” of letters well beyond lettered circles, the decoration of their libraries, and the engraved frontispieces of their works. The “Christianized” Parnassus and Arcadia were adopted by the Jesuits to symbolize the quality education in the humanities that they promised to their young students. Parnassus, in scholarly Jesuit works, became a useful antonomasia to designate an education in poetic techniques: gradus ad Parnassum. Arcadia, evangelized beginning in the early sixteenth century by Battista Mantuano and Jacopo Sannazaro in Du partu Virginis, became the conventional backdrop of the infant and adolescent pietas litterata within Jesuit colleges. Yet, we should not rush to the conclusion that Arcadia and Parnassus were “worn down to the quick” by the pedagogical and devout industry of the Jesuits during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: neither the academies of Jesuit colleges nor Protestant academies succeeded in dulling the original idea. These

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figures of otium litteratum, exalted by masterpieces of poetry and art, found the inspiration in those works needed to rejuvenate themselves and acquire new meaning. It is therefore worth insisting on the seminal character of Sannazaro’s Arcadia and Raphael’s Parnassus, which took the reins from Petrarch’s works, themselves still very present in the early sixteenth century. In the same way that Arcadia was the myth of the Pontanian Academy of Naples, the Parnassus of the Signature Room (in all likelihood originally destined to house the library of Julius II) was the myth of the Roman Academy, home to lettered leisure in the Roman court since Sixtus IV. It is therefore not surprising that the first literary works that deployed the “classic” and Raphael-­esque version of Parnassus appeared in Venice, within the humanist network that, after the sack of Rome in 1527, had transported the literary preoccupations of Leo X’s court, though not its theological duties, to northeastern Italy. Well before Vasari erected a vast Parnassus of painters in Florence in his The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), at the summit of which Michelangelo was crowned, Ludovico Dolce had published his Sogno di Parnaso en terza rima, a poetic mirror of Raphael’s fresco, in Venice in 1532: Questo è quel Monte, ove mai State o Verno Non giunge, ma felice Primavera Produce fiori e frutti in sempiterno. Questo è l’albergo de la gente vera Che fuggendo d’amar le gemme e l’oro Per cui convien che l’vulgo errando pera Si chiede a seguitar l’alto Tesoro Che virtu scopre a chi l’apprezza e ama, Godendo in terra un più ricco lavoro. (Such is the mount that knows neither summer nor winter, But a happy perpetual spring With its eternal flowers and fruits. Such is the home of true beings Who flee the love of precious stones and gold Who dazzle abused vulgarity and drive it to defeat While these true beings strive to find the great treasure That virtue reveals to those who appreciate and love it, Rejoicing on earth for a more fertile labor.)32 The golden-­age climate reigning evenly across Arcadia therefore extended to Parnassus as well. Like the land of shepherds, the mountain of a chosen, lettered elite was reserved solely for those selfless and contemplative souls who had

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turned their backs on the world of passions and vulgar desires and dedicated themselves to the otium litteratum. Unlike medieval monks, the shepherd lovers of Sannazaro’s Arcadia cannot entirely escape time on earth: their mortality looms over them, threatening to break up their ephemeral society. In contrast, the Parnassus depicted by Ludovico Dolce, like Raphael’s, claims to offer poets a timeless paradise, a trip through immortality during which a conversazione sacra eternally reunites them with Homer, Dante, Virgil, and Petrarch. This difference in ontological status between Parnassus and Arcadia did not escape Aretino, who was heavily influenced by Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly.33 In a famous letter to Mgr. Jacopo Leonardi (referenced earlier), which was published in the same year as Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1537), Aretino tackles the Parnassus trope, but in a deeply ironic and even burlesque way. He emphasizes the pagan allegory’s fictional and formulaic character. In Aretino’s view, Parnassus is no longer a Mount Tabor or an eternal paradise for men of letters, but the convenient and amusing setting for a literary chronicle, somewhat akin to how Arcadia in the fifteenth century was the overtly formulaic setting for a political one. Current events supersede immortality, as does sophisticated literary criticism over erudite reminiscing and contemplative manners. Aretino’s humor, a departure from the grand lyrical style of Parnassus, was even more at ease when it came to using the metaphorical mountain as propaganda for men of letters and notably his own work. During the “dream” that takes Aretino to the outskirts of the mountain in Phocis, he first notices the fall of a group of “pedants,” who threaten literature with their charlatanry and are hurried off the mountaintop. This was the new “final judgment” of the literary criticism emerging at the time. Transported to the mountain’s peak by his heroine Marphise, Aretino finds himself in the presence of Apollo, an attractive young man of loose morals, just as they like them, claims the author, in Rome. Mockery of the ecclesiastical court thus went hand in hand with literary criticism. By now, we are already in the universe of Boileau’s Satires and Lutrin. But as ridiculous as Apollo may appear, the ephebic god nonetheless remains a god, and the arbiter of talent in the Italian Republic of Letters. He is the one chasing the unworthy “pedants.” This Apollo-­Bacchus (the very modern model for the god painted by Poussin in The Inspiration of the Poet at Hanover and Prado’s Parnassus) gives the Venetian poet a warm welcome; he pre­sents him to the Muses and signals the goddess Fame, who sings the poet’s praises as well as those of the poetesses Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara. Minerva then escorts Aretino to pay his respects to the horse Pegasus, as morally liberated as his master Apollo. The supposed dreamer then drinks from the waters of Hippocrene. Irony worthy of Lucien reduces these rites to an amusing farce. The “secularization” is here indisputable.

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Aretino, armed with this mocking captatio benevolentiae, does not hesitate to use Parnassus as a means of publicity: he courts the Duke of Urbino, Francesco Della Rovere, notably through a poem dedicated to him, Marphisa. In Aretino’s dream-­text, this poem—though it was written well before he drank from the waters of Hippocrene—earns him access to the company of immortals on Parnassus. This is also his opportunity to emphasize the supremacy Venice has achieved over Rome: this ideal and contemporary academy is entirely Venetian and Paduan. Titian is here, as are the principal members of the Accademia degli Infiammati de Padoue: Sperone Speroni, Benedettto Varchi, Trissino, and, of course, Aretino’s correspondent, Mgr. Leonardi. This entirely modern and secular academy (it does not include the Ancients) has gathered to hear Pietro Bembo, the Venetian prince of the Republic of Letters, read excerpts of the Latin History of Venice he is in the midst of writing, on the official command of the Serenissima. The dream ends with the coronation of Aretino, who, thanks to the diversity of his largely libertine and satirical work, receives from Apollo not one but several crowns, made of nettles, olive-­tree branches, oak, and laurel. The seeming nonchalance with which Aretino treated the allegory of Parnassus attests in reality to the solidity of this “universal of the imagination” in sixteenth-­century lettered Italy. This “universal” was in no way sacred; it incorporated profane poetry and literature, the “realness” inherent to them, and the quidlibet audendi potestas (power to dare anything) in the historical time that conditioned them. A figure of praise among men of letters (but also of the irony that such men were capable of directing against themselves), the allegory of Parnassus got its second wind thanks to Aretino. The Venetian writer used the allegory effectively to affirm the authority of the lettered men of his generation, which was inseparable from that of Venice, their sanctuary of “freedom.” It is in this sense that Aretino’s letter to Mgr. Leonardi, despite its satirical appearance, took the allegory of Parnassus quite seriously. All the while reassuring theologians by its inoffensive jest, as the Council of Trent approached, the letter nonetheless conserved and protected the order of secular letters. As farcical as it was, Aretino’s Parnassus remained, under the auspices of irony, a place where men of letters were chosen and recognized. We can also consider his epistle as the chreia on which another Venetian, Trajano Boccalini, labored at the end of the sixteenth century in order to construct a vast expansion of a “satirical” Parnassus in the centuries of the Ragguagli del Parnasso. For Boccalini, Venice was always, and never more so than at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the homeland of men of letters and the capital of the Italian Republic of Letters, whereas Rome, which had ceased to fill that role after the sack of 1527,34 had to settle for being the headquarters of the Tridentine Ecclesia militans and theological orthodoxy.

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The Ragguagli (the first journal of ideas and books) reaffirmed at every chance the superiority of the Venetian political regime, which was the sole in Italy to truly grant men of letters libertas poetandi et philosophandi (freedom to make poetry and philosophize). Fictitiously located in Greece, Boccalini’s Parnassus was in reality a Venetian “superstructure,” in the same way that Sannazaro’s Arcadia was a Neapolitan “superstructure.” It symbolized the superior and impartial point of view that only Venice could provide Italians on the entirety of European letters, their internal debates, and the community that nonetheless united them through travel, correspondence, and the circulation of manuscripts and printed books, and that weaved between various political and religious powers. Boccalini wrote the Ragguagli in a Venetian Republic that had been struck by the interdict of Paul V Borghese, and whose theological advisor, in the fight against Rome, was the Servite and near-­heretic Paulo Sarpi. In 1601, the last great master of the Italian Republic of Letters of the sixteenth century, Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, Bembo’s successor, passed away. In 1607, his friend Paolo Gualdo published the Vita of Pinelli, in which he describes the library, museum, considerable correspondence, and conversation of his subject, an erudite intermediary between men of letters in northern and southern Europe, and between the forms of humanism practiced by Jesuits and Protestants. The allegorical fiction of Parnassus introduced Ragguagli readers to that difficult context without having to explain it in detail. The imaginary ancient Greece that serves as the backdrop for Boccalini’s Parnassus was, like Venice, completely independent from seventeenth-­century political and religious Europe; however, through a kind of chronological prolepsis, it also existed at the same time. From the mountaintop, Apollo, surrounded by his council of Muses and assisted by leading classical and modern minds (foremost among them, in a sign of the times, is Tacitus), reigns as the king-­judge and pontificates on European letters. He allegorically represents the authority exercised by figures like Bembo, Erasmus, and Pinelli. But he represents Boccalini himself above all, the new Aretino and the precursor of Pierre Bayle of Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (News of the Republic of Letters). From essay to essay, livened up by allegorical narration, which often takes the guise of a coded political-­literary chronicle, Apollo’s government offers the final word on European events (notably the assassination of Henri IV); newly published works; quarrels of poetic, moral, and political doctrine between men of letters; and the prizes to award (or not) to literary celebrities. Boccalini’s text is more than a “battle of the books.” The author’s brash polemic ventures as far as the frontiers of religion, and takes a marked interest in political philosophy, not to mention politics itself. For example, Apollo excludes the Jesuit Francesco Benci from lit-

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erary immortality, despite his indisputable titles (among others, the fact that he was Marc-­Antoine Muret’s student): his mistake lay in having “castrated” classical poets in his editions and commentaries, and, as a result, in the name of clerical morality, having seriously violated the libertas poetandi, even if it was retrospectively, of the most revered classical masters. The threat posed to the Republic of Letters’ freedom by the Society of Jesus was thus denounced, with humor, but also firmness. The Ragguagli attest to the huge importance attained by problems of political philosophy in Europe in the wake of France’s religious wars. Tacitus, next to Apollo, arbitrates the “quarrel on the raison d’État.” The god of Parnassus presides over the trial of Machiavelli, who is found guilty. Other theorists of the raison d’État are subjected to judgment as well, but always, and evidently, from the perspective of men of letters, in search of the best regime to harmoniously exist with their otium and freedom. The Republic of Venice is repeatedly cited as an example of political wisdom and generosity toward men of letters. The notion of “Italian decadence,” the consequence of pressure from Rome and the Jesuits, is also visible in Apollo’s judgments. He summons Italian academies to appear and declares them “corrupt.” The Ragguagli del Parnasso should be studied in relation to De Thou’s Historia sui temporis or John Barclay’s Argenis (1621). Boccalini’s Parnassus played a large role in giving to the savant Republic of Letters of the first half of the seventeenth century, which had been rebuilt in northern Europe, an awareness that its identity and authority stood no chance, except in Venice, in Italy. Boccalini thus paved the way for Paris, for Bayle, and for Voltaire. The malleability and stability of the Parnassus allegory, carved with classical tools by modern men of letters, are surprising. Not only did this rhetorical figure lend itself to a wide variety of visual representations, differing in style and function, but it was also adapted to literary works in very different genres, multiple languages, and across several centuries. Even more than Arcadia, though often in relation to it (a history of this relationship, visible in seventeenth-­century works by Poussin and Claude Gelée, and those by Ingres and Puvis de Chavannes in the nineteenth century, is needed), Parnassus had been the emblem of letters, their inherent spirituality, and their persistent freedom in relation to the church and the state. Beginning with Petrarch’s coronation in 1341, this allegory symbolized the superior order of humanity that could be attained by letters, the particular authority they dispensed, and the singular immortality they conferred. There is an oxymoronic quality to this allegory, which ultimately contributed to its longevity and brilliance: it claimed to be “divine” and timeless, while recognizing itself as undeniably “human” and immerged in time, in a paradox

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that enabled its rich irony and self-­directed humor, much like the entirety of pagan mythology, which became, following Boccaccio and his Genealogy, a repertory of literary figures and an object of the suspension of disbelief inherent to literature. The Arcadian allegorism was no less lacking in dogmatic and conceptual pretension. It was a self-­conscious literary game and dream. But that game was more serious and more contagious than may appear to our modern gaze: its rules and roles, and the dispositions and talents it demanded from its interpreters, introduced those it seduced and who accepted it into a contemplative society superior to all the common “militias.” As a result, the allegorical terrain of Arcadia was particularly fertile: it created a “second homeland” for the mind, protected by literature. Arcadia implied readings, a “Petrarchist” art of writing and composing, as well as collaboration and conversation dedicated to that art, which demanded a particular set of manners—gentle, meditative, attentive to others, amiable. Feelings rather than passions. The landscape, climate, and flora and fauna of the Golden Age of Arcadia existed to favor those manners and range of sentiments, as well as to reflect and symbolize them. Nonetheless, this utopia of the secular otium litteratum was most often rooted in one place, in a small, natural homeland whose uniquely literary genius it manifested. Supremely civilized, it rediscovered and accomplished man’s most spiritual desires at the other extreme of violence and war. Parnassus and Arcadia were therefore generative allegories. They emerged, more or less explicitly, everywhere a literary academy appeared. The spaces opened by the two allegories, both created simultaneously with the invention of perspective, had no precise limits and were composed of distant places. Contrary to the abstract and two-­dimensional allegories of “Gothic” liberal arts, Parnassus and Arcadia, Muses and shepherds created dispositions toward joyful sociability (that is, the shared walk in the garden). They also, beginning in the fifteenth century, fostered the relationship between letters and arts. Painters, sculptors, and musicians could borrow symbols previously evoked by humanist men of letters, thereby boosting the creation of artist academies, in collaboration with literary academies to create what was not yet called Gesamtkunstwerk. No episode of art history (at least not until the nineteenth century of Théophile Gautier, Richard Wagner, La Revue Blanche, and Russian ballets) is more convincing in this respect than the Florentine sequence of 1540–1600.35 During this period, we can observe the development, in turns, of a literary academy, where a still-­living Michelangelo was the object, as a poet, of two lectures delivered by Benedetto Varchi; then of the “Accademia del Disegno,” supported by Vasari; followed by the musical Camerata Bardi, linked in many ways to the Florentine Academy; and finally the Accademia degli Alterati and the Accade-

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mia della Crusca. The Parnassus allegory, which is evident even in the structure of Vasari’s Vite and which appears in one of the large canvases painted to decorate San Lorenzo during Michelangelo’s funeral services in 1564, took on a musical guise in the epithelia sung, danced, and played by the members of what was known as the Camerata Bardi. In the sixteenth century, it deployed all its semantic malleability to facilitate the rapprochement between artists and men of letters, poetry and visual arts, and poetry and music, and the emergence of a new symphonic studium. The great public rites of court society (that is, matrimonial and funerary rites) were the occasion for Florentine academies to bring the myths of lettered leisure to the stage, familiarizing them to the collective imagination and associating them with the “good governance” of princes and with civil peace itself. One of the greatest disappointments experienced by Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Tuscany, was Michelangelo’s refusal to return to Florence. But the duke’s entire “cultural” policy, which, as shown by Michel Plaisance, was well advised, succeeded in transforming that failure into a success. The cult of the absent Michelangelo fostered the creation of both Vasari’s Lives and Florentine academies. Veneration of the poet-­artist situated that evolution as parallel to the arts, which themselves admirably served the European outburst of theater and the court festivities of the young duchy. However, it is important to note that this political interplay only superficially affected members of these lettered societies, which provided a social framework for otium studiosum and determined for themselves the rules governing fruitful cooperation on research projects that were far from the prince’s immediate interests. Erudite veneration of the Tuscan language, which led to the Dictionary of Crusca, was connected to musicological research that exalted Tuscan popular song and appropriated it to the mythical “music of the ancient Greeks.” This was how Count Giovanni Maria dei Bardi, one of the chiefs of the ducal armies, a diplomat and a member of the literary Academy of the Alterati in 1585, began in 1553 to sponsor research by musicologists Girolamo Mei and Vincenzo Galilei. He gathered poets, instrumentalists, composers, and singers of the Camerata Bardi at his home. The ducal court and its festivities would only benefit much later from the spectacular results of these scholarly investigations begun in a climate of selfless research. When the Marquis Giustiniani summarized this grand intellectual endeavor in Discorso sopra la musica dei suoi tempi in 1628 in Rome, he did so using an allegorical landscape in which nostalgia for lost Greek music combines with the subjects of the first drammi per musica proposed to the Florentine and Italian public by the Camerata Bardi: I could add the many effects of the music in use in Arcadia mentioned by classical authors, as well as all kinds of fables, like the Sirens, Amphion,

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Marsyas, Arion, Apollo, the Muses, and Orpheus, and others, spoken of as truths and which demonstrate the ability of classical music to move its listeners’ souls to diverse and contrary actions, in a diversity of manners and modes, and in particular, with enharmonic music, which has not been rediscovered by the present century.36 Both a research project for lost music and the emblems of a new form of music, the allegories of Parnassus and Arcadia structured the development of the Seconda Pratica, the modern melody. They provided the settings for librettists composing these first masterpieces. The interludes of La Pellegrina in 1589, written for the wedding of Ferdinand de’ Medici and Christine de Lorraine, evoke celestial harmony, the Muses’ victory over the Pierides, and Apollo’s combat against the serpent Python. Later, Orazio Vecchi’s Amfiparnasso borrowed the allegory of Apollo and the Muses; Peri’s Euridice and Caccini’s Rapimento di Cefalo in 1600, and Monteverdi’s Orfeo, in 1607, provided the most convincing versions of the Arcadian allegory for the lyrical stage. On each occasion, academies (Count Bardi’s in Florence and the Invaghiti Academy in Mantua) ensured that these works of art were the encapsulation of their work, research, and ideal of harmony between the arts. To conclude, I want to emphasize a final trait shared by the allegories of Parnassus and Arcadia, and one that also characterizes the encyclopedic ideal of the sixteenth century. I have already underlined their fertility as the setting for praise in lettered life and as a sign of unity and recognition between men of letters. I attempted to demonstrate their function as a model for lettered society and its specific rites. However, it is equally important to recognize the presence of a quasi-­research program, in other words, the frontispiece of a future collective work: Arcadia was the land of musician and shepherd-­poets; Parnassus was home to the lute-­playing and poetry-­inspiring Apollo and the nine Muses, who expanded the number of the seven traditional liberal arts; the academy, thanks to its Platonic origins and encyclopedic curiosities, strived to reform the Greeks’ mousikos anêr (cultivated man). From the start (meaning their still-­veiled appearance in the works of Petrarch), these three symbolic registers contained the basic elements of a synthesis of the arts that would take shape during the sixteenth century and spread to an encyclopedic genre, opera, thus linking music and poetry, architecture and painting, and sculpture and dance. It is undeniable that this project successfully completed by Italian academies is better situated in the wake of Castiglione’s Cortegiano than it is following Politian’s Miscellanea or Valla’s Annotationes ad Novum Testamentum. In the Florentine giostra entitled The War of Beauty, in honor of the young Duke of Urbino, designed by Giulio Parigi and etched by Jacques Callot in 1610, one of the chariots repre-

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sents Mount Parnassus. We can see, a little above the choir of Muses, the tutti quei litterati che nomina Il Cortegiano wearing crowns of oak (the emblem of the Della Rovere). This courtly Parnassus transformed the otium studiosum of men of letters into both hostage to and ornament of celebrations at court, diplomacy, and polite leisure.37 That festival chariot would have been an obvious target of Trajano Boccalini’s sarcasm. The Italian satirist believed that Parnassus was a myth of the freedom of men of letters, intended to affirm their relative independence from courtly corruption, flattery, and servitude. This festive, Florentine Parnassus dating from 1610 was similar to the version that emerges amid the Medicean gardens of Pratolino, or the “Apollo’s fountain” imagined by Giambattista Marino in the gardens of Venus in Adonis (1623), in his kingdom on the island of Cythera. But this philosophical contrast between Boccalini’s rather stoic and “republican” Parnassus and courtly versions should not be exaggerated. In all their incarnations, the Parnassus allegory as the Platonic origin of the academy and the Arcadia allegory share a philosophical substrate: the ideal, defined by Petrarch from the start, of the man of letter’s otium studiosum, which could be reoriented in various ways at the court of Urbino, according to Castiglione, at the court of Florence (where it should be noted that Galileo was able to pursue his research in peace in 1610), and above all in “free Venice,” according to Aretino and Boccalini. Parnassus, Arcadia, Academia—dreams, figures of thought, ideal societies—outlined and defended the fundamental frameworks that made the bios theoretikos (contemplative life) of the man of letters possible, and distinguished it from ordinary modes of active life. They legitimized the disinterested “way of life,” and favored the apparition of small societies suited to a shared endeavor, in other words a Republic of Letters that united the academies and allowed them to collaborate with each other. These beautiful fictions devoid of sacred authority were no doubt insufficient to eliminate the tensions between the literary otium and the negotia of politicians, warriors, and even administrators of the state and the church. They concealed, much more than they erased, the conflicts dividing men of letters and eventually splitting them between incompatible programs of research, as occurred in the seventeenth century when the “new science” of Bacon and Descartes challenged the philological and erudite tradition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, the persistence of these fictional ideals throughout the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries attests to their importance in Europe’s intellectual history.38 That importance was tied notably to the principle of otium studiosum, which these allegories maintained in the face of all forms of utilitarianism, commercialism, and fanaticism, as well as to what was staked on that principle: the studious leisure of the

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man of letters could be an exemplary social model, a discipline that demanded and encouraged friendship, goodwill, and the politeness and gentleness that letters could extract from human nature so much better than could the imperious precepts of revealed morals and religion. Parnassus, Arcadia, and Academia, which in certain respects inherited elements of eremitism and solitary meditation, offered in others a model of sociability that was particularly gay, and whose contagious example and benefits could extent to political bodies, whether they were monarchies or republics. That explains their presence, well beyond the Italian courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as major themes in official and public festivities or celebrations, the performances and works of art they united, and even the iconography of the French Third Republic (1874–1940), during which they were celebrated a final time by a poet of the Republic, Paul Valéry, author of L’Âme et la danse (Dance and the Soul, 1931), and by its philosopher, Alain, author of Système des beaux-­arts (System of the Fine Arts, 1920) and Dieux (Gods, 1947).

12 MARSILIO FICINO’S DE TRIPLICI VITA: A REGIMEN FOR THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS?

As I do not claim to be a specialist of Ficino and fifteenth-­century Florentine humanism, in this chapter I simply intend to propose a hypothesis for study and reflection: Is there not a link between the notion of the “renaissance of good letters” introduced by Petrarch in the fourteenth century, the notion of a Republic of Letters introduced in the beginning of the fifteenth century within Poggio Bracciolini’s network, and the guide to health, long life, and spiritual fertility for men and women of letters published in 1489 by the philosopher and doctor Marsilio Ficino, under the title De triplici vita? If so, the work’s reception in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries would be intimately linked to the history of the Republic of Letters and the fate of the Renaissance. In the first pages of book 1 (On Caring for the Health of Those Who Devote Themselves to Literary Studies), Ficino suggests that he is the first to address the specific nosology of the studious.1 As observes A. Tarabochia Canavero in the notes to her Italian translation, De triplici vita is in reality part of a quasi-­ uninterrupted tradition, beginning with Petrarch, which also produced works by doctors such as Antonio Guainerio da Pavia and Constantino Africano in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.2 However, the scale and ambition of the three essays assembled in De vita, acknowledged and celebrated by Ficino himself, fully justify the author’s claim. Furthermore, the work’s intended audience—the “priests of Minerva” themselves and the powerful humanist patrons to whom Ficino dedicated each of his three books (Lorenzo de’ Medici, Philippe Valori, and the king of Hungary Matthias Corvin)—manifestly formed a unit to which Ficino himself belonged and to whom he made clear that they were tasked with a great mission and responsibility. So De vita was not a medical regimen applied to the needs of a broad social category, in the vein of—as Aristotle, Plato, and Galen might have offered—a guide for family men and another for preceptors. Instead, the poem (prose-­poem?3) in book 1, addressed to Lorenzo, links a renewed and quasi-­sacred form of medicine to the Bacchic mysteries. Its objective was to maintain the “priests of Minerva,” viewed by Ficino as the humanists of today and tomorrow, in long-­lasting vibrant health. This “Ficinian” 191

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medicine, though built on tradition, appears to be the response to a precise historical content, which assigned a fortuitous and essential task to Ficino, Lorenzo and Cosimo de’ Medici, and the men of letters within their circle. In the background of De triplici vita, the reader can sense Ficino’s keen awareness, both astronomical and historical, of his era and the “revolution” (in the technical connotation this term had in astronomy) to which it bore witness. That astro-­historical awareness of time (if I can call it that) was accompanied by an intense concern for the men tasked with carrying out said “revolution.” Here, Ficino was not thinking of the clergy in general, and indiscriminately, but rather of the “priests of Minerva” and their patrons, the supreme agents of the recent renaissance of “good letters” and citizens of the new humanist Republic of Letters. I had the opportunity to hear the great humanism historian Hannah Gray speak in Philadelphia, where she expressed her regret that the concept of Renaissance had been replaced, over the last thirty years, by the strictly chronological category “Early Modern.” This neutral and scientific category reflects a standardized, mechanized, and linear conception of historical time. At the very moment when research by figures such as Garin, Walker, and Yates was revealing humanists’ astrological speculations, the Early Modern category adopted by historians was erasing the conception of cosmological time that had dominated since antiquity and from which the specificity of the “revolution,” and the astronomical and historical “Renaissance” consciously initiated by the humanists, drew its meaning. By creatively borrowing from Plotinus, the third book of De triplici vita undoubtedly offers the most explicit account of the profound legitimacy of the concept of Renaissance: a simultaneous return to the astro-­ historical circumstances that gave rise to the genius of antiquity and the fervent beginning of a new cycle of the Christian era. Book 3 also taught the studious individuals consciously participating in this “revolution” how they could and should obtain from the sky, and notably from the favorable convergence of the Sun, Mercury, and Venus,4 the vital spiritual energy and life span that inspired and supported the historical task that came to them from the renovatio ­temporum. Incidentally, the past few years have fortunately seen the concept of a Republic of Letters, seemingly forgotten or devalued since the eighteenth century, come back into historiographical favor. Like “Renaissance,” the concept of a Republic of Letters was borrowed from its contemporaries; it reflects its members’ self-­awareness. I have therefore endeavored to bring it back into circulation. Make no mistake, however. It is clear that the French expression “République des Lettres,” as used in 1789, for example, by countless revolutionary

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publicists, does not have the same philosophical context or semantic content that it may have had in Erasmus’s letters, which date from the beginning of the sixteenth century, in its original Latin form: Respublica litteraria. But we now know that Erasmus himself borrowed this Latin expression from the Italian humanists. The phrase emerged with the Renaissance, with which it was intimately tied practically from the start. Respublica litteraria appeared for the first time, as previously noted, in a letter written by a young Francesco Barbaro, in Venice in 1417, to Poggio Bracciolini. The two correspondents belonged to the generation of Florentine and Venetian humanists that immediately preceded Ficino’s. A student of Guarino Guarini, the Venetian Francesco Barbaro had been adopted by the circle of humanists assembled in Florence around Leonardo Bruni. In his 1417 letter, Barbaro congratulates Poggio Bracciolini on his recent discovery of Latin manuscripts in the libraries of the convent, in German-­speaking Switzerland, which he visited with a Florentine delegation to the Council of Constance, assembled to bring an end to the Great Schism. In this elegant letter-­eulogy, using highly classical metonymy, Barbaro identifies the uncovered manuscripts—notably the complete text of Quintilian’s Institution oratoire—with their authors, clarissimi viri, quorum vita ad omnem memoriam sibi commendata esse debuit (the exceptional geniuses whose memory should have been eternally precious), who were nonetheless relegated to the sidelines for centuries by Teutonic barbarism. These grand Ancients, like those who later endeavored to revive their works across Europe (namely Poggio), belonged to the same Respublica litteraria.5 Barbaro became the spokesman of this community, which successfully bridged the Ancients and the humanists to express its collective joy and gratitude toward Poggio. Thanks to his discoveries, Poggio proved himself to be an eminent citizen of the respublica, whose dignity and utility he served so well.6 In his letters, Poggio compares his discovery of forgotten classical masterpieces to Aeneas’s saving act—reaching into the flames destroying Troy to save the city’s Lares and Penates, which would allow him to establish a new Rome in Latium. Both Poggio and Barbaro wrote of a return, a renaissance, a cycle starting anew after a tragic interruption, in another time and another place. Thanks to this “revolution,” the great and scorned figures from the dead would return to take their places alongside the living who brought them back, in a single community bent on pushing back barbarian darkness and ignorance. Barbaro named this reconstructed community Respublica litteraria. It was the vector of the European Renaissance and recognized itself as such. In a slightly different form, in the 1450 dialogue entitled De politia litteraria,7 Angelo Decembrio clarifies the difference between the political city-­

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state, in the Aristotelian sense, and the politia litteraria, a conversatio governed by urbanitas, whose object was to refine and polish minds. The conversation takes place in the Estes’ library in Ferrara. Through manuscripts of classical masterpieces, contemporary interlocutors communicate with great figures of antiquity, to whom are granted new life, speech, and a generous presence. Four decades later, only a few years after the publication of Ficino’s De vita (1489), the formula Respublica litteraria reappeared in Venice in the prefaces and dedications published by Aldus Manutius in his editions of Greek and Latin classics. Summarizing and multiplying, through print, the fruits of a century of “manuscript chasing” and identifying texts, the ideal library created by savants across Europe thanks to Aldus’s publishing house served as a safeguard against any eventual patrimonial disaster, akin to the barbarian invasions: once dispersed and multiplied, Europe’s intellectual legacy could no longer disappear. Aldus’s collection thus provided the “literary republic,” which reunited men of letters from different European nations with the Ancients, with an unassailable “commonplace.” That “commonplace” was also the link between the Renaissance and antiquity. It allowed the Renaissance to resume the Ancients’ interrupted efforts and work with them to “polish” the nations of barbarian Europe. We know of Ficino’s close connections with Aldus,8 who published the Neo­ platonic treatises by Proclus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Psellus in the Flor­ entine philosopher’s Latin translation in 1497. Even though Aldus did not continue the interrupted publication of Ficino’s translation of Plato’s Opera Omnia, his edition of the Greek philosopher’s Complete Works (in the original Greek), which was dedicated to Leo X in 1513,9 represented the peak of Plato’s resurrection, a goal toward which fifteenth-­century Florentine humanism had been working for several generations, and for which Ficino had been the inspired spokesman. Writings by both Aldus and Ficino reveal a shared conviction that a new era had begun, thanks to the rerooting of Christianity in an classical philosophy uncovered by philology. Ficino never used the expression Respublica litteraria, at least not to my knowledge, but in many respects the new topicality that he himself conferred on the idea of the academy, adopted much later by Aldus, provided the literary republic of humanists with an institutional dimension and model that were then still lacking. One can also reasonably think that the 1489 De vita may have been a “life regimen” for this congregation of men of letters, whose established mission was to revive Christian Europe’s links with the philosophy, science, letters, and arts of antiquity (in other words with the nine Muses), that rendered them, if I dare say, operational. The mental effort required by the new “priests of Minerva” to carry out their herculean task threatened to prematurely physically exhaust

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them and jeopardize their shared mission. The “life regimen” Ficino prescribed for these men was intended primarily to preserve their health; secondly, to prolong their lives, as great mental endeavors require long and numerous years to mature; and finally, to protect these studious men, saturnine by nature, from the potentially harmful effects of Saturn, and to enable them to fully receive the beneficial effects of the most favorable astral convergence, described by Ficino in the beginning of book 1: the alliance of Phoebus-­Apollo, Mercury, and Venus. The lifestyle Ficino recommended for the new “priests of Minerva” was dictated by an understanding of medicine that incorporated the relationships between microcosm and macrocosm. The lifestyles of lettered men predisposed them, according to Ficino, to an excess of phlegm and black bile,10 which made them worried, sad, and infertile and could violently disrupt the judgment of the brain, “the fortress of Pallas.” And the meditative concentration and relative sedentariness of such men drove them toward an overly narrow alliance of Mercury and Saturn,11 causing an excess of cold and dry humors. It was therefore necessary to compensate for that excess with heat, which restored light to the brain, but without succumbing to another, no-­less-­dangerous excess, which was the violence of fire. One had to recreate and maintain moderation and regular balance—crase—between these humors. Ficino therefore recommends a chaste life, or at least one spared sexual excesses12 that drain the blood and place too much importance on the carnal sense of touch, an obstacle to intelligence. The beneficial influence of Venus should emerge through the imagination and the representation of celestial Aphrodite rather than through the senses of the terrestrial Aphrodite. Ficino also advises his readers to avoid all satiety in wine and food, which provokes dense humors, ruining abstract thought and blunting acuity of judgment. Ficino advises against staying up late13 and for beginning work at sunrise,14 because at nighttime the convergence of the Sun, Mercury, and Venus is neutralized, the air is thicker, and the imagination more troubled. He suggests living in elevated areas, far from heavy and humid air, and adopting a light and regular diet, in which cold foods are flavored with nutmeg, cinnamon, saffron, ginger and sandalwood.15 He recommends breaking fasts with pomegranates and oranges, and inhaling different scents: an excess of warm humor can be corrected by the smell of roses, violets, myrtle, camphor, and sandalwood, and the reverse by the smell of cinnamon, citron, orange, clove, mint, melissa, saffron, crocus, aloewood, amber, and musk.16 The symphony of smells composed by Lorenzo Magalotti in a text of baroque daring famous in the seventeenth century was a belated, albeit very faithful, expansion of the doctor Ficino’s orders. The sound of musical instruments and the human voice17 can clearly have

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a tempering effect on a disorder of humors, as Ficino himself knew from experience. For that matter, the doctor-­philosopher advises his readers to gaze frequently at flat, shining water,18 as well as the colors green and red, to frequent gardens and woods, and to take regular, peaceful walks along rivers or in fields of flowers. Travel by calm trains, by horse, or by boat on fresh water are other beneficial activities. Above all, advises Ficino, one should vary one’s occupations and affairs, avoiding fatigue and boredom, and while seeking out the company of civilized people. The seminal reach of Ficino’s pages cannot be exaggerated. It is surprising that Montaigne’s exegetes did not look to De triplici vita for one of the most illuminating keys available to unlocking and understanding his Essays.19 Ficino’s work met with enormous success in France beginning in 1494. Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie provided a magnificent translation of De triplici vita during Montaigne’s lifetime, in 1582, including book 3, which was strongly suspected of astrological paganism. For Montaigne, and later Descartes, health was the prerequisite for all wisdom. In order to follow a course of treatment meant to cure his own melancholy,20 and independently shake off a furious period dominated by the harmful convergence of Mars and Saturn, Montaigne forced himself to compensate for studious concentration in his library with walks or horseback rides outside, small trips in good company, a diet built around wine and small meals, and a veritable science of variety and distraction in his activities and readings. The chapter “Sur des vers de Virgile” (Upon Some Verse of Virgil), in book 3 of Essays, is an admirable exercise in “warming” those humors cooled by age through vibrant images of Venus evoked by classical poets.21 The principal tenets of medicine that Ficino recommended to nonclerical men of letters found a quasi-­experimental extension in Montaigne. Essays persuaded the average “honest man” of France’s “Great Century” to adopt the sage lifestyle proposed in the first two books of De triplici vita. Incidentally, Ficino and Montaigne would be succeeded by stars of the Republic of Letters as different as Peiresc and Poussin. In the Life of Peiresc written by Gassendi after his friend’s death, and published in 1641, the biographer concludes with a portrait of the lifestyle adopted by the great Provençal leader of the European Republic of Letters, following the model set by the Italian Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, his predecessor in the role. Peiresc’s calling “to Pallas and the Muses” had manifested very early on. In order to effectively carry out his all-­consuming encyclopedic activities (research, correspondence, and international coordination), the frail and sickly Peiresc was forced to adopt a regime of compensations and distractions seemingly inspired by Ficino’s principles. He alternated between city and countryside, between

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his residence in Aix-­en-­Provence and his Belgentier country home, following the rhythm of the seasons. He lived as chastely as a monk, and incidentally, like Ficino and his friend Gassendi, eventually embraced the priesthood. Although he often worked and wrote alone in his library and his cabinet of curiosities, Peiresc was very hospitable and received many visitors, with whom he enjoyed the most varied and lively of conversations. He was too busy to be able to follow the ideal schedule recommended by Ficino and instead worked late into the night. However, he took great pleasure from painting and painters and found enormous relaxation in the joys of a collector. He went on regular outdoor walks in friendly company: “He gladly chose small valleys, shaded spots where one could advance without constraint, and in full enjoyment of the view and sounds.”22 In his garden in Belgentier, near Hyères, he planted robust plants, flowerbeds, and lemon trees; the grounds included a pretty canal and a large fountain. He got along well with dogs and then with cats. He preferred birdsong to instrumental music and the human voice, as he found the former less troubling and more enchanting.23 We can just as easily show, using Félibien’s Vie de Poussin (Life of Poussin), how the exceptionally literary painter, who was well integrated into the Republic of Letters, maintained a lifestyle in Rome that was both balanced and enlivened by outdoor strolls and conversation according to Ficinian guidelines. We can also reasonably consider the genre of painted landscapes invented by Poussin, which he painted more and more frequently as he grew older, as exercises in internal temperance. Thanks to their lifestyles, Montaigne and Poussin died much later than was average in their day, and one can rather easily, in my opinion, argue that this was also the case for most leading men of letters. If Peiresc died at a relatively young age, it was because he was sickly from birth. The fact that he lived until forty-­ seven, suggests his biographer, should be viewed as a kind of miracle. Ficino focused on the long life expectancy desirable for savants in book 2 of De triplici vita. How can one maintain, he asks, the flame of life that feeds off the oil of Minerva’s olive tree?24 Nothing is more beneficial, starting in childhood, than good nutrition and an informed choice in food; in adulthood, a life alternating between city and countryside; and in old age, reliance on aromas, tonics, and contact with gold, “the most temperate thing of them all, the least scathed by corruption, and the closest to the sun.” One must therefore carefully choose one’s place of residence and diet, and breathe in the appropriate smells. Again in book 2, Ficino suggests that anything that can expose aging savants to the beneficial influence of the most vital celestial bodies (Apollo, Mercury, and Venus) will increase their life expectancy. In book 3, by far the most anno-

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tated of the three, and which pre­sents itself as a commentary on a passage from Plotinus’s Enneads,25 he ponders the ways to obtain health and life from the stars. By this time, astrology had become a science, though one viewed with suspicion as it threatened to cast doubt on the all-­powerfulness of God and human liberty. Ficino therefore tiptoes around the subject, repeating orthodox protests and hiding behind the authority of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Nonetheless, he encountered serious problems with ecclesiastical authorities. During the sixteenth century, the church’s suspicions were reinforced by the early successes of the celestial science practiced by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. It is noteworthy that neither Montaigne nor Peiresc ever refers directly to astrology. Whereas all of Ficino’s practical advice in the beginning of De vita is already based, implicitly, on a system of relationships between the sky and the earth, and between terrestrial traits and characteristics, beneficial or harmful, and their celestial foundations, book 3, with its astrological white magic, is the true key to understanding the first two. According to Ficino, the art to maintaining a savant’s health depends on an astrological “know thyself,” which makes each individual his own best doctor to treat his unique temperamental and astrological profile. One’s horoscope at birth, an indicator of an individual’s particular talents and the celestial bodies on which he depends, is the best possible guide to the art of leading a good life in accordance with nature. There are felicitous births and others that are difficult to correct, like that of Ficino himself. Here again, and perhaps more than ever before, we are getting closer to Montaigne, so confident in his own “beautiful birth,” and easily disposed to listen to nature in order to fully benefit from the favorable orientation which he was granted and which he welcomed as a blessing. However Montaigne is careful not to reveal the cosmological backdrop of his thinking in his word choice. Several passages in book 3 demonstrate Ficino’s familiarity with alchemy, another suspicious science which he does not name explicitly, but which, until the seventeenth century, was regarded as a science of metallic transmutations linked to the revolutions of the celestial universe.26 Nothing could be more favorable to health and to the clever exercise of the mind than to match the various aspects of physical life to the corresponding aspects of the celestial life of the Anima mundi. One can, writes Ficino, become jovial and “solar” if one knows to imbibe, at the propitious moment of celestial movements, the rays of Jupiter and the Sun by which the Anima mundi magnanimously shows itself to us. The three Graces, which govern that which is the happiest and most natural that earthly life has to offer, are the figures of Jupiter, the Sun, and Venus, whose convergence creates the most tempered celestial virtue that can benefit

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from the natural, vital, and animal virtue that nourishes us on earth. To “capture the virtue of a star,” nothing is more effective than its corresponding hard stone or metal on earth, in particular when it is engraved with a mathematical figure or suitable image, conceived according to astrologists’ rules: stones and metals thus become powerful talismans. Correctly chosen smells and flowers can have a similar effect. Walking in elevated places allows us to breathe in cosmic movement and vigor. In book 3, therapy by smells, savors, colors, and voices is explicitly linked to its astrological foundation. Works of art themselves, namely images, draw occult properties from the sky, as if from nature, and can have a powerful influence on the health and life of the mind. This corresponds perfectly to the role played by painting and painters in Peiresc’s lifestyle and to the function served by images in Poussin’s thinking and that of collectors of his paintings. All these different beneficial mediations between the sky and us have their place in a well-­moderated style of living: Mutare locum quamvis semper cum delectu praecepi; quoniam bona coelestium et universae naturae apud nos sunt rebus locisque aliis passim atque aliis distributa quibus denique omnibus est fruendum. (I have advised changing your place—though always by your own choice— because the good things of the heavens and of all nature are distributed among us widely in this or that thing or place; and all of them indeed should be enjoyed.27 The object of this therapy of variety was certainly one of the raisons d’être of the Wunderkammer (rooms of wonders) of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: it aimed to “render the mind Solar,” meaning luminous, serene, and long-­lasting, through a perfect dose of opposing qualities. That harmony obtained from the sky kept the mind in the body and kept it healthy. However, Ficino’s thinking does not acknowledge contradiction. Though one might understand that everything should be done to avoid the influence of Saturn, and favor the “solarity” of the mind, the doctor-­philosopher reminds his studious audience not to naïvely rush to the assumption that we can do without Saturn; rather, one should recognize that nothing could be more desirable than obtaining its favors. It is the highest planet and governs the largest sphere and, despite its limited convergence with Jupiter, tempers it. The poisonous influence that this celestial body can deploy can just as easily become highly beneficial, at least for the most authentically contemplative savants who do not refuse to live dangerously via the mind. There is a striking convergence in Ficino’s sublime book 3 between therapy and aesthetics, and science and wisdom, whose modern disappearance haunts a

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recent essay by Rémi Brague, entitled La Sagesse du monde.28 The lifestyle that Ficino recommended to men of letters in 1489 reverberated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, either by its direct dissemination or the far-­flung influence of literary, artistic, and musical works that spread his lessons well beyond the limits of the Republic of Letters. The impact of De triplici vita remained fully visible in the eighteenth-­century arts and art of living, even though the classic cosmology on which Ficino had based his therapeutic recommendations had given way to the mechanics and rationalism of scientific modernity. It is precisely this contradiction that gives a figure like Voltaire in Ferney or the literary Europe of the ancien régime their retrospective charm. In France, when the Republic of Letters wanted to bestow the new sciences with practices of joy inherited from a vision of the world whose meaning and credibility had been lost, it would be dragged alongside the ancien régime as it fell.

13 VENICE AND THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

If I were to be faithful to this chapter’s title, I would be displaying quite the excess of ambition. Even if I dealt with the announced subject matter in hypothetical terms, while narrowing its chronological field to the “autumn of the Renaissance,” I would still be forced to situate Venice in the center of a Republic of Letters that I would be assuming to be defined, known, studied, and familiar. But, as we know, that is not the case. The very notion of the Republic of Letters, despite its well-­proven usage during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has yet to attract the favor of either historical research broadly speaking or the historiography of ideas. That said, in the past few years, under the influence of Paul Dibon and Tullio Gregory, as I have shown, the term has been used here and there in scholarly literature, though primarily to designate the European community of learned men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the concept’s semantic history remains to be established, a task that would necessitate going back to the origins of the Renaissance in the Florentine fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I am venturing onto shaky ground in two senses when, in my title, I dare to evoke both “sixteenth-­century Venice,” a vast phenomenon whose full extent has only begun to be revealed, thanks to the impressive research of the past several decades, conducted notably at the Cini Foundation, and a “Republic of Letters” whose exact meaning and historical status remain obscured. I will therefore feel my way along, an explorer of a topic whose future relevance strikes me as inevitable, and try not to stray too far from all that is well established and incontestable. Since I cannot explore it at length here, sixteenth-­century literary Venice can, I believe, be characterized by two particularly distinctive individuals. The first is Daniele Barbaro,1 whose magnificent portrait painted by his friend Veronese dates to 1569, shortly before the model’s death. This figure (who, though nonreligious, was the “named” Patriarch of Aquileia, a post he never held) ably symbolizes the Venetian continuity of the sixteenth century and the superior “serenity” of a republican aristocracy that knew to protect the Venetian territory from the Italian and European tragedy of that same century. In Venice, the 201

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tribulations and disasters that had in turn torn apart the Platonic Academy of Florence and Leo X’s Roman Academy (the French invasion of 1494 and the sack of Rome in 1527) were observed from afar, as if from the top of a Lucretian cliff: Suave mari magno. A half-­century later, the same spiritual gentleness that Raphael had attributed to his friend Castiglione was granted to Daniele Barbaro, giving him a youthful appearance in Veronese’s painting, with the following difference: the elegant Castiglione, in his portrait at the Louvre, is engaged in pure contemplation, whereas Veronese depicts Barbaro at work, in his studio, wearing an ecclesiastical surplice, like Saint Jerome, before the manuscript of his two most recent works: a translation of Dieci libri di architettura by Vitruvius, and his own Practica della prospettiva. But this seeming difference in fact links Barbaro and Veronese’s universe even more closely to that of Raphael and Castiglione. The two works depicted in Barbaro’s portrait are an extension of the readings and preoccupations of the Roman Academy at the beginning of the century. For that matter, they are also connected to a masterpiece that built upon the works of Raphael and Sangallo, which was conceived of by Barbaro in close collaboration with Veronese and Palladio between 1555 and 1569: the Villa Maser.2 This villa was in reality an academia, in the sense which had been applied by Cicero to his own countryside homes and revived by Poggio Bracciolini at the beginning of the fifteenth century: an ideal retreat for the otium litteratum, for scholarly, studious, and encyclopedic contemplation, in dialogue with the Ancients. As a young man in Padua, Daniele Barbaro had written a dialogue, Delle Eloquenza, that would be published in 1557 by Giacomo Ruscelli.3 A reflection on rhetoric emerges from this debate on art, the soul, and nature, which is very similar to later musings by Sperone Speroni, a cofounder with Barbaro of the Accademia degli Infiammati of Padua: Paduan Aristotelianism was seeking conciliation with Florentine Platonism. This work was therefore already an academic-­t ype synthesis, in the Ciceronian sense, which simultaneously evoked the Rome of Julius II and Leo X, the eloquence of Raphael’s Stanze, and in particular The School of Athens. In Delle Eloquenza, the Soul elevates Nature, in the Aristotelian sense, to the perfection of Forms, in the sense of Platonic Ideas, and through this effort of speech raises itself to contemplation of the earthly and celestial harmony that governs the universe. Eloquence, the vocation of the artist’s soul, is the soul’s medium and mediator of an asceticism of understanding and moral purification. The continuity between this youthful text and Barbaro’s later masterpiece, the Villa Maser, is evident, as is fidelity to the ideals of the High Renaissance. In the intervening period, Barbaro dedicated himself to scientific works, once again in the Aristotelian-­Platonic sense, and philological

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research, for example, uncovering manuscripts by his uncle Ermolao, a friend of Politian and Pic de la Mirandole. At the Villa Maser, an architectonic, Vitruvian, and Palladian eurhythmy created a Stimmung (in the Spitzerian sense) that owed much to Plato and Pythagoras: the architecture molded the space according to pure and perfect forms, the ultimate object of the sage’s contemplation. But the plays on illusion, perspective, and color introduced by Veronese’s frescoes fostered indispensable meditations between the contemplated world and the observed world, between the unique and intelligible order of the Idea and the multiplicity of the perceptible, between metaphysics and natural philosophy. These stages, from Nature to Idea, revealed the possible scope of eloquence (which was a close cousin, in Barbaro’s writing, to Ficino’s “poetic theology”), in other words, the entire range of philosophical experience. The allegories and trompe l’oeil portraits painted by Veronese, set at varying eye levels, associated the life of the mind with its familial roots (an Albertian project) and literary friendship (also an academic program). In an oft-­cited letter from Giulia da Ponte to Barbaro dated 1559,4 the latter congratulates her correspondent for having built a nuovo Parnaso complete with a bella e divina fountain: the Hippocrene where poets must drink before receiving inspiration from Apollo and the Muses. Faithful to The School of Athens, Villa Maser was equally loyal to Raphael’s majestic Vatican fresco: Parnassus, the ultimate academic myth, wherein poetic contemplation is depicted as the offspring of the encyclopedic and harmonic science of the nine Muses. In the “Crociera” of Villa Maser, Veronese painted eight musician Muses, and, in the dell’Olimpo room, the ninth Muse, Thalia, who, identified with Divine Wisdom, reigns over the cosmic allegories of the seasons, the stages of life, and the gods governing celestial and earthly cycles. In Venice, Francesco di Giorgio, diligently continuing the research begun by Marsilio Ficino, had published his Harmonia mundi in 1525, similar in so many ways to the project of harmonious science and wisdom undertaken at Villa Maser. As the spiritual successor to his uncle Ermolao, as well as a former student of the Padua studio, an “Aristotelian,” Daniele Barbaro was no less invested in the Platonizing humanism of Florence and the spirit of reason of the High Roman Renaissance. In his villa-­academy, the recurring allegory of Parnassus simultaneously represented the harmony of the Platonic-­Pythagorean world and the convergence of methods to understand and contemplate it: Aristotle’s science and Plato’s metaphysics, philosophy and poetry, but also the arts, painting, music, and architecture. Better than any definitions, this encyclopedic program rendered the ambition of sixteenth-­century academies visible and tangible, as well as that of the “Republic of Letters,” which united academies even

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more than it did individuals: it was within the collaboration between “men of letters,” in their shared “conversation” beyond time and space, that the “harmonious” truth of man and the world had to be sought out and studied. Villa Maser, a product of collaboration, and the result of several generations of “researchers,” should be analyzed as a temple built by a citizen of this savant Republic for his ideal homeland. Before further elaborating on that idea, however, I would like to mention another figure, from a later generation, who died in 1601, along with the sixteenth century: Gian Vincenzo Pinelli was a citizen of Genoa born in Naples, who settled in Padua in 1558. We know of him thanks to the strikingly beautiful Vita Pinelli published in 1607 by his friend Paolo Gualdo5 and the eulogy dedicated to him by Jacques-­Auguste de Thou in his Historia sui temporis.6 Pinelli’s career as a “savant” in Padua began roughly at the same time that Daniele Barbaro’s ended. Barbaro died before he could see the outcome of the Council of Trent; Pinelli, on the other hand, witnessed victorious Tridentinism firsthand. In his Historia (whose Gallican and anti-­Trent stance is well known), De Thou praises Vincenzo Pinelli as a second Pomponius Atticus, a friend of Cicero’s who was epicurean enough to remain on the margins of the political battles of the Forum. Far from reproaching that impartiality in Pinelli, De Thou considers it to be the quality that allowed him to exercise a universal literary magistracy (toto orbe christiana) from the territory of the Serene Republic. As for Paolo Gualdi, in his Vita, which often necessitates reading between the lines, he emphasizes Pinelli’s mission, following his encyclopedic studies, in the exclusive service of the Republic of Letters, and hints at the diplomatic dexterity he no doubt deployed where he was best able to do so, in other words, the Venetian territory, in order to keep exchanges between Tridentine Italy and Protestant northern Europe alive and fertile, and to make his Padua home the center of a network of European correspondence and collaboration: Patavii animorum Prytaneum, Bibliotheca ingeniorum, Musaeum doctrinæ et eruditionis (Padua, Prytaneion of minds, library of intelligences, museum of science and erudition).7 Within this state of complete independence, Pinelli was able to acquire universal influence (thus transcending the boundaries between Tridentine Europe and reformed Europe): he was the last Italian prince of the Republic of Letters, Bembo’s successor in a much more difficult era. His high standing did not come, writes Gualdo, from his works, but from his person and his home. He became a master in the art of conversation that was simultaneously brilliant and scholarly, a result of his continuing practice of extemporalis action (improvised apologia). It was thanks primarily to this contagious eloquence that Pinelli attracted such a diverse and at times seemingly incompatible group of friends. This interna-

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tional elite of chosen friends, whom he named aurei homines (golden men), saw in him a vir natus ad Litterariæ Rei publicæ commode (a man born for the growth of the Republic of Letters).8 They faithfully sent him the best books published throughout Europe and regular letters through which he was informed of everything important happening in politics and literature alike. Pinelli was himself a diligent and methodical correspondent, meticulously exacting and always ready to perform the duties demanded of him. In three decades, his library (which ignored the prohibitions of the Congregation of the Index) became “one of the best in Europe,” due equally to the encyclopedic scope of its content and the choice of editions and models, and the ecumenism of printing locations. His scientific study, with its celestial spheres, terrestrial globes, geographical and hydrographical maps, etchings of ancient monuments, optical instruments, natural history collections, and medals and currencies, offered his visitors a veritable theatrum naturæ et humanitatis, which provoked a curiositas scrutandi within them.9 He had assembled a collection of unpublished narratives and descriptions, and handwritten texts; these archives were arranged in chronological order. With its collection of musical instruments and its herbarium, this museum encapsulated the encyclopedia of the sixteenth century, prefiguring the one that would be assembled by Pinelli’s spiritual successor, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, in his Aix-­en-­Provence residence. This savant, or man of letters (the two titles in this case being interchangeable), monitored every debate that shook Europe’s savants, and was chosen by the protagonists as mediator. The network Gian Vincenzo Pinelli assembled around him, again according to Paolo Gualdo, excluded pedants; it was governed by the charm of an urbanity and humanity that provided insight into other people and was capable of a delicate balance of pleasant and serious. Within this elite society, Pinelli appeared as a “divine and unpredictable Proteus.” His physiognomic expertise allowed him to determine the inclinations of unknown persons according to their features. He also earned the description of the “father of elegance,” due to the reserve he applied to all aspects of life. Friends with Sperone Speroni, and a correspondent of Justus Lipsius and Jacques Corbinelli (in other words, the elite of European humanism), Pinelli was also on excellent terms with the Jesuits, to whom he dreamt of leaving his library. Like Pinelli, Peiresc in Aix, the Dupuy brothers in Paris, and Cassiano Dal Pozzo in Rome would transform their own libraries in subsequent decades into meeting sites of lettered sociability between all savants, whether they were Jesuits or Calvinists, Gallicans like themselves, or erudite libertines. Equipped with a consummate sense of diplomacy, Pinelli assumed a “spiritual power” of letters in Padua, more ecumenical than that of any church after the Refor-

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mation or Trent. He died before the eruption of the “quarrel of the Interdict,” whose true stakes revolved around the relative extraterritoriality that the Venetian Republic had managed to preserve on the margins of the Tridentine order that governed the rest of the Italian peninsula. It was at Gian Vincenzo Pinelli’s home that Galileo and Paolo Sarpi would meet. With them would come the end of the “autumn of the Renaissance” that had persisted for a considerably long time in both Venice and Padua. Galileo’s “new science,” which Pinelli had been able to encourage at its beginnings, was condemned in 1633. And the quarrel over the Interdict placed by Rome on the Republic of Venice, which forced Paolo Sarpi to dangerously steer it to the side of the Reformation, ultimately weakened the quasi-­irenicism in which the secular state had been able to exist and which had enabled, within its borders, the European standing of someone like Pinelli. After his death, the center of the Republic of Letters moved inexorably toward northern Europe. Nothing is more symbolic in this respect than the scene described by Gualdo in his Vita, which shows a dying Pinelli designating a Frenchman from Provence, Peiresc, to be his successor as leader of the Respublica litteraria.10 The two figures on which I have focused, Daniele Barbaro and Pinelli, one serene and contemplative, the other active and cautious, strike me as characteristic of Venice, a refuge of publishing freedom and religious tolerance after the death of Aldus Manutius, who, through his editions and prefaces, was the first to recognize and publicize across Europe that city’s role.11 Both were noble-­born, both secular humanists, both “academicians” in the Ciceronian sense, reconciling Plato and Aristotle, both “citizens of the world” in the Stoic sense, above and uninvolved with political and theological quarrels. Like Bembo, Aldus’s friend and collaborator, they saw Venice as the “Switzerland” of a divided Europe, where it was possible to live “philosophically” in harmony with the Roman Church but shielded from Roman politics. Earlier I quoted Jacques Auguste de Thou. Like all the leading French humanists, from Montaigne to Peiresc, he viewed Barbaro and Pinelli’s Venice as the parcel of Italy that had preserved the tradition of letters inaugurated by Petrarch, the second homeland of all humanists. The Gallican De Thou supported Sarpi as the thinker and man of action who had attempted to transform Venice’s unique status from de facto to law, by definitively and officially ripping it from the abusive power of the papacy, even at the cost of an Anglican-­like schism. But it was precisely that de facto situation and its invaluable ambiguity that had made Venice so strong and attractive up until then. By issuing the Interdict and forcing Sarpi to theorize Venice’s unique case, Pope Paul V achieved what he really wanted: forcing Venice to choose. Ultimately, however, the republic, after much resistance and hesitation, did not

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take the plunge. Within this debate, one expression, already employed by Aldus Manutius, and frequent in Gualdo’s Vita, played an important role: Respublica litteraria. How should we understand it in this context? The expression is all the more noteworthy, as it owes its Latin name and initial conception to a Venetian: Francesco Barbaro. Respublica litteraria12 appears for the first time in a letter from the young nobleman, a student of Gasparino Barzizza and Guarino da Verona, addressed in 1417 to Poggio Bracciolini, at nearly the same time that the Ciceronian word academia reappeared in letters written by Bracciolini himself. But Respublica litteraria is not of Ciceronian origin. A variation of the medieval Respublica christiana, it represents the earliest awareness within the community of humanists that letters also united Christianity, and that this spiritual power of unification was as brilliant and contagious as university theology and Rome’s universal mission were in their own way.13 According to Francesco Barbaro, in his letter to Poggio, letters constituted a “common good” that linked all who served them and who assembled them into a city-­state. Events at the time Barbaro was writing, namely the Council of Constance, which was striving to bring an end to the Great Western Schism, give his words a particularly dramatic backdrop. At the same time, the status of the Respublica christiana was the object of animated ecclesiological quarrels, pitting “conciliarist” theses against those of pontifical jurists.14 It is unlikely that Petrarchist Italian humanism had a decisive and unanimous stance on this “constitutional” problem. On the one hand, it is tempting to think that the right to be involved in the affairs of the church via a universal council, claimed by the “conciliarists” for the clerical and nonclerical congregatio fidelium, was aligned with the emancipation of laymen to which the studia humanitas was contributing. But on the other hand, it is clear that the papal curia, beginning under Antipope John XXIII (deposed in 1415 by the Council of Constance), exerted a strong attraction on the humanists, who, under Pius II, Nicholas V, Julius II, and Leo X, would contribute to the Roman Renaissance, populate the Sacred College, and even reach the throne of Saint Peter on multiple occasions. The “universal council” of letters could therefore ally itself with the papal seat (another fundamental element of the unity of the Respublica christiana), or even stand in for it when the papal authority was no longer recognizable or recognized (as was the case following the Reformation, Trent, and in particular the Great Schism). This “supplement of the soul” of Christian Europe was already visible in the Signature Room, painted by Raphael on Julius II’s orders, as a precursor to the Lateran Council, which he convened in 1511.15 The traditional principles of unity of the Respublica Christiania are represented on three of the room’s walls: theology (Disputa), philosophy (The School of Athens), and canon law

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(The Delivery of the Decretals to Pope Gregory IX), the major disciplines of medieval universities and historic sources of papal authority. However, on the fourth wall, Raphael portrayed Parnassus, the Academy of Poets, and with it, the new principle of “letters” as it had appeared beginning with Petrarch. Viewed in the Lateran context, Raphael’s Parnassus is also a metaphor for Julius II, patron of humanism and owner of the Apollo Belvedere, who in 1512 did not hesitate to himself play the role of Apollo crowning poets and orators.16 The principle of “letters” depicted in Raphael’s composition dovetails with the other three perfectly, supporting through its “modernity” the theological, philosophical, and legal edifice of the medieval church. When that edifice was shaken, and its traditional tenets rejected by a portion of the Respublica christiana, Parnassus, “letters,” and the academy became the last “common good” that could be shared by the scattered fragments of Christianity. The Respublica litteraria then took on the guise of a “universal council” for all Christians, which existed beyond the divisions between churches and nations. In the fifteenth century, the term Respublica litteraria, invented by a Venetian for use by Italian humanists, had not yet developed its full potential. It was an idealized city-­state that, during the division of the church and of Italy, rallied men of letters to rise above the rifts of the time. The Respublica litteraria was merely one more network among those that formed the ideally intact architecture of the Respublica christiana. Already, in Erasmus’s day, the Respublica litteraria was beginning to pre­sent itself as the true Respublica christiana, with which the traditional church was invited to identify. After Luther, and after the Council of Trent, the Respublica litteraria truly became the last shared motherland of Christians divided between rival churches and rival nations. It therefore excluded theological disputes and the ecclesiastical science of canon law from its “conversation.” All while striving to preserve its blend of Platonic and Aristotelian thought, the Republic adopted the vast field of letters, philology, history, eloquence, poetry, and natural philosophy as its own; the innovations that posed the greatest threat to the Catholic edifice restored by the Council of Trent would emerge from that collective domain. It was after having glimpsed a potential rival in the Republic of Letters that the Holy See, beginning with Paul III Farnese, so ardently favored the emergence of a lettered order, the Society of Jesus, which would create an organ to rival the Republic of Letters within the Roman Church, a point of reference and unity for Catholic letters: a lettered order, meaning an order that adopted the entire domain of “letters” (epitomized by Raphael’s Parnassus) but made it subordinate to Tridentine theology, canon law, and the Thomist alliance of Plato and Aristotle, but also a network of clerical academies, linked by a “special vow” to the Holy See, and primed to reconquer the ground occupied by a Re-

Venice and the Republic of Letters 209

public of Letters shared by Catholic Europe and Protestant Europe.17 In reality, the Society of Jesus, a Tridentine and ecclesiastical Republic of Letters, could not escape the temptation to act as tutor and teacher to the Holy See. Its Gallican, Baianist, and Jansenist enemies were quick to denounce this church within the church as contaminated by humanist innovations that bordered on heresy. In contrast, the interreligious, Erasmian, Gallican, Anglican, Calvinist, and libertine Republic of Letters viewed the Society of Jesus as a Trojan horse sent by the Holy See to overturn it within the Tridentine camp. But the fact remains that, beginning in the sixteenth century, Jesuit colleges and “professed houses” cultivated the same subjects as humanist academies and fostered the same convergence of arts, all while subordinating them to the theology and Platonic-­ Aristotelian philosophy acceptable to Tridentine orthodoxy. The greatest savants of these Jesuit “academies” frequented the academies of the Republic of Letters, at least those that prospered in Catholic states, and direct dialogue between the two types of academies continued in Venice until Pinelli’s death and in Paris until Jacques Dupuy’s death. The quarrel over the Venetian Interdict, the apparent end of the Dupuy Academy in Paris, and, most radically, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes gradually erased the remaining meeting grounds between the Republic of Letters and its primary Tridentine rival over the course of the seventeenth century. In addition to “savants” willing to dialogue with or challenge their peers in the Republic of Letters, the Society of Jesus relied on educators, orators, and predicators from secular brotherhoods, whom it used to attract and control a large audience. The academies of the Republic of Letters, however, relied on solidarity and transmission between men of letters, some of whom employed a controversial tool: the printing press. The spiritual power of “letters” (attributed precisely because the domain of letters had become inextricably associated with the universality of the mind) thus became the object of a heated rivalry dominated, from 1560 to 1700, by the Society of Jesus and the Republic of Letters. Despite the methods adopted by the former to conquer Catholic society in Europe and new worlds outside of Europe, the Republic of Letters was not defenseless. It benefited from the prestige still attached to the notion of the Respublica christiana, to which the Roman Church and the Jesuits could no longer lay claim. It also benefited from its influential academies, some of the most prestigious of which lay within the Tridentine orbit, in Venice and Paris. For that matter, it was in Venice that the philosophy of harmony (meaning Platonic-­Pythagorean harmony) found its greatest proponents after Ficino: Francesco di Giorgio and Francesco Patrizi. While that philosophy was not incompatible with the Aristotelian encyclopedia, as we have seen in the case of Daniele Barbaro, it was difficult to reconcile with

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Tridentine dogma. A freedom of exchanges and publications reigned, again in Venice, a commercial and diplomatic center, in defiance of the Congregation of the Index. For the lifeblood of the Respublica litteraria depended on an unhindered circulation of books and letters, which made its citizens collaborators of the same ideal academy, transcending frontiers and faiths. This regular “commerce” of books and letters should be linked to the “dialogue” form, a reflection of “academic conversation” and a substitute, among men of letters, for the disputes of university scholars, theologians, and canonists. Whether letter or conversation, Republic of Letters or academy, the same epistemological and sociological framework structured the solidarity, collaboration, and transmission of this “universal council” of “savants,” which at times reinforced and at other times replaced the traditional fabric of universities and clerics. The savant voyage became a method of research and medium of collaboration in itself. This flexible, metamorphic, and expansive mode of organizing knowledge contrasted with the universities’ institutional rigidity and escaped the hierarchical organization of their primary disciplines. That said, the literary republic did have discipline, but it was self-­discipline, which was more influenced by the code of friendship and urbanity than by institutional norms. The collaborative framework offered by the academies was scarcely more restrictive, and was often as changeable as that of a meeting of friends. But although the academies themselves could appear ephemeral, the notion of the academy itself was tenacious; it was easily reformed from its “myth” or founding image: Parnassus.18 Given that Parnassus united men of letters “in glory,” it was only natural that the academies produce eulogies, cycles of “portraits,” and Vitae which memorialized their members, and which fought against the fragility of those links by referring to an ideal Parnassus and to its tradition. In Venice once again, in a famous letter written by Aretino,19 the myth of Parnassus passed from poetry to prose and, in place of the Platonic music of the celestial bodies, was used to designate the society of lettered men who, ideally, aligned themselves with it. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Ragguagli des Parnasso, written by an admirer of Venice, Trajano Boccalini, was the first “modern journal of ideas and books.” In it, Apollo and the Muses symbolize the internal order of the Republic of Letters, the idealized standard that governed concordia discors between men of letters.20 The Respublica litteraria was first named by a Venetian nobleman, described allegorically by a Venetian publicist, and given its first international journal by an unconditional admirer of the Venetian Republic. Venice played a decisive role, from the early days of Petrarch, in the rise of “letters” and their “Republic.” It was a Venetian, Cardinal Zabarella, first a professor in Padua, who, through

Venice and the Republic of Letters 211

his moderate conciliarism, did much to ensure the success of the Council of Constance and the resolution of the Great Schism. It was in Venice that Byzantine scholars, who would give the Italian Renaissance its second wind, were first welcomed. It was to Venice that Cardinal Bessarion (who had played a central role in the negotiations of the Council of Florence and in the short-­lived resolution of the schism between East and West) left his library: he, along with his “Platonic Academy,” had been an ally of Marsilio Ficino in Rome, and with him the “co-­prince” of the Republic of Letters in the Italian fifteenth century. That humanist tradition notwithstanding, several characteristics suggest the presence of a preestablished harmony between Venice and the “spiritual power” of letters that thrived in fifteenth-­century Italy. Its geographical location, its political regime, which appeared to conform to Aristotelian and Ciceronian ideals, its independence in regard to Rome and the Empire, and finally its links to the Greek world, subject or not to the Turk yoke, all made the Republic of Letters a singular element in the game of Christianity and primed to appear as the most stable and secure home for the “common good” of letters. Venice and Padua effectively filled the previously mentioned role of the Republic of Letters’ southern capital from 1496—and the debut of the career of Aldus, publisher and prince of the philhellenic academy soon to be bolstered by Bembo’s authority—to 1601, the year that marked Pinelli’s death. During this period, solidarity between Valois France and Venice quite naturally joined the two “singularities” of Catholic Europe, two centers of “intellectual freedom.” The Interdict quarrel would be the “swan song” of that Venice, a welcoming academy in a Europe torn apart. In conclusion, I posit that study of the concept of the “Republic of Letters,” in its Italian phase, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, merits more attention than has been thus far granted. The emergence of this concept was accompanied by another: the “spiritual power” of men of letters, initially in harmony with Rome, whose true mission was to take over from Rome and maintain, even in its absence, the unity of European culture. This concept was inseparable from that of the academy, which reappeared at the same time, on the fringes of universities or in step with them (as was the case for the University of Padua and the Venetian academies), but which was also in a position to take the reins of high European culture. By the fifteenth century, the concept of a Republic of Letters in its Italian (and notably Venetian) phase, which had initially been linked to ecclesiology, as well as to epistemology and the organization of knowledge, already contained the seeds of all the developments that would emerge in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with which we are much more familiar.

14 THE GENESIS OF CLASSICAL EPISTOLOGRAPHY: H U M A N I S T L E T T E R - ­W R I T I N G R H E T O R I C F R O M PETRARCH TO JUSTUS LIPSIUS

For a long time Italian humanism harbored illusions about the possibility of resuscitating, within a still-­Christian Europe, the eloquence of Cicero and Demosthenes, for which the speakers of [Tacitus’s] A Dialogue on Oratory had already mourned fourteen centuries earlier. But perhaps in order for modern literature to emerge, that period of mourning for a form of public speech that had granted the Athenian and Roman orator a direct, immediate, and quasi-­carnal hold over his audience had to be extended via the humanist myth of eloquence. The Augustinian-­influenced Middle Ages had already come to terms with that loss by reserving the legacy of the three defunct genres of pagan eloquence for the sacred orator, the simple stand-­in for Holy Writ and written theological dogma, and making the then-­unknown art of letter writing the written successor to the oral eloquence of the Ancients, much as the sermon was to Aristotle’s Rhetoric.1 Despite humanism’s veneration of Cicero and Demosthenes, the great humanist debate on prose—the Ciceronian quarrels—did not focus on the classical oratio, but on the letter and on epistolary style, the only true secular rivals of sacred eloquence. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of humanism is that, renovatio bonarum litterarum, it attempted to restore the rhetoric of Cicero and Quintilian, intended for use by orator-­statesmen, within an institutional context that, with the exception of the Florentine Republic, which was replaced at the end of the fifteenth century by the Medici princedom, offered no outlet for oral and direct political eloquence other than an academic one. Barring times of crisis (for example, the Fronde and Wars of Religion in France), monarchic regimes were in principle incompatible with the kind of eloquence that humanist pedagogy was nonetheless propagating, among its young disciples, through the works of Cicero and Demosthenes. This thirst for eloquence, encouraged at school but repressed by institutions, would not be fully appeased until the French Revolution and the parliamentary regimes of the nineteenth centuries. In fact, epistolography and homiletics, the two literary genres favored by Christianity begin212

The Genesis of Classical Epistolography 213

ning in the time of Saint Paul, would be the sole survivors of pagan eloquence, even after the Renaissance and even under lay monarchies, within which the prince’s “secretary,” tasked with writing his correspondence, would be the only true heir, stripped of the “power of the word,” of the magistrate-­orator of ancient republics, whereas the holy orator, the direct successor of apostles and church fathers, themselves the successors of pagan rhetoricians, had at his disposal the full “power of the [spoken] word” over the “people.” Fittingly, this debate on letter writing most often occurred in the form of letters, or on occasion, as with Erasmus’s Ciceronianus, in the form of a dialogue that, like the letter, was not linked to public speech but to a private discussion, amicorum mutuus sermo (conversation between friends). This extraordinary standing of the epistolary genre within humanist literature clearly reflects a direct continuity with the medieval tradition, which made the letter, along with the sermon, one of two major prose genres. That continuity was overshadowed by the rupture between new epistolary rhetoric and the forms that had dominated during the so-­called barbarian centuries. The latter category, the Formulae dictandi or Artes dictaminis, exhaustively inventoried and analyzed by James Murphy in Rhetorics in the Middle Ages,2 had frozen the epistolary genre, so to speak, in administrative use by secretaries, organized according to the five sections of the classical oratio in close imitation of established models and in adherence to a decorum imperatively adapted to a limited number of official situations. To a certain extent, the humanist stylus ciceronianus honed by the papal chancery, one of the most prestigious centers of medieval epistolography,3 was merely an aggiornata version of the Artes dictaminis. It had a modern tint, borrowing the vocabulary, structure, and syntax of the letter exclusively from Cicero, custodian of the rediscovered purity of the Latin language. But when it came to the essentials, in other words the principles of imitatio and decorum, Ciceronianism remained faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of medieval epistolary rhetoric. In its loyalty to that model, this entirely external imitatio engaged the secretary’s professional competence and nothing else. This was an official decorum, bringing into contact two individuals whose social ranks and institutional roles entirely determined the ritual of the exchange. Even when it was transposed to private exchanges, the stylus ciceronianus of pontifical briefs remained rigid and affected, incapable of expressing the internal, personal tremor of the Christian soul that had precisely been the obsession of northern humanism, in opposition to Roman and scholastic exteriority. From this perspective, the advent of the stylus ciceronianus can actually be considered a regression from the progress made one century earlier by the

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founder of humanism, Petrarch. In his Letters,4 the author of each missive is the private and intimate individual, not the official persona, even when addressing an important figure. The Petrarchist doctrine of imitation, as expressed in a famous letter to Boccaccio, strove to move beyond existing models and discover a personal style, a “painting” of the epistolarian’s intimate person. Though Petrarch admired Cicero’s Familiar Letters, which he had introduced to Christian Europe, he was deeply shocked by what he viewed as the impure mixing within the Roman statesman of the public man and the private one, the persona and the person. For Petrarch, heavily influenced by Seneca and Saint Augustine, the private, intimate quest for personal salvation could not be put on hold for the tribulations of public life. In both his collection of Letters and his Secretum, he invariably begins with the intimate “I,” withdrawing into an internal, uninterrupted meditation, when writing to his correspondents of love, friendship, death, and glory or drawing on his travels and memories to describe Tuscany and the banks of the Rhine or Mont Ventoux and the sources of the Sorgue. Petrarch’s Letters, halfway between Letters to Lucilius and Confessions, are the beginnings of a fragmented moral autobiography. At its Italian origins, the humanist letter was already an “essay” in the Montaignian sense, approaching all subjects with a meditative and central “me,” the sole unifying principle amid a variable diversity. It fell to a northern humanist, Erasmus, to decisively revive the Petrarchist spirit and challenge a disguised return, in the Italian style ciceronianus, to the social formalism of the medieval Artes dictaminis, beginning notably with the 1522 treatise De conscribendis epistolis, “the art of the letter.”5 (Incidentally, I cannot thank Jean-­Claude Margolin enough for having procured the critical edition of this text for me in 1971). Within the relative disorder of this work lies something quite inspired, cheerful, and irresistible—the victorious relish of a man who not only made his own erudition second nature, but also discovered within this superior nature a principle of freedom that could strip away all the strappings of the official persona. In the first few sentences of this treatise, demonstrating an authority rich with irony, Erasmus affirms the fundamental principle which governed, in his mind, the epistolary genre, and which reversed each of the limiting principles that had thus far prevented it from flourishing. The principle was one of infini: re[s] tam multiple[x] propeque in infinitum varia (a subject so complex and varied almost to infinity”).6 Infinity shattered the magic circle, the circulum istum magicum,7 within which barbarian and ignorant pedants wanted to enclose the epistolary genre. Infinity presented an insurmountable challenge to the negative finiteness of the dictates, premade formulas, and rules of medieval rhetoric. But where did this principle of infinity governing the

The Genesis of Classical Epistolography 215

epistolary genre come from? First, from its potential subjects, “no less innumerable,” according to Erasmus, “than the worlds of Democritus,”8 which consequently had an infinity of possible forms, “no less innumerable,” once again according to Erasmus, “than the grains of sand in the Libyan desert.”9 These innumerable forms corresponded to just as many possible nuances of style, quae sunt infinita (which are infinite),10 according to the Quintilian principle of aptum (appropriate). But the dizzying metamorphism of the letter, versipellis ac polypus (changeable like the octopus),11 was not solely due to the infinity of things it could address. A much more profound cause lay in the infinite variety of man himself: the infinity of ingenia, temperaments, conditions, ages, and moral characters, which determined, as much as an infinitely varied subject matter, the aptum of the epistolary genre. And finally, beyond the aptum that Quintilian already knew so well—vel a re, vel a persona scribentis, vel a moribus fortunaque et aetate ejus cui scribitur (equally adapted to the subject as to the person writing and to the character, situation, and age of the person to which one is writing)12—and which alone considerably relaxed the formalism of medieval rhetoric, Erasmus ascribed the supreme principle of this polymorphism of the epistolary genre to Christian freedom, libertatem illam epistolarem.13 Was an epistolary rhetoric still possible amid this boundless and infinitely mobile and changing landscape? For Erasmus, it was all the more desirable given the presence of another adversary in addition to the Artes dictaminis and their excessive legalism: a kind of spontaneism, which could condemn the art of the private letter, a genre without literary value, to negligence without diligence. The infiniteness of the letter should not encourage a lack of form or shape. Already the principle of aptum, which Erasmus borrowed from Quintilian and preferred over the rigidity of decorum, was contradicting the hypothesis of epistolary spontaneity. For the choice of style harmoniously accorded with the countless variables present in the writing of any letter was too complex and delicate an operation to be left to spontaneity. This deliberate act, this consilium,14 could only achieve precision through long and cautious preparation. Epistolary freedom was not license but reward for a perfect mastery of knowledge and linguistic possibilities. Rhetoric, which Christian freedom and simplicity seemingly rendered useless, rediscovered its pedagogical function imparting knowledge, taste, and discursive freedom. Thus was resolved the seeming contradiction between irony, so critical of the rhetorical formalism of Formulae dictandi, and the abundance of rhetorical recommendations dispensed to students and tutors alike. But the latter were indeed recommendations, often negative, and not rules that threatened to stifle a child’s personal ingenium. The classification of diverse kinds of letters proposed by Erasmus was a scholarly

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commodity, not a vain attempt to measure the infinite. The letter models used to illustrate his typology were more like pedagogical examples than formulas to be reproduced: the gap between these models and the letters actually sent by Erasmus gives a sense of the distance that separated, in his mind, the virtuosity of school exercises and the freedom conquered by an adult ingenium in full possession of its methods, that is, by a Christian soul that had achieved the simplicitas of expression.15 Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis thus proposes a two-­part method to replace medieval epistolary rhetoric: the first, limited to childhood and adolescence, implements an intelligent and sensitive course of instruction to provide the future epistolarian’s ingenium with a mastery of knowledge and language; the second opens the doors to Christian freedom and simplicity: the riches of memoria and the techniques of eloquentia allow the writer to respond rapidly and precisely, day after day, to the infinite requirements of epistolary speech. Nature, fulfilled by art, but not dependent on it, became freedom and simplicity. And rhetoric, now a perfectly interiorized habitus, was merely an instrument of impeccable taste able to find the perfect, and invariably new, response to the constantly varying demands of social, intellectual, and spiritual life. The lessons of De conscribendis epistolis were applicable to much more than just the epistolary genre, though Erasmus made this fundamentally immeasurable work the cornerstone of a new literature and a new conception of rhetoric. In Ciceronianus,16 published five years later, Erasmus is no longer content to pit the epistolary New Testament against the legalistic Old Testament of the medieval Artes dictaminis: he also uses the former to challenge the reappearance, within humanism itself, of a paganizing rhetorical legalism. De conscribendis epistolis had rather discreetly evoked Christian “freedom” and “simplicity,” the ultimate foundation of that infiniteness of speech through which the letter writer, while reducing the role of chance as much as possible, “threw his dice.” In contrast, that same intimate freedom of the Christian epistolarian is front and center in Ciceronianus, where it is used to reverse the new scholasticism of the imitatio ciceroniana. Cicero, preemptively distancing himself from his imitators, had defined eloquence as wisdom speaking copiously: copiose loquentem sapientiam.17 This was especially true for the Christian writer who carried the crucified and redeeming Jesus Christ deep in his heart: the apte dicere of Cicero and Quintilian was already a lesson in freedom; the Christian apte dicere was even more liberating. It excluded any servile imitation that would conceal or erase the epistolarian’s spiritual autonomy in comparison to his pagan scholarly models. The debate on imitation allowed Erasmus to define, with more ironic vigor than ever, the difference between a closed rhetoric, which imprisoned one’s personal ingenium and Christian identity, and an open rhetoric, which

The Genesis of Classical Epistolography 217

imposed its discipline only to grant the Christian “I” a full and free mastery of logos. This was the basis of a later, more famous, distinction made by Pascal between the “spirit of geometry” and the “spirit of finesse.” The two stages of “open rhetoric” defined by Erasmus would slowly gain influence over the greatest minds in Europe. In Italy, where the prestige of stylus ciceronianus was somewhat correlated with national pride, Erasmus’s lessons took hold obliquely, without mention of the great northern humanist’s name. In 1543, in a letter to Celio Calcagini,18 Jean-­Baptiste Giraldi accepted, while maintaining Cicero in his role as teacher of prose, the notion that an adult in possession of his faculties had the freedom to imitate other classical writers, allowing himself greater personal expressivity and greater adaptability to diverse subjects, circumstances, and recipients. In 1555, Paul Manutius, who had just published an edition of The Treatise on the Sublime,19 noted, in a Discorso inserted into a collection of Italian letters,20 the lessons absorbed from his enthralled reading of Pseudo-­Longinus: there are two kinds of rhetoric, one scholarly and servile, and the other suited to liberating great souls, offering them a path to personal originality. This affirmation is all the more remarkable coming from an author known for writing Latin letters in a purely Ciceronian style. In 1580, in an oratio given in Rome,21 Muret proclaimed the triumph of the epistolary genre over other genres of eloquence handed down from classical antiquity, which were as out of place in a monarchical and Christian Europe as they were at a collège or academy. He further noted, like his friend Manutius, the inadequacy of the stylus ciceronianus when it came to fulfilling the infinite possibilities of the epistolary genre, the de facto successor of all other genres of eloquence. Finally, in 1593, in his Bibliotheca selecta, the Jesuit Possevino dedicated the majority of his chapter on rhetoric, entitled “Cicero,”22 to the art of letter writing. In an official work intended to serve as a manual for his order’s ratio studiorum, he endorsed Justus Lipsius’s epistolary doctrine. At roughly the same time in France and Belgium, two authors, Montaigne and Justus Lipsius, were acclimating Catholic culture to the Erasmian conception of the letter once and for all. It would be worthwhile to note the many ways in which Montaigne’s Essays were influenced by De conscribendis epistolis and Ciceronianus. Here, however, we will limit ourselves to observing that Montaigne, who wrote in the vernacular to give himself more freedom, took additional care to avoid the importunity of having to adapt to the persona of any given recipient: On the subject of letter writing, I want to say this: that it is a kind of work in which my friends think I have some ability. And I would have preferred to adopt this form to publish my sallies, if I had had some-­one to talk to.

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I needed what I once had, a certain relationship to lead me on, sustain me, and raise me up. For to talk to the winds, as others do, is beyond me except in dreams; nor could I fabricate fictitious names to talk with me on a serious matter, being a sworn enemy of any falsification.23 For want of an Étienne de La Boétie to whom he could open his heart and mind, Montaigne based the metamorphic infiniteness of his Essays on the infinite metamorphoses of a “me” that revealed, in the absent eyes of an unknown reader, the recesses of its singularity and the meanderings of a quest for wisdom. Montaigne is not hostile toward rhetoric, either in the chapter “Considération sur Cicéron” (A Consideration upon Cicero) or “Institution des enfants” (Of the Institution of Children). But he frames the discipline, which he viewed as elementary, as subordinate to the development of “understanding” and “judgment” and to an apprenticeship in wisdom. Montaigne believed, like Erasmus, that intellectual and spiritual maturity, the sciences, and mastery of a language, once achieved, as if through a game, led to an inherently philosophical freedom and simplicity. With Montaigne emerged an adult literature in French prose, which would be separated by a mysterious but obvious dividing line from all written productions that, in one way or another, gave off the smell of scholastic exercises. In 1581, the year following the first edition of Montaigne’s Essays, Henri Estienne published a collection of Epistolae ciceroniano stylo scriptae (Letters Written in the Style of Cicero) at the invitation of Henri III.24 This unexpected publication from an opponent of Ciceronianism25 can be explained by two reasons. The first is pedagogical: like similar collections published ad infinitum by the Jesuits, Estienne’s work offered novices basic models of correct Latin prose. The second is patriotic: the collection was an assault on Italian pride and stressed the supremacy of two Frenchmen, Brunel and Longueil, in the perfection of the stylus ciceronianus. In his preface, Estienne attempts to highlight the academic style’s flaws: monotonous form, insufficient subject matter, and lack of personal sincerity. In so doing, he affirms an epistolary Erasmianism that Justus Lipsius would later revive in his original Centuries and his Epistolica institutio (Principles of Letter-­Writing). Lipsius’s preface to his first Century of letters, published in 1586,26 is a critical manifesto in the history of the classical letter. Written in first person, the preface does not come from a magister rhetoricae but from a private individual benefiting fully from his spiritual independence and meditating on his epistolary oeuvre. Not without false modesty, Lipsius claims to be apprehensively sharing his letters with the public, assured there will be no glory in return. Century was not a completed work, an opus perfectum, but an ongoing one, im-

The Genesis of Classical Epistolography 219

perfectum, which assembled daily notes (diales), a handful of trifles (nugas), games (jocos, lusus), and idle talk between friends (cum amicis garritus). Lipsius does not hesitate to emphasize the discontinuous, fragmented, and multifaceted character of a genre that lacked the polished and perfected character of the speeches through which classical orators achieved their glory. His collection does not recommend a specific organization, the choice of a single and grand subject, or stylistic beauty (cura et lima in stylo): in Lipsius’s mind, these qualities were foreign to the epistolary genre, which, “spontaneous” by definition (sub manu nasci debere et sub acumine ipso stili [they must spring from the hand that runs behind the quill]), looked down upon rewriting and proofreading (bis non scribe, bis vix eas lego [I do not rewrite them and I barely reread them]). The “figure of humility” that marks the beginning of Lipsius’s reflections to the reader subtly transforms into self-­affirmation and praise for the epistolary genre as the best method of expression for the exceptional individual. The “spontaneity” of letter writing allowed it to faithfully re­cord the writer’s changing passions and slightest variations in mood (languent enim illae, excitantur, dolent, gaudent, calent, frigent mecum [they languish, excite, suffer, delight, burn, and shudder with me]). This could result in a scattering of details from daily life (leviorum multitudo). But at times, by liberating itself from its humoral holds, the mind could elevate itself to the level of moral philosophy and philology. Style then spontaneously accompanied the momentum of the ingenium. The letter was therefore the ideal instrument to paint the self-­ portrait of a great soul “who encountered a body,” a multifaceted, accentuated self-­portrait that reflected the various levels of self-­awareness: Ecce homo. This self-­expression simultaneously implied ingenuity (candor), sincerity (veritas), natural style (alibi focus et simulation, hic nativus color [elsewhere, everything is artifice and simulation, here there is nothing but native color]), as well as the courage to be one’s self in spite of desires and doubts. Erasmus, freeing the epistolary genre from its “chains,” had nonetheless adopted the perspective of a humanist teacher subjecting his student to the only kind of discipline and exercises that could make the freedom of the apte dicere possible. Lipsius, however, abandoned the pedagogical approach entirely and, assuming his readers’ rhetorical training, adopted the “adult” perspective of a great soul who lifts the veil (nec velum ei ducere succurrit [it does not occur to him to cast a veil]) on his “interior,” within the trusted space opened by friendship. He defined the epistolary genre by a series of oxymora: a discontinuous and short genre becomes the sorcerer’s mirror of the infiniteness of the human me and its oscillations between contemplation and suffering; a plain style, consistent with the “comical” and “private” condition of the letter writer, becomes the

220 Lettered Leisure and Correspondence

sensitive receptacle of all “ideas” of style, fragments of the classical architecture of three superimposed styles, within which the highs and lows of an interiority, both spiritual and physiological, are reflected. Lipsius would attempt to create a rhetoric of letter writing based on these paradoxes with his Epistolica institutio, published in 1591.27 In this brief treatise, he is unconcerned with analyzing the progymnasmata needed to train a letter writer, or with offering him models. Instead, Lipsius speaks to the adult reader, no longer under the constraints of the collège. He relies on already acquired knowledge to fuel the copia of his letter, and on preformed judgment to adapt his epistolary writing to the situation and the recipient. He avoids, as much is possible, the classification of the epistolary genre into subgenres: more clearly than Erasmus, Lipsius transforms the familiar letter into an overarching genre, able to welcome and contain all others, and also able to encompass all possible subjects. He deduces, based on the preeminence of the familiar letter, the importance of the sermo humilis, which, though a favored hypothetical, was only one of several possible letter-­writing styles in Erasmus’s text. Lipsius distances himself most clearly from De conscribendis epistolis when it comes to his conception of the sermo humilis and of the elocutio of the familiar letter. In Erasmus’s treatise, the sermo humilis, compared to friendly conversation or comical dialogue,28 is a reflection of the free improvisation of an eloquent and cultivated speaker. Lipsius, on the other hand, observes a previously unnoticed dimension of the epistolary aptum: transposed into writing, the copious, unbound flow of the oral exchange had to yield to a different perspective—the reader’s. He does not renounce the rapid improvisation that Erasmus views as essential to the epistolarian’s freedom and ease. But that very rapidity, which, in Erasmus’s writing, was maintained by trained observation of the aptum, now had to incorporate an awareness of the gap between oral and written styles into that precision. The Lipsian letter thus became the written metaphor of an entirely interiorized improvisation in the spiritual presence of an absent friend. Raised to the rank of prose art, meaning written prose destined for attentive readers, Lipsius’s sermo humilis found itself between two extremes: the conspicuous, ample, and external effects of grand oral eloquence, and the loose and indistinct relaxation of ordinary conversation. Borrowing the notion of idéaï tou logou ([the notion of ] forms of discourse) from Hermogenes, Lipsius summarizes the forms of sermo humilis adapted to epistolary writing in five categories: brevitas, which we would translate as condensation; perspicuitas, which is less clarity than depth; simplicitas, less spontaneity than an effect of spontaneity; venustas, which encompasses urbanity, elegance, humor, wit, and all stylistic graces; and finally decentia, a more fluid and interiorized version of decorum.

The Genesis of Classical Epistolography 221

These qualities guaranteed that written prose, widowed, as it were, by the voice, benefited from substitutions of vigor, precision, accuracy, and “strokes” that would imprint the text into a reader’s soul, in spite of silence and absence. Erasmus’s prose was written to be read as rapidly as one would have listened to his spoken word, without looking backward. Lipsius discovered that the reader, in contrast to the listener, was free to look backward, to linger on the page, and to contemplate and imbibe it as one would a poem. The prose of letter writing had to not only retain that searching attention but also reward it with joyful language. In a way, if Erasmus had discovered the “freedom” of the epistolary genre, then Lipsius discovered, or at least deepened, the spirituality of the act of writing and receiving letters, two contemplative forms of solitude intersecting in silence and absence, and exchanging signs of complicity over time. All the attention was therefore focused on the quality of these signs—their quasi-­cryptic density, depth, and candor—which were all markers of a mind that made the letter writer a kind of engraver chiseling the traits of his me onto the page in order to imprint them more deeply into the soul of a friend, who viewed them as objects of meditation and a source of simultaneously spiritual and aesthetic joy. Through language, the melancholy of the great soul purified itself at the same time that it manifested and shared itself in that purified form. By thus reinforcing the expressivity of a wholly interiorized form of speech, prose was enhanced by characteristics of inspired poetry, oratia stricta. Lipsius was echoing Tacitus’s lesson in his Dialogue on Oratory, which transformed nostalgia for oral eloquence into the foundation of a new philosophical enthusiasm, that of the poet-­prose writer, withdrawn from public life, free on the inside, within a circle of chosen friends, despite the darkness of the world. It is hardly a surprise then that Lipsius, Tacitus’s editor and a contemporary of Gesualdo da Venosa, rediscovered the musical secret of the “style coupé.” The favored instrument of this stylistic acuteness was acumen—the pique, stroke, sally, or “thought,” which was nothing more than a surprising paradox or metaphor, though disdainful of further developing itself in order to maintain its maximum force and allusive seduction. Lipsius viewed acumen as a semen dicendi (a seed of discourse) maintained in its germinal state to combine, in a written style, the gushing impact of thought, its suggestive density, and its power to awaken. Montaigne admirably describes the allusive vigor of prose that makes the reader think, sowing thoughts in his mind, instead of forcing a subject matter exhausted from overdevelopment on him: And how many stories have I spread around which say nothing of themselves, but from which anyone who troubles to pluck them with a little ingenuity will produce numberless essays. Neither these stories nor my

222 Lettered Leisure and Correspondence

quotations serve always simply for example, authority, or ornament. I do not esteem them solely for the use I derive from them. They often bear, outside of my subject, the seeds of a richer and bolder material, and sound obliquely a subtler note, both for myself, who do not wish to express anything more, and for those who get my drift.29 This type of writing, disdainful of striving for the amplification and finiteness of oral eloquence or of descending to the chatter of daily conversation, remained, in a way, closest to the sources of inventiveness (fonts inventionis) in which the thoughts (sententiae) of great antiquity and the germination of the modern writer’s adult ingenium overlapped (or “met,” according to Montaigne). This art of the rapid and allusive sketch, rich with “infinite” developments, was to “completed” discourse what the drawing was to the painting. Balzac’s rival, Dom Jean Goulu, joyfully expresses this aesthetic of the important sketch: You should take [my letters] like the drawings of Michelangelo, which being only sketches still surpass and excel over all the polishing and finishing of the Flemish tableaus and paintings.30 “Incompleteness” was therefore inseparable from a certain degree of coarseness. Indeed, such was the reproach leveled against Lipsius and Montaigne’s style coupé by the treasured “douceur” of France’s courtiers, to the great displeasure of Mademoiselle de Gournay. The style coupé implied a “restrained rhetoric,” though in the opposite sense from that given by Gérard Genette to the restrictive expression, for the style coupé tended to focus on inventiveness and dispense with elocution, insofar as the latter was inseparable from periodic amplification and euphonic finishes. This style that “jumped” (La Mothe Le Vayer dixit) from acumen to acumen, from semen dicendi to semen dicendi, preferring the “pit” to the “pulp,” nonetheless continued to delight connoisseurs, who here seized upon the ingenium at the inventive stage, protected from weakness by the rapidity of projection on the page: like the archer, wrote Lipsius, echoing Quintilian, who at first glance hits the target, neither falling short nor exceeding it.31 This written expressivity of the ingenium was to be maintained in a precise balance with social and moral decorum and all the other requirements of the aptum through judgment, or judicium. But the ingenium and the judicium of epistolary writing were not innate faculties. In order to reach maturity, they required an education in rhetoric and a profound knowledge of antiquity. Lipsius thus distinguishes three stages in an epistolarian’s education: the first, based on scholarly imitation of Cicero and Ciceronian humanists, would equip one’s written style with basic precision and clarity; the second, embellishing on that

The Genesis of Classical Epistolography 223

solid framework, would imitate less academic authors, including comic writers Plautus and Terence. (Erasmus essentially stopped at this stage.) The third, qualified as “adult” by Lipsius, introduced the epistolarian’s ingenium to the whole “lyre” of classical literature, and in particular its tautest cords, the three Latin “Attic” writers, Sallust, Seneca, and Tacitus. In order to prepare for the “first draft” of a letter, the epistolarian also had to compile collections of quotations (excerpta), ornaments (ornamentum), turns of phrase (diction), and vocabulary (formulae). Among the possible ornamentum, Lipsius recommends that the epistolarian accumulate, in his memory, images, allegories, piques, or sallies (acutiora dicta), in other words phrases that can add venustas to his style. The rapidity of epistolary writing therefore relied on the patient acquisition of loci communes and a flawless possession of diverse resources of philosophical and literary culture. The Lipsian epistolarian was like an actor of art: his improvisation was a trompe l’oeil that hid the clockwork of mnemonic techniques and the cunning of an art exercised on a daily basis.32 We can apply Corneille’s description of his Alcandre to Lipsius’s epistolarian Latin style: And yet his bodily strength does not abate, His limbs are supple and his bearing straight: Mysterious forces drive this old man’s heart, And all his steps are miracles of art.33 Can we say as much for Montaigne? According to René Fromilhague,34 the French writer veered and developed between a purely Erasmian attitude, which viewed prose style as a cursory version of cultivated conversation, and a Lipsian attitude, which emphasized the pointedness of the written style in comparison to the nonchalance of dialogue. Here, implicitly, was the problem that the art of the French letter had to resolve in the seventeenth century. The great debate over Guez de Balzac’s Premières Lettres (First Letters) pits one of Lipsius’s successors, Balzac, against one of Erasmus’s successors, Dom Jean Goulu.35 Like Lipsius, Balzac considered the letter to be a written work, which had to gain the reader’s attention through the strength of expression. That said, Balzac was more painfully nostalgic than Lipsius for the grand eloquence of the Forum, and more prone to amplification, complex phrasing, and “polishing” than the Flemish humanist. For that matter, Balzac, addressing a courtly audience in French, which was accustomed to the gentle, euphonic style of novels and romantic poetry, renounced the ridges and abrupt starts of the “style coupé” to adroitly seek an effect of harmony and musicality. These two traits of Balzac’s style, which steered his rhetoric toward meticulous elocu-

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tion at the expense of the rapidity of invention, further increased the distance separating it from an Erasmian conception of the letter. Dom Jean Goulu, like Erasmus, viewed the familiar letter as a simple substitute for dialogue between friends, whose meditative freedom and disdain for an overly deliberate elegance it borrowed. This tension between artful prose as understood by Balzac and the notion of oral improvisation as understood by Goulu gradually dissolved as the art of conversation and the art of writing, borrowing features from each other, became asymptotic in sophisticated milieus. But the role of epistolary art was neither less important nor less central to French literary culture than it had been to humanists’ Latin culture. As had occurred in the sixteenth century, the “infinite” genre of the familiar letter, associated with the infinite freedom of the private, Christian me, eventually counterbalanced the scholarly edifice of Aristotelian rhetoric, all while borrowing fragments that would serve to express an interiorized rhetoric, which emphasizes personal style and taste over dependence on external models, rules, and laws. The Christ of this New Testament of rhetoric was Erasmus; its apostle in France was Pascal, author of The Provincial Letters. Regardless of the precedence long maintained by private correspondence in exchanges, notably exchanges of political or literary news, a new mode of public modern communication soon joined this informative epistolography: the “journal.” I will only mention the major dates of these developments. When it came to political and cultural news, Richelieu, as we know, encouraged the creation of the quasi-­official Gazette in 1631 by Théophraste Renaudot in order to serve his propaganda purposes.36 As for scholarly and scientific news and exchanges between savants previously limited to conversation or handwritten letters, the printed journal also became a method of communication specific to the Republic of Letters. Thus was created Europe’s first high-­quality journal in 1665, Denis de Sallo’s Journal des sçavans (Journal of Savants), which was published in French in Paris every Monday. Beginning on March 6, 1665, the English launched the organ of the Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions, whose prestige was also established almost immediately. The Dutch Refuge rivaled that national press with its circulation of scholarly French-­language periodicals, the most famous of which, after March 1684, was Pierre Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (News from the Republic of Letters), which he wrote entirely himself. As a large province of literary Europe, the Germanic zone, whose scholarly language remained Latin, was obligated to have its own scientific periodicals as well. The first to appear, Acta eruditorum, published beginning in 1682 by Otto Mencke, a professor at Leipzig University, and then by his son Johannes Burckhardt Mencke, enjoyed

The Genesis of Classical Epistolography 225

widespread authority from its debut. The Italians had their own scholarly journals as well. This development of a generalist and scholarly press benefited from long rhetorical debates on the best epistolographic style. Its periodicals favored the simple, clear, and succinct style, stripped of an excess of eloquence, that had slowly permeated, since the time of Erasmus, the writing of private c­ orrespondence.

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Part IV LIVES

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15 FROM LIVES TO BIOGRAPHIES: THE TWILIGHT OF PARNASSUS

“Biography” is a simple, precise, and modern word. Like similar terms with Greek roots, it appears both competent and understandable. It makes dashing appearances in the tables of contents of journals and on conference stages, between “biology” and “bibliography,” and “necrology” and “radiography,” amid that scientific elite of a lexicon that moves from one language to another, traveling in “business” class,” always at ease in different time zones, hotel lobbies, conference rooms, and lecture halls. Compared to that prosperity, the term “life” is old hat, a poor relation doomed to nursing homes and convalescence. It disappeared from store windows and book covers during the interwar period. The hesitations of André Maurois, the author of Aspects de la biographie (Aspects of the Biography, 1928), are characteristic of that transition: he wavered between Vie de Disraeli (Life of Disraeli, 1927), Ariel ou la Vie de Shelley (Ariel or the Life of Shelley, 1923), Prométhée ou la Vie de Balzac (Prometheus or the Life of Balzac, 1965) and, beginning in 1930, the succinct Byron. One senses that the title Vie was fated to disappear or yield to a proper noun or allegorical figure. And yet it was a respectable term, of noble Latin origin, as distinguished in its way as were the Massimi or Colonna of Rome, which claimed to have ancestors named by Titus Livius. The word’s genealogy is even older, if one remembers that its metonymical and literary meaning, in Latin, is a translation of the Greek word bios, with which the ancient Greeks, inventors of the genre and whose use of their language was less pedantic than ours, contented themselves until the end. According to Liddell and Scott, “biography” only appears in antiquity quite late, in the writings of a Neoplatonic philosopher named Damaskios, who introduced the humorless term into the waning Roman Empire, between the fifth and sixth centuries, on the eve of the Middle Ages. It crept into modern languages in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, when Renaissance humanism was reaching its end and the Enlightenment was beginning. This belated and portentous word then began a slow, long-­delayed ascension; it did not enter common usage, “antiquarian” circles notwithstanding, until the nineteenth century. The old term “life” proudly persisted until the 1920s 229

230 Lives

within the particularly conservative language of book titles. Its definitive erasure in favor of “biography” led to that of the terms “memoirs” and “confessions,” which yielded to “autobiography,” whereas “hagiography,” though less able to enter common usage, stripped much of the solemnity and credibility from the “Lives of the Saints.” The fact remains that Lives flourished during the golden age of letters, and it was under that general title that they had the most success. Xenophon and Aulus Gellius both subscribed to Montaigne’s judgment, in his essay “Books,” in which he cited Lives and memoirs as among his favorite readings: The historians are my right ball, for they are pleasant and easy, and where man, in general, the knowledge of whom I hunt after, appears more vividly and entire than anywhere else: the variety and truth of his internal qualities, in gross and piecemeal, the diversity of means by which he is united and knit, and the accidents that threaten him. Now those that write lives, by reason they insist more upon counsels than events, more upon what sallies from within, than upon what happens without, are the most proper for my reading; and, therefore, above all others, Plutarch is the man for me. I am very sorry we have not a dozen Laertii—[Diogenes Laertius, who wrote the Lives of the Philosophers]—or that he was not further extended; for I am equally curious to know the lives and fortunes of these great instructors of the world, as to know the diversities of their doctrines and opinions.1 The paradox in ranking Plutarch’s Parallel Lives far above lengthy, Polybian Histories and favoring Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers even over works by the “great instructors of the world” is in keeping with the Essays as a whole and with the lessons of antiquity as understood by Montaigne. The Muse of all the authors and readers of Lives was the Sphinx, who stopped Oedipus at the gates of Thebes and asked him to solve a riddle: the answer (“word”) to that riddle was a man’s life, from birth to death—in other words, the unity of time, the yardstick of Greek art, be it by Thucydides the historian or Sophocles the dramaturge. A life is the simplest, most resistant, and most elementary unit of measurement. But it is posthumous. After solving the riddle of one word, Oedipus thought himself its master. But he was in the invisible claws (more dangerous than those of the Sphinx) of time. The riddle asked of him was too general not to conceal another one, to which time, alone and on two occasions, would provide the answer: Oedipus’s own life, which was still on hold when, confronted by the Sphinx, he discovered, though in a general and abstract way, that man’s greatest measurement was the bios, the more or less short life cycle

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granted him. That life, full of surprises, needed no one less than Sophocles to write it, in no less than two tragedies, to imitate its twists and turns. As simple and elementary as the genre of Lives may have been, in comparison to Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, it was nonetheless a form of tragic genius. Comedy inevitably reflects a single episode; tragedy—and following its example, Lives—encompasses the entire decline of a career and life cycle, adopting a posthumous perspective that, once the veil of death is lifted, alone allows us to perceive the organic logic of an individual’s destiny and defining traits. What is surprising about Oedipus is that he had two lives, one as a seeing man blinded, the other as a seeing blind man; one linked to the visible world through death, the other to the invisible world by an awakening. The bios is a measurement, but a multilayered one. A life cycle contains shorter cycles, with their own organic completeness, and it is linked, through repetition or variation, to previous cycles, of family members, for example: the “Life of Oedipus” contains a life of Laius, of Jocasta, of Antigone. The most striking element of Suetonius’s “Life of Caligula” is the inclusion of a short “Life of Agricola,” his father, the object of the Roman people’s admiration and love whose superior humanity and tragedy had already been described by Tacitus; Caligula, the antithesis of Agricola, is depicted as a caricature of his parents’ killer, Tiberius, and the repetition, in short and in features vastly exaggerated by haste, of his uncle’s character and path. The bios thus becomes a “nest” of time, in which several broods come to live, and the comparison between them a source of inexhaustible reflections for anyone—meaning any reader—in a nest other than his own, so to speak. Montaigne recognized himself in Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius: outpacing time, confronting its pressures, he was in the midst of writing his own Parallel Lives, his own Life of the Philosophers. Using the more cautious register of prose, he avoided the surprises of Oedipus by prematurely casting himself as Sophocles. Can this genre be traced back to gravestone etchings? In a way, cemeteries, with their juxtaposed family “nests,” are massive collections of Lives. The dispersion and variety of graves conceal the monotony of the rectangle, based on that of the human body, which is their measurement for everything, their “unity of place.” There are few genres like the bios whose contours are as natural, and whose universal “subject,” susceptible to infinite variations and interweavings, is more central in literature. One of the warning signs of a certain “death of man” is the substitution of the biography for the Life. The two authors of Lives cited by Montaigne composed collections. They have reached us intact. Others, which he did not cite, like Cornelius Nepos’s The Lives of Illustrious Men, Suetonius’s The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists also survived the shipwreck of classical lit-

232 Lives

erature. But there is no doubt that the Ancients wrote similar collections very early on, beginning in the fourth century, and prolifically during the Hellenistic period, which were categorized by profession: captains and statesmen, orators and philosophers, painters and poets. Lives were more generous than “histories,” which were reserved for war heroes or government leaders. They acknowledged the “immortality” of men who excelled at endeavors of the mind. That feature draws attention to the importance of professions in the classical bios: the “life cycle” took social form within a “career profile.” Oedipus himself, once a king, had his own profile. The occupation of living, shared by all men, is learned or encounters its decisive challenges within a profession. If the life cycle itself incited an author of Lives to take an interest in the genealogy, family, and medical records of his subjects, their careers would prompt him to mention education, rivals, acts and works, and the successes and setbacks of a master in his particular domain. These milestones served as markers or acknowledgments for a group of like minds and the type of individual that corresponded to it. The Lives of these diverse professional groups formed for each of their new aspirants an elected society, an ideal assembly of examples or witnesses to which one was invited to join. A passage from the tract On the Sublime draws us, along with the aspiring writer, into a circle of invisible accomplished writers watching, so to speak, from above his inkwell: Accordingly it is well that we ourselves also, when elaborating anything which requires lofty expression and elevated conception, should shape some idea in our minds as to how perchance Homer would have said this very thing, or how it would have been raised to the sublime by Plato or Demosthenes or by the historian Thucydides. For those personages, presenting themselves to us and inflaming our ardour and as it were illumining our path, will carry our minds in a mysterious way to the high standards of sublimity which are imaged within us. Still more effectual will it be to suggest this question to our thoughts, “What sort of hearing would Homer, had he been present, or Demosthenes have given to this or that when said by me, or how would they have been affected by the other?” For the ordeal is indeed a severe one, if we presuppose such a tribunal and theatre for our own utterances, and imagine that we are undergoing a scrutiny of our writings before these great heroes, acting as judges and witnesses.2 The life and work of an “illustrious man” are here perceived by a single disciple as a living person, the presence of a superior, timeless order, but with whom dialogue is possible. These exemplary presences are assembled in tribunals or

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theaters, as if on the Mount Parnassus painted by Raphael or Poussin, intimidating but ready to welcome those of the living who were able, in their turn, to vanquish time. Aristotelian encyclopedism, and its desire for a complete inventory of all that is real, has been mined for the impulse that drove the Greeks to compose collections of Lives corresponding to the great professions of the city-­state. But it is clear that this appetite for classifying and inventorying was not incompatible with the more practical desire to create an “informative milieu,” a world of paradigms and examples that led potential heroes to imitate them. The Lives were not merely prosopographical documents. Their audience, aside from the philosopher interested in human diversity, was the professional concerned with shaping his own path while considering the path followed by the most representative of his predecessors. This educational objective is even more visible in a genre related to Lives—the eulogy. The latter abandoned the simple style used to narrate Lives in favor of a more formal and ornate style; scrupulous truth gave way to idealization. Here a significant dose of Platonism was used to exalt an individual life to the level of an admirable model. But the distance between the two genres did not prevent some overlap. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives are also “Exemplary Lives,” a guide to achieving the virtues exercised by Plutarchian heroes. Suetonius’s Lives, without negating the superiority of Caesar or Augustus or liberally indulging in repulsion, nonetheless does not hide the vices and pathological excesses of its twelve revered monsters. Suetonius assumes his readers are filled with both admiration and indignation and adroitly cultivates their discernment of their fellow man. His portraits of emperors, the “guinea pigs” of a new profession, affected by both their early successes and the aggrandizing and monstrous effect that supreme power had on their inherent character flaws, implicitly pay homage to the seasoned, adult emperor, master of his nerves, who will ultimately become “the delight of the human race.” In short, the portrait of Trajan celebrated by Pliny in his Panegyric, the implicit ripe fruit of those twelve, still sour lives. Hadrian, the reigning emperor to whom Suetonius dedicated his Lives, was also his ideal reader, an optimus princeps who learned from the trials and errors of his earliest predecessors. Lives and eulogies, though linked here somewhat paradoxically, contributed to teaching humanitas, that interior harmony desirable in all professions but above all in a “master of the world.” Categories of professional Lives were therefore not specialized to the point of forgetting that the exercise of an occupation first implied the occupation of being human. If a Life offered an unrivaled measurement of time, though shared by all men, its central reference remained a norm of humanity whose

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transgression or forgetting had a necessary and tragic sanction. That norm, more or less observed, more or less lacking, transcended the differences in eras, regimes, and peoples that the authors of “Histories” (like Tacitus) tended to stress. A Life did not acknowledge “progress” or “decline”; it was a variation on a single paradigm, a man’s destiny unfolding between birth and death. That interlude had neither age nor country. The Life format also offered a boundless and timeless meeting place with no outer limits, where the living were invited to meet representatives gathered from previous generations. That indifference to chronology and geography made all the heroes of Lives contemporaries and guests to the same banquet. As soon as the authors of Lives had their characters speak as they supposedly did during their lifetimes, why couldn’t one imagine the discussions they could have had in the Elysian Fields, where they were reunited after death? The genre of “Dialogues of the Dead,” illustrated by Fénelon and Fontenelle in imitation of Lucien, which Montaigne was already exploring in his own way in the interweaving of his Essays, was the modern blooming of Parallel Lives come to maturity. Lives, memoirs, and “Dialogues of the Dead” thus represented, beyond historical time and its circumstances, a swathe of humanity who had passed the test of bios and who were charged with sharing that experience with those living souls still “engaged” in the passage of their own lives. It is clear that the Ancients did not make up the history of the Life genre, which would be narrated abstractly, as was already the case for religious Christian history, and as the philosophical history of the Enlightenment and Hegel would be to an even greater extent. Classical history rooted its narratives in cyclical time, which corresponded to the rhythm of the stages of human life, the seasons, and cosmic revolutions. Everything is born, dies, and metamorphoses for a new cycle. The Life genre thus had origins in classical history, of which it provided a reduced model and canonical measurement. Though clearly “egalitarian” in terms of time and death, Lives reserved the privilege of access to immortality to a small elite, which grew very parsimoniously. How did that elite self-­recruit? It represented and encapsulated humanity, but according to what mode of selection? A unanimous “vote” was necessary, first from one’s contemporaries, but that choice had to be approved by later generations. Meriting a Life implied that right had been previously recognized by all men in a continuous plebiscite that, though implicit, was nonetheless irrefutable. Which further implied, among an “electoral body” of illustrious men, a sure and ultimately infallible ability to find others within its ranks who, in one way or another, had been exemplary “humans”: in other words, those who had overcome

From Lives to Biographies 235

the challenges of the bios in exceptionally distinctive conditions. The author of a Life did not have the power to make his hero “illustrious.” He was merely executing an implicit though objective decision, which had been unanimously made before him, without him. It was even more difficult, however grand one might imagine oneself to be, to proclaim one’s own “illustrious” nature, even justly, if the individual in question was relying exclusively on testimony from his “inner self.” According to Aristotle, the “magnanimous” man could only become so, and furthermore believe himself to be so, if the public recognized him as a “great soul.” This did not signify his moral superiority, but rather that his “visibility,” positive for some, negative for others, was uncontested. And if that notoriety resisted the obstacles of death and oblivion, then said candidate to a Life had effectively been approved. At that stage, it was inevitable that a Life would be written sooner or later, setting in written memory an image that had imposed itself in oral tradition by a unanimous chorus of votes. There is something profound and rather mysterious, especially from our perspective, about this kind of direct, spontaneous election and the degree of certitude it long introduced into the changing flux of human opinion. The number of Greek villages in antiquity that fought over the distinction as Homer’s birthplace reinforced the uncontested nature of his fame and of his titles, which would be attributed to the most illustrious poets and therefore those men most deserving of a Life. We would be mistaken to think that Suetonius’s “twelve Caesars” merited their Lives because their fortune and birth led them to the head of the empire. The implicit order of Lives is far from a chronological automatism. For Suetonius to begin his work, those figures had to be recognized and elected a second time, not as leaders of the empire, but as exceptionally characteristic, anthological, and truly legendary representatives of humanity, individually subjected to the test of a power unknown in Rome, which was neither royal nor republican and all the more discretionary. This law of unanimous election, which the authors of written Lives merely reinforced, had not been done away with by Christianity. In the primitive church, canonization (and therefore inclusion in the catalog of the “Lives of Saints and Martyrs”) occurred by a vote of the assembly of followers, presaging the unanimous agreement of the church. Later, official recognition of the heroic nature of virtues would imply an “odor of saintliness” unanimously recognized by the subject’s entourage, and miracles publicly attesting, before all, to the titles and honors of the deceased, who was to earn sainthood and a place on the calendar of liturgical holidays. Vox populi, vox Dei. The only direct democracy that has functioned from Athens to our day, without interruption and to general satisfaction, is the one that selected the representatives of humanity in the Pantheon, Parnassus, or Paradise. Even Chris-

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tian interiority, and its sense of individual salvation, did not break with the plebiscitary objectivity of glory and exemplariness, indispensable prerequisites to entry into the transcendent kingdom of Lives. And though the implicit philosophy of the doxa governing the system of Lives was quite Aristotelian, Plato and Platonists themselves had, before the Christians, quietly accepted its presuppositions. True, Socrates, a distinguished mortal among mortals, was condemned to death by an Athenian court supported by a majority of Athenians. Plato and Socrates’s disciples were nonetheless able to appeal that judgment through a more decisive authority—universal public opinion. Unanimity was reached on Socrates’s greatness, though it had been denied by a short-­lived majority. But in Aristotle’s strict conception, Socrates’s exceptional notoriety in Athens, in his very lifetime, had already made him one of the great souls destined for a Life. Far from endangering that notoriety, his conviction pushed it to its extreme, as if sealing it with a tragic and unanimously discussed and debated event. His rehabilitation through the Lives dedicated to him by Plato and Xenophon quickly rejected as abhorrent the judges who had convicted Socrates and the Athenian majority who had supported them. More importantly, however, those dialogued Lives confirmed the unanimity of “votes” by friends and enemies alike, even in Athens, that recognized the titles merited by Socrates, an exceptional man and philosopher. Even Aristophanes’s The Clouds confirmed that tremendous notoriety, and the philosopher’s condemnation ruptured the “importance” of the person. The unanimity that acknowledged and elected a “great soul” was therefore not necessarily favorable to him, and could be manifested as much by cries of hatred as by applause. After Socrates, Christian martyrs would first be “designated” by the harassment of unbelievers and later by the admiration of the faithful. In contrast, Christ himself escaped this kind of plebiscitary designation: in a provincial canton of the empire, far from the theater of public opinion, he earned, in his lifetime, few “votes,” favorable or otherwise. He harbored the seeds of another kind of unanimity, destined to grow across space and time due to its divine, nonhuman origin. Christ escaped the genre and philosophy of the Lives. Strauss, Renan, and their imitators picked the wrong figure when they wanted to add the “Son of man,” first and foremost the “Son of God,” to the ranks of “illustrious men.” The biography, supplanting the Life, governs an entirely different landscape and according to an entirely different system. A direct form of democracy—the ancient customs relative to “illustrious men,” the unwritten conventions that regulated their canonization, and the violent or pious dispositions that drove them, from childhood, to want to enter an elite, elected circle—was replaced by a modern and egalitarian democracy, whose electoral body was limited to

From Lives to Biographies 237

one’s living contemporaries. Granted, this body is collectively as numerous as all those that came before, all eras combined. The old form of direct democracy had given considerable weight to the suffrage of the dead, to a vote repeated and confirmed from generation to generation. In a way, it made time the leader of this vote, granting it a preponderant authority over the decisions of the jury. But egalitarian democracy relegated time, and Lives, to the warehouse of historic castoffs. It shifted its focus instead to the “daughter” of time: the young, smiling, active, and rushing news of the day. And, covertly, it stopped being direct. From then on, a wave of intermediaries, or middlemen, was to intervene between the mass of contemporary voters and the objects proposed in their favor (that is, candidates for biographies) who were and are not at all inclined to allow the old spontaneous symphony of voices to play, or the irresistible and ultimately unanimous recognition that once ensured fame and glory. The heroes of past Lives, maintained by a tenacious collective memory, remain attractive and find “biographers.” But they are now merely a decimated and abused old senate, the superstitious worship of whom historical study is incidentally attempting to reconstitute. A swarm of more recent, younger, and “cooler” representatives are increasingly designated for the admiration of the democratic masses by “Great Electors” emerging from who knows where but authorizing themselves to canonize anyone who has had the fifteen minutes of fame by which we are all tempted. And if by chance an individual’s reputation swells without, or far from, these intermediaries, they hasten to reduce him of her to their mold so that not one idol can be formed out of their control. They have the necessary means to force admiration and even adoration upon the creatures they select. They stake their honor on making something out of nothing and are careful to multiply their “stars” in order to ensure, among these nebulae, that none truly stand out; rather, each harms and diminishes the other. Their secret despair is of course time, which, though relegated, marches onward. They banish it by occupying all the available space with their trumpets of “Reputation.” In lieu of the chiseled artisanship of eulogies, Lives, memoirs, and “Dialogues of the Dead,” they substitute flashbacks and interviews. Printed echoes of athletic, political, and cultural celebrity mingle on “superstore” shelves with biographies of leading figures, which haphazardly respond to a thirst for Lives that remains intact despite this bombardment. But that thirst is overstimulated and unquenched—reduced by the Great Electors and stripped, by their voting privileges, of its historic right to choose what would truly satiate it: news of eternal friends. The usurpers of a vox populi confined to the present day serve their audience an overabundance of ephemeral and random representatives swinging between the Charybdis of repetitive hyperbole and the Scylla of abrupt silence.

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This biography “factory” churning out ready-­made texts does not merely jumble past and familiar intercessors and celebrities du jour. History has ceased to be moderated by a Mount Parnassus which was based on the test of experience and on which humanity’s greatest members were judged and approved by humanity itself. History has become a conglomeration of news and current events, all equal, all radically different, a succession of “cultures” that all produced “types” who have nothing in common, but who also claim their right to be the subject of a biography. The news, the new Virgin of Mercy, thus welcomes under her vast jacket of golden nylon the Hopi Indian and the Bronx vagrant, the Siberian shaman and the headhunter, the rock star and the talk-­show host. Within this vast and overpopulated “who’s who,” everyone can dream of the unpredictable favor granted by an intermediary’s whim of suddenly gaining access to the noisy box office and, for a time, donning the dazzling garment of a “standard” biography. By expanding the classical privilege of Lives so liberally, we have ensured that that life itself loses some of its charm. Intermediaries have attempted to address that risk, placing each new face in a phantasmagoric decor meant to represent the abyss of “Me,” which the psychology of one’s inner depths can render more or less mysterious, albeit always under the same spotlight and with the same accomplices. Lives were less dazzling, but also less predictable. Chance, temperament, character, caprice, but also blessings and miracles emerged in these texts, silently revealing the soul’s impatience in the body, the finiteness rapidly fighting against time or measuring itself calmly in relation to it. The reader finds him or herself transported in those works by seeing so many diverse responses to the same questions, so many diverse participants in the same game of imperceptible rules. By switching from the soul to “Me,” monotony menaces. This Proteus of psychological origin can adjust to any profile. Sartre’s biographical monsters (Saint Genet, L’Idiot de la famille [Saint Genet, The Family Idiot]) share the characteristic inability of serial biographies to reveal much about their subjects, despite their interminable analy­ses. Flaubert and Genet became doubles, not of Sartre but of the writer enmeshing his “Me,” with a more or less accepted bad faith, into the labyrinth of fiction and its deceptive backdrops. The only difference between these self-­centered famous reflections and the starry-­eyed girl or the rock star is the entirely arbitrary one between popular fiction and literature. Of course Sartre did not resort to the most radical method of leveling the playing field—the terror of scientific fact. Lives sought the truth, but as defined by Aristotle, not Sherlock Holmes. They did not rely on either magnifying glass or microscope. Instead, the human gaze, and its capacity for discernment, was enough to capture, in detail and in the act, the current of a life and to appeal to readers’ shared experiences. That “just sonority” has always been the factor linking the historical Life to the novel. In Suetonius’s text, the young Tiberius sur-

From Lives to Biographies 239

reptitiously casts lovesick glances at his wife, Agrippina, whom he was forced to divorce for the sake of his country. Once an emperor, that same passion brightened the terrible and intricate debaucheries of his voluntary and dangerous exile in Capri. There is nothing to explain here. It “screams,” as they say, of truth. But for the scientific biography, this kind of characterization was unacceptable. Who could have possibly observed the sideways glances attributed to Tiberius? And had they been observed and correctly interpreted, how could they interest any historical scholarship relating to the Roman Empire? Suetonius’s art falls under literary fiction. Our savant curiosity latches on to other hints, resembling a police investigation. Even the classic biography of yesteryear is no more than a novel when compared to a rigorous prosopography or measured by a more discerning method. The “glances” of a young Tiberius, sensual and still capable of being in love, like Racine’s Nero, nonetheless appeal to a sense of “truth” that has remained the same for twenty-­four centuries and has yet to abandon us even today. The scholarly biography wants to see even further, and considers that one man’s singular drama is necessarily a clash of superior or underlying forces, the aspects of his “character” a facade or consequence. The Prince of Condé is no longer the Prince of Condé but a product of an old feudal society grappling with the rise of the administrative monarchy. And, more profoundly still, he is that soldier who imagines himself crossing the flooded Rhine but who is carried away by the notion of history, a simple chance for the historian to measure the river’s lowest watermark and speed. In this way, the biographer hopes to reveal, beneath the backdrop and actors that amuse the people, the grand apparatus moving the theater. This keeps the specialists on tenterhooks and leaves others somewhat underfed, or, in compensation, overfed on serial biographies. But the word “biography” is not responsible. It made the mistake of triumphing when the shared sense and thread of implicit wisdom of Lives was lost. When the exchange between the initiates of time—between them and with us—was interrupted. Biographies can accumulate. But they no longer attempt to liberate us. And yet are we meant to believe that we have left the era of Lives for biographical modernity in one fell swoop, like in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which, from one day to the next, transports the reader from Shakespeare’s and Fielding’s sunny and vibrant Merry England to a rainy and pompous Victorian England? Between the classical and medieval landscape of Lives and the biographical tropics of today, a vast interim period saw the superb sunset of Lives and the first signs of our mediatized age. This was the era of academies in Italy and France, and the era of English Lives, the masterpiece of which was Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1792). The academies, institutions characteristic of the Italian Renaissance and then of classical France, were interlinked with the Lives genre. One of their

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main activities was to perpetuate their members’ memories after their deaths through a eulogy and the publication of collections of eulogies. This panegyric vocation was voluntarily extended beyond the academies’ own ranks. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Paolo Giovio canonized the most renowned men of humanist Italy, preferably from Florence, in a cycle of eulogies. Vasari was following his example, or so it would appear, when he began his own Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (by preference, Italians). Unlike Pliny the Elder,3 he does not restrict himself to briefly juxtaposing the names of unanimously admired artists with definitions of their styles. He carefully traces the career and describes the character of each of his subjects as if he were one of Plutarch’s heroes or a philosopher according to Diogenes Laertius’s definition. Spontaneous, popular, and royal recognition clearly preceded the text. But the commentary provided by Vasari’s Lives, in addition to establishing Italy as the motherland of artists and art as the true glue of the Italian homeland, also raised the artist in modern Europe to the rank of a model representative of humanity, to the same level as the statesman and warrior, the thinker, and the poet. Vasari further grants his subject a place of honor in the assembly of Parnassus. He also introduces an unknown but auspicious hierarchical criterion. His Lives build gradually, and the most recent come the closest to perfection. This idea of a “progression of the arts” was entirely foreign to the collective wisdom that had “elected” Giotto and Raphael, and Leonardo and Michelangelo, and which was limited to viewing those figures as the “best.” In other words, this erudite “historiographical schema” built on general opinion. Its expanded perspective originated in the Medici Court, the Florentine Academy, and that literary aristocracy’s preoccupation with challenging Gothic Europe. The “progressive breakthrough” of Florentine painters and artists beyond medieval “coarseness” was another victory for Florence, then the intellectual capital of Europe. That in no way weakened the classic function served by Lives and the “transhistorical” magnetism of the group of elites they proposed. In his general introduction, Vasari writes: The minds of an elite moved in all they do by an ardent desire for glory do not spare any pain, however burdensome it may be, in bringing their works to a point of perfection that renders them fit to dazzle and enthrall the entire world; the humble births of many among them could never prevent their efforts from reaching superior stages, the honors offered in this life and then the indestructible renown of their exceptional merits. There are therefore echoes of Plutarch in Vasari’s writing: the grandeur of one’s soul, and the response it elicits from man’s latent desire for greatness, are

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the basis of all true and lasting glory. And it fell to Vasari to cement, so to speak, and protect from the accidents of time the memory of that encounter. He was no less familiar with Suetonius: the grandeur of the soul has its pitfalls, dangers, and eccentricities, which can become pathological or ridiculous. The “best” artists are not sages but melancholy figures troubled and sometimes destroyed by their demons. It was rare that a “family of minds” would find an enthusiastic tribute that summarized, in its own way, with its own illustrations, that group’s distinctive identity, shared traits, and capacity to encapsulate all of humanity, replete with all its grandeur, weakness, variety, inventiveness, and folly. Yet Vasari’s collection of Lives did just that. It was in France that the “historiographical schema” introduced by the Italian academies would take on the dimensions and hold of a national myth. The fleur-­de-­lis kingdom had to not only reproduce the miracles of the Roman Empire but surpass them. The French state strove to intensify, to its benefit, the same upward movement that the numerous and dispersed Italian academies had weakly applied to Parnassus’s elected assembly. The Académie Française became a “glory machine” far more entitled, central, and visible than its Italian predecessors. It was itself an official Parnassus, albeit a modern and French one, that implicitly augured a new way of evaluating great men. Though it undoubtedly did not claim, like the intermediaries of the twentieth century, to be a substitute for the spontaneous choices sanctioned by a long tradition, or even those made by contemporary public opinion. It did however ensure—albeit not without resistance—that its own jury, whose authority was derived from the state, was called upon to confirm acquired fame and glory and to impose its own dignity on recent apparitions of both. Quite naturally, the academy—followed by its younger siblings, the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture and the Académie Royale des Sciences—attempted to boost its recent authority via the idea of “progress,” which made it, its protector the king, and modern France witnesses of “great men,” more accomplished than all those who had preceded them. That dual-­purpose “biographical” vitality (the exaltation of human excellence in general but also of French and modern “politesse”) appeared nowhere with more perseverance (excepting the Gallican Church) than in the collections of academic eulogies that Fontenelle, Abbot Gouget, d’Alembert, and Cordorcet raised to the level of a structured genre. In a biting move, the “reformer” of the strictly English biography, Lytton Strachey, in the preface to his Eminent Victorians (1918), chose to pay homage to a tradition fundamentally opposed to British values and to a genre tightly linked to French academic conventions:

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The art of biography seems to have fallen on evil times in England. We have had, it is true, a few masterpieces, but we have never had, like the French, a great biographical tradition; we have had no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable éloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.4 This display of Francophilia is purely strategic of course. Here, France is hostage to a daunting attempt to hijack the tradition of the original Lives to the advantage of the Bloomsbury group. Through Lytton Strachey’s voice, the entire group reveals its ambition to become the self-­appointed academy of English literature, liberated from the Tory yoke. Incidentally, there is a large gap between the Oxbridgian mockery in Strachey’s biography of Cardinal Manning and the delicate urbanity of the eulogies chiseled by figures like Fontenelle, Valincour, and even Newton! The only common denominator between the two styles is their refusal of Suetonius. However, Fontenelle avoided bizarre or pathological traits, the petit fait vrai, in the name of the elegance and propriety that dominated in French royal academies. Whereas Strachey, keen to denigrate, preferred the insinuation of disturbing underlying psychological aspects to the direct and calm power of the detail that “paints.” If Fontenelle diverged from Suetonius, his colleague at the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture André Félibien was equally removed from Vasari: in his Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes (Discussions concerning the Lives and Works of the Most Excellent Painters, Ancient and Modern), whose publication began in 1666, he composes a Parnassus of artists in which French figures, with Poussin in the front row, receive the laurels of Apollo in the form of dialogued Lives, in the “natural” French style, in which conventions of decency and good taste gently mask the rough edges of the chosen individuals. From 1696 to 1701, Charles Perrault, of the Académie Française and the Académie des Inscriptions, published the similar series of Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle (The Illustrious Men Who Have Appeared in France During This Century), with a supplement published separately, “in Cologne” in 1697, the Éloges de MM. Arnauld et Nicole (Eulogies of Misters Arnauld and Nicole). For the leader of the “Moderns,” this meant extending the academies’ official privilege of declaring someone’s immortality well beyond the group’s own members, perhaps based on the pontifical model of the Congregation of Rites, established in 1588 to advise on canonizations. Perrault went as far as to repair the injustice of the court toward the leading figures of Port-­ Royal, objects of unanimous respect and admiration in France and in Europe, despite their Jesuit adversaries who had influence with Louis XIV. He was not the first to somewhat rectify the aspects of academic eulogies that could be too

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cautiously bureaucratic. In 1673, the academician Honorat de Bueil, the Marquis de Racan, published his Mémoires pour la vie de M. de Malherbe (Memoirs of the Life of Malherbe). As Malherbe, Racan’s teacher of poetry, had died too early to enter the academy or benefit from an official eulogy, Racan, with his Memoirs, established his true ranking on Parnassus as the founder of the French school of poetry, the Nicolas Poussin of modern literature. As a result, a unanimous plebiscite in favor of Malherbe was indeed ratified, and this highly unique individual’s qualities were memorialized. Racan, in order to give himself more leeway, modestly claimed he was writing Malherbe’s Memoirs and nothing more. He nonetheless succeeded at definitively granting the poet his place in the “historiographical schema” protected by the academy, which maintained a processional character and responded to concerns of precedence. The following year, Boileau summed up the significance of that canonization by the famous “Enfin Malherbe vint” (Finally Malherbe Arrived) in Art poétique. La Fontaine would soon situate Malherbe and Racan among “the choruses of angels.” This same “corrective” process benefited the author of The Misanthrope, who, though banned from the academy during his lifetime due to his actor profession, was memorialized in 1705 by Grimarest in a proper Life, posthumously making him an academician. Molière’s glory was complete. One wonders if Adrien Baillet, who in 1691 published the masterpiece of seventeenth-­century Lives, on Descartes, was driven by a similar goal. In his dedication to Chancellor Boucherat, the librarian of the parliamentary president Lamoignan, writes that from early childhood, Louis XIV lavished attention and pensions on Descartes, an exaggerated claim to say the least. His intention is clear: repatriate Descartes and the reach of this Life without which a renowned man in France could not be definitively and officially established as such. And yet, Adrien Baillet, an irreproachable scholar, strayed from the literary model of the academic eulogy: his meticulously chronological Life is the history of both a great personality and a great thinker, culminating with a portrait of a “Salesian” philosopher who combined the qualities of a sage of antiquity and an “honest [Christian] man.” Baillet even adds a “Suetonian” characteristic, softened with a French touch: Descartes’s irresistible attraction to cross-­eyed women, the result, explains the author, of an unrequited childhood love for a cross-­eyed young girl. This manner of completing official lists even influenced the church. The Jesuit Bouhours, the author of the elegant Lives of Saint Ignatius and Saint François-­X avier (1679 and 1682), published in 1686 Vie de Mme de Bellefonds supérieure et fondatrice du monastère des religieuses bénédictines de N.D. des Anges établi à Rouen (Life of Madame de Bellefonds: Superior and Founder of the Monastery of Benedictine Nuns of N.D. des Anges established in Rouen):

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this exquisitely cultured abbess, who had hosted salons in her Norman parlor, was not distinguished by any miracle, and the Congregation of Rites had no plans to beatify or canonize her. Nor would the academy consider a woman, particularly a cloistered one. With this account, Father Bouhours, himself close to the academy, though as a Jesuit unfit to enter it, at least elevated Madame de Bellefonds to the Christian Parnassus. There is little doubt that the academic genre of the eulogy and its cousin, the Life, so regulated, rational, and politely spiritual in France, had a decisive influence on the novel. Valincour, for example, for whom Fontenelle wrote a eulogy, was himself the author of a Vie de François de Lorraine, duc de Guise (Life of François de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, 1681), a work typical of an academic historian, whereas the Abbot of Saint-­Réal published a Don Carlos in 1672 with the subtitle: “Nouvelle historique” (Historical Story). Saint-­Réal also wrote the Mémoires de la duchesse de Mazarin (Memoirs of the Duchess of Mazarin, 1675). Thus, by contagion, authentic eulogies, Lives, and memoirs all influenced fiction. The distance between what was fictional and the degree of historical truth diminished. The description that Fontenelle, in his Éloge de Valincour (Eulogy of Valincour), provided for the Life of the Duke de Guise could just as easily be applied to the “historical stories” that became, under Louis XIV, the nec plus ultra of the novel: A small piece of history that responds to all that we ask of a good historian, research that, though undertaken quite carefully, and sometimes gathered from distant sources, does not surpass the limits of reasonable curiosity, a well drawn, and animated, narration that naturally guides the reader and maintains his interest, a noble and simple style, which draws its ornamentation from the heart of things, or else quite subtly from elsewhere, with no bias toward the hero, who can nonetheless inspire passion from his author.5 One then wonders if, by adopting the academic model of the Life for her historical novel La Princesse de Clèves (The Princess of Cleves, 1687), Madame de La Fayette was not trying to pit altar against altar and had not canonized a woman in the way required, but in a strictly feminine register foreign to the masculine Lives: that of private life and an entirely secret and profane grandeur hidden in the depths of one’s heart. Women were not alone in aspiring to the heights of Parnassus. Men of letters, who were not looked on favorably by the Académie Française, and who would not obtain their own company (inscriptions) until 1701, could count on a kind of canonization via the short-­lived genre of the anas. The Naudaeana,

From Lives to Biographies 245

Patiniana, and Chevraeana, which were dedicated to erudite luminaries like Gabriel Naudé, Guy Patin, and Urbain Chevreau, diverged greatly from the narratives of academic Lives. Inspired by Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, these fragmented collections assembled anecdotes, bon mots, and literary judgments about their heroes. There was no attempt to trace the vast curve of a bios: the last French Pantagruels of Greco-­L atin humanism made do with appearing at the summit of their scholarly careers, among their peers, amid all the cruel judgment and biting wit of those who were well read, well traveled, and experienced. The genre, compromised by the number of mediocre imitations, declined quickly during the eighteenth century. The bon ton of academic eloquence then enveloped the world of men of letters, increasingly looked down upon as “antiquaries,” and the timid attempt to transform the citizens of the former Republic of Letters, who wrote in Latin, into heroes collapsed in archaisms or ridicule. A standard of French, modern, and polite civility imposed itself everywhere through the academic eulogy: Parnassus became the policed and eloquent salon in which the clothed and bewigged dead spoke under the gaze of the gracious Muses and an Apollo in a coronation cape. Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV (The Age of Louis XIV) offers a clear illustration of this assembly of Moderns, whom he calls upon to henceforth preside over the progress of the Enlightenment. For history itself took very seriously the upward or ascending view of history held by gens d’esprit after the Moderns’ victory. The Revolution, the work of orators, ultimately persuaded men of letters that they were indeed the drivers of a humanity heading toward new heights, and not the custodians of a human experience that, in its finiteness, always had to be redone, by other means. Without deigning to directly confront the reigning illusion of his century, the Chateaubriand who penned Mémoires d’outre-­tombe (Memories from beyond the Grave) challenged it, with irony and melancholy, with what he had the courtesy to pre­sent as his individual experience: the succession of human bios, the rules of a game as old as the world itself, but whose classical rigor, hiding beneath verbose ideals, had become even more poignant. His less haughty contemporary, Sainte-­Beuve, was subtler; he has been largely forgotten today. And yet, in his feline manner, he was even shrewder than Chateaubriand. This historian awoke quickly from the nightmare of history. Sainte-­Beuve wanted to write Lives. A Benedictine, he singlehandedly constructed a Parnassus of dynamic portraits capable of intimidating the Moderns. A poet and novelist, he populated his Port-­Royal and his Causeries du lundi (Monday Chats) with figures even more unscathed by the troubles of his time than the great and eloquent Chateaubriand: these were not bright “beacons,” but faces that reflected in the

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half-­light. The ability to distinguish and pre­sent those faces indicates an inner independence and superiority whose masked heroism has not often been recognized. This oeuvre of scattered “criticism”—done justice by Roberto Calasso in his admirable essay The Ruin of Kasch—is in fact a creation as ambitious and monumental as Balzac’s La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), Hugo’s La Légende des siècles (The Legend of the Ages), and Michelet’s Histoire de France (History of France), but with less padding. One finds echoes of both Boileau and Pascal in Sainte-­Beuve’s writing. Sainte-­Beuve forced literature to recreate what it had undone by reflecting and focusing on a collection of parallel Lives, not about men of letters, but about men and women who lived and who wrote. They did not necessarily pen “masterpieces” (a frequent reproach directed at Sainte-­Beuve). But he was suspicious of the modern notion of the masterpiece, which he viewed as too corrupted by exaggerated genius and illusions of sublimity. His less naïve choices led elsewhere: true fidelity to historically and unanimously recognized masterpieces (Homer and Virgil, Horace and La Fontaine, Racine and Saint Augustine). Sainte-­Beuve recognized the loyalty among unknowns and minores whom excitement and bavardage could no longer discern and whose secret talents were well hidden. A prime example is Joseph Joubert. Sainte-­Beuve loved Leopardi, and he would have appreciated Emily Dickinson if he had had the chance. So his touchstone, less personal taste than an infallible intuition for what suited and would always suit honest men and women throughout time, was a way of being, preferably veiled, and good use of finitude, in contrast to the Faustian desire to shock one’s era and knock it a bit further off its hinges. And if the discretion and indirectness of a written narrative did not suffice, this divinatory critic then restored the singular plentitude of a life and face through other means. “Life” and “work” and “character” and “style” worked together to reveal an interior singularity, as well as human dignity gained over time. These elements were as indissociable for Sainte-­Beuve as physiognomy, clothing, interior decor, and a soul’s trajectory were for Balzac. Monday Chats was therefore the last Parnassus of the West and the first to make room for its members’ private lives, for their talent to live hidden and appreciated by small numbers. At this time, the universal standard of humanity to which Sainte-­Beuve refers had ceased to be immediately and unanimously recognizable; it was threatened with clandestinity. More than ever, it needed a representative discreet and invisible enough to allow that standard to emerge from the shadows and be revealed to distracted contemporaries. The discontinuity and prodigious diversity of Monday Chats only initially masks the united and profound coherence of an Elysian landscape to which this critical genius convoked souls rather than demonstrations of glory, tested and civi-

From Lives to Biographies 247

lized figures rather than masterpieces. Sainte-­Beuve, whose claws were so quick to graze others, carefully recommended these figures to his readers: The critical mind is by nature easy, insinuating, mobile, and comprehensive. It is a large and limpid river that snakes and unwinds around works and monuments of poetry, as if around rocks, fortresses, carpeted vineyard slopes and the dense valleys that line its shores. As each object of this landscape remains fixed in its spot, paying scant attention to the others, as the feudal tower dismisses the valley and the valley ignores the hill, the river goes from one to the next, bathes them without damaging them, embracing them with a living and flowing current of water, understands them, reflects them; and when the traveler is curious to know and visit these varied sites, the river takes him in a small boat; it smoothly transports him, and successfully shows him the changing spectacle of its course.6 Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, Port-­Royal, Causeries, Portraits (Chateaubriand and his Literary Group, Port-­Royal, Monday Chats, Portraits): an entire society selected and gathered, far from the noise and “acceleration” of history, to accompany the modern homo viator, share experiences with him, offer him a freely elected family, and liberate him from the flawed belief that living within one’s limits was the only necessity in life. For Sainte-­Beuve, the literary kingdom of Lives had become the initiatory double of the principalities of this changing world, and the only fixed reference point from which to liberate oneself. The French genre had found its “amble” during the seventeenth century, within the academic sphere. Thus the vast ensemble gathered by Sainte-­Beuve in the nineteenth century was not lacking in affinities with the academic genre of the eulogy, which the caustic writer in part helped revive. In his Pensées et Maximes (Thoughts and Maxims), he writes: Monsieur de Chastellux (the author of La Félicité publique [On Public Felicity] and on whom Villemain is in the midst of writing an academic Notice) was the quintessential admirer at the end of a century during which illusions distracted everyone and people were like kites. He applied this to everything. One day, returning from the Comédie française, where he had seen the debut of an actress named Thénard, and entering the home of Madame de Staël, he said, “I just saw a new actress who performed marvelously.” “Oh! That is a bit strong,” said Madame de Staël. “I was there and I thought she was not a good actress at all.” “But,” responded Monsieur de Chastellux, “I found that she did quite well in

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this or that scene,” which he then tried to specify. Madame de Staël persisted, joined by one or two individuals returning from the theater. Monsieur de Chastellux finally backed down, saying, “What else do you want? The poor devil did what she could.” Thus his great admiration, further and further reduced, concluded. I do not know if Villemain will dare describe this quality in his academic Eulogy. But he should, at risk of not painting the man. Paint the man: that phrase paints Sainte-­Beuve himself. Suetonius had the Christian perspective of La Bruyère, Plutarch the French wit of Voltaire, but for all that Sainte-­Beuve may have been our literary “Homer,” his supposed successors, Taine, Brunetière, and Lanson, cruelly rejected him. And the art of Lives in France suffered from the contempt that Valéry, and later Proust, would heap on the pinnacle of the genre: the Life of the writer and the artist. The result: legend and truth, admiration and the art of knowing oneself lost much. Though perhaps the age of assembly-­line biographies will eventually ease and bring us back to Lives, portraits, and maybe even “Dialogues of the Dead.” Nothing can better measure the distance between the French and English traditions, as well as what links them, than a comparison between Lives in England and in France. Lytton Strachey feigned astonishment that the English had nothing comparable to Fontenelle’s academic eulogies. And yet he knew of the existence of John Aubrey (1626–1697), a friend of Hobbes and a member of the Royal Society, who wrote Brief Lives, a collection dedicated to his most noteworthy contemporaries, whom he had known personally or through an intimate oral tradition: Bacon, Hobbes, Henry Wotton.7 But these were masterpieces of melancholy and erudite wit, composed “tumultuarily,” as he himself wrote to his friend Anthony A. Wood, an “antiquary” at Oxford. And therefore nothing that could be read before the Royal Society, a company of savants and scholars cultivating a plain style and not eloquence. Lytton Strachey’s silence begs indulgence, however. Bloomsbury was too fixated on the Londonian Académie Française to see itself in Aubrey; the group was dreaming of the power of figures like Fontenelle, Voltaire, d’Alembert, and their brilliant friends. Aubrey’s delicious and profound brusqueness was too much for these somewhat intimidating intellectuals, who could do no more than add a collection of portraits of original and eccentric figures to England’s rich literary legacy. That did more than any other literary tradition, when it came to the canonization of England’s great men, including its writers, to conserve the capricious spontaneity of the classical and medieval world. The Anglican rupture with Rome shielded England from being influenced by the Roman Congregation of Rites, as had been the case for Richelieu. In England, Lives inevitably emerged wherever an indi-

From Lives to Biographies 249

vidual had reaped universal esteem. Another method of posthumous consecration was the engraved tomb in Westminster Cathedral, another classical ritual that has no equivalent in France. The Pantheon is not the chapel of a unified group, like Westminster, but a secular institution. It is natural that, in the absence of academic eulogies, the genre of Lives in England took on a character vital for national memory and was held in high esteem. An English Sainte-­ Beuve would have been published by Penguin Books. In France, Monday Chats has not been republished in half a century. The history of Life and Letters, and reflection on the genre, became a national discipline in England, which spread throughout the Anglophone world: a journal entitled Biography is published in Honolulu. And the vitality of the genre, the respect accorded its authors, and the reviews it garners in the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books are quite surprising to the French, children overly spoiled, without knowing, by their majestic academic tradition. More generally, the national English mind-­set perceives humanity via the unique individual; it sees no contradiction between private and public virtues. In short, it operates with the sense of bios as viewed by Suetonius and Plutarch. It is not in the land of Shakespeare that you can, with impunity, announce the “death of man” in terms other than those of an individual. That said, English loyalty to a common ground of civility and humanity (extended as far as the animal world) is extremely vibrant. This is in a way the mystery of the English garden: it appears “tumultuous,” but deep down every element or essence is treated with a loving attention that places each in its best light. French Lives, before they devolved into biographies, appeared to have been governed by Le Nôtre’s hand. Once they strayed, in the works of Sainte-­Beuve—the most “English” and “Tory,” along with Montaigne and La Fontaine, of all the French—these figures viewed that eccentric with growing suspicion. The numerous, energetic, dispersed, and varied English Lives responded to an entirely different conception of man, nature, and the connections that linked them. Within that landscape looms an enormous oak tree: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. It was in a way, amplified to the scale of a Smollett novel, a brief life of Aubrey himself. His “hero” was a learned man comparable to Saint-­Évremond, Boileau, and Bayle, whose excellent Lives, written by Pierre Desmaizeaux (1711, 1712, and 1732), the French were so quick to forget. Boswell grants Dr. Johnson, and for good reason, the honors of a Roman emperor: the reader learns every aspect of his inner self, his quirks, his deformities, and the extent of his literary knowledge, taste, and wisdom. However, Boswell is no less unique than his subject: playing at “good country boys,” he ultimately reveals the most complete portrait (or “nature”) produced by any author of Lives in literary history. Though Goethe attempted to reproduce that

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miracle by taming Eckermann, he merely emphasizes, by comparison, what we can call for lack of a better term the “genius” of James Boswell, the Herodotus of the modern genre of Lives. He manifested the latent gifts of an anonymous public, in their vibrant and joyful plenitude, which had always been able to recognize, love, and honor its great men. Moreover, Boswell, like Sainte-­Beuve, had developed the ability to recognize the grandeur of hidden humanity, and help bring it into a permanent spotlight. Less studied than Goethe, Johnson was able to sense that calling, which he viewed as a heavenly gift, and made Boswell his friend and extremely close confidant. He himself published a series of Lives of the Poets. Johnson knew that literature’s most important role was to take the measure, and the memory of that measure, of a man’s life. From their relationship emerged the most unsparing and tender Life that has ever been written, whose hero, without ever ceasing to be one, appears “naïvely” in both his comical quirks and moments of grandeur. The fact that Johnson was a scholar, a living library, a philologist, a critic, an unparalleled moralist, known to true connoisseurs but rarely honored by the masses or the rest of the world, and furthermore a poor man, a kind of Londonian Socrates who nonetheless dazzled in England, gives us a sense of both Boswell’s insight and the admirable persistence across the Channel of these Ancients, in the sense of Boileau and his confidant Brossette, at the very moment (1792) when in France the Moderns were completing their victory by polishing the guillotine blade. Starting with Boswell’s masterful work, obligatory bedside reading for the English (the equivalent of Montaigne’s Essays among the French), Lives in England ripened with the abundance and regularity of the vines. On multiple occasions during the nineteenth century, a deputy of the “electoral corps” would spontaneously come forward, during the lifetime of a “great man,” to prepare himself, in his private life, for his future task as the author of a Life. Such was the case, for example, for Forbes as regarded Carlyle, who was himself obsessed with the quest for great men and the form of their Lives. The greatest writers and historians were not above contributing to the genre. The Life of Charlotte Brontë, by the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and The Life of Charles Dickens, by John Forster, can be counted among the still-­popular monuments of the so-­called Victorian Lives of which the Bloomsbury Group was so contemptuous. And yet this tradition inspired the most indisputable literary biographies of our century: Leon Edel’s Henry James, Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, and even Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf! And since every rule has its exceptions, it is important to note that the twentieth century saw a French masterpiece in the style of the English Life: Jean Delay’s marvelous Jeunesse d’André Gide (The Youth of André Gide, 1956),

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which Sainte-­Beuve would have savored. A doctor and a friend of Gide’s, Jean Delay was in a way his Boswell. His Avant-­Mémoires (Before Memory), written in the manner of Lives, have since confirmed at what point, and with what detached and spiritual humanity, this writer could use the bios to take the genuine measure of a man’s life. His writing combined the French academic tradition, minus Strachey’s cant, with the resources of English Lives, which had already inspired André Maurois. Jean Delay could have easily borrowed, as an epigraph for his work, the epigram cited in the seventeenth century by John Aubrey: “I remember one saying of General Lambert’s: ‘That the best of men are but men at the best.’”

16 THE “FAMILIAR LETTERS” OF PRESIDENT DE BROSSES: A VOYAGE THROUGH ITALY AS AN EXERCISE IN LETTERED LEISURE

Reading Charles de Brosses’s Lettres familières (Familiar Letters), about his time in Italy from the perspective and imagination of Stendhal, is far from the worst way to understand and appreciate this gem of travel writing.1 Yet, over time, the “Stendhalization” of these Letters penned by the president of the Burgundy parlement has become a cliché that dispenses with seeking the inherent truth and beauty of this masterpiece. That said, this cliché no doubt remains preferable to the exhausting analy­ses of which a certain form of modern pedantry is capable, bent on detecting “class” mockery, anti-­Enlightenment “conservatism,” and an affectation of rococo style within de Brosses’s writing. But coming back to Stendhal: The musical effect of “rapid and gentle leisure” to which the author of La Chartreuse (The Charterhouse) often referred, from 1799 to his death, as if to the touchstone of the supreme literary gift, nonetheless threatens to conceal the rigorous discipline that supports it, and which renders taut and tremulous the cords of an instrument with which de Brosses improvised with such apparent ease. In effect, the traveling president was not a tourist in the modern sense of the word introduced by Stendhal into the French language. And not simply because he periodically abandoned his supposed libertine roaming in order to write long and frequent letters. If de Brosses the traveler was truly vacationing from his role as parlement president, he nonetheless remained much more active in his second occupation as a citizen of the Republic of Letters. His Italian voyage, and the very Letters through which we know about it, were exercises in the otium studiosum et litteratum that, since Petrarch (who was hailed in passing at Fontaine-­de-­ Vaucluse by de Brosses’s traveling companions, the two Sainte-­Palayes), had defined the paradox of contemplative and erudite lettered life. If one notes a degree of ostentation in de Brosses’s Letters, it comes from the traits that elevated that ideal of lettered citizenship, which were practiced by the Dijon magistrate throughout his trip to Italy, above the ordinary constraints of professional life or purely worldly leisure. 252

“Familiar Letters” of President de Brosses 253

Make no mistake: even the refined epicureanism deployed so liberally and vivaciously in Letters carries the philosophical seal of the Republic of Letters’ most learned tradition, stretching from Lorenzo Valla to Gassendi, and from Erasmus to Abbot Du Bos. It was a sign of recognition and complicity between Europe’s greatest savants. For de Brosses, as was already the case for Naudé, this literary epicureanism had so deeply penetrated Catholicism following the Renaissance that it served as the common language in Rome, even between nonclerical “libertines” like our Dijon-­born magistrate and the most learned prelates of the Roman Church, namely Cardinal Passionei and the future pope Benedict XIV Lambertini. But even that elevated urbanity and attic wit, so natural in de Brosses’s letters, betrayed him as a citizen of the Republic of Letters to his peers, rather than as a worldly man or salon habitué. De Brosses’s literary humor, which inserted finesse and laughter into mention of even the crudest realia touching upon sex and death, reveals the moral habitus of erudite humanism, which was superior to pedantry, pietism, and prudery, but equally removed from cynical or fanatical mockery. Traveling through Italy, far from his professional obligations, de Brosses was another Peiresc at work, but while writing prose as elegantly as La Fontaine did poetry. But he was also a Peiresc traveling abroad. Beneath the exterior of neglegentia diligens with which de Brosses was happy to describe his travels, this Italian voyage clearly fell within the scope of a research endeavor whose solid structure becomes apparent as soon as we agree to no longer separate otium from studium within his Letters. De Brosses invented a blended genre: an account of the savant voyage rendered through gallant letters. Chapelle and Bachaumont’s Voyage in the southwest meets Gronovius’s Letters, written during his peregrinatio academica in Italy and France,2 the former’s humor and playful charm concealing and rendering seductive the latter’s erudite and classical knowledge. De Brosses could not have read Montaigne’s Journal de voyage (Travel Journal), which was only published in 1770, but he was influenced enough by the philosopher’s Essays that it seems as if he had. A vigorous and lively Montaignian “I,” both enthusiastic and ironic, confidently reveals itself “by leaps and gambols” in an intimate nakedness throughout de Brosses’s letters. Thanks to that singular “I,” the multitude of scholarly or apparently nonchalant curiosities seemingly indulged by the magistrate during his travels are unified by the same style and intention. However, this profound “I” does not belong to a novelistic hero “chasing happiness” in Italy. Though mobile and metamorphic, it remains solidly constructed, knows how it wants to appear and what it wants to be, and is no less organized and determined in its travels than were the Benedictines Jean Mabillon and Bernard de Montfaucon, who penned, respectively, an Iter and a Diarium itali-

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cum. Like them, even if he was not held to monastic discretion, de Brosses was on a study trip, in the name of a community of savants, in the company of savants, and his Letters were first and foremost reports on his mission. Despite the charm and elegance applied by de Brosses to cleanse this solid and studious foundation of all pedantry, his Letters remain in the same Republic of Letters as that of the Maurists. However distinctive or “Montaignian” it may be, de Brosses’s “I” is inseparable from the erudite society he is addressing and from which he draws his assurance and freedom, the font of a happy life. Literature was for him akin to a hive of learned bees among which he could be fully himself before inviting his readers to share the proverbial honeycomb. From the start (meaning Petrarch), friendship was the social connector of the Republic of Letters and an activity neither Erasmus nor Peiresc ever tired of practicing or recommending. The small group of erudite magistrates who accompanied de Brosses to Italy was composed of close friends. Alternately confident, tender, gruff, and infectious, this warm and active friendship permeates the copious missives de Brosses sent to his beloved Blancey, his gentle Quintin, and his dear Buffon, who, though faraway, were still “traveling” at his sides. Such robust and stable friendship, regardless of distance, was only conceivable through the example and generous presence of minds liberated from time, distance, and age: Horace and Ariosto, and Sallust and La Fontaine were thus observers of these men of learning’s leisurely pursuits. Often they were granted speaking parts in de Brosses’s correspondence. Citizenship in the ideal Republic of Letters, as it was exercised by de Brosses and his friends, was also an exquisite victory over the weight and specter of pride and ego; it was the foundation of gay sociability and shared knowledge at one table, one banquet, around which the living, even absent, and the dead happily conversed. This friendship would prove to be the most fertile moral climate for scholarly collaboration and conversation. If de Brosses’s “I” was able to flourish without self-­absorption, it is because he was at home in the sunny climate of Arcadia, Parnassus, and the academy. The classic light of Italy extended this ideal climate to a vast landscape and people, both quite real. It is important, in my opinion, to be quite attentive and receptive to the differences between this humanist brand of literary friendship, shared with us for the last time by de Brosses’s Letters, and the seductive alliances into which Voltaire strategically knew to lead his correspondents. In de Brosses’s writing, there is always a note of pure love in friendship that a man of letters like Voltaire, perennially on guard, carefully avoided. To the trained ear, that note evokes the old Republic of Letters. From Florence, de Brosses writes to the Count of Neuilly:

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You wanted to come to Italy, my king, but it was for a second voyage, was it not? For unless one has been here before, one cannot know of all the things here in the way that you do. But how on Earth! The Borromean Islands, the houses of Brenta, the details of Venice, and one hundred other things you know just as well, and of which you speak to me as precisely as if you had them before your very eyes. Oh, how I would love for that view to be at this moment actual and not a dream, especially now that I find myself within the study of the Grand Duke and amid all the masterpieces of art and science, curiosities and sweet odds and ends that truly make this the most surprising place in the world. I am quite beside myself to not be able to see you when I think how all these kinds of things are in your style and your taste that I find myself only halfway here myself. At this point, a quote from memory comes to mind, from Horace’s book 2, 17: a, te meae si partem animae rapit maturior vis, quid moror altera, nec carus aeque nec superstes integer? (Alas, if some untimely blow snatches thee, the half of my own life, away, why do I, the other half, still linger on, neither so dear as before nor surviving whole?)3 Perhaps de Brosses and the Conte de Neuilly were no Petrarch and Colonna, Montaigne and La Boétie, or Peiresc and Gassendi, but their devotion was identical, their transparency and reciprocity almost pastoral. Rousseau would dream of such friendship his whole life, never finding it among Paris’s philosophes. The traveling de Brosses cannot be separated from the men of learning who accompanied him, mentally following him from Dijon, or those whom he encountered and incorporated into his group along the way. These men were the last shepherds of Arcadia. There was not one man of importance in the Italian Republic of Letters in 1739–1740 that de Brosses did not want to meet and by whom he was not well received: Cardinal Noris, the famous marquis Scipione Maffei, gifted at both poetry and erudition, the Sinicizing Jesuit Foucquet; Abbot Ludovico Antonio Muratori from Modena, a great historian and linguist; the collector Niccolò Gaburri, author of a collection of Vite de Pittori; and finally P. Antonio Maria Gori, a leading antiquary and author of Museum florentinum and Museum etruscum. Nothing in common then, except the itinerary, between this literary voyage, de Brosses’s Iter italicum, and the British

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Grand Tour, from which the word “tourist” is derived. The Grand Tour was the province of very young male members of the British aristocracy, accompanied by their preceptors, who in traveling throughout continental Europe and Italy sought the finishing touches to their educations as future diplomats, statesmen, and members of the gentry. These young men were not and would never become citizens of the Republic of Letters. Their travels were part of an elite curriculum vitae undertaken at the requisite age, during the final years of adolescence. In 1739, de Brosses was already a high-­ranking magistrate, and neither he nor his companions needed this trip to establish themselves. They left for Italy because they could, as adults well established in life, who had already acquired sufficient moral, philosophical, and scholarly maturity. They went to Italy not to learn, but to verify. In keeping with a French tradition, the trip embarked upon by de Brosses and his friends was that of an accomplished and recognized man of letters. The pilgrimage to Italy, the homeland of letters, was therefore, for de Brosses, a general remembering of what he already knew and what he had long read, studied, reflected upon, and seen in the libraries and collections of Dijon and Paris. At his age (thirty-­something), with his vast erudition, for de Brosses Italy was not a learning ground but a place in which to recall and deepen existing knowledge. Like the devout pilgrim visiting the tombs and sites of the holy land, de Brosses put his humanist imagination and memory to the test of sensory experience in Italy. For him, Italy was a veritable euphoria of relearning, which revived and incarnated both texts and art. When he found these works in their original sites, theory became practice, mnemonic prolepsis replaced by the plentitude of a sensual and tangible presence. He may well have been irritated or amused by the discrepancy between the beauty of an idealized Italy and a reality that was often obscured to the traveler. Regardless, he chose to view it from a different angle. The following point is important and indeed the very foundation of the happiness abundant throughout Familiar Letters. When he left for Italy, de Brosses was already, as were the peers of his age group and social class that accompanied him, a recognized citizen of the European Republic of Letters, which, in 1739, had long been divided between Ancients and Moderns. Members of the latter group, like Descartes, Malebranche, Fontenelle, and La Motte, were metaphysicists and geometricians; their analy­ses largely ignored memory, erudition, or antiquity. Italy, for which they cared little, was no longer the Mnemosyne of Europe, in their eyes. Among the Ancients, successors to Boileau, Racine, Madame Dacier, and de Fénelon, we find President Bouhier, the Socrates of the Dijon Academy. This literary divide occurred in both Paris and London. As for Dijon, the city and its parlement remained faithful to the spirit of

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a Republic of Letters unified by a shared reverence for antiquity, at least until 1750. Dijon was a citadel of the Ancients, in harmony with and yearning for an Italy that itself was largely indifferent to the Moderns. De Brosses was to find his natal Dijon amplified and magnified in Italy. In fact, in Dijon,4 as in Italy, the regenerative lifeblood of the Republic of Letters was a Jesuit college, the Collège des Gondrans, where de Brosses’s teacher of poetry and rhetoric was Father Oudin, a translator of Homer. His study companions were Buffon and an Italian, the nephew of the Francophile and pro-­Jansenist Cardinal Passionei. But his true teacher of erudite humanism was President Bouhier, also a former Gondrans student, who was elected to the Académie Française in 1727, thanks to the support of the Marquise de Lambert, when the Moderns were already in power. Editor and preface writer for Montaigne’s Essays, translator of Herodotus, and commentator and translator of Cicero, Jean Bouhier perpetuated the savant tradition of the sixteenth century’s greatest magistrates, the De Thous and the De Mesmes, in Dijon. In his library of thirty thousand volumes, for which his father had obtained the privilege of receiving works published by the Imprimerie royale du Louvre, he assembled a small academy of young magistrates interested in philology and antiquity. He maintained an erudite correspondence with a hundred or so savants from France and abroad. De Brosses was his most talented student. As soon as he returned from Italy, in 1741, he purchased the office of président à mortier from his teacher, who had become first president. He would address his most technical letter from Italy, Mémoire sur les bâtiments antiques dont il subsiste quelques restes à Rome (Recollection of Antique Buildings Partially Remaining in Rome), to President Bouhier. The text on the Antiquités d’Herculanum (Antiquities of Herculaneum), also composed from notes taken on location, and which de Brosses read before the Académie des Inscriptions in 1749, was another clear example of scientific communication in his Letters. Other scholarly “memoirs” are included in Familiar Letters: notes on Avignon, Genoa, Milan, Padua, Bologna, Florence, Naples, and Rome all serve as monographs on urban and human geography, or materials ready for inclusion in an Italian version of an Essai sur les moeurs (Essay on Manners). There are also several well-­considered painting catalogs: Mémoires sur les principaux tableaux de Venise, de Bologne, de Florence, avec de courtes remarques; Catalogue alphabétique des principales peintures et sculptures de Rome (Memoirs on the Principal Paintings of Venice, Bologna, and Florence, with Short Remarks; Alphabetical Catalog of the Principal Paintings and Sculptures of Rome). Finally, the Letters include notes on geology, for example those de Brosses took on the activity of Vesuvius and addressed to Buffon. The breadth and vivacity

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of de Brosses’s style overshadows this vast scientific dossier, which nonetheless occupies a large part of his collected letters. Via their recipients in Dijon, these observations were also directed at the scholarly public of various royal academies. They fulfilled de Brosses’s duties to the French Republic of Letters.5 To these endeavors of a geographer, geologist, antiquary, and art historian, we can add de Brosses’s essays on the political, moral, economic, and even military realities of the countries in which he was traveling, his precise instructions on diverse techniques (the art of creating mosaics, relining paintings, or transporting canvas frescos), and expert remarks on theater and music, all of which serve to dispel the image of an aesthetic and dilettante de Brosses gone in “search of happiness” in Italy. Never had a better (and better-­prepared) encyclopedic mind more completely fulfilled his studious mission, in a concerted effort to understand Italy and share that understanding with France’s literary milieus and political circles. His final letters on the election of his dear Cardinal Lambertini, who took the name Benedict XIV, are a model example of diplomatic relations and political analysis. De Brosses even established a comprehensive alphabetic catalog of the cardinals at the papal conclave, including their descriptions and political heft.6 Chateaubriand modeled his account of his experiences during the 1826 conclave in his Memoirs after de Brosses’s exemplary work as an ambassador in partibus. The “substantific marrow” in de Brosses’s writing is incomparably more varied and nourishing than that of any other voyager in the eighteenth century. The pleasures enjoyed by the erudite magistrate are indistinguishable from his duties as a citizen of the Republic of Letters, and even those of a good subject and servant of an enlightened monarchy. De Brosses applied the curiosities and revealed the competencies of an academician from several different academies. In that sense, his studious leisure was perfectly adapted to a magistrate of a sovereign court on a mission abroad. We should see in his Letters the work of a great parliamentarian who believed, prior to the crises of the end of Louis XV’s reign, that the kingdom’s senates were essential cogs of the royal state and powerful and informed counterbalances to the court’s potential arbitrariness. De Brosses believed that even the leisure life of a high-­placed French magistrate should contribute to enlightening one’s peers. The authority and prestige of the Republic of Letters were in fact indispensable to leading magistrates like de Brosses. That tradition dates back to the sixteenth century. The humanist otium studiosum et litteratum was the corollary to the senatorial auctoritas. In keeping with that tradition, and upon the advice of President Bouhier, de Brosses undertook the emendatio of one of the finest texts of antiquity. He prepared a philological edition of Sallust’s Jugurtha and Catilina and a reconstituted essay, using a method of conjecture that dates

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back to Scaliger, of the scattered and corrupted Roman History, also by Sallust. This ambitious project would ultimately remain unfinished, however, and de Brosses had to settle for publishing a French translation of Roman History, which he had haphazardly reassembled, in 1777. However, from 1739 to 1740, the project still appeared viable. Indeed, de Brosses’s trip to Italy was in part dedicated to this mission. Throughout his travels, de Brosses invariably sought out Sallust’s manuscripts in local libraries. His curiosity for monuments, inscriptions, medals, and ancient sites was spurred on by his desire to corroborate or illuminate a truncated text, a task whose difficulty he knew all too well. From Milan, he wrote to his friend Louis Quarré de Quintin, general procurer of the Burgundy parlement: I had gathered diverse collations of Sallust’s manuscripts at the ­Ambrosiana.7 Regarding Naples, he writes to the Comte de Neuilly, speaker at the Burgundy parlement and future plenipotentiary minister in Genoa: The canton of manuscripts [of the Palais-­Royal library] appears quite vast to me. I placed aside a few written by Sallust and Suetonius for purposes of which you are aware.8 At the end of his note on Herculaneum to President Bouhier, de Brosses, overwhelmed by the discovery of papyri in his searches, finds himself dreaming of the discovery of a few ancient authors among our friends, a Diodorus, for example, a Berosus, a Megasthenes, or a Titus Livius, perhaps even Sallust’s five books of Roman history which we have lost; even if then all the care that I have already taken to recreate them would itself be lost.9 However it was in Rome that his search for Sallust truly gathered momentum and intensity. The magistrate was a frequent visitor to the Vatican Library, noting: I have worked hard for my Sallust, whose excellent manuscripts of pronounced antiquity I have discovered here, particularly one that once belonged to Fulvius Ursinus and since the Queen of Sweden. I had seven collated in my presence with great care.10 He also frequented the Biblioteca Casanatense: I found there some excellent MSS. of Sallust, which are being collated for me. One is well attended to, and with celerity.11

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His visits to the churches and ruins of Rome constantly led him back to his author. While in the San Pietro church in Montorio, he notes: The fine balustrade [of the Cardinal of Montepulciano’s chapel] of yellow antique marble came from the garden of my friend Sallust.12 From San Pietro in Carcere, he writes to Quintin of the “Carcer Tullianum, built by [the king] Tullius Hostilius”: You can imagine with what delight I descended into this place to see the ghost of the Numidian King. The place is still just as it was when described by Sallust. Here St. Peter was imprisoned, but that is so recent an event that it is hardly worth while alluding to it.13 We therefore find ourselves dealing with a philologist, epigraphist, and antiquary on mission in the field. Here, we are quite far from the Stendhalian tourist of Rome, Naples and Florence. Though not that far, in reality, wherein lies the paradox. In his accounts of his promenades through Rome, Sallust’s editor lingers on the remnants of the vast Horti Sallustiani (Gardens of Sallust), as if his scholarly interest for the ruins of the Latin historian’s work were inseparable from the enchanting decor of Sallust’s otium. By editing Sallust’s work, and walking in his footsteps, de Brosses rediscovered one of the most fulfilling moments—luxurious, calm, exquisite—of the classical otium. In Baia, on the Gulf of Naples, where the magistrate carefully studied the ruins of Roman villas by composing detailed notes and lists, his efforts were accompanied and rewarded by a vision of classical leisures, which superimposed themselves on the reality of what had become a lamentable and deserted spot: [. . .] the ancient Romans came here to pass the villeggiatura in the autumn. All the praises that have been sung of this charming bay do not seem to me to be an exaggeration. What a lovely sight this half-­moon-­ shaped hillside must have been when covered with exquisitely built country places, with gardens and terraces, columns and porticoes, monuments and marble statues, and the luxurious barges and ships occupied by those who could find no room on shore. What quotations could I not employ were it not that Addison has forestalled me! What delightful company one had here in the days of Cicero, of Pompey, of Horace, of Maecenas, of Catullus, of Augustus! What exquisite suppers one would have enjoyed at Lucullus’s villa, near the promontory of Miseno! What a delightful way of passing the evening, resting in those golden gondolas, richly decorated, gay with colour, bright with lanterns, floating on a sea covered with roses, with beautiful women, not over-­clothed, upon them! What heavenly

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water-­concerts all through the night on those waters! A marvelous feast of life was that, so graphically described by Seneca! Oh, my Neapolitan friends, why do you not use your money to revive these former delights in these favoured spots?14 De Brosses happily extended his voyage through Italian Arcadia with a pilgrimage to Cythera. But this was no Nervalian islet. While in Italy, de Brosses never felt in exile from the happiness evoked above, for which antiquity served as both a living source and model. Neither grief nor melancholy for Italy’s ruins affected him; neither did resentment against the Christian religion intervening between a defeated present and a vanished, luminous past. Thanks to de Brosses’s Jesuit teachers, he viewed the Roman Church and the Renaissance of antiquity as closely linked. Contemporary Italy, more so than in any other European nation, was the theater of that alliance, a natural and spontaneous continuity. In Lombardy, de Brosses admired the fruits of the administration of the great cardinal of the Counter-­Reformation, the severe Charles Borromeo. But he knew that this ascetic was also a prince of the Renaissance. Braving a storm on Lake Maggiore, he visited the cardinal’s family mansion on the Isola Bella, later writing to the Comte de Neuilly: In short, these are the rooms we have dreamt of, in which you, Maleteste, and Neuilly would love to pass an ideal summer.15 The civilized gaiety of ancient Rome was able to re-­emerge and blossom in Christian Europe to the advantage of the Renaissance of letters and, despite Gothic relics of devout, reformist, Jansenist, or popular fanaticism, once again influence social mores, notably in Italy where it was bubbling underneath the surface. De Brosses’ scholarly and impassioned study of contemporary Italy was inseparable from his philological study of Sallust and the ancient monuments to which the latter led him, for in both cases, be it through memory or experience, a model or a later variant, he found what he was looking for: intelligence in pleasure and the science of happiness. But the epicurean philologist was an equal match for the epicurean encyclopedist, who had mastered the most varied disciplines of understanding reintroduced by the Renaissance. Geographer and geologist, political philosopher, economist, anthropologist, and moralist, de Brosses applied his informed and keen curiosity to all facets of contemporary Italy, in all its delectable diversity. He gladly drew comparisons with his native Burgundy and Paris. This scholar on a voyage of study was also an ethnologist conducting research within a territory richer in humanity than any other, a living palimpsest of antiquity. It is noteworthy that, among so many learned acquaintances, de Brosses found himself most engaged by the former

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Jesuit Foucquet, a missionary to China, a victim of the “Chinese Rites controversy,” and the greatest living Sinologist at the time. In a way, de Brosses in Italy was like a Jesuit in China, both abroad and at home, decoding a living text of humanity written in a foreign language and marveling at his discoveries of its similarities and differences with the original, ancient text. Nihil humani alienum puto (I consider nothing that is human alien to me). In this respect, his Letters contain a scientific discovery of the highest order, of which Stendhal would duly take note: the natural Italian disposition (compared to the French affectation) rendered the study of humanity in Italy more direct and more attractive. This was the strongest legacy of antiquity’s “naturalness” in Europe. Every Italian town offered de Brosses the opportunity to draft a remarkable Essay on Manners, which should be counted among the classics of historical sociology. It should come as little surprise that, as a layman less limited than his Jesuit counterparts, de Brosses placed no limits on his ethnological pursuits, and studied the relics of ancient customs as well as Italian, notably romantic, ones. He did not separate the utilitarian from the pleasurable, nor the search from the experience! One finds some Otaiti in de Brosses’s Italy. But the traveling encyclopedist was no less at ease when it came to study of the arts, the delights of classical leisure uncovered by the Renaissance. Hence, no doubt, his vast “system of knowledge” far surpassed that of the philologists of the seventeenth-­century Republic of Letters. Much like the system of royal academies from the time of Colbert, the French successor to the patronage of the Medicis and popes, de Brosses’s humanities included painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theater, each elevated to intellectual disciplines. The magistrate found himself within each. His observational range was as vast as it was precise, his judgment as personal as it was informed. He belonged to a generation that had read Abbot Du Bos’s Réflexions critiques (Critical Reflections), first published in 1719.16 Du Bos, a philosopher, philologist, and rhetorician (one could call him the French Quintilian), had the stroke of genius to align good taste (goût), the so-­called “sixth sense,” with the savant and refined culture of the Ancients. Following a path paved by Fénelon, he parried the rationalist criticism of the Moderns with a general aesthetic. He showed that artistic sensibility could also be learned, and that good taste was an intelligent mode of understanding. Once in Italy, de Brosses was able to get his hands dirty, so to speak. He was as confortable and engaged at religious services as at the Vatican Library, with Vivaldi as with Gori, at the Campo Vaccino as in the hospitals of Venice, where choirs of the most talented women in Europe transported his trained ear. His architect and urbanist gaze was both professional and sensual. De Brosses was prepared to understand and experience everything in this uni-

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versally artistic country from an expert perspective. It was in Italy that he was able to blend study and leisure, contemplation and joy. His comparison of Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana and Raphael’s The Battle of Constantine (“One of these paintings is a living action, and the other is a performance”)17 is a gem of art criticism, written against the backdrop of the “quarrel over colors and drawing.” His savant’s understanding of the richness of Italian music was less dogmatic and ultimately more complete than Rousseau’s. Not a single page of the latter’s Confessions is comparable to the debut of a letter to Blancey, for all that it was written in haste and seemingly disjointedly, which begins with the following allegro vivace: Not that I am in want of music here, for there is scarcely an evening on which there is not a concert; but all the world rushes during the Carnival to the opera with as much ardor as if they had never heard music before. The passion of the natives for the art is extraordinary. Vivaldi has made himself one of my intimate friends.18 One could reconstruct the history of art in the eighteenth century, using Du Bos’s principles and not those of the prevailing German aesthetic, on the basis of a comparative analysis of the French and Italian goût conducted by de Brosses, in a letter sent to Quintin from Rome: The Italians reproach us [in France] with introducing the Gothic style into our fashions, and accuse us of making our chimneypieces, our snuff-­ boxes, our silver in such shapes that we seem—to them—to have lost sight of the round and square forms. They also say that our ornaments have become to the last degree baroque in style. Such is undoubtedly the case, but in small things more excuse is to be made.19 He adds that, in general, the French master the layout, decoration, order, and amenities of a home’s interior, and the Italians master the magnificence and grand mode of the exterior: “The two tastes combined make a perfect house.”20 This glimpse at the French Gothic background and the classical Italian one foreshadows the future victory of neoclassicism in France. But this was no fleeting premonition. De Brosses continues his musings in another letter, in which he compares the good tastes governing gardens in France and Italy. He focuses in particular, with a disconcerting freedom and intensity, on a parallel between the character of the two nations when applied to their respective form of festive sociability, or what he calls “pomp”: I often contrast the different styles of living between the French and Italian nations, and, to be frank with you, the latter appear to me to be

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richer, nobler, more agreeable, more useful, and more magnificent, and appear to feel their dignity more than ours. What we consider living in a great style is that of a personage who entertains largely. [. . .] An Italian behaves in quite another manner, and after having become rich by a frugal life, spends his money in building or adorning some great public building, which serves either for the use or the adornment of his country, thus handing his name down in a durable manner, and leaving a lasting testimony to his generosity and good taste. Is this not a better kind of vanity than the other? And does it not answer better in the long run? [. . .] And must it not be infinitely more satisfactory to see the result of our own work growing under our eyes in permanent buildings and monuments, than to spend it in a banquet which disappears so soon? [. . .] A finely fluted column is worth a dish of larks. One is an enduring pleasure, and it is a joy for all time.21 De Brosses continues: But the act of dining itself is an agreeable thing. Indeed. Who knows this better than I? It is a daily amusement that forms one of the principal links of society. Yes, when one eats without pomp in a small circle of friends, or among persons who enjoy each other. Which is what men and women of good taste and ordinary fortune in France do. I blame the Italians for not knowing to do the same, but people of ordinary fortunes are not made to undertake public constructions.22 Apart from the Piranesian predilection evident in the above passage, it is important to note the writer’s high praise for conversation between friends “of good taste and ordinary fortune,” which, for de Brosses, was the best trait of the French character. Regardless of the superiority, in terms of architecture and urbanism, of the Roman goût resurging from antiquity, the French arts, notably interior architecture, which, in France, relied on a practical sense of layout, as well as the arts of decoration and entertaining, had the merit of favoring conversation that “forms one of the principal links of society.” As a result, and despite or because of its Gothic heritage, France was better able to absorb, as compared to Italy, the most exquisite gems of the Pax Romana into its national character and customs: Horace’s Voyage to Brindes, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, Macrobius’s Saturnalia, and Athenaeus’s Deipnosophists. At the time, de Brosses, like the Comte de Caylus, considered the monarchy to be at its peak, like a grand conversation focused and refined to the point of being able to mirror its academies’ classical models of studious leisure. The Familiar Letters about Italy—the Attic Nights of the French monar-

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chy—were also the swansong of the old Republic of Letters. They were a sermo convivialis in the purest classical and humanist tradition, a lettered and savant “banquet” that rewriting and structuring, by de Brosses himself, salvaged from a fleeting voyage to create “enduring pleasure” and a “joy for all time.” He adds, speaking of ancient monuments, that “all are invited, and it remains true that the wider the festivity, the more he who gives it can represent and bring honor to himself.”23 It is hardly surprising that, though having prepared to do so, de Brosses never published his Letters. After 1750, amid the general embitterment of the kingdom and the intense conflict pitting king against parlements and the court against philosophes, the independent spirit revealed by his letters would not have been tolerable. De Brosses would have cruelly exposed himself. In his Considérations sur les mœurs de ce siècle (Considerations on Manners of this Age, 1751), Du­clos notes the discredit in which literary erudition had fallen. At the time, the Encylopédie was changing the very nature of the French Republic of Letters. It alienated it from the court and parlements, transforming it into a combative opposition party, whose strategist, from Potsdam, was Voltaire. De Brosses would have also exposed himself to scandal; though deeply conservative, even in his Lettres de Rome (Letters from Rome), the humor and irony expressed by the magistrate, who had become président à mortier and was in violent conflict with the court, would have drawn the wrath of the Jansenists, who wielded power in his professional milieu. A masterpiece of private life, friendship, and the freedom allowed by shared tastes and feelings, these stripped-­ down epistles recounting intimate dinners or scholarly pursuits would not have been able to withstand criticism and the public’s hostile curiosity. The joyful plenitude of de Brosses’s “I,” his arte di godere, indicates that he felt, even during his travels, as if he was at the center of a harmonious conversation of which the French monarchy was itself the protector and amplifier. But after 1750, did the president, shaken by the earliest tremors of the ancien régime, somehow sense, to borrow an expression from Julien Gracq, applied to Chateaubriand, “the new eruption of history as a suffering, incurable dimension of sensibility”? He was a good-­enough musician to understand that the age of Vivaldi, Corregio, and the Horti Sallustiani had once again passed. Back in France, he would undoubtedly also retrospectively decipher Poussin’s melancholic Et in Arcadia ego, which de Brosses had not seen, while traveling, on a single tombstone in Italy.

17 THE COMTE DE CAYLUS AND THE “RETURN TO ANTIQUITY” IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

From works considered to be authoritative, we learn that the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, the dispute that violently disrupted the Republic of Letters beginning in 1687, was over by 1700. And there was a brief resurgence (the quarrel over Homer) that came to a clear end in 1716. Two attacks launched between men of letters and learning should not divert attention from the great “crisis of the European conscience,” whose combatants included giants like Bossuet and Spinoza, and Malebranche and Locke. In contemporary French, the expression “quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” has lost its historical anchor, designating instead the eternal recurrence of a generational conflict that pits old laudatores temporis acti, defeated from the start, against young Moderns with life, future, and progress on their side. This current and general meaning retrospectively colors the interpretation of the “quarrel,” in the strict and historic sense. Arnaldo Momigliano and Leo Strauss, each in his own way and respective discipline, share the merit of having challenged, on our behalf, the bias, if not misleading illusion, according to which the quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns launched to great fanfare in 1687. Paris ruled, rather quickly and definitively, in favor of the Moderns, as befits “youths” jostling and pushing the “old” into graves and oblivion. Using different arguments and premises, the philologist and philosopher each showed that the quarrel, which did indeed inaugurate the conflict between modernity and its enemies, far from having been definitively decided by a purported defeat of the Ancients and supreme victory of the eighteenth-­century Encylopédistes, has been ongoing and in dispute up until present day, notably because throughout the eighteenth century the Ancients of the quarrel succeeded in countering a modernity whose “decadence” they ferociously denounced with a restorative or regenerative “return to antiquity.”

266

Comte de Caylus, “Return to Antiquity” 267

Decadence and Progress: Contrasting European Views of History Both the Italian philologist and the German American political philosopher proved to be Ancients among Moderns, saving the study of classical antiquity from its relegation to a university specialization and restoring the philosophical, moral, and civil meaning it had gained during the Renaissance: distance from “vain scholastic disputes” and “Gothic barbarism” (the decadent modernity of the time), but also a classical foundation for a “renaissance” or “regeneration” of the old Christianity ripped apart by the Grand Schism. Facing a similar general crisis, these two great twentieth-­century minds mirrored the fifteenth-­century humanists who returned to “ancient sources” to heal Europe of its melancholic disease, or the eighteenth-­century antiquaries that came three centuries later: like Rousseau, the philosopher of a “return to nature and antiquity”; Winckelmann, the historian of antiquity-­era art; and Gibbon, the historian who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and who also transformed classical antiquity into a foundation on which to escape the quicksand of the Enlightenment. Since the eighteenth century, terms like “old age,” “twilight,” “diseased soul,” “corruption,” and “dissolution”—all metaphors deployed by Moderns claiming a bounty of virtues over the Ancients (progress, youth, vernal and fertile newness, a healthy mind cleaned of the “rust” of naïve illusions and old errors)—have been regularly turned against the former camp by the Ancients, who paint modernity as nothing more than a decrepit and disguised decadence, a sinister Goya-­esque old woman posing as a young and attractive beauty. This antagonism did not cease during the French Revolution. Arnaldo Momigliano’s “return to antiquaries” and Leo Strauss’s “return to the Ancients” both correspond to a reoccurrence (Vivo would call it a ricorso) of the divided European mind-­set, which, in the nineteenth century, oscillated more than ever before between two collective depressions: one born of a modernity that believed its rise to be restricted by the persistence of a great blind age; the other of an antimodernity that looked to an ancient and original state of the mind for a remedy to its later ills and modern aging. In turns, figures like Auguste Comte and Ernest Renan highlighted the destructive and negative character of what Comte called “the critical doctrine” and what Renan called “the critical art” of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, negators efficient enough to undermine the religious and moral foundations of the Roman Church and the political ancien régime, but unable to replace the social links they had criticized and dissolved with other, more unassailable ones. This shadow cast by the Enlightenment had been described as early by 1802 by Chateaubriand in his novella René, meant to support his Génie du Chris-

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tianisme (Genius of Christianity): this allegorical portrait uses the paradoxical traits of a young man prematurely and morally aged and paralyzed to symbolize the melancholy or boredom provoked by the critiques of the Enlightenment, which corroded natural social links as much as they did the religious faith that sanctified them. Reinhart Koselleck summed up this philosophical “critique of critique” in his 1959 Kritik und Krise, published in English as Critique and Crisis.1 Koselleck allows the “philosophes” of the eighteenth century to speak for themselves, alongside their master, the author of Dictionnaire historique et critique (The Dictionary Historical and Critical), Pierre Bayle. In their moments of supreme lucidity, the Enlightenment’s “kings of critique,” tireless liberators and sworn enemies of dogma, myth, superstition, legend, and tradition, though prudently conservative in politics, recognized the distress to which they were condemning a humanity reduced to negations, and the intolerant authority revealed by their critiques by demanding tolerance between belief systems they had already emptied of meaning and authority. In his Dictionary, Bayle describes the negative effects of the extension, beyond the aristocratic “secret” of the Republic of Letters, of the infighting, and indeed civil war, among “critics,” using terms that foreshadowed Chateaubriand’s 1802 diagnosis of the modern man, disoriented from childhood by the generalized criticism of “prejudices.” Bayle writes: In a word the fate of man is in such a bad situation that the wisdom that delivers him from one evil precipitates him into another. Drive away ignorance and barbarity and you eliminate superstitions, and the foolish credulity of the people so profitable to their progenitors, but who then abuse their gains to immerse themselves in idleness and debauchery: but by enlightening men on these disorders, you inspire in them the desire to examine everything, they dissect and scrutinize so much that they no longer find anything to content their miserable reason.2 In a supplement to his Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary) in 1771, Voltaire also stigmatizes the popularization of the sovereign critical judgment that he himself had practiced, while believing that it could be reserved, in all safety, solely for “princes of the mind”: “There is not a single of these critics who does not believe himself judge of the universe and listened to by the universe.”3 This state of permanent revolution and civil war sparked by the critical thinking of the Enlightenment was on Caylus’s mind when he recommended, for the “third stage” of intellectual history, the reestablishment of a “spiritual power” that would support the advances of science while also counterbalancing the col-

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lapse of all certitude and shared norms in a world in crisis where the continually evolving nature of truth condemned all provisional likelihoods to cancel each other out. Renan came to similar conclusions in his Dialogues and Drames philosophiques (Philosophical Dramas); he believed that the only possible future for the “Brahmanic” and “aristocratic” character of science lay in the revival of a “religion of the heart” that would recreate a moral conscience and restore the sense of sacrifice required by a scientific truth that was unfolding but not yet complete, in other words, distant and largely hidden. Following Chateaubriand, who had advocated for a revival of the old Christian faith, Comte and Renan therefore looked to Rousseau, who had observed better than anyone the destructive and negative character of the Enlightenment’s criticism of religion, for a defense of the religious act of faith as the cornerstone of any society, even and especially a regenerated one. Rousseau did indeed include an outline of “civic religion” in the utopia of the reconstructed society of his Contrat social (The Social Contract), sanctifying the rediscovered natural social link among men; in Emile, the “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” had looked to sentiments of the heart, more persuasive and universal than arguments of theological reasoning or atheistic criticism, for the regeneration of a moral conscience and religious faith in a modern world stripped of both by the anticlericalism of the Parisian Enlightenment. A Return to Antiquity and Sources of Faith: Convergence and Dissociation This negation of negation and call for the positivity of a “return of the rejected,” in terms of religion and morality, are structurally similar to the faith in antiquity that inspired the work of eighteenth-­century antiquaries who were indifferent to the criticism and disdain imparted on them by Enlightenment philosophers. At first glance, however, there is no clear link between the “return to antiquity” and the return to faith encouraged by Vico and Rousseau, each in his own way, with the former attributing the first awakening of the true human conscience to fear of the gods and worship of the dead, and the latter advising the return to the “religion of the heart” natural to all men. After all, isn’t the “return to antiquity” intrinsically “pagan,” and the act of faith intrinsically biblical and Christian? This contradiction, if it did exist, was dormant among fifteenth-­century humanists, as well as Petrarch, for whom the “return to antiquity” emerged from the same regenerative swell of Christianity as the “return to the church of the first centuries and its [Greek and Latin] Fathers,” unscathed by the consecutive “gothicization” of barbarian invasions. That movement did not separate the return of the Christian faith to its patristic “ori-

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gins” from modern Christians’ reappropriation of the Greco-­Roman resources imbued by the Apostolic Fathers with the wisdom of the Revelation. Exasperated by the Reformation and the Counter-­Reformation, this “return to origins” was able to produce, in French Catholicism, a veritable “archeolatry” of the early church and fathers,4 which was taken to the extreme by the dogmatic Augustinism of Port-­Royal.5 More faithful to the original and renovating spirit of the Renaissance, the “critical art” of the Saint-­Maur Benedictines strove to purify the Catholic tradition, in order to invigorate it, of legendary or superstitious accretions accumulated during the “Gothic” centuries, and also understand, through documents and inscriptions, as used by the Maurist Bernard de Montfaucon’s Antiquité expliquée (Antiquity Explained), the religious backdrop of pagan antiquity that the Christian Revelation had penetrated, purified, and illuminated. Granted, unlike their predecessors of the Italian Renaissance, the secular antiquaries of the eighteenth century paid little attention to a return to patristic origins. Even Vico, unique among this group due to his Catholic apologetics, indirectly constructed his reasoning using anthropological premises: critical modern reasoning would atrophy the human mind and lead it astray if man were to cut himself off from the sources of knowledge that awakened his consciousness of himself, that is, religion and poetry. Rousseau, the most ardent of the eighteenth-­century Ancients, was uninvolved with and even hostile toward the world of antiquaries: that distance was all the greater given that his study of man did not merely recommend a coordinated return “to nature” and “to antiquity” but also called for a return to natural religion, notably the form he considered to be the most transparent, Christianity, provided it was purified of the alienating “enlightenment” of theological erudition and controversy. In contrast, a full-­ fledged antiquary like Edward Gibbon was all the more tempted, like Machiavelli, to attribute to Christianity a disastrous mission that threatened any solid and durable political order, given that this religion of slaves had already contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon, a historian of late antiquity, focused his reverence on the Roman Empire as it had been celebrated by the Greeks Polybius and Aelius Aristides, and not on the republican Rome whose fall was mourned by Lucan and Tacitus and whose civic virtues had been praised by Rousseau to shame the vices of subjects of the great modern monarchies. The anatomy of the decomposition of the empire offered by Gibbon is commensurate with his admiration for the administrative and military aristocracy of the Flavians and Antonines, repeatedly left unscathed by palace revolutions, Eastern religions, Christianity, and cowardly concessions to the barbarians. Decline and Fall (1776) was an early mirror for and a warning

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to the British Empire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kipling would rewrite Gibbon in the ­present. In general, eighteenth-­century antiquaries looked to Greek and Roman antiquity for a noble and altruistic form of historical knowledge. But the most ambitious among them went even further: they looked to a now-­better-­understood antiquity for the principles of a regeneration of modern art and taste: their ardent and patient excavations of Roman culture, the successor to Greece, and their call for man to regain his footing on ancient ground—though they no longer sought justification through the providential receptivity of the Greco-­ Roman world to the Christian revelation, as fifteenth-­century humanists had— nonetheless revealed an act of faith in the vigorous, natural wisdom of classical genius that had been forgotten, weakened, and diminished by the Moderns. This act of faith in an antiquity assumed to have fully effected the natural enlightenment of man pitted them against the philosophes of the modern Enlightenment, and brought them unknowingly closer to Rousseau, the new Diogenes who denigrated the arts and was clearly not one of them. That was because Rousseau’s resort to the natural wisdom still intact during antiquity implied a radical regeneration of modern man (see Emile) and society (see The Social Contract), whereas the most ambitious antiquaries remained as politically conservative as the philosophes, and dreamt only of remedying the “corruption of taste” and of modern arts through the return to nature and antiquity. The art criticism penned by Diderot, Rousseau’s former friend, is the best testament to the French convergence of the two conceptions of the “return to antiquity” held by antiquaries and Rousseau, respectively. This fusion, to which David’s post-­1785 “history paintings” largely contributed, supplied one of the explosive ingredients of the “revolution” prophesized, desired, and feared, beginning in 1763, by the author of Emile. The fact remains that, whether radical or conservative, friendly or hostile to Christianity, the point of view of eighteenth-­ century Ancients, haunted by the sense of a modern decadence, amputation, or alienation, challenged that of the Moderns, inspired by a euphoric confidence in the superiority of the “mind of the time” and its “progress,” with surprising success. The Counter-­Enlightenment and Rousseau By redeeming eighteenth-­century antiquaries, and siding with Gibbon over Diderot, Arnaldo Momigliano facilitated a deeper and less naïve re-­ interpretation of the century of Enlightenment. In parallel, Leo Strauss, redeeming the classical thinking of ancient philosophers and historians within modern and critical philosophy, also looked to a “return to antiquity” to heal

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the modern mind of the general relativism inherited from the Enlightenment and restore the classical foundations lacking in an adrift political modernity. In some respects, through their “critique of critique,” these two twentieth-­century thinkers overlapped with the anti-­modernity of Nietzsche, and like him, turned to ancient ground, though not to awaken Dionysus or Zarathustra. But Momigliano and Strauss were more aligned with Caylus and Renan when it came to one fundamental belief: modernity is the errant child of an ultimately harmful critique, which liberated it from faith to better lead it into nihilism and irrationalism. “Progress” that claims to enlighten men by amputating their call to sacrifice, beauty, and admiration belies the very “enlightenment” it suggests and condemns humanity to an unprecedented moral withering. Even as he suggested saving the “future of science” by linking it to a religion that provided people a sense of sacrifice, Renan could not but doubt the very thing he desired, since at the edge of science, “the truth is perhaps sad.” Thus on multiple occasions, modern doubt revolted and turned against the modernity that had so heedlessly generalized it. The product of a vein of criticism that had long pretended to spare society and the State, the modern crisis was so successful at attacking every foundation of society and the State that it provoked, from generation to generation, with reoccurring diagnoses of decadence, new attempts to heal the modern disease by returning to the tenets of an ancient health. The talent and propaganda of the French Encylopédistes succeeded in convincing many, well beyond their initial public, that the Moderns were the only side in the quarrel to have been right and to always be right. The philosophes, led by Voltaire, succeeded in spreading the axiom that their critical modernity had an unlimited future and could dispense with history. The critical and skeptical “doxa” of the Enlightenment paradoxically adhered to the dogmatism of an irresistible and irrefutable modernity that adored the progress devouring it, and rejected any obstacle, impediment, and objection as absurd or perverse archaisms. In Emile, Rousseau occasionally mocks the Académie des Inscriptions, but his constant quoting of classical events and texts proves the extent to which antiquity was still alive for the homo naturalis redivius he claimed to be and which he wanted to encourage in his student. No other Ancient of the quarrel did a better job at defining how antiquity, a time when man was still naturally enlightened, was the perennial solution to a decadent era in which man was alienated from his own nature by the very weight of his contradictory enlightenment: Speaking generally Emile will have more taste for the books of the ancients than for our own, just because they were the first, and therefore

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the ancients are nearer to nature and their genius is more distinct. Whatever La Motte and the Abbé Terrasson may say, there is no real advance in human reason, for what we gain in one direction we lose in another; for all minds start from the same point, and as the time spent in learning what others have thought is so much time lost in learning to think for ourselves, we have more acquired knowledge and less vigour of mind. Our minds like our arms are accustomed to use tools for everything, and to do nothing for themselves.6 Rousseau further viewed the Enlightenment, a phenomenon with which his century was so pleased, as the ultimate and modern state of alienation from natural enlightenment, a civil war of the mind waged against itself, which linked an arrogant and intolerant dogmatism to universal scepticism and criticism: Shun those who, under the pretence of explaining nature, sow destructive doctrines in the heart of men, those whose apparent skepticism is a hundredfold more self-­assertive and dogmatic than the firm tone of their opponents. Under the arrogant claim, that they alone are enlightened, true, honest, they subject us imperiously to their far-­reaching decisions, and profess to give us, as the true principles of all things, the unintelligible systems framed by their imagination. Moreover, they overthrow, destroy, and trample under foot all that men reverence; they rob the afflicted of their last consolation in their misery; they deprive the rich and powerful of the sole bridle of their passions; they tear from the very depths of man’s heart all remorse for crime, and all hope of virtue; and they boast, moreover, that they are the benefactors of the human race. Truth, they say, can never do a man harm. I think so too, and to my mind that is strong evidence that what they teach is not true.7 The result of that aplomb of “criticism,” which influenced posterity even more than it did the audience of the Enlightenment, passionate readers of Rousseau, was that entire sections of the eighteenth century were draped in shadow, suppressed like insignificant gnats incapable of stopping the steamroller of modernity from advancing. It is only in the past few years that we have started to overcome this retrospective astigmatism. Suddenly, books unthinkable a mere decade ago have begun to appear, which measure the previously invisible extent of the resistance to an Enlightenment believed to have completely invaded and permeated the eighteenth century.8 In the center of this Counter-­Enlightenment looms the formidable figure of Rousseau, traditionally listed among the intellectuals of the Aufklärung, even though this Janus bifrons was also, and perhaps above all, the most determined

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and prophetic enemy of critical modernity as celebrated and practiced by Enlightenment thinkers. Beginning with Discours sur les origins de l’inégalité (Discourse on the Origins of Inequality), Rousseau contrasts Fabricius, the citizen from antiquity, and his noble, heroic soul ready to sacrifice for the city, with the modern bourgeois, liberated from God and idols and protectively diminished to enjoyment of his private rights and liberties. In Emile, Rousseau does not merely oppose the “man of nature” in possession of all his gifts with the withering away of the modern individual, the “man of man” alienated from his own nature; he invites the man exceptionally restored to his nature, reborn an Ancient among the Moderns, to free the world of alienated and degenerate men: Degeneracy is the result of youthful excesses, and it is these excesses which make men what they are. Old and base in their vices, their hearts are shriveled, because their worn-­out bodies were corrupted at an early age; they have scarcely strength to stir. The subtlety of their thoughts betrays a mind lacking in substance; they are incapable of any great or noble feeling, they have neither simplicity nor vigour; altogether abject and meanly wicked, they are merely frivolous, deceitful, and false; they have not even courage enough to be distinguished criminals. Such are the despicable men produced by early debauchery; if there were but one among them who knew how to be sober and temperate, to guard his heart, his body, his morals from the contagion of bad example, at the age of thirty he would crush all these insects, and would become their master with far less trouble than it cost him to become master of himself.9 Confronting the violent and facile anticlericalism of the Enlightenment head-­on, Rousseau exalts the sentiment that makes man believe and doubt, beyond reason, and celebrates the fecundity of a “religion of the heart” superior to the sterile and cynical coldness of the exclusively critical “mind.” He goes so far as to write the following, presaging both the Terror of 1793 and our contemporary ones: Bayle has proved very satisfactorily that fanaticism is more harmful than atheism, and that cannot be denied; but what he has not taken the trouble to say, though it is none the less true, is this: Fanaticism, though cruel and bloodthirsty, is still a great and powerful passion, which stirs the heart of man, teaching him to despise death, and giving him an enormous motive power, which only needs to be guided rightly to produce the noblest virtues; while irreligion, and the argumentative philosophic spirit generally, on the other hand, assaults the life and enfeebles it, degrades the soul, concentrates all the passions in the basest self-­interest, in the mean-

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ness of the human self; thus it saps unnoticed the very foundations of all society; for what is common to all these private interests is so small that it will never outweigh their opposing interests.10 In his Lettre à d’Alembert (Letter to d’Alembert), which foreshadows the current rebellions against and aversion to a “globalized” antisociety of spectacle and consumption, Rousseau launches a merciless assault against the “leisure societies” of his time, effectively, at least in England and France, anticipating today’s entertainment society in which distracted, off-­centered, bored, and depoliticized individuals demand that mass-­market “culture,” which has swallowed up the arts, occupy the void. An Ancient reappearing among the Moderns, Rousseau saw in the philosophical and moral modernity of eighteenth-­ century England and France a well-­developed hint of “our modernity,” which he condemned in advance by adopting the distant, overhanging, and violently ironic perspective of the “return to antiquity and nature.” Of course, Rousseau was in no way an antiquary, but his reading of poets, moralists, and classical historians mirrors that of Madame Dacier, who praised the simplicity and grandness of the world of the Iliad, which existed at the same time as that of the Bible, to an audience encouraged by the Moderns to see nothing but archaism, crudeness, and vulgarity in Homer’s poem. Rousseau’s revolt against the sophism of the Enlightenment in the name of nature and antiquity paralleled the combat led by the antiquaries in the Ancients’ camp against the modern decadence of arts and manners, which, in their eyes, could be summed up by the sprinkling of colors and the languid drawings by alcove painters, flatterers of the “corrupted” taste of the modern public, in the vein of François Boucher and Carle van Loo. This was the moment in France when parallel perspectives converged, and Rousseau’s moral and political revolt coincided with the antiquaries’ battle for a regeneration of taste. Winckelmann, the brilliant and eloquent successor of the eighteenth-­century antiquaries, was somewhat of a “Rousseauist” when he constructed his history of classical art using the poignant framework of Longinus’s On the Sublime, contrasting the heroic grandeur and liberty of ancient republics, the source of grace and sublimity in art, with the physical and moral decline of the “denatured” world of the eighteenth century. In England, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, which cast a much less “romantic” judgment on contemporary Europe, looked, on the contrary, to the Roman Empire at its height for a model to imitate and consider for Europeans resolved to perpetuate, spread, and defend a civilization awoken by the Renaissance, for which they were henceforth responsible before all humankind and in which they were meant to believe. If the French Revolution of 1789 had been, according to the Marxist vul-

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gate, a “bourgeois” revolution, the Jacobin “bourgeoisie” that pushed it to the extreme nonetheless claimed to be “ancient” and “sublime” citizens, along the lines of Rousseau’s Fabricius, and not “bourgeois” ones, in the sense of Voltaire’s modern Mondain or the philosophe husband and father who served as Diderot’s voice in the Neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew). The French Jacobins had perfectly assimilated the vehement antibourgeoisie sentiment that erupts in Rousseau’s two Discourses, and in Emile and The Social Contract, and which made the “virtue” of the citizen of antiquity the plebian foe as unforgiving of bourgeois hypocrisy as of aristocratic vices. Allan Bloom, one of Leo Strauss’s students, was the first to note that we should look to Rousseau, who incidentally, at times proved quite forgiving of the hereditary aristocracy and sympathetic to its chivalrous virtues, for the basis of the “romantic” horror of the bourgeoisie and the best definition thus far given of the hypocrisy of the “modern” man: He who would preserve the supremacy of natural feelings in social life knows not what he asks. Ever at war with himself, hesitating between his wishes and his duties, he will be neither a man nor a citizen. He will be of no use to himself nor to others. He will be a man of our day, a Frenchman, an Englishman, one of the great middle class.11 Vico, Enlightenment Philosophers, and Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century The self-­taught Rousseau is fundamentally the most consequential and extreme example of the reaction of which a mind that has decided to adopt the perspective of antiquity and nature to judge the modernity of the bourgeois Enlightenment is capable. In the years following his death, which preceded the revolution, it was Rousseau the prophet, speaking on behalf of antiquity and nature, and no longer Moderns like Voltaire, d’Alembert, and Diderot, who inflamed a young generation of Bonapartes and Chateaubriands. It was also Rousseau who inspired the neoclassical and republican heroism of David, the “painter of history.” It is therefore not surprising that during his lifetime, the author of Emile was the object of an impressive campaign of denigration and denunciation waged by philosophes and Voltaire.12 Rousseau’s darkly ironic gaze on the progress of the Enlightenment was the flip side of an enthusiasm for antiquity and nature whose radicalness greatly bothered a movement of philosophical criticism that refused to see the destructive nature of its modernity. But even the classic and conservative eighteenth-­century antiquary, the successor to the humanist tradition of the man of letters examining his own era in the light of antiquity, was treated with persistent suspicion and denigration by the Encyclopédistes. Indeed, the Encyclopédie is responsible for introducing

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the conflation between antiquarianism and dated pedantry that has since become a commonplace of modernity. In a noteworthy article,13 Arnaldo Momigliano had the nonchalant audacity to question that cliché and praise the Italian Renaissance, which, in contrast, viewed the antiquary and the philologist as the agents of a regeneration of Christian Europe. Eighteenth-­century Italy remained the chosen land of antiquarianism: Venice, Padua, Florence, Cortona, Parma, Rome, Naples, and their antiquaries (typically amateurs and art collectors), academies, excavations, and monumental publications kept an enthralled Europe on tenterhooks, much as the first discoveries of painted caves and ancient statues in Rome and Latium did during the sixth and seventh centuries. Enlightenment Italy also had its own philosopher and philologist of modern decadence, Giambattista Vico, who discovered the first German “philosophers of history” at the end of the century. Based on the paradigm of the three ages of the Roman Empire, Vico constructed a cyclical interpretation of the process of civilization, in which decadence was not regarded as an end but as a return, in an exacerbated state, gravid with renewal, to fertile original barbarism. This stage of civilization, which was led astray into decadence, experienced by Rome in the third century, and which carried the seeds of feudal and medieval Christendom, reoccurred in the modern Europe of “criticism” and the “Enlightenment.” Vico defined it as a “barbarism of reflection,” a formula Chateaubriand appropriated in his Memoirs when describing the “barbarians of civilization” rampant in Paris during the Terror or when predicting the still-­to-­come moral repercussions of the social decomposition of postrevolutionary Europe. But Vico had already spoken of civil wars, past and future: they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. For the latter displayed a generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight or be on one’s guard; but the former, with a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates.14 As early as 1707, Vico had diagnosed Europe’s return to the “third age” of civilization—a “barbarism of reflection” that heralded its slide into decadence, a repetition of third-­century Rome—in his speech “Sur la méthode des études de notre temps” (On the Study Methods of Our Time): the education of the Enlightenment, which exhausts the feelings, imagination, and faith of adolescents

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through their premature exposure to Descartes’s analytical and critical reasoning, deprives them of the natural development that would capsulize that of the three ages of human society (barbarian/poetic, religious/heroic, human/rational) and drives them instead toward the “barbarism of reflection.” The alienating transformation of the “man of nature” to the “man of man,” according to the author of Emile, is highly similar to that amputation of the modern and exclusively rational man, denounced by Vico as the very essence of decadence, of the poetic, religious, and courageous capacities plentiful in the man of antiquity. Momigliano, Gibbon, Caylus, and the Return to Antiquaries But it was in France, theater of the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, and not in an Italy still in the throes of the Renaissance and the Catholic Reformation, that the question of decadence raised during the eighteenth century would take its bitterest turn. The philosophes’ criticism replaced that of the Moderns, and Rousseau’s “critique of critique” then replaced the Ancients’ criticism of the “corruption of modern taste.” At the height of the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, the former acquired a citadel with the creation in 1701, initiated by one of their members, Abbot Bignon, of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. This French Academy was at that time, during nearly every one of its elections, the battleground on which each side tried to mark points. The relentless hatred with which the Encyclopédie’s mastermind, Denis Diderot, who also became one of Rousseau’s persecutors, harried France’s most prestigious and influential antiquary, the Comte de Caylus, a member of the Académie des Inscriptions since 1742, was merely one episode of the fierce battle waged by French philosophes against antiquaries. The epitaph Diderot wrote for Caylus’s tomb in 1765 was nonetheless sufficient to compromise his memory in the long term and to delay, until quite recently, a fair evaluation of the antiquary’s role and work. Yet, in his correspondence with Diderot, the great sculptor Falconet, who represented the world of studios and true connoisseurs, in 1766 jumped vehemently to the count’s defense, and that of his role in the French arts.15 And beginning in 1761, Edward Gibbon, who had witnessed Diderot’s hateful campaign against Caylus, openly and publicly took the antiquary’s side in his Essai sur l’étude de la literature (Essay on the Study of Literature). In a note included with a letter from Mallet addressed to the future historian of Decline and Fall, Caylus expressed his gratitude: I speak as if Mr. Gibbon had not praised me, and that too warmly. His work is that of a real man of letters, who loves them for their own sake,

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without exception or prejudice; and who unites with much talent the more precious gift of good sense, and an impartiality that displays his candour and justice, in spite of the bias that he must have received from the innumerable authors whom he has read and studied. I have therefore perused with the greatest avidity, this little work; and wish that it were more extensive and read universally.16 Gibbon, equipped with letters of recommendation, saw Caylus on “three or four occasions” in Paris, and described him in his Memoirs as “a simple, good, placid man, who demonstrated great kindness.” If the historian did not see him more, it was due to the count’s lifestyle, which, dedicated to artists during the day, confined him to his home after six o’clock at night to pursue his individual projects.17 The posthumous authority of figures like Diderot, Marmontel, and the Encylopédistes in France was so great that a relative damnatio memoriae overtook Caylus despite nineteenth-­century attempts to rehabilitate his memory by the Goncourt brothers and erudite thinkers like Nisard, Rocheblave, and Fontaine. I developed my own interest in Gibbon’s defense of antiquarianism, and in particular the antiquary Caylus, thanks to Arnaldo Momigliano, whom I heard speak at a conference at the Warburg Institute in 1980.18 With the encouragement of Francis Haskell, I dedicated my 1994 lectures at the Collège de France to this unknown figure of the Age of Enlightenment. I have since been preparing a book that will be dedicated to his actions and thoughts, which were decisive in the French “return to antiquity” movement. Since that date, a young generation of art and literary historians has developed a passion for this count long relegated to the shadows, and several works and publications are currently in progress. Following a quite deliberate encounter, Alain Schnapp, indirectly a student of Momigliano, was responsible for arousing scientific interest in Caylus. In a book on the origins of archaeology published in 1994, La Conquête du passé (Conquest of the Past), Schnapp showed that Gibbon was right in defending Caylus: the French antiquary was well ahead of his time in terms of his methodical and concrete way of viewing archaeological excavations and studying their results. Schnapp thus challenged another of Diderot’s biases, since embraced by Marxists: though an aristocrat, and as such “condemned” by historical progress, a great lord like Caylus could only have a “reactionary” and obscurantist perspective. I myself was very quickly cured of this bias by another of my predecessors, Raymond Aron, who was the first to reveal that another aristocrat, Tocqueville, had viewed the future of modern societies with at least as much perceptiveness as the commoner Karl Marx. Evidently the so-­called

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“vanquished of advancing History” could at times see more clearly and distantly than their temporary vanquishers. A Magistrate of the Republic of Letters and Arts In the eighteenth century, the Comte de Caylus, in a way born on the very steps to the French throne in 1692, son of a niece of Madame de Maintenon and a descendant of an ancient feudal family from southwest France, and friends with everyone who mattered in Louis XV’s court, was far from “vanquished” in the way that Alexis de Tocqueville, born in 1805 to a noble family destroyed and stripped of its privileges by the Revolution, would be in the following century. Nevertheless, even as he remained a member of the royal nobility and showed himself to be passionately attached to the monarchy, after 1714, the year in which he ended his brief and brilliant military career, Caylus would no longer serve either the royal government or administration. Disdainful of power and ostentation, he combined, within the same ideal vision of life, the leisure of the “true gentleman” born of nobility who “lives without pretensions” and that of the magistrate of the Republic of Letters and Arts who, as an altruistic, devoted, and generous “amateur,” monitors the harmony of the community and the education of his fellow artists. One could have, with much subtlety, compared that ideal life, chosen by a resolutely agnostic layman, liberated in his intellectual pursuits and manners, but raised by a Fénelonian mother and a resolutely Port-­ Royalist paternal uncle, the bishop of Auxerre, to that of a prelate in partibus, practicing out of “pure love,” without hope of reward, nor even counting on the consolations of efficacious grace, that enlightened and universal charity whose moral and social presuppositions were defined by Caylus himself during a speech on the figure of the amateur given before the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture in 1748: “the gentle manners, the knowledge, the politesse, the appreciation for good company, the ornaments and pleasures of the mind.”19 The Comte de Caylus did not transform overnight in 1714, when he left active service in the royal armies after seven years, during the War of the Spanish Succession, into either the influential amateur from 1747–1751 or the antiquary respected across Europe from 1751–1765. Unlike the great antiquaries of previous centuries—Scaliger, Pirro Ligorio, Peiresc, Saumaise, all born to humanist families and as children gifted at philology—the young noble whose family name destined him for a military career had received a perfunctory and prematurely interrupted education. Going against the grain of the modern, high-­society world, this gentleman of the sword chose to pursue a second, strict education under the greatest masters of the day: Antoine Watteau and Pierre-­ Jean Marriette, whom he met at Crozat’s home in 1711, to study the arts of

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drawing and engraving; and for the literary disciplines, a friend of his mother’s, the Venetian abbot Antonio Conti, a polymath who resolutely sided with the Ancients and Homer in the quarrel. Later, Caylus would benefit from collaboration with the great numismatist and Hellenist Abbot Barthélemy. Initiated into the world of artist studios and the system of private and public commands governing their productions, as well as the world of academic theorizing about art and its literary and erudite foundations, Caylus had the means to act as an active mediator between the two universes. He dedicated everything—his birth, rank, income, friendships and relationships at court, and the position he now held at two royal academies—to the service of the arts and, with increasing resolve, to their “return to nature and antiquity,” which he was counting on to transform the public taste, the craft and talents of artists, and the fecundity of the monarchy’s literary and artistic institutions. Beginning in 1714, Caylus embarked on a series of study trips to Italy, the eastern Mediterranean, Holland, and England. Surrounded by “monuments,” he studied the arts of ancient Rome and Greece and modern Italy on site. He befriended Italian amateurs and antiquaries, including Zanetti in Venice, Gaburri in Florence, as well as Dutch and British princes of the Republic of Letters, Richard Mead in London, and Basnage de Beauval in The Hague. In 1731, Caylus was granted the title of “honorary amateur” at the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture. He would not truly exercise this post until 1747, when his friend the painter Charles Coypel became director of the academy and First Painter to the King, and when the two men decided to reestablish “conferences” in academic life and reform the system to educate young artists. The same year, outside of academic circles, and in regard to the Salon du Louvre, Lafont de Saint-­Yenne published his Réflexions sur quelques causes de l’état pré­sent de la peinture en France (Reflections on Some Causes of the Present State of Painting in France), in which he publicly expressed opinions that Caylus, Coypel, and Marriette quietly held among themselves, albeit using different premises: the French arts are on the “decline,” and “everything is leading us unavoidably to the decrial and ruin of all that is strongly and futilely believed.”20 In 1749, the same author, claiming a “citizen’s” zeal, deepened and expanded his portrait of the decadence of the French arts in a brochure entitled L’Ombre du Grand Colbert, le génie du Louvre et la ville de Paris (The Shadow of the Great Colbert: The Genius of the Louvre and Paris), a dialogue in which the “decline” of the academic system of royal arts since the Regency is contrasted with the “grand goût” in all its possible manifestations, under Louis XIV and Colbert, which prompted the admiration of all of Europe for the genius of the French nation. This heated “patriotic” debate, which would have a long reach,21 borrowed and

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amplified Charles Perrault’s arguments in favor of Colbert’s administration in his 1687 poem “Le Siècle de Louis le Grand” (The Century of Louis the Great), which triggered the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns. Designating the Louvre colonnade designed by Claude Perrault as the emblem of grand goût, Lafont de Saint-­Yenne encouraged, in the abstract and with an entirely “modern” mind-­set, a “return to Louis XIV” under Louis XV. Caylus, whose mother had dictated to him Souvenirs de la cour de Louis XIV (Memories of the Court of Louis XIV), published by Voltaire in 1770, and who had himself penned, in the wake of the success of The Shadow of the Great Colbert, a “philosophical” panegyric about the century of Louis XIV, was certainly not indifferent to this nostalgia for the Grand Siècle and grand goût. But like Coypel and Mariette, he knew that things were not so simple when it came to art. The grand goût of the Colbertian Academy had been shaped by the quarrel over drawing and coloring, pitting “Poussinistes” against “Rubenists,” against the backdrop of the great sixteenth-­century Italian debate between Florence and Venice. Caylus had been friends with the painter Antoine Watteau, the genius of “Rubenism.” And he was a friend of Edmé Bouchardon, the sculptor hailed by Italy as an Ancient reappeared among the Moderns. But the true response to the oratory “zeal” of Lafont de Saint-­Yenne could not be merely a modern and purely French “return to Louis XIV”; it necessitated a long-­term effort within the academy itself and among its professors, an overhaul of the education of young artists, and the reappropriation of everything that had shaped the classical genius of the Italian Renaissance: the study of nature and the Ancients, the honest and scholarly occupation, the great disciplines. It was not a question of repeating the “century of Louis XIV,” but of inventing a “century of Louis XV” that was classical in its own right. In 1742, Caylus was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions as an “honorary amateur.” He proved so diligent and gave so many lectures that he looked to be Bernard de Montfaucon’s successor. In 1717–1721, in the illustrated volumes of his Antiquité expliquée, the Benedictine Montfaucon had published a series of visual documents and writings that supported or complemented knowledge of the Greco-­Roman world drawn solely from literary texts. Montfaucon was immensely cultivated but blind to the intrinsic qualities of the works of art he was “explaining” and to the visual reliability of their reproductions; he was not at all concerned with lessons of technique or the formal models that contemporary artists could potentially find in the relics of a disappeared civilization. An engraver himself and familiar with artist studios, Caylus had collaborated, while at Pierre Crozat’s home, on the technically irreproachable elaboration of a collection of engraved reproductions of tableaus and drawings

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by sixteenth-­century masters from collections belonging to the king, the Duke of Orléans, and Crozat himself, who was a great connoisseur. Caylus had engraved and published, with the same degree of precision and taste, a collection of caricatures attributed to Leonardo, then in the possession of Mariette, who had written the work’s preface. His entrance into the Académie des Inscriptions had been facilitated by his reputation as a traveler in Greece and Turkey, and by the 1750 publication of Recueil des pierres gravées de la collection du roi (Collection of Engraved Stones from the King’s Collection), illustrated with engravings by Caylus, based on line drawings by Bouchardon, which had illustrated Mariette’s Traité des pierres gravées (Tract of Engraved Stones). This masterpiece was a response to the desire to train artists and amateurs to produce the most faithful and intact representations of the classical arts of composition and drawing. Beginning in 1747, Caylus began to share the best of his experiences with the techniques and impressions of the forms that made the artisans and artists of antiquity, particularly the Greeks, so superior, and which had nourished the masters of the Italian Renaissance, into his many lectures at the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture and his publications destined for artists. This project to revitalize the French school, embraced and pursued with extraordinary tenacity across several categories at once, increasingly replaced the social life of the “virtuoso” that had long occupied the count while also dividing his attention. A refined connoisseur of Pascalian ennui and diversion, Madame du Deffand, one day noted, “Caylus engraves for fear of hanging himself.” In a eulogy penned for his friend and colleague at his death in 1765, Abbot Le Blanc offered this more developed description of the count’s moral character: An enemy of affairs, the count made all the amusements of life into one. He busied himself with music, drawing, and painting. He wrote, but these were only games and caprices of society to which he never granted more care than was merited. Sparkling with fire and gaiety, he never subjugated himself to the correction of style. He proposed no other perfection of this genre than the entertainment of his friends. He expected everything of nature, which served him willingly. To judge works of Art, he possessed that taste, that instinct superior to study, surer than reasoning, and more rapid than reflection. His first glance rarely betrayed him, he immediately noticed beauty and flaws.22 Caylus himself described the kind of conversion to the otium studiosum that he had experienced in the company of the most erudite antiquaries of France in the preface to the first volume of his Recueil d’antiquités (Collection of Antiquities), addressed to his colleagues at the Académie des Inscriptions:

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Before you granted me the honor of admission among you, it was from the sidelines of art that I observed the remnants of savant antiquity saved from the barbarism of the time. You taught me to attach an infinitely superior worth to it, by that I mean of containing a thousand unique traits of the history of religion, custom and manners, of those renowned peoples who, by the vicissitude of human nature, disappeared from the earth, which they had filled with the sound of their names.23 Caylus, Bouchardon, and the “Return to Antiquity” in the French Arts What drove Caylus, not content to become a “bridge” between the various worlds in which he felt at home—Parisian “bonnes companies,” where potential French and foreign clients for the artists under his protection met, the Académie de Peinture and its artists, and finally the Académie des Inscriptions and its antiquaries—to personally, and increasingly, side with antiquarianism, thus lending unprecedented weight and prestige to a vocation in itself modest and austere? Why did a man with an income of sixty thousand French pounds, and gifted at a variety of leisure activities, turn away from Watteau and rococo art? Why did he withdraw from the seductions of Parisian social life? And why, not content with having accumulated, through his scholarly lectures at two academies, an enormous body of work, did he dedicate the final years of his life to the immense undertaking of his Collection of Antiquities, whose seventh volume was published after his death? The key to understanding this extraordinary reformative, literary, and scholarly activity can be found in Caylus’s early affiliation with the Ancients of the first quarrel and the subsequent quarrel over Homer. The Ancients and the defenders of Homer viewed “modern” arguments as a symptom of the decadence that had to be stopped at all costs. Toussaint Rémond de Saint Mard, the author of Trois essais sur la corruption du goût (Three Essays on the Corruption of Taste, 1731), and an excellent spokesman of that collective anxiety, had frequented the circle that gathered around Madame de Caylus and the Abbot Conti in the small house near Luxembourg where the countess lived with her son between 1715 and 1728. Nostalgia for the Grand Siècle within this small gathering, within which the countess conceived of her Memories of the Court of Louis XIV, was not as singularly patriotic or modern as Lafont de Saint-­Yenne described it. Its members enjoyed Italian music, read Fénelon and Gravina, and took an interest in the quarrel between Newton and Leibniz. Abbot Conti and his academician friends from the Académie des Inscriptions, who all belonged to the Ancients, introduced a young Caylus to the broad European scope of the Republic of Letters. The count would further es-

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cape the Moderns’ insularity and Italophobia at Crozat’s Parisian home, where Roger de Piles’s work was immortalized, and which attracted academicians from the Académie des Inscriptions, painter academicians, and erudite actors from Luigi Riccoboni’s Italian troupe. Again, the perspective was European—Paris was the capital of the Republic of Arts, but nonetheless knew it had a lot to learn from the origins of the Renaissance, from ancient Rome and Greece. Well before the outline for Collection of Antiquities formed in his mind, Caylus was able to measure the difference between the art produced by his friend Antoine Watteau, a self-­taught genius whose training had evolved before the Rubenses of Luxembourg and the Venetians in Crozat’s collection, and that of the masters of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century who had trained by studying antiquity. He slowly pulled away from the modern “rococo art” which was welcomed by the Regency and which had broken with the classic grand goût reclaimed by Charles Le Brun and the sculptors of Versailles. That shift, which Caylus would indirectly reveal by reading his Vie de Watteau (Life of Watteau) before the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture in 1748, manifested itself through his friendship and collaboration, beginning in 1733 upon the artist’s return from Italy, with Bouchardon, a genius who had quite naturally rediscovered classical forms while in Rome. In the funeral oration for the great sculptor, read before the academy in 1762, Caylus drew the portrait of a French artisan of immense talent whose manners and taste for perfection brought the Greek and Roman authors of engraved stones to life: Modest in his clothing and household, he always maintained simple manners. The rectitude of his heart rendered him incapable of any ploy or plot; living apart, he never knew any intrigue. . . . His life was ordered and moderated, his domestic relaxations never harmed the perfection of the work to which he was ceaselessly dedicated; on the contrary, while never losing it from sight, he allowed his work to rest, or rather he distanced himself from it in order to himself rest and see it with fresh eyes.24 Impressed by Bouchardon’s talent and bearing, Caylus attempted to secure this antiquity-­inspired artist royal orders commensurate with his abilities, notably for the ornamentation of the Neptune Fountain at Versailles, which Louis XV and his court had won back after the regent’s death. He successfully procured Bouchardon the commission for an equestrian statue of Louis XV, which was completed by Pigalle after the artist’s death and destroyed during the Revolution. Beginning in 1737, Caylus provided Bouchardon with the subjects, borrowed from the height of antiquity, of large dramatic drawings, which he would engrave himself and which enjoyed great success. During the period 1755–1758, encouraged by that experience, he published several collections of

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descriptions of tableaus depicting important scenes from The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Legend of Hercules in order to encourage painters who did not know ancient languages to depict major classical subjects and their patrons to suggest them. Once he had perceived the “weaknesses” of rococo art, Caylus used his connections and many talents to transform the academic French system into one capable of producing great art for the “century of Louis XV” that would rival the art created during the “century of Louis XIV,” but which would be composed of original creations directly inspired by the foundations of the Renaissance: classical arts better known, understood, and studied from the artistic perspective. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, in 1747, he, along with Charles Coypel, turned to correcting the education of young painters, using his own money to distribute grants, create prizes, and place commissions, in France and in Europe, for or to the students who were the most disposed to his teachings. The many disciplines that had given the art academies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries their strength, and which were all dedicated to the in-­depth study of the heroic body and the expression of the passions of the soul, were granted places of honor in the atelier for the artists under Caylus’s protection. From 1747 to 1764, Caylus showed himself to be a tireless educator of his artist colleagues at the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture, reading them fifteen Lives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century French artists, emphasizing their “beauties” and “flaws,” and twelve essays on concrete aspects of the craft and poetry of art. In 1761, he created a prize for drawing faces and facial expressions followed by a prize for perspective in 1763 and a prize for osteology in 1764, in order to encourage students to master the representation, in historical paintings, of the grace and grandeur of the human experience, in contrast to the far presto and decorative “affectation” of rococo art, appropriate only for the pleasures of private life. By the 1750s, the studios of his protégés, painters, and sculptors—­ Bouchardon, Jean-­Marie Vien, Lagrenée, Vassé—had become the centers of a “return to antiquity” in royal commissions and even in the decoration and furnishing of private homes in the Greek style. Caylus attributed a motto to Bouchardon in 1763, in the Life dedicated to his memory, which he had adopted as his own: “Appropriate the talent of the Ancients and find it again in Nature.” Antiquarian Caylus and the Technical and Aesthetic Understanding of Classical Art Caylus’s involvement in the royal arts, initially via the conduit of the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture, led him to take an increasingly deep and ex-

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clusive interest, now with the support and collaboration of the Académie des Inscriptions, in the comparative study of texts and monuments of Greek, Etruscan, Egyptian, and Roman art. The fact that his research, which rivaled the works of Venetian, Florentine, Roman, and Neapolitan antiquaries, also included archeological explorations of Celtic and Roman Gaul and of Merovingian France indicated that national pride was guiding his efforts as well. Caylus’s generation had been marked by an important tract about aesthetics by the Ancients’ camp, Abbot Du Bos’s Réflexions sur la poésie et la peinture (Reflections on Poetry and Painting), which was published in 1718. Caylus knew Du Bos, who was a regular visitor to Pierre Crozat’s home. A historian of exceptional expertise and standing, the abbot established in his Origines de la monarchie française (Origins of the French Monarchy) that the medieval kingdom had not been, as argued Boulainvilliers, an ab ovo creation of German invaders but a local continuation of the Roman administration and army despite the dissolution of the Western Empire, but with the blessing obtained by Clovis from the Eastern Empire. For Caylus, a reader of Du Bos and like him a supporter of the Ancients in the quarrel, the “return to antiquity” in the royal arts was not merely a revival of the classic grand goût of the academies of Louis XIV; it was a return to the Roman origins and essence of the Gallican monarchy, the revelation of the endless bloodline it shared with Italy and civilized Europe. In 1754, in a move typical of his method of revitalizing modern invention through the history of antiquity, Caylus used the channels of two academies to publicize his rediscovery, long developed with the collaboration of chemists and philologists, of classical encaustic paintings. Over several sessions at the Académie de Peinture, he read a text on the “Painting of the Ancients,” and at the Académie des Inscriptions, he presented and explained a “tableau painted in wax on wood,” composed by his protégé Vien, and depicting the head of Minerva. Diderot would swiftly publish a pamphlet to attempt to destroy the impact of this rediscovery of a forgotten classical technique. Encaustic painting nonetheless became an oft-­used technique in neoclassical decors. The 1750 publication of Collection of Engraved Stones from the King’s Collection was similarly representative and topical: in this work of erudite memorialization, Caylus and Bouchardon invented or reinvented the technique of “line drawing,” which would later be favored by neoclassical artists ranging from Flaxman to Girodet. As for the Tract of Engraved Stones, Mariette’s text reminded its readers that since the Renaissance, figures carved into hard stones, which were more intact than other more friable materials, had revealed to great modern artists the Ancients’ sense of contour, art of composition in accordance with one’s subject, and perfect execution. The two friends were working together toward a second Renaissance.

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This Renaissance was conceived in close collaboration with Italy, where friends like the Venetian Zanetti and in particular the great Florentine antiquaries Gaburri and Venuti were keeping lettered Europe on tenterhooks with their epic publications, Museum Florentinum and Museum Etruscum, which were available throughout Europe by subscription. By 1715, Caylus had witnessed firsthand the initial excavations attempted at the Herculaneum site by the ambassador of France. After Charles III reinitiated excavations at the same site, and following the discovery of classical paintings protectively transported to and stored at the Royal Villa of Portici, the public’s curiosity was awakened, which fostered the “return to antiquity” for which Caylus, Mariette, and their friends were striving. In 1757, to protest the secrecy still surrounding the discoveries of Herculaneum, and to force the Neapolitan authorities to enforce strict criteria for the publication of rediscovered classical paintings (by the Herculaneum Academy created by the king of Naples), Caylus paid for the limited reproduction, in accordance with the philological requirements of a “Crozat Collection,” of an ensemble of gouache drawings by Pietro Santi Bartoli, which were themselves reproductions of classical paintings rediscovered in the seventeenth century in Roman “caves” and other Latium sites, but which had been erased in the meantime. In 1764, again out of his own pocket, he had Winckelmann’s Sendschreiben von den herculanischen Entdeckungen, an den Reichsgraven von Brühl (Report on the Latest Discoveries at Herculaneum) translated by Michel Huber and published. The young Winckelmann was based at the time in Dresden, where Caylus had a long-­standing correspondent, as he did in most of Europe’s capital cities. This Parisian publication marked the debut of the then-­unknown historian’s international reputation. Like Caylus, Winckelmann protested the attitude of the Neapolitan authorities, which ran counter to the unspoken duty of communication within the Republic of Letters and Arts. In December 1749, at the Académie des Inscriptions, Caylus had presented a book of drawings of ancient vases from Nicolas Peiresc’s library, thereby marking his filiation with the great polymath from Aix and the French antiquarian tradition. The many texts he read before the Académie des Inscriptions, which were published in the academy’s famous Mémoires, were as concerned with interpretations of passages written by Pliny the Elder and the great debate during the quarrel over Homer on Achilles’ Heel as they were with rubbings of recent archaeological discoveries made in Gallo-­Roman soil, which had been transmitted to him, according to a protocol he carefully devised, by the engineers working on bridges and roads under Trudaine’s administration. With the help of his correspondents in Avignon, the Marquis de Clavière and Abbot Esprit Calvet, Caylus began to reconstruct all the rubbings of Roman monuments in

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Provence drawn by Nicolas Mignard on Colbert’s orders and to publish them as Louis XIV’s minister had intended. This reconstitution of a scattered collection would prove to be both difficult and incomplete. Mariette resumed the effort after Caylus’s death, but he died too early to complete the project. Beginning in 1751, Caylus’s studies and communications, increasingly reserved for the Académie des Inscriptions, changed somewhat: they were now destined for inclusion, along with scientific notes on the classical pieces within his own collection, in his Collection of Antiquities, which would eventually be published in seven volumes, with the help of several colleagues, including the great Hellenist Jean-­Jacques Barthélemy. Each of the classical pieces within his collection, beautiful everyday objects rather than exceptional masterpieces, of which carefully made engravings were published, was described and explained with utmost precision in his Collection from a material and technical perspective and also often from an aesthetic angle, offering a retrospective lesson on the articles and plates of the Encyclopédie, which was limited within the field of visual arts to an inventory of the practices of the academy and contemporary production. Caylus was therefore not interested in broadening antiquaries’ iconographic “corpus” but wanted to provide artists and amateurs with authentic and concrete representations of the modus operandi of their classical counterparts. Most of the pieces he collected remained in his possession, allowing him to examine and analyze them himself, in collaboration with chemists; as soon as they were published, he gave them to the Bibliothèque du Roi to make room for new ones. In addition to the pieces discovered at recent excavations in France, many were sent to Caylus from Italy, as well as the Levant and Marseilles, by his correspondents, as well as by admirers and persons unknown to him. His most frequent correspondent and shrewdest supplier was the great Theatin antiquary Paolo Paciaudi. Their correspondence, published by Charles Nisard in 1850, was the eighteenth-­century equivalent of Peiresc’s exchanges with Cassiano dal Pozzo, and offers us a glimpse into the elaboration and development of Caylus’s Collection. The influence of that collaboration on creations by cabinetmakers, bronze workers, ornamentalists, jewelers, and decorators of various neoclassical styles, up until the empire, must not be underestimated. The Collection, often cited by Quatremère de Quincy, alongside Caylus’s lectures at the Académie des Inscriptions, was the reference for Pierre-­Hugues d’Hancarville’s Antiquités étrusques grecques et romaines (Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities, 1766–1776), Seroux d’Agincourt’s Histoire de l’art dans les siècles obscurs (History of Art in the Dark Ages, 1821), and later, works by the societies of antiquaries and archaeologists that would multiply in France in the nineteenth century.

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The Singular Destiny of the French “Return to Antiquity” When Caylus died in 1765, he was at the height of his fame and influence in France and Europe. He had the time to observe the beginnings of a reversal of taste at court and the artistic talent of the city in favor of the antiquity he had served so well. In 1750, a Greek mode in furnishings, vases, decor, and tableaus began to emerge, rivaling the rococo style so persistent in Paris. Caylus also witnessed, at the Salons of 1761 and 1763, the success of his protégé, the painter Jean-­Marie Vien, named the “Nestor of the Neoclassical School” by Girodet, and his preferred sculptor (after Bouchardon), Vassé. He might have taken great pleasure in reading Correspondance littéraire de Grimm (Grimm’s Literary Correspondence, 1763), in which Diderot, his enemy and that of the antiquaries, gushed over Vien’s La Marchande d’amours (The Merchant of Love), which was directly inspired, most likely at the count’s urging and unbeknownst to the critic, by a classical painting reproduced in Pitture antiche d’Ercolano (volume 1, plate 8), which was finally published in 1759 and parsimoniously distributed by the Neapolitan authorities. Vien, when composing other graceful feminine figures in the Greek style—the four Seasons, Glycera, the sacrificing priestess (Salon de 1762)—had already drawn inspiration from classical-­style gouaches by Pietro Santi Bartoli published at Caylus’s expense in 1757. Beginning in 1755, the tireless count had encouraged painters, in a pamphlet, to favor Greek grace and charm over the modern and rococo equivalent: If one desires simply joyful images, tableaus of the daughters of the Sacred Isle and the daughters of Sparta provide groups as delightful as they are interesting. The simple dress of the Greek Daughters, the nobility of their poses, the elegance of their forms, the beauty of their faces, all related to the necessary research of Costume, bring infinite value to the mind and merit of the Painter, in any subject.25 As for grandeur, a category in which “rococo” by definition fell short, the collections of classical “subjects” (The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and The Legend of Hercules), narrated and annotated for painters, which Caylus published in 1755–1757, were prominent in the studios of the young generation of historical painters, and lent their subjects to several neoclassical “historical paintings” by Gavin Hamilton, a young David, and other French and foreign painters. In the preface that appeared after his death in his Collection of Antiquities (volume VII), Caylus justifiably congratulates himself, in terms that recall Virgil’s Georgics, for the serenity and fulfillment he found in his long efforts to “plow” and “sow” antiquarianism: he believed he had seen the first crop grow.

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He contrasted that patient fecundity with the vain, jealous, and withering agitation of the criticism introduced into the Republic of Letters and Arts by philosophes. In Vie de Bouchardon (Life of Bouchardon, 1762), this same ironic castigation of the “brilliant and sublime metaphysics,” in which the ignorant, priding themselves for passing judgment on the world of art, adorned themselves, appears. Caylus was thus spared the worst—seeing the French “return to antiquity” in visual arts, a movement he had desired and prepared with extraordinary perseverance, change in meaning, and the transformation of taste become if not the catalyst, then at least the reflection of a political revolution. In many respects, however, the Comte d’Angiviller, the director of the Bâtiments Royaux under Louis XVI, would turn out to be Caylus’s executor, enthusiastically completing the overhaul of disciplines related to historical painting in academic teaching, and commissioning “historical tableaus” with classical themes from Jacques-­Louis David. (David’s training took place in the studio of Caylus’s most cherished painter, on whom he imprinted his reformist views from the beginning, Joseph-­Marie Vien.) The French school, for which the author of tableaus inspired by The Iliad and The Odyssey had dreamt of a Renaissance entirely in honor of Louis XV, found in David a master who would place the “return to antiquity” in service of Jacobin Sparta and Napoleonic imperial Rome. Between 1765, the year Caylus died, and 1785, which marked the salon in which David’s Oath of the Horatii was exhibited, the “return to antiquity” in the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture and the Académie de France in Rome had gradually ceased to be the movement to reform the royal arts so ardently desired by Caylus. All the count’s works and efforts had aimed to bring to Louis XV’s France the same academic reform “on antiquity and nature” that had revived the Bolognaise and Roman schools, at the instigation of Annibal Carrache at the end of the sixteenth century, and the seventeenth-­century French school at the instigation of Le Sueur, Poussin, and Le Brun. David, who studied under Caylus’s protégé, was, like his peers, a reader of Emile, whose author, Rousseau, Caylus hated, as well as of Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity. (Caylus died too early to be able to hate the historian.) For the two authors, the sublimity for which the Ancients were marvelously gifted—moral for the former, and moral and artistic for the latter—had only dazzled in manners and arts during their eras of republican liberty. Subjugated and artificial modern society prevented rediscovery of the secret of that sublimity except as an object of tortured desire and grief, or else as the reward for its radical regeneration, on a blank slate freed from centuries of servitude and their ruins. The French rationale behind a “return to antiquity,” in manners or art, could not accept reform, be it academic or political: it led either to a Terror or to romanticism.

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In 1785, with the Oath of the Horatii, commissioned by the director of the Bâtiments du Roi, painted in papal Rome, and exhibited at the salon of the Académie Royale, David began to break from the spirit of reform that Caylus had imparted to his protégé Vien: he created the male icon of the classical republican sublime, as conceived of by Rousseau and Winckelmann, breaking not only with the style of Boucher and Van Loo, but even with the “ancient” grandeur Caylus and D’Angiviller had expected from the artists of the reformed Académie Royale. David thus established the first cornerstone of his own Jacobin, and eventually imperial, neoclassicism, whose academy would no longer represent a king but a France reinvigorated by political revolution, restored to the “liberty of the Ancients” and heroic civicism, and viewing itself as Spartan or Roman in the “historical paintings” created in his atelier and by his students. The quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, whose gaping loophole beneath the apparent consensus of the Enlightenment salon was revealed thanks to Arnaldo Momigliano and Leo Strauss, shifted so dramatically toward an Ancients’ victory during the eighteenth century that it provoked the emergence in Paris, in both art and life, of the Athens of Abbot Barthélemy’s Voyage du jeune Anacharsis (Voyage of Young Anacharsis, 1788), the Lycurgan Sparta and republican Rome of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité (Discourse on Inequality, 1790–1794), and the Roman Empire of a new Caesar (1804–1815).

18 SEROUX D’AGINCOURT AND “LITERARY EUROPE”

Why would a farmer-­general in Louis XV’s France who had everything— noble birth, wealth, good health, education, wisdom, royal favor—necessary to comfortably enjoy the diverse pleasures reserved by Paris’s high society for “amateurs and the curious” like him, choose to move to Rome in 1779, when he was in his fifties, and dedicate the next thirty-­five years of his life, until his death in 1814 (just in time to learn of the Bourbon Restoration), to an unprecedented project that would celebrate and amass a thousand years of history of visual arts for the first time in Europe? The manuscript of Seroux d’Agincourt’s first volume, ready by 1783 and sent to Paris in 1789, was returned to Rome as a precaution after the storming of the Bastille. (The Comte d’Angiviller, director of the Bâtiments du Roi, had feared a terrible fate for a work whose immense value he sensed.) Its publication was delayed until 1805, giving the author fifteen years to refine his text; due to further delays on the part of his editors, the work was completed and published posthumously in 1823, in the heyday of the neo-­Gothic period of the Restoration. The rare art historians of our day who have focused our attention on Seroux d’Agincourt’s masterpiece—from the great Giovanni Previtali1 to Evelina Borea,2 from Francis Haskell3 to Henri Loyrette4—pondered in passing the Benedictine lifestyle chosen, nel’ mezzo del cammin della sua vita, or “half of his life’s way,” by the author of Histoire de l’art par les monumens depuis sa décadence au IV e siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe (History of Art by Its Monuments from Its Decline in the Fourth Century to Its Restoration in the Sixteenth). The research project to which this aristocrat fully dedicated himself for a quarter-­ century was all the more difficult and selfless given that its subject, practically unexplored beforehand, was repugnant in principle to his own tastes; what’s more, in order to pay the draughtsmen (painters, sculptors, architects) and engravers indispensable to his endeavor, he was forced to sell, piece by piece, in Rome after 1789, the magnificent collection of drawings by Italian and French masters of the previous three centuries, assembled in France, which had given him such joy as an amateur of refined art. The Revolution had deprived him of income that he had amassed from the public funds of the former regime. And 293

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yet neither the Revolution nor its dramatic consequences for Italy and Rome interrupted Seroux’s industrious efforts, which transformed him and his magnum opus into a legend of “literary Europe.” The fame of this project of pure love, in the Fénelonian sense of the term, long preceded its publication. The trajectory of Seroux’s History echoes that of the Antichità di Ercolano esposte (Antiquities of Herculaneum Exposed), which was published in Naples between 1757 and 1792, twenty years after the rumors of excavations began in 1738 and whispers of marvelous discoveries protectively hidden from prying eyes by the Neapolitan government had stirred literary Europe into a frenzy, had prompted a myriad of antiquarian publications, and had sparked a “return to antiquity” movement in the arts that would erode the popularity of Parisian rococo in only a few years. Seroux’s Roman atelier and his many collaborators and correspondents slowly inaugurated and spread another taste revolution, whose effects would emerge by the beginning of the nineteenth century, even before the long-­developed History was published in its entirely in 1823. Nothing would have a greater influence on this shift in favor of medieval and Gothic art than the collective project launched by Seroux, whose countless collaborators, painters, engravers, and architects became enamored with objects and monuments previously viewed with disdain or ignored. The subsequent revolution was far-­reaching and increasingly went against the express intentions of its unwitting instigator. During Seroux d’Agincourt’s lifetime, in anticipation of the delayed publication of his History, Italian collectors, French amateurs who had visited Seroux in Rome, and illustrators of his current or future volumes fell in love with parts or all of the “decadence” that the French aristocrat had endeavored, driven by the pure desire of a documentarian, to reveal to his future readers. A “primitivist” passion, unanticipated by Seroux, and of which he disapproved, insinuated itself in the very heart of the “return to antiquity” movement; from that point onward, this radical affirmation of taste would prove a continual thorn in the side of the academic tradition dating back to the Italian Renaissance and the privileged position in which it placed Greco-­Roman antiquity. For Seroux, the methodical “remembering” of the long corruption of European art, beginning in the sixth century, was a question of scientific ethics; he expected no other benefit for European art and taste than proof of the legitimacy of their first “renewal” in sixteenth-­century Italy and their second prompted by the recent “return to antiquity.” He himself had witnessed in Paris and Rome this neoclassical contemporary “Renaissance” among artists of the Académie Royale persuaded by the teachings of the Comte de Caylus and inspired by Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity.5 But the establishment

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of Seroux’s Roman atelier, and the posthumous publication of his work and its translation into several European languages, unintentionally created a thirst for “renewal” among certain artists and amateurs that far surpassed a “return to antiquity” and was limited to repeating, so to speak, the revival sparked by the Italian Renaissance. Henceforth, an uninterrupted series of primitivist, even decadentist, “revolutions” would shake the ground beneath the academies that had succeeded the Italian academies of the Renaissance, even rattling the academy that David and Quatremère de Quincy6 hoped to establish in Paris and Rome on the foundations of the Winckelmannian “return to antiquity.” David’s studio had its “primitivist” dissidents—the “Barbus” led by Maurice Quaï, who were celebrated by Charles Nodier and looked down upon by Delécluze.7 Multiple shifts in public taste—the popularity of, and then obsession with, Gothic architecture, pre-­Raphaelite painting, pre-­Giottesque painting, Roman art, late Roman art, archaic Greek art, and Cycladic art—successively emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led by scholars and archaeologists and embraced by artists in a reversal of the quest undertaken by academies that had sprung from the Renaissance: the latter had looked to antiquity and its universal standards of beauty for ways to heal the arts of their long medieval “decadence.” Romantic and modern artists would demand a purity of forms from the Middle Ages and archaic eras, which they considered to have withered within the academic tradition. This increasingly retrospective focus on Europe and humanity’s past was accompanied by centrifugal movements that projected artists toward novel forms (Eastern and Far Eastern, American, Polynesian, African), following in the wake of missionaries, travelers, explorers, colonial forces, and ethnologists. Seroux had been an unwitting first link in this extraordinary chain of events, but a decisive one nonetheless. There is great irony, against the backdrop of the French Revolution and the Terror, in the slow and meticulous development by a gentle, lettered French aristocrat emblematic of the ancien régime, protected in Rome, of a masterpiece of memorialization, prepared patiently and serenely, but overlapping, against the author’s intentions, with a formidable and irresistible revolutionary groundswell, which since has become permanent, of European taste.8 Before we get to the heart of this singular irony in art history, it is important to examine, once again, how a figure like Seroux d’Agincourt, the tireless and sacrificial bee producing the incredibly erudite honey that is History of Art by Its Monuments, could emerge in the century of Diderot and the Encylopédie, sworn enemies of erudition, scholars, antiquaries, and indeed all recourse to the past.9

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The French ancien régime reached its height under Louis XV and Louis XVI, with its administrative monarchy abundant in quasi-­sinecures, its church overflowing with contemplative, erudite clerics, privileged canonships, and benefits for semisecular men of letters, and its courts of law teeming with offices, ennobling or otherwise, all of which still left room for leisure, and its noble aristocracy, now a class of urban leisure exempted from any obligations apart from war and courtly intrigues, and arbiter of the niceties of the art of “living nobly.” The result was that France’s two highest-­ranking classes and even their imitators, the Messieurs Jourdain of France’s commercial and artisanal bourgeoisie, had the privilege of spare time, which most of their servants were deprived, not to mention, to a greater degree, the majority of the country’s peasant population, whose labors, punctuated by the many festivities of the Christian year, supported and nourished the edifice of “bonne société” without being crushed by its weight. The leisure time enjoyed by a French minority shielded from a life of physical and manual labor was not a privilege of waste, however. Thorstein Veblen, the American sociologist famous for his study of the leisure class and its “conspicuous consumption,” is no better a guide than Marx and his class struggle to understanding what leisure signified in the European ancien régime, notably in France.10 Both the puritan sociologist and the philosopher of the industrial proletariat, prophets of twentieth-­century society, situated work in all its forms as the motor of the only economy they perceived to be real—the material economy. Manual labor in the European ancien régime provided the foundation for a leisure economy whose vast aspirational range included the warrior’s chivalrous leisure-­rest, literary and urban leisure, the scholar’s studious leisure, and the monk’s contemplative leisure. These diverse forms and stages of leisure during the ancien régime did not abandon their origins in the Greek scholê and Latin otium. Far from signifying unproductive idleness, these key notions transposed into the Christian register designated the different, increasingly perfect rungs of a ladder that liberated the mind from the weight of the body, bringing it closer to its true end and bestowing it with spiritual possessions and symbolic riches. The regular clergy and the noblesse de robe were prolific when it came to productions of the mind, which continue to fuel us today, and which were conceived during the leisure time specific to these two classes. The noblesse d’épée, whose leisure time was, in principle, merely an interval of rest in its active life, the profession of arms, had long steered clear of lettered leisure (otium litteratum) and its most elevated and demanding stage, studious leisure (otium studiosum), which, in contrast, prompted countless vocations within monastic orders and courts of law. Men of learning born of the sword, like Seroux d’Agincourt and his model and teacher, the Comte de Caylus, were rare.

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Psychologists of high-­society boredom like Pascal and later Schopenhauer had their own theories on aristocratic leisure. The remedy, though imperfect, to the ennui that threatened the leisure time of the noblesse d’épée, which paid for its privileges with military service and was anxious not to lose them, was diversion. The French military aristocracy, by ancestral tradition, ranked hunting and gallantry at the top of all its diversions. Until the sixteenth century, it considered intellectual pursuits, relegated to members of the clergy and lesser nobility, beneath it, and conflated artistic professions with “mechanical,” manual, and mercenary jobs. It was not until the seventeenth century, under the influence of Montaigne’s Essays and Jesuit education, that the otium litteratum—the taste for reading, writing, and reflecting, the art of conversation, the visual arts, and the practice of music, theater, and dance—entered the sphere of “living nobly,” offering the urbanized French high aristocracy a range of “liberal” diversions suited to filling their leisure time and dispelling their boredom. Gambling, ostracized by the church, and dueling, banned by royal edict, nonetheless remained violent temptations for young military nobles. Very rare were those, however, in the seventeenth century, who condescended to dedicate themselves to rigorous intellectual disciplines: erudition, study of antiquity, natural sciences. If some nobles wrote or even published, following Caylus’s example, they typically did so as “amateurs,” preferably remaining anonymous, and not as professional authors. Under the ministerships of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, who themselves set the example, the creation of a library and collecting became socially acceptable among the French nobility. François Roger de Gaignières (1642– 1715), an equerry and in many respects a pioneer, further expanded the art of “living nobly.” Granted, Gaignières was quite a new noble, the grandson of a merchant from Lyon, the son of a steward granted a title by the Duchess of Lorraine, and himself a “servant” of the Duchess of Guise.11 But the “noblesse de l’esprit,” in the sense understood by the Italian humanists, which would be long in permeating the French mind-­set, claimed to prevail over the noblesse du sang, a saying Gaignières took to heart. During his studious leisure, Gaignières assembled a large library of manuscripts and books and created an extraordinarily sumptuous “cabinet,” which included visual documentation (portraits, monument rubbings, and drawings of works of art) that retraced the history of a millennium of the French monarchy and its successive styles. Before Seroux, Gaignières had undoubtedly already laid the foundations for a “return to the Gothic” in France. He inspired respect from members of high society “curious” about genealogy and history and was regarded as an authority by the erudite Benedictines of the Congregation of Saint-­Maur; he corresponded both with noble amateurs like Bussy-­Rabutin and Coulanges, friends of the Marquise de

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Sévigné, and leading men of letters like Boileau and Fénelon, as well as with erudite scholars of historical methodology like Mabillon, a Benedictine monk. In fact, much like Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, the illustrious lawyer from Aix-­en-­ Provence, three generations earlier, Gaignières was able to earn a rank of high nobility within the Republic of Letters based on the modest evidence of the prolificacy of his studious leisure.12 During the last three centuries of the ancien régime, the “Republic of Letters” referred to a smaller society that developed within society as a whole and gathered men of letters and savants, all those working for the common good of a Europe of the mind, through correspondence and travel, in the same studious use of leisure, regardless of profession, ecclesiastical and secular status, and even of borders and religions. The result: a swarm of “bees,” to borrow a metaphor made famous by the pope-­poet Urban VIII, who had three bees engraved onto his coat of arms, and Jonathan Swift, who made it the Ancients’ emblem during the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. These “bees,” of their own volition and with their own resources, collaborated and conversed with one another in the same tireless otium studiosum, accumulating and increasing the “honey and wax” of historic rememoration, a living and continuously reinvigorated source of the enlightenment of knowledge and the gentleness of civil manners.13 In the eighteenth century, the phrase “Republic of Letters” was a synonym for “literary Europe,” with the adjective “literary” simultaneously encompassing literature and erudite and scholarly disciplines (theology, law, history, natural history, moral and political philosophy, the rhetoric and poetry of arts and letters, and so on).14 The noblesse de l’esprit that allowed the Italian Renaissance to establish its moral credentials was indisputably very attractive to the Italian noblesse d’épée and, by extension, the European noblesse d’épée. One of the fruits of the Republic of Letters (which sixteenth-­century Jesuits sought to penetrate) was a program of liberal education and an ideal of “civil conversation” that transported the high aristocracy from knighthood to the peaceful urbanity implied by the exercise of lettered leisure. But even if dialogue between “clerics” of the Republic of Letters dedicated to studious leisure and the “laymen” of the noblesse d’épée dedicated to lettered leisure did become possible, it was rare for a nobleman to voluntarily adopt the self-­discipline of studious leisure and take an interest, other than as an “amateur” or “curious” observer, and in the name of one “noble distraction” among many others, in the rigorous endeavors of the Republic of Letters. It was even more rare that a noble would aspire to join its ranks. This was in any case much less common in France than in Italy, where a strictly military nobility had become rare beginning in the sixteenth century

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and countless academies had emerged, participation in which counted among the obligatory activities of lettered leisure for the Italian noble-­born aristocracy. The eighteenth-­century “Arcades” attracted a panoply of leading nobles on the peninsula, thus uniting in a way its many municipal academies. Yet even in an Italy abounding with scholars and antiquaries, rare were those who, descended from old noble families, elevated themselves to the erudite stature of the marquis Scipione Maffei, a prince renowned in literary Europe among his peers in studious leisure,15 or the marquis Giovan Gioseffo Orsi, the Italian leader of the quarrel that, publicly within the European Republic of Letters, pitted Italians and French against one another at the beginning of the eighteenth century as to the value of their respective languages and literatures.16 An entire world separated the arts and letters as a noble, high-­society distraction among many and as a methodical exercise of studious leisure. Going from one to the other required a genuine conversion for which the noble ethos was not prepared, even though it had long accepted, in order to embellish and divert its lettered leisure, the nobility of the arts and letters. However, switching from a life of lettered and studious leisure to the contemplative life of sacred orders demanded a much more radical conversion. The Benedictines overcame these two stages and united them in their spiritual life. In the seventeenth century, Pascal, though a layman, abandoned studious leisure to rejoin the quasi-­monastic life of the Messieurs de Port-­Royal and dedicated himself to convincing other laymen of the absolute superiority of the contemplative life inspired by the Christian faith. In the eighteenth century, France’s cities, including Paris, were generally still “green” and their surfaces largely taken up by convents of contemplative orders, which were built on vast parks. In the countryside, monks lived on large forested and agricultural properties. The Enlightenment, with Voltaire, relegated these religious reserves of contemplation, silence, and prayer to the “dark ages” that opposed progress, though Petrarch, the forefather of Renaissance lettered and studious leisure, had nonetheless felt a profound attraction and reverence for them. The pious and sophisticated Madame Geoffrin commissioned three decorative panels from Hubert Robert, to be hung between the high mirrors in one of her receiving rooms.17 In an effort to amuse her guests at her own expense, Madame Geoffrin had asked that she herself be depicted on the canvas, during her yearly, well-­deserved, monthlong retreat to the Convent of the Visitandines on rue Saint-­Antoine. Robert showed himself painting, en plein air, with the elderly bourgeois lady dressed in widow’s black, walking or conversing in the verdant paths of the conventual park, or drinking chocolate in the company of other nuns, seated around her under ancient bowers. The monastic sanctuary is

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represented from the only pleasant angle in the garden; it is annexed to lettered and sociable leisure, as it were, to which it hastens to offer a psychotherapeutic respite, rather than demanding the slightest rupture with its comfort and ordinary gentle habits. Seroux d’Agincourt experienced firsthand the conversion from lettered and sociable leisure to studious leisure: this occurred relatively late, coinciding with the death of Louis XV, which freed him from the state duties the late king had required of the Ferme générale; it began with his Grand Tour in northern Europe, and then Italy, undertaken by Agincourt so he could be recruited by the Republic of Letters and to assure its cooperation with the long-­term project he was planning to bring to fruition, in the leisurely outlet of a secular Benedictine exercised at all times. As I previously mentioned, this conversion had a model: the Comte de Caylus, a great lord unique in his genre, about whom Quatremère de Quincy would write in 1834, in his essay on Canova et ses ouvrages (Canova and His Works): He had set the rare example of a grand and rich lord who preferred the renown of knowledge over the fame of court, using his fortune for acquisitions of all kinds and awakening a taste for research and discoveries of the arts and ancient monuments within the heart of the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres, through either his writing or his collections, as can attest his grand and still invaluable Collection of Antiquities.18 The young Caylus had singlehandedly tested all the forms of Parisian aristocratic ennui in the eighteenth century, enthusiastically exercising every form of lettered leisure that could occupy that time and render it enjoyable. Abbot Le Beau, the permanent secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions, describes the count’s younger years in a eulogy he gave for his colleague in 1766: An enemy of affairs, [the count] made all the amusements of life into one. He busied himself with music, drawing, and painting. He wrote, but these were only games and caprices of society to which he never granted more care than was merited. Sparkling with fire and gaiety, he never subjugated himself to the correction of style. He proposed no other perfection of this genre than the entertainment of his friends. He expected everything of nature, which served him willingly. To judge works of art, he possessed that taste, an instinct superior to study, surer than reasoning, and more rapid than reflection. His first glance rarely betrayed him; he immediately noticed beauty and flaws.19 In the 1740s, Caylus had begun his conversion to studious leisure, which he would exercise with increasingly ardent and methodical concentration until his

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death. After joining the army at the age of fifteen, the great-­nephew of Madame de Maintenon (through his mother) deliberately chose to leave military service in 1714 and dedicate the best of his time to lettered leisure. This was his first conversion, undertaken with some nonchalance and inspired by the charming company he found in Pierre Crozat, a great art connoisseur, a shrewd collector, and a patron, host, and friend of painters, musicians, and men and women of letters. To better immerse himself in this existence of an enlightened dilettante, Caylus traveled. Three successive and introductory Grand Tours of the Republic of Letters had him visit Italy (1714–1715), the eastern Mediterranean (1716–1717), and finally Holland and England (1722–1723). Upon his return, even as he continued to frequent joyful “companies” whose members, as amateurs and improvised authors, indulged in playacting or pleasant literary games, Caylus made his first steps toward being adopted by the Republic of Letters.20 In 1731, he was accepted as an honorary member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture: he had been a friend of Watteau, at that time largely unknown, and remained friends with the painter academician Charles Coypel; he befriended the sculptor Bouchardon, who had returned from Rome, and became the patron of several young artists; as an engraver, he collaborated on the Recueil Crozat and publications of Watteau’s work coordinated by Jean de Julienne.21 But this traveler to the Peloponnese and Magna Graecia was also an amateur antiquary, and in 1742 Caylus, a rare specimen among the great figures of France’s old noble aristocracy, became an honorary member of the Académie des Inscriptions.22 He would undergo a second conversion within this scholarly company, which led him to dedicate himself more and more exclusively to the composition of the seven volumes of his Collection of Antiquities. In the dedicatory epistle of its first volume, Caylus expresses his gratitude to his colleagues at the academy: Before you granted me the honor of admission among you, it was from the sidelines of art that I observed the remnants of savant antiquity saved from the barbarism of the time. You taught me to attach an infinitely superior worth to it, by that I mean of containing a thousand unique traits of the history of religion, custom and manners, of those renowned peoples who, by the vicissitude of human nature, disappeared from the earth, which they had filled with the sound of their names.23 Caylus died in 1765, in the harness, as it were, of this grand antiquarian endeavor. Literary Europe celebrated the count upon his death with all the more enthusiasm given that his name, birth, rank, and links to the court of Louis XIV had granted the rare seal of high nobility to the lettered vocation and in par-

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ticular the studious vocation. Diderot, who detested antiquaries and envied this great lord who paid little attention to his dress and devoted himself entirely to the arts and letters, penned a cruel epigram about Caylus following his death. From Petersburg, Diderot’s friend and sculptor, Falconet, harshly reproached him for his meanness and, in contrast, praised Caylus as the kind of enlightened ally always needed by the arts. However, Diderot’s criticism was not alone in relegating the antiquarian Caylus, a tireless promoter of a “return to antiquity,” to the shadows; Winckelmann’s eloquence in his History of the Art of Antiquity in fact did more in the long run to overshadow the nobleman’s pioneering role in the French and European arts. At the time, for someone like Seroux d’Agincourt, as well as Pierre-­François Hugues d’Hancarville and Quatremère de Quincy, the lessons left by Caylus, the reformer of a “corrupted” taste, were indissociable from those of Winckelmann.24 In 1823, Gigault de La Salle, the writer of the preface to Seroux’s History, clearly and elegantly expressed the natural synergy between the life of arts and the scholarly research of the Republic of Letters, which nobles like Caylus and Seroux had proudly served for the common good of French and European art with as much enthusiasm and competence, not to mention eloquence, as the commoner Winckelmann: Art therefore not only needs artists to support itself in all its brilliance, but also theorists, archaeologists, and historians, and in every era in which architecture, sculpture, and painting are elevated to their most sublime conceptions, one finds writers busy noting their history, illuminating their functioning, illustrating their monuments, and researching their ­antiquities.25 It is difficult to determine, given the current extent of our knowledge, when Seroux d’Agincourt met Caylus and began to follow in his footsteps. Seroux himself acknowledged Caylus’s decisive influence on him. Like d’Hancarville, in the second tome of his Antiquités étrusques (Etruscan Antiquities, 1766– 1776),26 Seroux paid Caylus the posthumous homage of a student to his master at the end of the former’s Recueil de fragments de sculpture antique en terre cuite (Collection of Antique Terra-­Cotta Sculpture Fragments), which, though it was not published until 1814, had long been conceived of and illustrated as an extension of the count’s Collection of Antiquities.27 Born in 1730, Seroux was one generation younger than Caylus, who was born in 1692, and was thirty-­five years old when Caylus died in 1765. However, the count’s many vocations included that of Fénelon’s Mentor, the preceptor for his Telemachus: Caylus successively sponsored a number of young artists

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from their debuts and helped guide the talents of painters like Vien, Lagrenée, and Roslin, and of sculptors like Bouchardon and Vassé. It is therefore hardly surprising that he would have befriended a young farmer-­general of noble birth, in whom he saw a mirror image of himself at the same age, with shared affinities for lettered leisure and studious leisure. Like the famous count, Seroux had first embraced, class tradition obliging, a military career; under the command of Charles de Rohan, prince of Soubise, in the cavalry of the Maison du Roi, he obtained the rank and bought the post of captain. In a Necrology conserved in Besançon,28 he is described at that age and in that uniform as “dazzling by the stature and nobility of his character, the elegance of his manners, the generosity of his behavior, a beautiful face, a keen and seductive mind”— a perfect Louis XV gentleman, in other words, who was greatly appreciated by the king he served. The king himself was the one to overcome Seroux’s remorse over and resistance to leaving the army, in order to increase his young subject’s fortune and reestablish that of his family, and incited him to take on his duties as the celibate head of a large family of brothers and cousins. Like Caylus, who after 1714 resumed his until-­then limited studies with the learned abbot Antonio Schinella Conti,29 Seroux took classes at the Collège de Navarre, studying under the physician Nollet and the renowned professor of rhetoric and poetry Batteux. While simultaneously taking care of familial affairs, in addition to his own, Seroux developed a taste for lettered leisure, in which he indulged more fully after entering the Ferme générale, where he would both excel and financially profit. A protégé and guest of the Rohans in a superb Parisian mansion decorated by the best artists of the period, as Caylus had been in his youth in the no-­less-­ sumptuous Hôtel de Crozat, Seroux had a free pass to the best social circles, and, like Caylus in the 1720s–1740s, excelled at improvising poetry and silly plays in said company; he attended without fail Madame Geoffrin’s infamous “Mondays,” which debuted in her receiving rooms in 1748, following the Comte de Caylus’s suggestion, and where artists could converse with art amateurs, men and women of letters, foreign diplomats, and collectors.30 His close ties to Caylus, Mariette, and the circle of “grand amateurs” intimately associated with the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture no doubt developed on rue du Faubourg-­Saint-­Honoré. Like Caylus, Seroux learned to draw and engrave as a semiprofessional. According to Gigault de La Salle, he was friends with Boucher, Van Loo, Pierre, Fragonard, Vien, Robert, Vernet, Pigalle, Bouchardon, Le Bas, Wille, and Cochin—the elite of the Académie Royale and talented amateurs who lived symbiotically with it. He attended sales of famous collections held after their owners’ death, a popular draw of lettered leisure in the

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capital, and assembled a noteworthy collection of drawings by Italian, Flemish, and French masters of which we have only a partial notion today due to their discreet dispersal in Rome by their desperate owner. Like Caylus, he considered himself to be a servant of the arts and artists; he gladly lent drawings from his collection to Élisabeth Vigée-­Le Brun so she could study and copy them: in Rome, in 1792, the émigré artist had a joyful reunion with Seroux, as good-­ natured as ever despite being forced to separate from his drawings.31 Gigault de La Salle credited Seroux’s Italian voyage for his discovery that “false brilliance had led our school astray,”32 curing him of any attachment to rococo and sparking his enthusiasm for a return to antiquity. However, it is far more probable that he had already been persuaded, while in Paris, by the long-­ running campaign led by Caylus, who frequently spoke at the two academies to which he belonged, engaging with the public as well as with those artists whom he was protecting, and for whom he had created and granted prizes (for drawing facial expressions and anatomy) in order to gently steer the fragile favor in which rococo taste was held toward the “bel antique.” Long before his departure from Paris in 1776, and in the count’s lifetime, Seroux was familiar with the two published volumes of the renowned Recueil Crozat (Crozat Collection), a veritable museum of engravings of sixteenth-­century Florentine and Venetian paintings and drawings; he was well aware of the demanding method applied by Crozat, his friends, and his collaborators to reproduce these works of art with the utmost precision. Seroux was also familiar with the Recueil de pierres gravées antiques de la collection du roi (Collection of Antique Engraved Stones from the Collection of the King), transposed in line drawings by Caylus, and the Traité des pierres gravées (Tract of Engraved Stones), which included a long preface by Pierre Jean Mariette and was illustrated using the same plain technique, with drawings by Bouchardon engraved by Caylus. These scientific catalogs were also meant to serve as manuals of pure, perfect forms to shape or reshape artists’ and amateurs’ tastes.33 The pedagogical and rhetorical dictate that called for “showing” before “saying” or commenting, and which Seroux applied to his own publications, was the legacy of the great antiquaries and historians of French art during the reign of Louis XV. One of the greatest editorial endeavors undertaken by Caylus, who was furious with the Neapolitan authorities for delaying publication of the frescos rediscovered at Herculaneum, was the luxurious publication, in thirty copies (1757–1760), of the hand-­colored reproduction of a collection of gouaches by Pietro Santi Bartoli, copies made by Bellori’s famous collaborator of classical paintings that reappeared in Rome and subsequently disappeared.34 This publication was more a technical challenge directed at the Neapolitans by the French antiquary through the models

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he suggested to his protégé, the painter Vien, than an homage to Santi Bartoli, who was more concerned with elegance than fidelity. Seroux was apprehensive enough about that shortcoming that he had illustrations of the classical Vatican Virgil, already engraved by Santi Bartoli, reproduced at additional cost. He borrowed only a few plates of well-­known monuments from the illustrious engraver’s Admiranda Romanorum antiquitatum veteris sculpturae vestigial (The Remnants of Ancient Sculptures of Roman Antiquities, 1693), which were presented to the reader for comparison with other later and previously unseen ones. It was through publications by Caylus, Mariette, and Bouchardon, long before Seroux laid eyes in Rome on the plates line-­drawn by Flaxman and engraved by Piroli, that Seroux discovered the documentarian virtues of a “drawing” technique that would come to characterize Europe’s “return to antiquity”; in his History, that technique became the unifying principle behind engraved plates faithfully depicting paintings, statutes, and monuments of the “decadent” ages of art, thus inadvertently equating them with the affinity for “simplicity” and “truth” that drove his contemporaries to prefer David over Boucher, and Canova over Clodion.35 In reality, the European “return to antiquity” had been in the making for a long time, in Paris, by Caylus, Bouchardon, Mariette, and Vien, well before the dates of the exclusively English and Roman origins recently proposed by Robert Rosenblum, and had already paved the way for a Europe-­wide “return to the primitives,” a movement in which Caylus’s French disciple, nolens volens, would play the primary role.36 The method used by Seroux for his “rapid sketch” of a millennium of European art history (architecture, painting, sculpture, miniatures) was faithful to the rigorous principles established by Pierre Crozat, Pierre Jean Mariette, and the Comte de Caylus for the plates included in their “collections” of Renaissance tableaus and drawings and paintings and engravings of classic antiquity. The meticulously selected collaborators involved in these team efforts received instructions to use strict and fastidious precision with the “motif,” which was then verified by masters at either the drawing or engraving stage. As often as was possible, for paintings and miniatures, Seroux relied (or had his collaborators rely) on tracings made directly onto oiled vellum. He recruited expert architects for monuments; when dealing with sculptures, he carefully indicated the perspective (or perspectives) from which they had to be drawn. No individual or school mannerisms, nothing remotely embellished, could come between the original objects represented and their simple visual representation. Seroux’s “method” brought to Italy the techniques of the “grand [French] amateurs” trained at the Hôtel Crozat which they had developed in order to remedy the flaws in the illustrated plates of Montfaucon’s Antiquité expliquée (Antiquity

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Explained) and Les Monumens de la Monarchie françoise (Monuments of the French Monarchy),37 too often carelessly engraved using second-hand or third-­ hand drawings or engravings. Seroux, like Caylus, believed that productions of human art indexed and reproduced by archaeologists and historians should benefit from the same visual precision as productions of nature, botany, entomology, conchology, and anatomy reproduced in indexes of natural history, especially as, in the former case, time was pressing, condemning works of art to ruin, disappearance, and oblivion. Contrary to the widely believed assumption, the plates in Diderot and Alembert’s Encyclopédie, an inventory of an exclusively contemporary state of the arts entirely lacking any dimension of historical memory, are a limited representation of the intelligence and, in particular, curiosity of the Enlightenment. Countless drawings and plates created with utmost care, verification, and correction under Seroux’s direct oversight or according to directives given to his correspondents (for example, Count Choiseul-­Gouffier, ambassador to Constantinople, who agreed to collect rubbings of Byzantine monuments) remained unpublished, in an attempt to lighten Seroux’s manuscript. These unseen items were, alongside the original published plates of History, among the beautiful detritus of drawings and extensive handwritten notes Seroux left to the Vatican Library. As demonstrated by Henri Loyrette, using the example of an altarpiece, many of these line engravings are reflective of the works’ states before their degradation or dismantling, which now allows us to reconstruct those original states.38 The example set by Caylus in his final years, increasingly resolute in his studious antiquarian leisure, composing volume after volume of his masterpiece, Collection of Antiquities, in collaboration with many of his fellow savants at the Acadèmie des Inscriptions, undoubtedly fascinated Seroux and prompted him, as soon as he was able, to similarly detach himself from the world. Caylus’s tenacity, as he himself notes in the preface to volume VII of his Collection, completed shortly before his death, was partially inspired by the disgust he felt toward the Parisian art scene, which was overwhelmed by criticisms from “the gut,” notably those penned by La Font de Saint-­Yenne and Diderot, whose noisy charlatanism would henceforth successfully rival the authority of true enlightened amateurs like Mariette and the count himself.39 It is likely that when Seroux left Paris in 1776, carrying numerous recommendation letters, to begin his Grand Tour of the European Republic of Letters, much like the one taken by a young Caylus in 1714–1723, he shared the sentiments that had perturbed the old count some ten years earlier and was hoping to find a location for his new studious existence that was more conducive to the serenity of otium than was an increasingly agitated Paris.

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His intuition was on the nose. Rome was good to him, ensuring that he and his work escaped what would have been unavoidable violence during the Terror in Paris. The two kinds of nobility incarnated by Seroux—the noblesse de la naissance and the noblesse de l’esprit—were unfailingly recognized in Rome, earning the elderly, erudite gentleman universal respect in addition to countless friendships and collaborations and dedication, even from those French belonging to the opposing party, as well as, at the end, a kind of crepuscular princedom of the Republic of Letters, to which, in 1804, in his famous Lettre sur la campagne romaine (Letter on the Roman Campaign),40 the royalist Chateaubriand paid an homage as lovely as the one the Republican Paul-­Louis Courier, traveling in Italy, would soon write in his correspondence with his friends in France.41 Note that Chateaubriand chose one of Seroux’s friends, the French sculptor Joseph Charles Marin, to carve the tomb for Pauline de Beaumont, which he had erected in a column of the church of San Luigi dei Francesci. To justify the dark, bloody nature of his tragedies, Crébillon said, “Corneille took heaven, Racine the earth. Only hell was left for me.”42 Seroux justified his decision to offer literary Europe a History of its long “artistic decadence” in a similar fashion: Winckelmann, after Caylus, had claimed the “heaven” of the arts, classic Greece and its Roman heritage; Vasari and his many successors had focused on the “earth” of the arts, Renaissance Italy, the source of their European “revival”; all that was left was “hell,” the interim millennium during which the arts were corrupted.43 Seroux was thus allotted the humblest and, because it lacked precedent, the most ambitious and difficult role of this tripartite scheme, which led him to unexplored terrain and was dedicated to a thankless and disparaged subject. He had undoubtedly conceived of his plan well before leaving the Ferme générale and Paris for a voyage intended to earn him access to the European Republic of Letters, whose support he needed to successfully carry out a project destined to fully occupy his own, premeditated future of studious leisure. It is likely that he was inspired by both the celebrated example of Roger de Gaignières and works by the Benedictine Bernard de Montfaucon— his Antiquité expliquée, which highlighted works of art dating after the sixth century, and in particular his Monumens de la Monarchie françoise, a veritable visual encyclopedia of medieval France—via Caylus’s own Recueil d’Antiquités (Collection of Antiquities), which boldly juxtaposed Gallo-­Roman works of art with objects of classical craftsmanship. In the France of Ange Gabriel, François Lemoyne, and Edme Bouchardon, which adhered to the tradition of Italian academies, the memory of the kingdom’s Middle Ages was honored by a handful of scholars, including an academician from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres, La Curne de Sainte-­Palaye, who was a compatriot, friend, and colleague of President de Brosses.44

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At this time the kingdom of France was grappling with an unresolved contradiction between the myth of the French “Renaissance” (the renovatio studiorum et atrium imported from Italy in 1530 by Francis I) and the founding myths of the French monarchy (Clovis and the Holy Ampulla of Reims), which stretched back, as did several subsequent and glorious reigns (notably that of Saint Louis), to the Dark Ages that followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres was compelled to dedicate a number of its “memoirs” to the “medieval” literature and language of the French kingdom; Caylus, simultaneously pushing for a “return to antiquity,” was among its authors. In parallel, the Benedictines of Saint-­Maur had begun to write a Histoire littéraire de la France (Literary History of France), which devoted erudite, dry summaries to the “barbarian” authors of the first centuries of the kingdom.45 Seroux d’Agincourt, a determined enthusiast of the “return to antiquity,” who dedicated his life to bringing the arts of late antiquity and the Middle Ages to light, is emblematic of that French schizophrenia. After conducting familial, genealogical research, he began to believe in a deep past that had been somewhat eclipsed by the prestige of the Renaissance of arts and letters. The “return to antiquity” movement and criticism of rococo, in which Seroux participated alongside an older Caylus, took aim at the limp and sensual affectation in which the French school of arts had “fallen.” Tired of rococo arabesques and rainbows, the movement’s proponents called for “pure” forms. The austerity or naïveté of the arts during centuries of “decadence” acquired a secret appeal within the context of a revolution of taste that would, in its desire to rediscover the bel antique, go so far as to align itself with the Doric Greek Paestum revealed by Piranesi’s engravings.46 For all that the Jacobin revolution created a blank political slate, vandalizing monuments of the ancient monarchy in the name of an austere return to Sparta and republican Rome, it was nonetheless one of their own, Alexandre Lenoir, who, invoking the national legacy and the need to educate citizens on art from every era, created the Musée des Monuments Français (French Museum of Monuments), using fragments saved from vandalism, in which Gothic ogives and sharp angles found themselves abruptly revalorized. For that matter, not only was studious leisure independent of the trends dictating high society’s lettered leisure, it also boasted its own traditions and rhythm, which were relatively independent from the vicissitudes of taste and political revolutions. Furthermore, thanks to its European dimension, it was not limited to the specific context of French national history. During his Grand Tour of literary Europe, Seroux, already attracted to the terrae incognitae of past French art, could focus his attention on the many

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monuments he saw that dated back to those “dark ages.” He must have also noted that he was far from the only person outside of France to take an interest in periods of forgotten art. His arrival in London coincided with the publication of the first volume of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.47 He traveled to Twickenham to visit Horace Walpole, a precursor of an English Gothic revival that undoubtedly had more to do with an aesthetic caprice than a scholarly one; after that meeting, Seroux maintained a friendly correspondence with the British “virtuoso.” He was introduced to collectors in Holland and Italy who, indifferent to international trends and tastes, had assembled, out of local pride, collections of “primitive” tableaus (Flemish ones in Holland and pre-­Giottesques or pre-­Raphaelites in Italy). Reaching Modena in early 1779, Seroux befriended the former Jesuit Girolamo Tiraboschi, who was writing his epic History of Italian Literature, which accorded a generous and comprehensive role to the centuries and authors predating the “century of Leo X” and which invited art historians to imitate it.48 This study trip through Italy, which, in the eighteenth century, was teeming with historians, antiquaries, and archaeologists, figures whose long memory unabashedly embraced their own Middle Ages, resulted in comforting Seroux in his plans to methodically recapitulate the arts of Aetas media, which had been conceived of in France in the still-­timid medievalist wake of Caylus, the Académie des Inscriptions, and the Benedictines of Saint-­Maur. But for Seroux it was out of the question to effect the aesthetic rehabilitation of the “decadence” he nonetheless aimed to memorialize. Yet, at the numerous stops on his long trip leading to Rome, Seroux, leaving behind the “affectation” of rococo art, occasionally demonstrated an affinity for works that predated the “revival” of the sixteenth century. As he stood before Carpaccio’s Legend of Saint Ursula series in San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the “simplicity” and “naturalness” of the attitudes and feelings represented inspired “a gentle emotion” in the French aristocrat. Along his journey, Seroux’s ambitious project attracted apparently unexpected interest, sympathy, and collaborations, which never would have arisen in France. Even the French citizens he then befriended—which he did even when Rome was under the protection or administration of the Directory in France—shared his love of the arts and respected him as a scholar dedicated to the res communis of literary Europe. During his travels, Seroux easily obtained drawings of medieval monuments from young French architects on study trips. In Venice, he befriended the custodian of the Marciana library, Abbot Jacopo Morelli, who introduced him to the treasured illuminated manuscripts in his care. In Florence, he was introduced to the former Jesuit Luigi Lanzi, who was then writing his Storia pittorica della

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Italia (The History of Painting in Italy), which [first] appeared in 1792;49 plagiarized by Stendhal, this masterly work served as an authority on the art of Italian drawing and its various “schools” for the first half of the nineteenth century. Seroux remained in contact with these experts once he had settled in Rome, where he arrived on November 29, 1779, recommended to the director of the Académie de France, Joseph Marie Vien, a favored student of Caylus, and David’s teacher, by the director of the Bâtiments du Roi, the Comte d’Angiviller. In the same year, the young Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova arrived in Rome, where he earned the appreciation of the English painter Gavin Hamilton50 and a French amateur, and one of Seroux’s friends, Quatremère de Quincy, both enthusiasts of the “return to antiquity.” In 1784, David returned to Rome to paint the Oath of the Horatii amid an atmosphere of intense general curiosity.51 Pope Pius VI Braschi’s Rome, where Seroux made his home in the Via Gregoriana, became Europe’s leading center for the “return to antiquity” in the arts. The French nobleman frequented society à la Parisienne at the home of Cardinal de Bernis, Louis XVI’s ambassador, crossing paths with his peers, Roman scholars and antiquaries, and foreign amateurs passing through, like King George III of Sweden and Goethe, who was brought to Via Gregoriana in 1787 by the famous painter Angelica Kauffman. The poet was impressed by the medieval collection and illustrated plates of Seroux’s future publication, which in his mind revealed the endurance of man’s creative spirit, “even in the dark ages.” Though financially and morally drained by the fall of the French ancien régime, the royalist Seroux continued his work; the Frenchmen of the new regime that invaded or administered Rome after 1798 treated him like a “national treasure” and not as a ci-­devant noble. The secretary of the embassy of the French republic, Artaud de Montor, regularly visited Via Gregoriana between 1798 and 1803; he preempted Seroux’s History with his own work, first published in 1808: Considérations sur l’état de la peinture en Italie dans les quatre siècles qui ont précédé Raphaël (Considerations on the State of Painting in Italy in the Four Centuries that Preceded Raphael). He would remain a great defender and collector of Italian primitives.52 Seroux’s Rome was also the backdrop for Paillot de Montabert’s Dissertation sur les peintures du Moyen Âge et sur celles que l’on a appelées gothiques (Dissertation on the Paintings of the Middle Ages and on Those That were Called Gothic), published in the Magasin encyclopédique in 1812. This rehabilitation of primitives is all the more representative of the increasing superposition of the “return to the primitives” and the “return to antiquity,” given that Montabert, a former student of David, would publish Théorie du geste dans la pein-

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ture renfermant plusieurs principes applicables à l’art du théâtre (Theory of the Gestural in Painting Using Several Principles Applicable to the Art of Theater) the following year: the strict “principles” outlined in this theory, meaning economy, naturalness, and decorum, though supported by Greek and Latin authorities and illustrated by classical statuary and glyptics, had been, according to the author, better observed, all things considered, by the Naïve artists of the Aetas media than they were by the all-­too-­skilled corrupters of art in the eighteenth century.53 François Cacault, negotiator of the Treaty of Tolentino and the Concordat and plenipotentiary minister of the First Consul in Rome from 1801 to 1803, was an amateur and collector too familiar with classical and modern Italian art not to hold Seroux in high esteem.54 Dominique-­Vivant Denon, another high-­ ranking amateur and the director of the Musée Napoléon, who had spent considerable time with Seroux in the Parisian societies of the ancien régime, encountered him again in 1811 in Rome during his mission to Italy. Vivant Denon had to personally select works from among the tableaus seized from the convents of Tuscany and Genoa to serve as appropriate additions to the collections of the Louvre, which was lacking in Italian primitives; after consulting Seroux and rounding out his museum collection with an enlightened eye, he went on to prepare the European exhibit of “Primitive Schools” in 1814, which included the Italian (from Cimabue to Perugino), German, Flemish, and Spanish schools. As a result, the Louvre seal was affixed to what was becoming, in part against Seroux’s wishes but also in many respects thanks to him, a clear reorientation of European taste, after having been regarded as a scientific obligation, and near penitence, during the eighteenth century.55 Among the many collaborators Seroux employed to work on his engraved plates, not to mention the equally numerous artists and amateurs to whom he showed and generously explained them in his home over a span of thirty years, several developed a greater admiration than their host or employer would have liked for the displayed works and the very “flaws” he pointed out. During its slow and long evolution in the Via Gregoriana, and well before its publication, Seroux’s History created “converts” to a primitivism its author had always wanted to resist. This reluctant missionary’s “converts,” in addition to the diplomat Artaud de Montor, a collector and defender of Byzantine and Italian “primitives,” and the architects and friends Léon Dufourny and Pierre Charles Pâris, two curators charged with overseeing the publication of Seroux’s History by the publisher Treuttel and Würtz in Paris, included two collaborators who were involved in the final phase of the book’s development: the Englishman William Young Ott-

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ley and his inseparable travel companion, the Dutchman David Pierre Humbert de Superville, in Umbria and Tuscany in 1792–1793 and 1798. Under Seroux’s direction, they created numerous drawings and tracings from frescos predating the Renaissance, notably at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi. Ottley, “converted” by Seroux, nonetheless worked on his own projects as well and published The Italian School of Design: Being a Series of Facsimiles of Original Drawings by the Most Eminent Painters and Sculptors of Italy: with Biographical Notices of the Artists and Observations on their Works in 1823 in London.56 The two friends had originally come to Rome independently, to draw in the style of antiquity and Michelangelo as “Davidian” members of the Académie de France in Rome. According to a hypothesis well supported by Miarelli Mariani,57 the two men met at the site of a Benedictine monastery in Subiaco as a result of orders given by Seroux to both of them; their friendship was reportedly cemented by the shared passion they felt for Italian primitives. Humbert de Superville (though he harbored Jacobin sentiments) even earned the nickname “Giottino” due to his efforts as a draughtsman, painter, and engraver, which were resolutely dedicated to the taste for simplicity and the clarity of language of the forms used by the artists of the Trecento.58 The two greatest Italian artists of neoclassical Rome under Pius VIII, the sculptor Antonio Canova and the painter Vincenzo Camuccini, both of whom visited Seroux frequently and occasionally provided him drawings, were also attentive to the sparseness and solemnity of the works they discovered at the prodding of the French antiquary, which, while undoubtedly “decadent” in regard to the bel antique, were also shielded in their rough fashion from the “corruption of taste” that, according to Canova and Camuccini, occurred in Paris in the eighteenth century. The engraver Thomas Piroli, on whom Seroux relied the most frequently in Rome, if we exclude his faithful, full-­time “employee” Gian Giacomo Macchiavelli, was the heart and soul of a private “academy” of highly gifted Roman and foreign artists who existed somewhat symbiotically with the studio, itself quite popular, of the famous antiquary. Vivant Denon had zero scruples, in the name of the common good of Europe, when it came to using new tableaus seized in Italy to supplement the historic panorama of the development of the arts that the Louvre wanted to offer literary Europe. At the time of the Treaty of Tolentino, which had stripped museums and papal libraries of their masterpieces to the benefit of the Musée Central des Arts, Quatremère de Quincy made an eloquent plea in his Lettres à Miranda (Letters to Miranda), with the support of David, in favor of maintaining those works in situ; he spoke on behalf of the common good of all the artists in Europe who needed to continue to find a living and complete museum in

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Rome and in Italy.59 In the summer of 1802, the painter François Marius Granet arrived in Rome, having possibly carried and read during his voyage Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme (Genius of Christianity), published on Easter. His first effort at open-­air painting, in front of the Colosseum, the symbol of imperial Rome, was a failure; he subsequently confined himself, in July, to the damp crypt of San Martino al Monte. He writes in his Memoirs: “I was among the dead who alone made their homes within those immense tableaus.”60 This time, his painting was successful. Denis Coutagne described that move from sunny Rome to underground Rome as a “conversion of perspective” and a quest for the “primitive perspective.”61 It comes as little surprise that Granet, a good friend of Ingres’s, then a member of the Académie de France, quickly allied himself with Seroux d’Agincourt, his neighbor at Via Gregoriana for a time, and with Artaud de Montor, who would publish Voyage dans les catacombes de Rome (Voyage in the Catacombs of Rome) in 1810. These two antiquaries of the “dark ages,” with whom Chateaubriand spent a great deal of time in 1803–1804, guided Granet in his search for abandoned sites, notably churches threatened with ruin, which mirrored his own meditative melancholy, were viewed contemptuously by a deceptively healthy classical and neoclassical world, and would soon be emptied of their eremites and monks by imperial authorities. While in Rome, Granet (who was by no means pious and was rather Jacobin in his leanings) was not attracted to the magnificence of Saint Peter’s Basilica or the monumentality of Santa Maria Maggiore, but rather by Santa Maria in Via Lata, Saint Frances of Rome, Santi Quattro Coronati, Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and, far from Rome, the Basilica of Saint Francis (ignored by the majority of eighteenth-­century voyagers, from President de Brosses to Stendhal) and its low chapel. A landscape painter, he attributed the following prosopopoeia to nature, addressing the painter, in his Memoirs: “Here I am in all my simplicity. If you want to make something that resembles me, be naïve and observe me well.” By 1824, Granet had accumulated over two hundred landscape and architectural paintings on oil on paper, whose severe rusticity emphasized the silence, space, and light of each view, during his promenades through Rome and the campagna. Cézanne, who would access these secret spiritual exercises left by the painter to the museum of his native city Aix-­en-­Provence a half-­century later, recognized a soul mate in Granet. But Granet could not envisage displaying his improvisations to the public at the Salons de l’Institut: instead he composed large-­format “historical tableaus,” which, while allegories of his contemplative poeticism, were somewhat more in accordance with the obligatory academism of the time. The most famous of these, and the archetype of this

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official form of production, was Le Chœur des capucins de la place Barberini (The Choir of the Capuchin Church on the Piazza Barberini), which was exhibited in Rome in 1814, the same year as the exhibit of “Primitive Schools” at the Louvre, and later at the Louvre itself, at the Salon of 1819. The work’s immediate success grew during the Restoration, prompting Granet, at the urging of his friend Auguste de Forbin, Vivant Denon’s successor as the Louvre’s director, to produce the work in multiple copies and numerous variations. Caroline Murat bought a version, as did Tsar Alexandar I. Louis XVIII reacted warmly to the painting, which was featured by Forbin. Amid the starkness of a timeless apse even more abstract than one of Saenredam’s churches, backlit, with vast gulfs of shadows, by the chapel’s only window, Capuchin friars standing in stalls around an altar table, one seated due to his advanced age, another in profile kneeling in prayer with his head between his hands, are attending a mass held by two of the friars, aided by two choir children bearing candles. Is the service taking place in the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century, or the era of the primitive church and the catacombs? Like its brown-­robed monks blending into shadow, their faces barely discernible, the painting is timeless. The painter would never compose biblical altar paintings. But within this genre of painting he himself invented (like Watteau and his fêtes galantes!), Granet did translate his own experience as a contemplative artist into a language that could be understood by the laymen attracted to the Catholic, romantic revival launched in France by Chateaubriand beginning in 1802. Viewers of The Choir of the Capuchin Church and its variations relearned something they had thought to be lost, which they wanted to find again and, at least in their better moments, revere: a stripping away of passions and the world, the pure geometry of a sacred place, the simple and austere grandeur of a religious rite. Restored to its primitive and severe exercise, the art of painting as conceived of by Granet was in itself a religion and a way to teach religion. Moving beyond the lettered leisure that had found its diversions and charming decor in rococo art, and committed to the severity of the studious leisure of scholars and antiquaries, Seroux d’Agincourt had led his guests in the Via Gregoriana, through the study of the architecture and arts of medieval clergy, to the threshold of rediscovery or nostalgia for the monastic vita contemplativa, which had been forgotten or derisively dismissed by the Enlightenment. Granet crossed that threshold. He is the true French contemporary of the German Caspar David Friedrich, whose paintings of interiors and landscapes, often punctuated with Gothic ruins, also call for a rupture with the world and for reverential contemplation of the divinity flowering in places safe from desecration. Thus, via an imperceptible transition during the turmoil of the Revolution

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and the French Empire, Seroux, a survivor of the noble manners of high Parisian society, who in Rome had become a master of European antiquarianism, dedicated to revealing a “return to the primitives,” encased within a “return to antiquity,” was more than the mere protagonist of two revolutions of taste; he also contributed, intentionally, to a profound change in values. Valorizing studious leisure by his example, and elevating it above the lettered leisure that had been made into a supreme ideal of existence during the Enlightenment, he consequently rehabilitated, through his representations of conventual buildings, polyptichs, and icons, the ideal of the contemplative life of medieval monasticism and notably a Franciscanism that now attracted the admiration of Protestants, agnostics, and Catholics alike. That ideal, revived two centuries earlier by the Catholic Reformation and by Port-­Royal, and reviled and denigrated by the Enlightenment, would impose itself in the nineteenth century as the counterweight to bourgeoisism, commercialism, and industrialization. It found itself at the forefront of countless purely religious revivals, but would henceforth be solicited by (and sooner or later permeate) poetry and art, when those disciplines sought liberation from servitude to mondaine society.

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AFTERWORD: THE SECRET OF THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

Beacons Lighting the Way One of the obstacles hindering our understanding of premodern European arts in context is the rhetoric that frames the invention and reception of Renaissance and classical art, and which we have either overlooked or apprehended. Our focus has instead been on aesthetics, a philosophy of art that dates from eighteenth-­century Germany, which we pro­ject, retrospectively and anachronistically, onto premodern art and its reflective and sustaining milieu. By “rhetoric,” I am referring to the ars bene dicendi invented by the ancient Greeks, adopted by their conquering students, the Romans, and discovered in the Western Christian world in the twelfth century and taught to clerics in a schematic and dogmatic form in the art faculties of pontifical universities in the late Middle Ages (circa 1101–1300). Thanks to Petrarch and his disciples, that first Renaissance experienced a second rinascità outside of clerical universities, which restored the variable and adaptable principle of convenientia (the ancient Greeks’ prepon) to the heart of the oratorical system. Petrarch borrowed that principle from Cicero, the author of De Oratore, who, while working in Rome as a lawyer and statesman, had introduced a preparatory education in legal eloquence, political discourse, and official and private epistolary practices. At that time, arts at medieval universities (established by the papacy) were ancillary to the ecclesiastical functions of the preacher and the theologian. The oratorical “conversion” prepared by a poet more secular than clerical such as Petrarch was favorably welcomed by the pontifical Curia, back in Rome with its high-­ranking officials (1347), and by royal courts and secular city-­states that needed political and diplomatic personnel able to negotiate and correspond with all of Roman Catholicity. The same quickly became true of the different kingdoms in the Western Empire. In the wake of Italy’s humanists, orators, and diplomats, a vast international epistolary network emerged and spread between European men of letters corresponding in a supple and elegant Ciceronian Neo-­L atin, unsullied by the modern “barbarism” of scholastic Latin. The history of Latin Europe was transformed by the unceasing compari-

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son of its current “barbaric” and unfinished state and the finished, superior, and model state propelling it forward. Pagan and Christian antiquity, emerging from its relegation to ignorance and oblivion, became the object of an archaeological and philological program of study that recalled and sparked a desire for actualized Greco-­L atin civilization, and which would prove capable of bringing a still unactualized modern Europe from potentiality to actuality. That principle comes from Aristotle: “Only a being in a state of actuality can bring a being from potentiality to actuality” (Metaphysics, book Λ). Whenever we encounter the somewhat mysterious expression “Republic of Letters” nowadays, we are immediately dealing with a rhetorical figure of thought, namely a political, eulogistic, or ironic allegory, which appeared during the fifteenth century to designate an informal institution of research and amicable cooperation that carved out a shared terrain of scholarly Neo-­L atin cooperation for its members, transcending borders and political and religious contexts, and in spite of linguistic and political differences, bridging “absolute” monarchies (Rome, Vienna, Madrid, Paris), aristocratic republics (Florence, Venice), bourgeois republics (Dutch Republic, 1579–1795), and independent Hanseatic ports. The Republic of Letters, a state without a state, did not elicit distrust or suspicion from the monarchies of the ancien régime, which, following Louis XIV’s example, had nationalized them in their savant or mondaine academies. The royal French state willingly selected its personnel from the ranks of local lettered societies, all belonging to the European Republic of Letters, whose members were recruited, under princely supervision, by co-­optation among peers, and chose the most competent and zealous individuals, including, if necessary, foreigners. The threat to the state therefore did not come from antiquaries, savants trained in the rigorous disciplines of philology, numismatics, and collectionism, but rather from the ranks of publicists and “philosophes,” who otherwise acquired their knowledge (for example, autodidacts like Rousseau) of a didactic antiquity and its Aristotelian division of political regimes. The masterpiece of that seemingly scholarly literature, which was in fact rich with double meaning, is Histoire romaine (Roman History, 1738–1740) by the Jansenist professor Charles Rollin, who, forbidden to teach, took his revenge by circulating on a much larger scale, via the printing press, a licit criticism of the French ecclesial and political regime under the innocent guise of an exemplum historical account that shamed both modern politics and the Moderns’ manners and religion. Mably, who penned Entretiens de Phocion et des doutes sur le fondement naturel des sociétés politiques (Phocion’s Conversations and Doubts on

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the Natural Order of Political Societies), and Rousseau with his two Discourses, would later embellish on the didactic framework of Roman History. The thousand-­year-­old evidence that inspired the French royal state was deconstructed in the eighteenth century by both Jansenist “archaeolaters” like Rollin and libertine, deist, or atheist philosophers protected by their unanimous veneration of beautiful, free, and virtuous antiquity. In his Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), Leo Strauss reveals the tricks used by philosophers from various schools and eras to escape, beneath the mask of antiquity, religious and political tyrannies. And in 1955, Arnaldo Momigliano, in his article “Ancient History and the Antiquarians,” rehabilitated the painstaking work of antiquaries during the ancien régime. Those philologists, numismatists, and archaeologists, though themselves of relatively little concern to authorities and often academicians, were nonetheless accumulating a mass of critical knowledge about antiquity from which Enlightenment philosophes would draw an eloquent argument in favor of the republican regime, the only one, among the regimes defined by Aristotle and Polybius, that guaranteed its citizens the plenitude of a freedom that stimulated them to generously exercise their civic virtues. An implicit contract linked Europe’s erudite community to the monarchies of the seventeenth century. In other words, antiquarian savants respected the regime that respected them. But that complicity crumbled in the following century when the French philosophes of the Enlightenment and their prerevolutionary disciples (Mably, Rousseau, Diderot) popularized a mythical and even melodramatic version of antiquity. The Fénelonian figure of the royal Good Shepherd (Telemachus in Salento, in Aventures de Télémaque (The Adventures of Telemachus, 1699), the Rousseauist figure of the Great Lawmaker (Lycurgus and Solon in Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (The Voyage of Young Anacharsis in Greece, 1788), and the sublime figures of republican Rome’s grandest citizens (the Scipios, Brutuses, and Pompeys of Rollin’s Roman History) spread and ingrained in the French imagination an exemplary panorama of good and bad governance, in the tradition of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes in Siena, in which the strict ethics of ancient republics were contrasted with the ingratiating and perverse aesthetic of modern monarchies, as they had been condemned, indirectly and implicitly, in Roman History. In 1865, Edgar Quinet could make the following observation in book 2 of his Révolution (Revolution): No tribune in the world had a language less common, more scholarly, and more studied than Robespierre and Saint-­Just. Anyone who tried to speak the language of the people was promptly and naturally odious to them. It seemed to them to diminish the Revolution, which they could only view

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with the pomp of Cicero and the majesty of Tacitus. [. . .] It was the Jacobins’ classical and lettered revolution that crushed the uneducated and proletariat revolution of the Cordeliers. Robespierre followed the designs of a classical tragedy. Anything that strayed from the accepted order, life, spontaneity, popular instinct, struck him as a monstrosity: he waged war against it. Language, the problematic and the tool of both the Girondin and Jacobin revolutions, can be found gestating in works by the French figures that popularized ancient history. Fénelon, Rollin, Mably, Rousseau, and Barthélemy all provided mute but stern mirrors of the most widespread political regime in Europe, notably in its powerful French variant. For these philosophe writers, Greco-­ Roman antiquity served as a critical foil for the French monarchy in the same way that the Persians did for Louis XV’s France, according to Montesquieu, and as Louis XIV’s Grand Siècle did for the reign of Louis the Well-­Beloved, according to Voltaire. That philosophical irony dates back to the Italian roots of the Renaissance, whose development was inseparable from the virulent satirization of scholastic disciplines and the feudal regime. The Republic of Letters was born in the context of a long “quarrel of language,” during which scholastic and medieval Latin—the language of learning, of teaching in Parisian universities, of theologians, and one shared by European universities—found itself deconstructed and devalued by philologists called “humanists.” They ensured the “rebirth” of classical Latin, the language of papal bulls and of Cicero, and emboldened champions of vernacular languages to correct and modify their dialects using the model of Ciceronian or Senecan Latin. Dante, Petrarch, and Bembo wrote between the three dueling linguistic centers: dated university Latin, the Ciceronian and Virgilian Neo-­Latin conserved by the papal Curia, and that same Neo-­ Latin adapted by the Tuscan vernacular poet Petrarch. The Tuscan vernacular reformed by Dante using the Ciceronian model, refined by Petrarch, and ennobled by Pietro Bembo, using the grammatical and rhetorical model of Augustan Latin, offered Europe an exemplary filiation that reconciled the unitary but varied foundations of Rome’s clerical court with the same varied and federating foundations that enabled the coexistence of a vibrant multitude of Catholic principalities and kingdoms within the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. Aesthetics, our current philosophy of visual arts, originates from a Latin thesis bearing that title and published in 1750 by the professor Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Its great success was due to the interest taken in the work, in German this time, by the antiquarian Johan Joachim Winckelmann (author of History of the Art of Antiquity, 1764) and the professor Immanuel Kant, author

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of “Critique of Judgment” (1790). Kant ultimately extricated aesthetic judgment from the domain of pure or practical reason. For him, it was not the object (be it natural or artistic) that imposed its selection and agreeable or disagreeable impressions on the subject, but the subject and his impressions that decided what was beautiful or not. Like a new Copernicus, the philosopher from Königsberg attributed to the receiver—to his aesthetic subjectivity, imagination, and feelings of pleasure and pain—the ability to make both fluctuating and universal judgments without reliance on reason, logic, or any rational understanding or awareness of the object or its representation. To the ancient and classical objectivity of beauty and sublimity that independently imposed themselves on their spectators and receivers, Kant introduced romantic and centrifugal subjectivism and even, in the long term, expressionism, figurative or otherwise, liberated from classical reason and substituting instead the poignant and relativistic game in which the modern individual engaged, in a quest for ugliness rather than beauty. By the end of the eighteenth century, even German universities had to sacrifice Latin and rely on the vernacular in their curricula. German courts, following the treaties of Westphalia, had converted to diplomacy and gallantry en français, though not without university resistance to that linguistic colonization. The centralization of the French royal state enabled its deliberate and long-­ lasting expansion, whose impressive continuity was inaugurated by Francis I, continued by Richelieu, and perfected by Colbert. The royal administration’s ambitions extended to establishing the French spoken by men of letters and savants as the universal language of cultivated Europe, destined to replace the Latin of Cicero, popes, and the Roman Curia. Under the guidance of its great ministers, Paris was primed to become a major translation hub, multiplying, throughout all of Europe’s capital cities, publications of political and literary “news” produced by a French press that would barely survive Napoleon’s Continental System. Here, we can observe a vast operation of “actualization” of the art of the vanquished being applied to the language of the vanquishers, still in its “potentiality.” We have already seen how, in the first century BC, thanks to Cicero, the Athenian oratory tradition, embodied by Isocrates and by Lysias and Demosthenes, absorbed Rome’s coarse language. Antiquity had experimented with that translation of the ars rhetorica of the prescriptive Greek discipline from one language to others with the “rhetoricization” of a relatively limited and impoverished Latin, as described and applied by Cicero. The “modernity” of the Italian Renaissance would repeat the great linguistic and literary mutation that had accompanied the transition from Latin republic to Roman Empire.

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The latter’s vast limits (its limes) included Athens, Pergamon, and Alexandria, late capitals of Hellenism, which were for ancient imperial Rome the equivalent of Florence, Venice, Naples, and papal Rome for the Gothic capitals, and Paris, London, and Amsterdam for the modern age. The Eternal Return! The imitation-­emulation of “actualized” beings had thus led, on two occasions, to the emergence of “actualized” capitals of modernity from capitals in “potentiality.” Invented in Magna Graecia in the fifth century BC, Gorgias and Protagoras transferable from one language to another, this discipline of language and discourse—which we should call by its name: rhetoric—which was legitimized in Athens despite Socrates and Plato’s quarrel with the Sophists, was rediscovered in the fourteenth century in imperial and papal courts and in free Italian republics. It entered into a long conflict with medieval and university Latin, which held itself to be the legitimate scientific language of scholars, regardless of place or time, though it was qualified as barbaric by the “humanists” who favored Ciceronian Latin due to its grammar, word choice, and eloquence capable of pleasing, moving, and persuading both churchgoing believers and citizens in state institutions. Rhetoric provided the free citizens of small republican city-­states their universal frameworks of commercial, political, and legal communication. This ars rhetorica was more diplomatic than theoretical, the art of arts, rather than a science, or, even less so, metaphysics. This “art of arts” took hold in Athens and then Rome, in Greek and Latin (the Greek of Byzantium to the Latin of pagan, then Christian, Rome). Its centuries-­long resilience through antiquity, from Gorgias to Quintilian, and Hermogenes to Augustine and his Confessions and De Doctrina Christiana, was followed, after a long eclipse—which was incidentally less intense than the humanists claimed—by a fervent renaissance in Italy. It peaked in fifteenth-­century republican Florence, before being adopted by the papal Curia returned to Rome from Avignon, where the tone was set by Petrarch’s Florentine disciples, namely the Neostoic Poggio Bracciolini and the neo-­Epicurean Lorenzo Valla, and also by the princely Aragonese Naples, whose royal court had the humanist Giovanni Pontano and his “Pontanian” Academy as its professors. Pontano is the author of the beautiful nostalgic dialogue De Sermone, written during the period in which Naples, the capital of Alfonso of Aragon (also called the “Magnanimous”), was invaded by feudal troops sent by France’s Charles VIII (1494). Pontano contrasts the brutal violence of the pillaging, ravaging French barbarians with the model of good governance and good manners set by princes educated by Italian rhetoricians attentive to the great poets of an-

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tiquity and appreciative of contemporary artists who mirrored classical styles and techniques. Charles VIII’s medieval army knew nothing of this humanist interior, which Francis I, unable to reign in Milan, would decide to transport to Fontainebleau and the Louvre in 1530. The circulation and teaching of rhetoric in Italy’s city-­states, and later in its noble courts, occurred in parallel with both the revival of civilized society and its Greco-­Roman models and the material growth of commerce, artisans, and the wealth of cities. These reawakenings all necessitated dialogue, persuasion, conviction, conversion, correspondence, and travel—in short, a virtuosity of discourse capable of influencing an audience through gentle, nonviolent means, through persuasion and conviction and the sole adept power of the Greek peîthô, rediscovered “persuasive speech.” In the fifth century BC Athens, the rhetorical system, initially inseparable from the republican system, had invented an ideal archetype of the orator: a free citizen of the republican polis, the kalos kagathos, the mousikos anêr (the good and beautiful man, the musician), trained to cultivate his physical grace and beauty in the palaestra, and his victorious oral eloquence in schools under the guidance of Sophists, meaning professors of rhetoric. That dethroned and forgotten ancestor would reappear suddenly in Cicero’s Rome, and in that statesman’s long-­forgotten manuscripts, as well as those left by the great educator Quintilian. He was reincarnated in the sixteenth century in the Christian and modern guise of Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1528), as depicted in Raphael’s sublime portrait of the author (1514–1515). The model is warmly dressed in the modern courtly style and not naked in the classical one; his beauty is entirely interior. The modern courtesan was educated in private conversation rather than the public eloquence of the rostra and forum. This new “divine” or “quasi-­divine”—read humanus—model of the ideal citizen of fifth-­century Athens found itself celebrated and identified for the third time (after Periclean Athens and Augustan Rome came sixteenth-­century papal Rome), in this new guise, by poets, sculptors, and painters. But like its two Greek and Roman predecessors and models, Catholic Rome’s ideal of humanity, shared by Raphael and Castiglione, an Athenian ideal lost and then twice rediscovered (the Eternal Return!), did not escape the temptations of wealth and power to which had ceded, in reality, the young princes of Athens (Alcibiades) and Rome (Caesar, Anthony, and Pompey in the first century, and in the sixteenth century, Cesare Borgia, [the inspiration for] Machiavelli’s The Prince, a harshly critical portrait of the Raphael-­esque man of court, published posthumously in 1532). On each occasion, new sophists had triumphed over new Socrates in the

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minds of the young men called upon to govern their city-­state. Successive ideals of humanity, and their faithful or deviant incarnations, were nonetheless not all reproductions of classical models: in The Prince, Machiavelli regretfully notes that Christianity has rendered the virile virtue of the great statesmen and warriors of pagan antiquity impossible. Erasmus, in Institutio principis christiani (1516), insists on the fortunate, but too often betrayed, difference introduced by Christian humility between severe pagan magnanimity and gentle Christian holiness, the wisdom of philosophers and the charity of the apostles. The “Sublime” According to Longinus: The Long-­Hidden Force of the European Literary Tradition In Ptolemy’s Alexandria, several centuries after Pericles and Demosthenes, an unknown rhetorician (“Longinus,” or Anonymous) voiced a brilliant lament for those born in a late, sterile era and recommended the ways in which they could escape decadence. The impact of his sublime treatise, entitled On the Sublime, would reverberate throughout the duration of the Roman Empire, influencing Tacitus and his Dialogue on Oratory, and Quintilian and his Institutio Oratio, before once again gaining prominence, secretly, in fifteenth-­ century Italy. It is impossible to trace the original Alexandrine manuscript’s (or its copy’s) path on the eve of its transfer to Europe, before the fall of Byzantium. Transported from Byzantium to Venice before 1453, it was saved just in time from the pillage of libraries in the Turk-­invaded Greek capital, just as it had escaped the Mamluks’ Alexandria and the fate of that city’s famous Ptolemaic library by its transfer in due course to Byzantium. Once in Western Europe, reading the manuscript would long remain a privilege enjoyed by a small circle of humanists in Venice, Florence, Rome, and possibly Francis I’s Paris. It was during the twilight of the Italian Renaissance that On the Sublime was finally published in its original form and in Greek characters (Robortello, Basel, 1554; Paulus Manutius, Venice, 1555), then in a very partial Latin translation (Leo Allatius, Rome, 1635), and finally in French translation (Boileau, 1674) in the waning days of Louis XIV’s reign, when it was used to support the cause of Ancients humiliated by the Moderns. Prior to Boileau’s bold initiative, this strange text had been reserved for an erudite elite within the European Republic of Letters. Beginning in 1572, Montaigne adopted, in vernacular, the essay format, which may well have been inspired by the exquisite freedom and elegance of the Longinian chapters dedicated to decadence and the ways to escape it. In an essay in Book III, chapter 5, “Sur des vers de Virgile” (Upon Some Verses of Virgil), Montaigne borrows Anonymous’s conception of an enthusiastic auditory reception of sublime cita-

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tions, which tear the listener from the corruption of his century and transport him to a divine milieu in which he can converse with “actualized” masters of classical sublime poetry and prose. Other hints of the Longinian literary rapture can be seen, preceding Boileau’s candid French translation of the treatise in 1674, in texts by the novelist Honoré d’Urfé and the playwright Corneille. After 1674, the mysterious masterpiece would be read and heard in Boileau’s beautiful French, annotated by the famous Hellenist Dacier, who was invited to become the permanent secretary of two royal academies (the Académie Française, dedicated to beautiful language, and the Académie des Inscriptions et Médailles, dedicated to study of antiquity). This masterpiece for the happy few would henceforth be heard and read in French by all of premodern Europe’s successive generations. The baton was handed, in German, to the great Saxon antiquarian Winckelmann, whose History of the Art of Antiquity was published in Dresden in 1764 and quickly translated into the French of the Enlightenment. His historical essays on the Ancients’ ideal of Beauty clearly incorporate the poignant and “sublime” commonplace of political liberty as the mother of the arts, as well as two other themes articulated by Longinus in a historiographical structure: the modern servitude and corruption caused by hedonism and avarice, and the recourse of great souls, in a time of degeneration, to direct contact with the great classics of antiquity that pull great souls born too late away from the general and contemporary current of submission and decline. Winckelmann writes: Art, which received its life, as it were, from freedom, must necessarily decline and fall with the loss of freedom in the place where it had particularly flourished. Athens, under the lenient rule of the Macedonian governors [. . .] meanwhile became just as populous as it once was, and from the 360 bronze statues erected to him within the span of a year [. . .] we can conclude that most of Athens’s citizens were artists.1 Here the pathos of nostalgia accompanies an awareness of art’s inexorable decline, even if individual heroes can escape that deadly trend by emulating “beacons” from the past that Baudelaire would invoke in turn in a famous “fleur de mal.” Foreshadowing the declaration that opens Joyce’s Ulysses (“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”), Winckelmann declaims in the peroration to his eloquent historical essays: I have in this history of art already gone beyond its set bounds, and although contemplating the collapse of art has driven me nearly to

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despair, still, like someone who, in writing the history of his native land, must touch upon the destruction that he himself has witnessed, I could not keep myself from gazing after the fate of works of art as far as my eye could see. Just as a beloved stands on the seashore and follows with tearful eyes her departing sweetheart, with no hope of seeing him again, [the myth that inspired the painting by the bride of Corinth] and believes she can glimpse even in the distant sail the image of her lover [. . .].2 This typically romantic narrative canvas would reemerge in Chateaubriand’s Aventures du dernier des Abencérages (The Last of the Abencerrages, 1826), and in Giuseppe Giocosa’s libretto to Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly (1904). At the same time that On the Sublime was written and circulated in Alexandria, Jesus Christ in Palestine was sharing or would soon share his message—“the way, the truth, and the life”—through speech and martyrdom, which would be spread by his apostles and the church fathers and borrow philosophical arguments in favor of the Christian faith from Socrates’s pagan disciples, Platonists, Neoplatonists, and Stoics, to the detriment of the humanism of Greek and Roman rhetoricians. In their dialogues against sophism, Socrates (and his secretary, Plato) repeatedly vilified the corrupted eloquence sold to Athens’s golden youths by professors of oratory art who called themselves sophists (from sophos, “wise”) while in reality revealing themselves to be dealers of a false logos that Socratic criticism intended to unmask. Christianity spread throughout the Roman Mediterranean during an era of decadence that was long predicted and combated by schools of Greek philosophy. Nothing prevents us from thinking that Anonymous may have been a contemporary of that burgeoning Christianity as it spread beyond Palestine, persuaded by Paul of Tarsus that his vocation was to give new life to both Judaism and Romanized Hellenism. Longinus, a perceptive admirer of the great Athenian and Roman classics, also looked to Moses, the “great legislator of the Jews,” who was also capable of sublimity when it came to having the biblical God speak as was fitting. Four centuries after Pericles, that glorious reference attests to the degree of Hellenization achieved by Alexandrine Judaism at the time of Philo, who was said to be “of Alexandria.” The unknown author of the treatise On the Sublime was an unrivaled literary critic, capable of sharing with his readers the intelligence of sublime works in a text that itself can be qualified as sublime. This genius was undoubtedly a Hellenized Jew as, among the quotations from earlier eras used to illustrate his conception of the “sublime,” he brilliantly highlights (a unique case in all of Greco-­Roman literature) the Greek translation (reportedly from the Septuagint) of the first verse of the Hebrew Genesis:

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Fiat lux et facta est lux. This marks the first appearance of the long list of the Old Testament’s grandiose theophanies, from the Creation of the world to the Fall of the Temple. The miracles of the Christian New Testament are not any less numerous than those of the Jewish Bible. But Christ, and his apostles and evangelists, achieved their miracles on a scale that was more human, modest, and ordinary, less spectacular, and almost furtive, than the blinding biblical acts multiplying God’s sublime interventions on the cosmic scale. The evangelical miracles, the wedding at Cana, the resurrection of Lazarus, and the rest dispensed with the supernatural cosmos evoked by the grandiose utterances by the God of Israel, a hidden God, whose presence and voice remained invisible behind a barrier of fire or clouds that prevented all direct and fatal exposure of the human to the divine. The cosmic backdrop of the Passion and the Resurrection, though the most biblical of the evangelical theophanies, did not go so far as to hide the visibility of the awe-­inspiring but not terrifying Jesus, in contrast to the burning bush of Sinai. The treatise On the Sublime was conceived of and written by its author to convince his Greek or Hellenized readers, who shared his sophistication, not to make the mistake, wrongly taught them by Caecilius in a short, at that time recently published, treatise, of believing that one of the three styles of formal rhetoric, the grand style, was another name for the sublime, or sublimity. From the start, Anonymous asserts what distinguishes the formal oratory grand style, which persuades its listeners, but not to the point of taking away their freedom to judge it, from authentic sublimity, which, in contrast, eclipses that which is merely reasonable or agreeable. To believe or not is usually in our own power; but the Sublime, acting with an imperious and irresistible force, sways every reader whether he will or no.3 Moses, “the Legislator of the Jews, no ordinary man” (writes Anonymous), recounted the original performative act (when saying equals doing) through which divine speech and action blended in the same moment of creation. That biblical rhetorical device appears as frequently in evangelical speech and its descriptions of miracles as it does in the Hebrew Bible. Except that in Jewish Holy Writ, the hierophany of the speech-­act is grandiose (the Flood, the crossing of the Red Sea, and so on) and more extraordinary and more dizzying than the Christian miracles performed by the Son of God or associated with him: the Annunciation, “Rise and walk,” and “This is my body”—all “performative” acts, which successfully superimpose “saying” and “doing” without shrouding these miracles in sacred terror. And isn’t the “sublime poet,” when he transcends the rules of his art and makes his poem heard, a mirror of biblical or evangelical divinity when it emerges from silence and acts by speaking?

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The sublime orator’s paradoxical desire to associate the rarest gifts of nature with the greatest subtleties of the art of discourse led Anonymous to align an appetizing exordium (the quarrel with the rhetorician Caecilius on the definition of the sublime) with a peroration that offers the reader the perspectives of a holy history of literature, alternating fertile earlier periods with sterile, conclusive, and recapitulative later periods. The rare great souls to emerge in those dark times freely subjected themselves to higher learning, whose spiritual literary exercises protected them from the contagion of mediocrity and vulgarity. These elevated souls alone knew how to preserve links, transmission, tradition, which the torrent of their contemporary, and once again fanatical, era sought to break and scatter. Rediscovered profound heuristic “commonplaces,” interpreted by newcomers, revealed their still-­hidden resources. [For the anonymous Alexandrine], it was not a question of applying a formal and dogmatic method intended to instruct, but of adopting the adult method of investigation and discovery. Two short chapters suffice to negatively contrast the conventional and cold perfection of beauty and grandeur with the imperfection of a sublimity that elicits enthusiastic attention and makes the pedant forget his target and the purist any errors. Longinus writes: when a passage is pregnant in suggestion, when it is hard, nay impossible, to distract the attention from it, and when it takes a strong and lasting hold on the memory, then we may be sure that we have lighted on the true Sublime.4 Another heuristic and fertile “commonplace,” which rejects the didactic cliché of the good pupil, is the positive view of the mind’s natural elevation as manifested beginning in childhood, a gift from heaven that should be fostered and increased continually, to the point of reveling, even through silence or improvised remarks, in grand and sound thoughts. Among the many bold essays written for those great souls reverberating in the sublimity of their discourse, the most extensive are dedicated to the commonplace of imitation, which is the most equivocal and most prone to error. Notably because it encompasses both servile, formal, and regurgitative copying and inventive and bold emulation that rivals the best examples of antiquity. Longinus warns his readers to guard against passive copy-­imitation of the classics and to avoid confusing that act with active emulation before the most difficult of judges—past masters. Behind these penetrating remarks is the broader question guiding the anonymous Alexandrian literary critic, and subtly underlying his search for a clear definition and explanation of sublimity: the “why” of our powerlessness before the sublime, evident among all modern orators and writers, in other words

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Anonymous’s contemporaries. One explanation offered in the treatise is historical and political, similar to the explanation, in the biographical vein, of the difference between The Iliad, a sublime, entirely actualized poem by the young inventor Homer in the prime fertility of his visionary genius, and The Odyssey, a later work filled with imaginative narrations by an older, yet still brilliant, poet facing death and tempted by diversion and amusement. This compelling analysis prefigures the famous article by the philosopher and musical critic Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” by two thousand years.5 However, the anonymous Alexandrian does not limit himself to the personal dimension of an artistic genius confronted with the physical and mental decline of aging. He emphasizes that the flowering of unparalleled oratory and poetic genius owes much to the freedom of Greek democracies, lingering in particular on the tempestuous sublimity of the political speeches given by Demosthenes, pleading to his compatriots in vain for a mass uprising of the city to defend it against the menacing maneuvers of Philip of Macedonia, who was attempting to seize and enslave their free homeland. The monarchic regimes of Alexander’s lieutenants and the global expansion of the Roman Empire triumphed over the free democratic city-­states of classical Greece. The freedom of the agora was replaced by the lawful servitude of court, in which reigned an emphasis on the flattering grand style that prevented all possibility of true sublimity. Was it possible to leave this restricted and demeaning life? To escape such a confinement of the mind? How? Longinus answers: by going back to the greatest eras, and looking to the testimonials of sublimity, freed from the bonds of time, that they left us; and by relying on those masterpieces that are in part divine, and better understood, to escape the modern sterility of monarchies that are lazier, more sensual, and more extravagant than republics. Boileau did not hesitate to faithfully translate the arrogant peroration of the Alexandrian treatise, a sublime touch that, in the seventeenth century, had lost none of its dangerously revolutionary reach. Anonymous writes: “Can it be [. . .] that we are to accept the trite explanation that democracy is the kind nursing-­mother of genius, and that literary power may be said to share its rise and fall with democracy and democracy alone?” For freedom, it is said, has power to feed the imaginations of the lofty-­minded and inspire hope, and where it prevails there spreads abroad the eagerness of mutual rivalry and the emulous pursuit of the foremost place. Moreover, owing to the prizes which are open to all under popular government, the mental excellences of the orator are continually exercised and sharpened, and as it were rubbed bright, and shine forth (as it is natural they should) with all the freedom which inspires the doings of the state.

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Nor did Boileau hesitate to translate the following paragraph: “We seem in our boyhood to learn the lessons of a righteous servitude, being all but enswathed in its customs and observances, when our thoughts are yet young and tender, and never tasting the fairest and most productive source of eloquence (by which,” he added, “I mean freedom), so that we emerge in no other guise than that of sublime flatterers.” This is the reason, he maintained, why no slave ever becomes an orator, although all other faculties may belong to menials. In the slave there immediately burst out signs of fettered liberty of speech, of the dungeon as it were, of a man habituated to buffetings. “For the day of slavery,” as Homer has it, “takes away half our manhood.”6 To escape imprisonment and protect, as much as is possible, the virtue threatened by the monarchical decadence of later eras, the principal recourse is combat: And in truth that struggle for the crown of glory is noble and best deserves the victory in which even to be worsted by one’s predecessors brings no discredit.7 Longinus continues: Accordingly it is well that we ourselves also, when elaborating anything which requires lofty expression and elevated conception, should shape some idea in our minds as to how perchance Homer would have said this very thing, or how it would have been raised to the sublime by Plato or Demosthenes or by the historian Thucydides. For those personages, presenting themselves to us and inflaming our ardour and as it were illumining our path, will carry our minds in a mysterious way to the high standards of sublimity which are imaged within us. Still more effectual will it be to suggest this question to our thoughts, “What sort of hearing would Homer, had he been present, or Demosthenes have given to this or that when said by me, or how would they have been affected by the other?” For the ordeal is indeed a severe one, if we presuppose such a tribunal and theatre for our own utterances, and imagine that we are undergoing a scrutiny of our writings before these great heroes, acting as judges and witnesses. A greater incentive still will be supplied if you add the question, “In what spirit will each succeeding age listen to me who have written thus?” But if one shrinks from the very thought of uttering aught that may transcend the term of his own life and time, the conceptions of his mind must necessarily be incomplete, blind, and as it were untimely

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born, since they are by no means brought to the perfection needed to ensure a futurity of fame.8 By rising, as Anonymous did, to the level of the universally admired masterpieces produced during great eras of freedom, by imitating them (not in the sense of passively “copying” them, but rather by bravely “rivaling” grand models), the treatise may appear inspired by Platonic idealism. In fact, Aristotle was not far off when he stated that a being in potentiality cannot pass to actuality without the exemplary influence of an already actualized being. Of course, genius and sublimity in their original state had disappeared along with republican political freedom. But great souls, born too late, still had the possibility of isolating themselves from their own diminished era (deprived of “liberty and that freedom from despotic mastery,”9 writes Longinus) and of living, writing, and working in symbiosis with the unanimously recognized masterpieces of golden eras. “The artifices of rhetoric (in the reprehensible sophistic sense) fade from view,” writes Anonymous, “when bathed in the pervading splendour of sublimity.”10 He adds, “Sublimity is the echo of a great soul.”11 The same philosophy of history resurfaced a little later in Latin in A Dialogue on Oratory, today attributed to Tacitus. To escape the literary and moral corruption of the imperial court, advises the author, one has to retreat into nature and abandon oneself, for lack of opportunities for great Demosthenian and Ciceronian eloquence, to the tradition of grand poetry introduced by Virgil. In Institutio Oratoria, the great educational treatise written under Domitian (AD 93–95) by Quintilian (long believed to have penned A Dialogue on Oratory), minds are trained to escape the corruption of their late eras through the study and imitation of Greek and Latin classics in childhood and adolescence. The artful productions of the imperial court were to Roman virtue what Homer’s old age was to the peak of his genius. After a very long silence, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the antiquarian and Grecianizing milieu of the Roman Academy resolved to emerge from the medieval “shadows” and use rediscovered antiquity to bring an urban civilization “back to life,” along with a climate of spiritual freedom favorable to genius and sublimity. For that matter, it is difficult not to assume, when viewing Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508–1512) and notably his sublime frescoes The Creation of the World and The Incarnation of Adam, that the painter or one of his friends had read On the Sublime, which praised the performative Genesis verse Fiat lux as “sublime.” This then is the birthplace of antiquarianism, a science that appears so

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strange to us today, but whose vast research and collection network spread across Europe for three centuries. The objective of this Republic of Letters, at least among its greatest citizens—Pirro Ligorio, Fulvio Testi, Nicolas Peiresc, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Scipione Maffei, Anne de Caylus, Quatremère de Quincy, all unknown today—is the same that Longinus, in his treatise, established for those great minds isolated and born too late in a withering era: the rediscovery, reconstitution, and imitation of works, even broken or partial, the most glorious and the most modest alike, that emerged from the genius of Greco-­Roman antiquity. A community of great minds discreetly proclaimed itself to be the Republic of Letters within the Europe of the ancien régime monarchies. This vast network of erudite philologists, archaeologists, and coin and medal collectors functioned as a warm incubator that, while reviving the ancient world, and imitating it in the sense used by Longinus (in other words, by reinventing it), maintained the temperature of research and the margin of philosophical freedom desirable for the birth of the modern world. The secret of the Republic of Letters can be found in Longinus’s anonymous treatise, which teaches its readers not to become prisoners of either their late and sterile times or of fertile antiquity, despite the greatness of its original inventions and productions that need to be reinvented. Known almost clandestinely by fifteenth-­century savants, the text On the Sublime (whose original Greek meant it was limited to an antiquarian elite) was published at close intervals in 1554 and 1555, still in Greek, which did little to broaden its audience. Its readership would grow, however, once complete and partial Latin translations of the treatise emerged at the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, notably in Rome, thanks to a translation by the great philologist of Greek origin, Leo Allatius, entitled De Erroribus magnorum virorum in dicendo (Faults of Great Men in Their Writings, 1635). There is no doubt that in the library of Cassiano dal Pozza, a good friend of Allatius, Nicolas Poussin read and contemplated this “critique of beauty” applied by Longinus to the masterpieces whose renown had survived intact from eras of genius to eras of decadence. On the Sublime was written for great thinkers born at the wrong time, whose salvation came from emulating masterpieces of grand and fertile eras. This pushback against decadence can be seen in the antiquity-­inspired megalographic images Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as well as in the creation of Catholic masterpieces by Rubens, an antiquarian savant and Peiresc’s friend and correspondent, and finally in the historical tableaus and heroic landscapes painted in adulthood and old age by Poussin, a friend and correspondent of several great antiquaries,

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including Cassiano, Cardinal Massii, Fréart de Chambray, and Gian Pietro Bellori. We can see the outlines of a Republic of Arts forming around these great masters and vanquishers of their decadent times, which, while seeking to reinvent the splendor of disappeared or ruined classical arts, also invented the modern arts, from David to Delacroix.

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NOTES

Preface 1. Paul Dibon and Françoise Waquet, Johannes Fredericus Gronovius, pèlerin de la République des Lettres. Recherches sur le voyage savant au XVII e siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1984). 2. Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Peter N. Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Daniel Roche, Les Républicains des lettres: Gens de culture et lumières au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1988); Laurence W. B. Brockliss, Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-­Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Chapter 1. The Rediscovered Republic of Letters This is a modified version of a lecture given on May 17, 1996, at the Instituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici of Naples, with the support of the Lessico Intellettuale Europeo, in the context of an international conference held in memory of Paul Dibon in Naples on May 17–18, 1996. It appeared under the title “La République des Lettres redécouverte, II,” in Marta Fattori (ed.), Il Vocabolario della “République des Lettres.” Terminologia filosofica e storia della filosofia: Problemi di metodo (Florence: Olschki, 1997). 1. For Paul Dibon’s publications, see “Bibliographie des écrits de Paul Dibon,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 2 (1995): 111–120. Pay particular attention to Paul Dibon’s Regards sur la Hollande du Siècle d’or (Naples: Vivarium, 1990), a compilation of many of his various works. 2. Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715, vol. 3 (Paris: Boivin, 1935). Jean Mesnard places this book in perspective in “La crise de la conscience Européenne: un demi-­siècle après Paul Hazard,” in Louise Godard de Donville and Roger Duchêne (eds.), De la mort de Colbert à la révocation de l’édit de Nantes: Un monde nouveau?, notes from the 14th CMR 17 conference, January 1984 (Marseille: Centre méridional de rencontres sur le XVIIe siècle, 1985), 185–198. 3. René Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit en France dans la première moitié du XVII e siècle [1943, vol. 2], expanded ed. (Paris: Boivin, 1983); see also issue 127 of the journal XVIIe siècle (April–­June 1980), dedicated to “Aspects et contours du libertinage,” with articles by Georges Couton, René Pintard, Pierre Rétat, Bernard Tocanne, and Roger Zuber.

335

336 Notes to Pages 14–19

4. See chapters 4, 5, and 6 on epistolary networks during the seventeenth century; see also Giuliano Ferretti’s thesis “Fortin de La Hoguette ou le vertige de la politique. Lettres aux frères dupuy et à leur entourage (1623–1662)” (Lausanne, 1996). 5. Paul Dibon, “Communication in the Respublica litteraria of the 17th Century,” Respublica litterarum. Studies in the Classical Tradition 1 (1978): 43–55; also found in Dibon’s Regards sur la Hollande du Siècle d’or, 153–190. 6. Annie Barnes, Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) et la République des Lettres (Geneva: Droz, 1938). 7. See Fritz Schalk’s pioneering study “Erasmus und die Respublica litteraria,” in Actes du Congrès Érasme, Rotterdam, 27–29 octobre 1969 (Amsterdam: North-­ Holland, 1971), 14–28. 8. This endeavor was magnificently recounted at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first third of the twentieth century by Remigio Sabbadini (1850–1934), throughout his many texts on the history of philology. 9. Francisci Barbari et aliorum ad ipsum epistolae ab anno Chr. MCCCCXXV ad annum MCCCCLIII (Brixiae [Brescia], Italy: Rizzardi, 1743), 1–8. (A letter sent by Barbaro in Venice to Poggio Bracciolini in Constance dated July 6, 1417.) 10. Ibid., 5. 11. Angeli Decembrii mediolanensis ad summum Pontificem Pium II oratorem clarum de politia litteraria primi libri prologus, Augustæ Vindelicorum [Augsburg], January 12, 1540, folio A 1. 12. See a compilation of relevant texts in Giovanni Orlandi, Aldo Manuzio editore Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, vol. 2, intro. C. Dionisotti, Edizioni Il Polifilo, “Documenti sulle arti del Libro XI,” (Milan, 1975), as well as Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). 13. Aldus Manutius, Scriptores astronomici veteres [Astronomica], dedication (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499), 23: Ut et ex eadem Britannia, unde olim barbariae et indoctae litterae ad nos profectae italiam occuparunt et adhuc arces tenent, latine et docte loquentes bonas artes accipiamus, ac Britannis adjutoribus, fugata barbarie, arces nostras recipiamus, et eadem hasta sanetur, a qua illatum est, vulnus (So that in this Great-­Britain, from whence barbarism and ignorance came to invade Italy, where they still reign, we the others, who speak scholarly Latin, will borrow true culture and, chasing away barbarism with the help of these same Bretons, take back our citadels, healing the wound with the lance that caused it). [Reference: mythologists and poets claim that Telephus, after being hurt by Achilles, can only heal his wound with a wrapping made of rust from the spear that injured him.] 14. Quoted in Orlandi, Aldo Manuzio editore, 1, 63. 15. Ibid., 69. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 70. 18. Ibid., 71: Nec minor gloria servata tibi, beatissime pater, instaurandis bonis

Notes to Pages 20–21 337

literis, suppeditando optime quosque libros studiosis, et qui nunc sunt, et qui post aliis erunt in annis, propagandis bonis artibus et disciplinis. (An equal glory is reserved for you, oh, Holy Father, for having restored the belles-­lettres, obtained all the best books for the savants of today and those who will be born after, for the defense of the sciences and the arts.) 19. Verum posteaquam Leonis Pontificis modis omnibus maximi laetissimis auspiciis pax tandem est orbi reddita [. . .] jam non solum meae litterae Romam ire gestiunt, verum ipse quoque mira quadam ardeo cupiditate revisendi veteres illos meos Maecenates. (But since peace was brought back to the world under the auspices of Leo, the greatest of popes in every respect [. . .], my letters are not alone in burning to visit Rome: I myself am gripped with a marvelous desire to see my Patrons again.) Note that at the end of this letter Erasmus bravely intercedes on behalf of Johann Reuchlin, a scholar of Greek and Hebrew (Erasmus, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen, 12 vols., vol. 2: 1514–1517 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910], 68–73 [May 15, 1515, letter to cardinal Raphael Riario]). 20. Ibid., 466. February 15, 1517 letter to Guillaume Budé. Erasmus thinks that Budé wants to prove his talent “before the assembly of men of learning.” 21. Ibid., 148. “You run the risk of being condemned [. . .] on the judgment of the council of savants” (letter dated April 12, 1518). 22. Ibid., 239. Budé told Erasmus that the honors recently awarded him went in fact to “the family and the nation of humanists”—nationi in universum litterarum bonarum studia colentium (letter from early 1523). 23. In a superscription in a letter to Erasmus, Hubert Balland designates his addressee as summus theologicus et reipublicae litterariae antistes (Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, vol. 7, 1527–1528 [1928], 546 [letter dated December 30, 1528]). 24. For more on this “major diplomatic incident in the Republic of Letters,” see Marie-­Madeleine de La Garanderie, “Un érasmien français: Germain de brie,” in Colloquia Erasmiana Turonensia, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Paris: Vrin, 1972), 371. 25. For more on this subject, see Yvonne Charlier, Érasme et l’amitié, d’après sa correspondance (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1977). 26. Antipolemus: Or, the Plea of Reason, Religion, and Humanity, against War. A fragment, translated from Erasmus (London: C. Dilly, 1794). 27. See The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 842 to 992, 1518–1519, trans. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, annot. Peter G. Bietenholz. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 232 (letter dated February 1, 1519). 28. Countless formulas of this type can be found in Erasmus’s correspondence, whether his correspondents designate him in this way or he designates his friends as such. For example, Erasmus calls Guillaume Budé “the marvel of France and the pontiff of letters” at the close of a letter dated July 14, 2015. (La Correspondance d’Érasme et de Guillaume Budé, ed. M.-­M. de La Garanderie [Paris: Vrin, 1967], 71.) 29. Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins, bk. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21: Eius autem vinculum est ratio et oratio, quae do-

338 Notes to Pages 21–23

cendo, discendo, communicando, disceptando, judicando conciliat inter se homines conjungitque naturali quadam societate. Neque ulla re longius absumus a natura ferarum. . . . (For its bonding consists of reason and speech, which reconcile men to one another, through teaching, learning, communicating, debating and making judgements, and unite them in a kind of natural fellowship. It is this that most distances us from the nature of other animals.) 30. Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, vol. 6 (1926), 37. 31. Juan Luis Vivès, De tradendis disciplinis seu de institutione christiana, referred to in Opera omnia, ed. Mayans y Siscár G., vol. 8 (Valencia: Monfort, 1782–1788), bk. 6, 1785; repr. (London: Gregg Press, 1964), 279: “The true academy, in other words the meeting and plebiscite of men both learned and good.” 32. Juan Luis Vivès, In Pseudodialecticos, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), 88. 33. See Percy Gothein, Francesco Barbaro. Früh-­humanismus und Staatskunst in venedig (Berlin: Die Runde, 1932). 34. See André Stegmann, “L’europe intellectuelle de J. A. de Thou,” in La Conscience européenne au XV e et au XVIe siècle, proceedings from the international conference organized at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles, Sept. 30–­Oct. 3, 1980 (Paris: ENSJF, 1982), 395–422. 35. Trajano Boccalini, De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso (Milan: Giovanni Battista Bidelli, 1614–1615). 36. Trajano Boccalini, Pietra del paragone politico, tratta dal monte Parnaso, dove si toccano i governi delle maggiori monarchie del universe (Cosmopoli [Venice]: Giorgio Teler, 1615.) 37. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 1st ed., vol. 2, entry “Catius,” remark D, “the freedom that reigns in the republic of letters” (Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1697). 38. Vigneul-­Marville (the literary pseudonym of Noël de Bonaventure d’Argonne), Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature, vol. 3 (Paris: Besoigne; Rouen: Maurry, 1699– 1701). 39. Adrien Baillet, Jugements des savants sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs, vol. 3 (Paris: Dezallier, 1685–1686). 40. Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor litterarius, philosophicus et practicus, vol. 3 (Lübeck, Germany, 1732). This work was written long before its publication date. The first edition dates to 1707. 41. For a summary of these texts, see P. Dibon, “Communication in the Respublica litteraria of the 17th Century.” 42. Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire. A Contemporary Version. A Critique and Biography by John Morley, notes by Tobias Smollett, trans. William F. Fleming, 21 vols., vol. 12 (New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901). 43. For use of the expression “Republic of Letters” by intellectuals of the French Revolution, see Jean-­Claude Bonnet (ed.), La Carmagnole des Muses. L’homme de

Notes to Pages 24–28 339

lettres et l’artiste dans la Révolution (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988), in particular Marcel Dorigny, “Le Cercle social ou les écrivains au cirque,” 49–66. 44. Christian Löber, Dissertatio politica de forma regiminis reipublicae litterariae (Jena, Germany: Literis Wertherianis, 1696); Johann Georg Prit (Pritius), Dissertatio academica de republica litteraria (Leipzig: Gözianis, 1698). 45. Francis Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, bk. 2, chap. 3 (1623). 46. Prit, Dissertatio academica, chap. 7, “Quid sit respublica litteraria?,” and chap. 12, “Caput non agnoscit.” 47. Ibid., chap. 15, 20–21. Prit is referring to Grotius, De jure belli ac pacis, bk. 2, chap. 5, § 18 (1680). 48. See ibid., chap. 16, “Non tamen illimitata” (But not for all that unlimited), 24, where Prit reproaches, Tractatus: quo ostendere conatur, in libera republica unicuique et sentire, quae, velit, et quae sentiat dicere licere, hanc libertatem aequo latius extenderit, viderint, quibus spinosiana mens crassis impietatibus immersa, paulo magis est perspecta. (Did [this treaty] wherein they attempt to show that each is permitted, in a free republic, to think what he wants and say what he thinks, push this freedom more than was right? Thus would say those who better know the Spinozian soul contaminated by the worst impieties.) 49. Samuel Sorbière, De l’amitié. À M. de vaubrun, comte de Nogent (Paris: Estienne Loyson, 1660). Chapter 2. Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc This is a modified version of a text read at the Erasmus House, in Brussels, on June 3, 1992, which reappeared under this title in Rivista di Letterature moderne e comparate, vol. 48, no. 1 (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1996). The Erasmus House, built in 1468, expanded in 1515, belonged to the Anderlecht commune. Members of the community and their guests resided there, the most famous of whom was Erasmus, who lived there in 1521. 1. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 3rd ed., vol. 3 (Rotterdam: M. Bohm, 1720), 2216–2217 (corrected by the author). 2. Ibid., 2217 (remark A, Balzac to Luillier; remark D, Balzac to Chapelain). This La Rochefoucauld is not the author of Maximes, but the prelate and statesman (1558– 1645). He was named Great Almoner of France in 1618. A very pious man, he dedicated himself, with Richelieu, to reforming the country’s monastic orders. 3. Pierre Gassendi, Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc, Senatoris Aquisextiensis, vita (Paris: Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1641). The first edition of this work was published in Paris in 1641, by Cramoisy (in quarto, 405 pp.). Two other editions followed in The Hague (A. Vlacq., 1651, 2 pts. in one vol., in duodecimo; ibid., 1655, in quarto). A fourth edition appeared in 1708 in Quedlinburg (3 pts. in 2 vols., in octavo, Strunzii). 4. Charles Perrault, Characters Historical and Panegyrical of the Greatest Men That Have Appear’d in France during the Last Century, trans. J. Ozell (London: Bernard Lintott, 1704), 105–108.

340 Notes to Pages 30–42

5. Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Lettres à Claude Saumaise et à son entourage (1620–1637), ed. A. Bresson (Florence: Olschki, 1992). 6. In a Latin elegy in the memory of Pierre Dupuy, composed by Gabriel Naudé and dedicated to Gilles Ménage, the author cites, on two occasions, Pinelli and Peiresc, with whom he associates and whose merits he compares to those of Pierre Dupuy. See Gabriel Naudé, In clarissimi viri . . . Petri Puteani obitum Gabrielis Naudaei Elegia ad Aegidium Menagium (Paris: Cramoisy, 1651), in quarto, in particular pp. 4–5. See also chaps. 4 and 5 of this book. 7. Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, trans. P. Desmaizeaux, 2nd ed., vol. 5 (London: Knapton, 1734), 804–806. 8. Jean-­Baptiste Requier, Vie de Nicolas Claude Peiresc, conseiller au Parlement de Provence, où l’on trouve quantité de choses curieuses, concernant la physique, l’histoire et l’antiquité (Paris: Musier Père, 1770), in duodecimo. 9. The Pro-­Peyresq Association, presided over by the dearly departed Mrs. Smets-­ Hennekinne, who was behind this translation, deserves deep gratitude for its efforts. 10. Desiderius Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1535–1657, trans. Alexander Dalzell, annot. Charles G. Nauert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 74–75. 11. Aloïs Gerlo and Paul Foriers. eds., La Correspondance d’Érasme. Traduction intégrale, vol. 12 (Brussels: Presses académiques européennes, 1967–1984); vol. 6: 1525– 1527 (1977), 520 (Louvain [Leuven, Belgium], December 10, 1526). 12. Gustave Cohen, “Le plus grand philologue du XVIe siècle: Joseph Juste Scaliger (1593–1609),” in Cohen, Écrivains français en Hollande dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1920; The Hague: Nijhoff, 1921), 187–217. 13. Cohen, “Le plus grand philologue du XVIIe siècle: Claude Saumaise (1632– 1653),” in ibid., 311–333. 14. Peiresc, Lettres à Claude Saumaise et à son entourage, 201. 15. Ibid., 201, n. 5. 16. Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility & Gentility, Being the Life of Peiresk, trans. W. Rand (Haverford, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2003), 28. 17. Paolo Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, patricii genuensis, in qua studiosis bonarum artium proponitur typus viri probi et eruditi (Augustæ Vindelicorum [Augsburg]: Mangus, 1607), in quarto. 18. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 704. 19. Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, 43–44. 20. Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility, 273–274. 21. Ibid., 45. 22. Ibid., 45, and Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, 108: Aetas sane nostra si quem feret eiusmodi, is (ita me Deus amet) non alius erit a Nicolao Fabricio Gallo Aquis Sextilis clarissimo adolescente, qui Romae et Patavii vixdum plenam pubertatem egressus, ea ardore Pinellum et Pinelli studia est com- plexus, ut omnibus nobis, et doc-

Notes to Pages 42–59 341

tis viris quotquot his capiuntur litteris, miraculo sit. (If our era produces someone of this value, it can only be (God willing) Nicolas Fabri, citizen of Aix-­en-­Provence, a brilliant young man who, in Rome and Padua, barely out of puberty, attached himself to Pinelli and his works with such zeal that he dazzled us all and all those who love good letters.) 23. Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility, 46. 24. Ibid., 291–292. 25. Ibid., 243. 26. Marin Mersenne, Harmonie universelle, contenant la théorie et la pratique de la musique où il est traité de la nature des sons, et des mouvemens, des consonances, des dissonances, des genres, des modes, de la composition, de la voix, des chants, et de toutes sortes d’instrumens harmoniques (Paris: Cramoisy, 1636), in folio. The second part has a different publisher and date (Paris: Pierre Ballard, 1637). The dedication to Peiresc appears in the second volume of Traitez des consonances, des dissonances, des genres, des modes, et de la composition (folios 2–4). 27. Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility, 265. Chapter 3. Conceptions of Europe in the Seventeenth Century A modified version of this essay appeared under the title “Penser l’Europe au XVIIe siècle. John Barclay, un prédécesseur de Keyserling” in Commentaire 72 (Winter 1995–1996). 1. Desiderius Erasmus, In Praise of Folly, trans. John Wilson (Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift Editions, 2003), 35. 2. Cited by Alphonse Dupront, “Du sentiment national,” in Michel François (ed.), La France et les Français (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 1140. 3. Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, Vol. I: History and Environment, trans. by Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 23. 4. Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 5. Hermann von Keyserling, Das Spektrum Europas (Heidelberg: N. Kampmann, 1928). 6. Louis Van Delft, “Le caractère des nations,” in Littérature et anthropologie. Nature humaine et caractère à l’âge classique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), 87–104. 7. John Barclay, The Mirror of Minds: Or, Icon Animorum, trans. Thomas May (London: Print. by I. B. for Thomas Walkley, 1633; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013), 31–32. 8. Ibid., 40. 9. Ibid., 43. 10. Ibid., 55. 11. Ibid., 59. 12. Ibid., 69.

342 Notes to Pages 60–72

13. Ibid., 79. 14. Barclay, The Mirror of Minds, 173. 15. Ibid., 219–229. 16. Ibid., 237–251. 17. Ibid., 259. Chapter 4. Rhetoric and Society in Europe This is a modified version of a summary of my lecture “Rhetoric and Society in Europe (Sixteenth–­Seventeenth Centuries),” lecture 1, 1987–1988, published under the title “Rhétorique et société en Europe” in L’Annuaire du Collège de France. Résumé des cours et des travaux, year 88. 1. For a more detailed look at the approaches adopted by Paul Hazard and René Pintard, see chap. 1. 2. Wilhelm Kühlmann, Gelehrtenrepublik und Fürstenstaat: Entwicklung und Kritik des deutschen Späthumanismus in der Literatur des Barockzeitalters (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1982). 3. Emilio Bonfatti, La “civil conversazione” in Germania. Letteratura del comportamento da Stefano Guazzo a Adolph Knigge, 1574–1788 (Udine, Italy: Del Bianco, 1979). 4. Following the conference for which this essay was originally written, Françoise Waquet and Hans Bots published a useful guide: La République des Lettres, “Europe & Histoire” (Paris: Belin; Brussels: De Boek, 1997). 5. Fritz Schalk, “Erasmus und die Respublica litteraria,” in Actes du Congrès Érasme, Rotterdam, 27–29 octobre 1969 (Amsterdam: North-­Holland, 1971), 14–28. 6. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 42. 7. Francisci Barbari et aliorum ad ipsum epistolae ab anno Chr. MCCCCXXV ad annum MCCCCLIII (Brixiae [Brescia], Italy: Rizzardi, 1743), 39; Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan, ed., Two Renaissance Book Hunters. The Letters of Poggio Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Nicolas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 199. The philologist Claudio Griggio has since published Francesco Barbaro, Epistolario, ii, La raccolta canonica delle “Epistole” (Florence: Olschki, 1999). 8. Saint Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2009), vol. 2, 21, and vol. 19, 21–26. 9. Carlo Dionisotti, “Chierici e laici,” in Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 63–67. 10. Coluccio Salutati uses the expressions studia litterarum, studia humanitatis (studies of letters, studies of humanities) in his correspondence to refer to what we call “humanism.” A bland humanitarian doctrine was therefore constructed out of what was, in its essence, an educational program, for lack of the slightest idea or desire of what a Bildung could be.

Notes to Pages 72–87 343

11. Translation cited from James Westfall Thompson, The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), 143. 12. Seneca, On Leisure, trans. Timothy Chandler, Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique 23 (2012): 218 (Monash University). 13. L’Amour des lettres et le Désir de Dieu. Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Édition du Cerf, 1957). See also Dom Jean Leclercq, Otia monastica. Études sur le vocabulaire de la contemplation au Moyen Âge (Rome: Herder, 1963; 3rd ed. Paris, 1990). 14. Ernest H. Wilkins, “The Ecclesiastical Career of Petrarch,” Speculum, 28, no. 4 (1953): 754–775. 15. Rabanus Maurus was able to speak of otium legendi et scribendi, “leisure dedicated to reading and writing.” 16. Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, I–­VIII, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (New York: Italica Press, 2005), 295. 17. Carlo Dionisotti, Gli umanisti e il volgare fra Quattro e Cinquecento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1968); Cecil Grayson, “Leon Battista Alberti and the Beginnings of Italian Grammar,” Proceedings of the British Academy 49 (1963): 291–311; Mirko Tavoni, Latino, grammatica, volgare. Storia di una questione umanistica (Padua: Antenore, 1984). 18. Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979); Giovanni Orlandi, Aldo Manuzio editore Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, vol. 2, intro. C. Dionisotti, Edizioni Il Polifilo, “Documenti sulle arti del Libro XI” (Milan, 1975). 19. See chap. 1. 20. Margaret Mann Philips, Erasmus on His Times: A Shortened Version of the ‘Adages’ of Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 28. Chapter 5. The Emergence of the Academies This is a modified version of a summary of my lecture “The Republic of Letters,” lecture 2, 1988–1989, published under the title “L’émergence des Académies” in L’Annuaire du Collège de France. Résumé des cours et des travaux, year 89. 1. Virgil, Géorgiques, bk. 3, 291–292. 2. Petrarch, Lettres de la vieillesse (Rerum senilium) (April 28, 1373, letter to Boccaccio), ed. E. Nota, trans. J.-­Y. Briand and P. Laurens, in Classiques de l’humanisme, series, 17, 2, 27 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013), 154–155. 3. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), bk. 3, chap. 8. 4. Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). 5. Augustine of Hippo, On the Trinity, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Arthur West Haddan, in Nicene and Post-­Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 3 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Lit-

344 Notes to Pages 87–121

erature Publishing, 1887), rev. and ed. for New Advent by Kevin Knight, http://www .newadvent.org/fathers/1301.htm. 6. Saint Paul, Letter to the Philippiens, 3:20–21. 7. Guy Patin, L’Esprit de Guy Patin, tiré de ses conversations, de son cabinet, de ses lettres et de ses autres ouvrages, avec son portrait historique (Amsterdam: Schelten, 1709), 35, 69. 8. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.) 9. See folios 23 and following of the 1540 edition (Augustæ Vindelicorum [Augsburg], Henricus Steinerus). 10. Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno alle Scienze e le Arti (Venice: Pavino, 1708), 106. 11. See folio 130 verso ff. 12. See folios 103–107. 13. See laici in chap. 4. 14. See André Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l’Art (Geneva: Droz, 1954). 15. Vigneul-­Marville, Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature, vol. 2, 60. Chapter 6. Conversation and Conversation Societies This is a modified version of a summary of my lecture “Rhétorique et société en Europe (XVIe–­XVIIe siècles),” lecture 3, 1989–1990, published under that title in L’Annuaire du Collège de France. Résumé des cours et des travaux, year 90. 1. John Barclay, The Mirror of Minds: Or, Icon Animorum, trans. Thomas May (London: Print. by I. B. for Thomas Walkley, 1633; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013). 2. Harcourt Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth-­ Century France (1620–1680) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932). See also Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution. The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666–1803 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971). 3. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, trans. Richard Kennington (n.p.: SMK Books, 2009), 2. 4. Stefano Guazzo, La Civile Conversazione (Brescia, Italy, 1574). 5. Nicolas Rigault, Vita Petri Puteani (Paris: Cramoisy, 1652). 6. Pierre Gassendi, Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc (Paris, 1641). 7. Strabon, Geographica, bk. 67, chap. 1. 8. Henri L. Brugmans, “Le Séjour de Christian Huygens à Paris et ses relations avec les milieux scientifiques français, suivi de son Journal de voyage à Paris et à Londres,” doctoral thesis presented to the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris (Paris: Droz, 1935). 9. See Hahn’s important study, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution. 10. See chap. 5, n. 7. 11. See Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

Notes to Pages 122–125 345

Chapter 7. Savant Conversation This text was used for a series of lectures given during conferences held in Paris in 1992 and Nimègue in 1993 and was published under the title “La conversation savante” in Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet (eds.), Commercium litterarium, 1600–1750. La communication dans la République des lettres (Amsterdam: APA-­ Holland University Press, 1994). 1. In addition to my lectures given at the Collège de France (see chaps. 4, 5, 6, and 8), see my articles “La conversation,” in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, vol. 3: Les France, bk. 3: De l’archive à l’emblème (1993), 679–743; and “De l’âge de l’éloquence à l’âge de la conversation: La conversion de la rhétorique humaniste dans la France du XVIIe siècle,” in Bernard Bray and Christoph Strosetzki (eds.), Art de la lettre, art de la conversation, à l’époque classique en France, Wolfenbüttel conference proceedings, October 1991 (Paris: Klincksieck: 1995). 2. See Henri de Valois’s Oratio published with Viri eximii Petri Puteani, regi christianissimo a consiliis et bibliothecis, vita . . . (Paris, 1652), work of Nicolas Rigault. Note on p, 95: “And we retain in our memory that this occurred several times to a famous parasite of our time [to be barred access to the door to the Dupuy Museum]. Pierre would immediately go to meet him, and he never allowed this man [the “eternal pedant” Pierre de Montmaur] to go any further or to join this very selective gathering.” 3. For more on Poggio Bracciolini, also referred to as Pogge, see the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, entry “Bracciolini” (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960). There were some forty editions of the Facetiae produced in the fifteenth century (Ferrare, 1470; Nuremberg, 1471; Milan and Paris, 1477, etc.); several partial publications in manuscript form emerged between 1438 and 1452. We can, in this respect, view these manuscripts as an intermediary between a savant oral version and a printed work, a function that would endure until nearly the eighteenth century, as evidenced by the work of François Moureau. 4. See, for example, amid savants’ reflections on jurisprudence, remarks by these two correspondents on the “debauched nuns of Auxerre” or the “corporal gallantry” of Madame de Tencin, after La Fresnaye’s suicide in his own home, in 1726, in Correspondance littéraire du président Bouhier, 14 vols. (Saint-­Étienne, France: H. Duranton, 1974–1988), bk. 9: Lettres de Mathieu Marais, vol. 2: 1726–1728 (1981), 12 ff. 5. See my study “La ‘conversation’ au XVIIe siècle: Le témoignage de Fortin de La Hoguette” in Louis Van Delft (ed.), L’Esprit et la Lettre. Mélanges offerts à Jules Brody (Tübingen: Narr, 1991), 93–105, and in particular p. 100, on which I analyze Fortin de La Hoguette’s famous reference to the “Dupuy cabinet.” 6. To see Gualdo’s writing on the art of conference with Pinelli, see my article Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, prince de la République des Lettres (Brussels: Pro Peyresq, 1993). 7. See the excerpt of Gassendi’s Vita Peireskii in chap. 2. 8. For more on this subject, see Bernard Beugnot, “Forme et histoire, le statut des ana,” in Mélanges offerts à Georges Couton (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon,

346 Notes to Pages 125–130

1981), 85–101, and Francine Wild, “Les protestants et les ana,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 138 (1992): 49–75. 9. See Jean-­Robert Armogathe, “Le groupe de Mersenne et la vie académique parisienne,” XVIIe siècle, no. 175 (April–­June 1992): 131–139. 10. See my study “Otium, convivium, sermo. La conversation comme ‘lieu commun’ des lettrés,” Bulletin des amis du Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, supp. to no. 4, Xe anniversaire de la Société (1991): 16–38. 11. See Carlo Ossola, Dal “Cortegiano” all’ “Uomo di mondo.” Storia di un libro e di un modello sociale (Turin: Einaudi, 1987). 12. Daniel Georg Morhof, Polyhistor, sive de notitia auctorum et rerum commentarii (Lübeck, Germany: Böckmann, 1688) chap. 15, “De conversatione erudite,” 153 ff. 13. Ibid., 168. 14. Ibid., 169. 15. Ibid., 171. 16. Fortin de La Hoguette emphasizes the fact that the diversity of minds constitutes the very basis on which the principle of conversational fertility relies. See my study “La ‘conversation’ au XVIIe siècle: Le témoignage de Fortin de La Hoguette,” (1991). This view is similar to that voiced by John Barclay in Mirror of Minds. 17. See Morhof, Polyhistor, 170. The title of the work is: De conjectandis cujusque moribus et latitantibus animi affectibus sêméiotikê moralis, seu de signis (Venice: M. Ginammi, 1625); for more on the author, see Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, entry “Chiaramonti (Scipione).” 18. Morhof, Polyhistor, 157: Quis non laudat illam in Salmasio generositatem, qui vel amplissimi stipendii spe adduci non potuit, ut Richelii historiam scriberet, quod ipsi multa essent adversus animi sen- tentiam et in veritatis praejudicium scribenda. . . . (Who cannot praise the nobility of soul of Saumaise, who despite hope of the most generous recompense could not be driven to write the history of Richelieu, because he would have had to re­cord too many things that shocked his honor and caused injury to truth. . . .) For more on this subject, see Pierre E. Leroy, Le Dernier voyage à Paris et en Bourgogne (1640–1643) du réformé Claude Saumaise. Libre érudition et contrainte politique sous Richelieu (Amsterdam: Maarssen, 1983), notably pp. 86–87. 19. See Marie-­Luce Demonet-­L aunay, “Art de conférer, art de raisonner, Montaigne, Essais, III, 8,” Cahiers Textuel, no. 2 (1986): 19–29, and Demonet-­L aunay, Les Voix du signe. Nature et origine du langage à la Renaissance (1480–1580) (Paris: Champion, 1992). 20. Morhof, Polyhistor, 170. For the way in which contact with nature can assist in conversation and reflection, see the idea expressed by Justus Lipsius in the beginning of bk. 2 of De constantia in Jean Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique. L’essor de l’humanisme érudit de 1560 à 1614 (Saint-­Étienne: Presses universitaires de Saint-­ Étienne, 1976), 254 ff. and 304. Claude Saumaise also had the habit of walking while conversing with his friends, in Dijon or Leiden. See Leroy, Le Dernier voyage à Paris et en Bourgogne, 56. 21. See Morhof, Polyhistor, 170, when he mentions the work by Tranquillo Ambro-

Notes to Pages 130–149 347

sini, Processus informativus, sive De modo formandi processum informativum brevis tractatus (Milan: Burdonius et Locarnus, 1598; repr. Rome: Martinellus, 1604). 22. Morhof, Polyhistor, 171. The Recueil de particularités, fait l’an 1665 was assembled by Paul Colomiès primarily using accounts from Vossières. It was published in the Opuscula (n.p.: Mabre-­Cramoisy, 1668). 23. P. Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Peter Bayle, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (London: J. J. and P. Knapton, 1734–1738), 388. Chapter 8. Parisian Conversation and Its Expansion across Europe This is a modified version of a summary of my lecture “Rhétorique et société en Europe (XVIe–­XVIIe siècles),” lesson 5, 1991–1992, which appeared under that title in L’Annuaire du Collège de France. Résumé des cours et des travaux, year 92. 1. See chap. 2. 2. Caylus (attributed to), Recueil de ces messieurs (Amsterdam: Crébillon fils et Duclos, 1745), 367–368. 3. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, trans. Richard Kennington (n.p.: SMK Books, 2009), 2. 4. Antoine Gombaud, Chevalier de Méré, Discours de l’esprit; De la conversation; Des agrements; De la justesse, or, Critique de Voiture, “Discours de la conversation” (Amsterdam: 1687), 60. 5. Dominique Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (n.p.: Mabre-­Cramoisy, 1671); La Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit. Dialogues (n.p.: Mabre-­ Cramoisy, 1687); Pensées ingénieuses des Anciens et des Modernes (n.p.: Mabre-­ Cramoisy, 1689). 6. Nicolas Montfaucon de Villars, De la délicatesse (Paris: Barbin, 1671). 7. Jean-­Baptiste Morvan de Bellegarde, Réflexions sur ce qui peut plaire ou déplaire dans le commerce du monde (Paris: Seneuze, 1688); Réflexions sur le ridicule et les moyens de l’éviter (Paris: Guignard, 1696). 8. Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano (Venice: 1528). 9. Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Huesca, Spain, 1648); in French La Pointe ou l’Art du génie, trans. M. Gendreau-­Massaloux and P. Laurens, pref. by M. Fumaroli (Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Âge d’homme, 1983). 10. César Chesneau Dumarsais, Des tropes, ou Des différents sens, ed. F. Douay-­ Soublin (Paris: Flammarion, 1988). 11. Étienne de Gamaches, Les Agréments du langage réduits à leurs principes [1718], ed. J.-­P. Sermain (Paris: Cendres, 1992). Chapter 9. Fortin de La Hoguette’s “Testament” This is a modified version of a text published in 1991 under the title “La ‘conver­ sation’ au XVIIe siècle: Le témoignage de Fortin de La Hoguette” in Louis Van Delft (ed.), L’Esprit et la Lettre. Mélanges offerts à Jules Brody (Tübingen: Narr, 1991). 1. See my studies on the memoir genre, “Les Mémoires au XVIIe siècle au carre-

348 Notes to Pages 150–152

four des genres en prose,” XVIIe siècle, nos. 94–95 (1971): 7–37; “Mémoires et Histoire: Le dilemme de l’historiographie humaniste,” in Jacques Hennequin and Noémi Hepp (eds.), Les Valeurs chez les mémorialistes français du XVII e siècle avant la Fronde, conference proceedings, Strasbourg-­Metz, May 18–20, 1978, Société d’étude du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Klincksieck: 1979), 21–45; “Apprends, ma confidente, apprends à me connaître: Les Mémoires de Retz et le traité Du sublime,” Versants 1 (Autumn 1981): 27–56; and my edition of Mémoires de Henri de Campion, suivis de Trois entretiens sur divers sujets d’histoire, de politique et de morale (Paris: Mercure de France, 1967, repr. 1990). 2. Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette, Lettres inédites de Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette, ed. P. Tamizey de Larroque (La Rochelle: Texier, 1888). See notably p. 69: “J’ai recouvert icy les dialogues d’Érasme” (January 10, 1627, letter to Pierre Dupuy). This familiarity with the Colloquia clearly reveals the deep assimilation of erudite conversation, as practiced by Fortin himself, within the Erasmian tradition so pronounced in the Dupuy milieu. 3. Apart from R. Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit en France dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle, which situates Fortin within the Dupuy milieu on several occasions, René Pintard dedicated one article to a letter written by Fortin, “Un témoignage sur le Cid en 1637,” in Mélanges d’histoire littéraire de la Renaissance offerts à Henri Chamard (Paris: Nizet, 1951), 293–301. 4. Giuliano Ferretti, Un “soldat philosophe,” Philippe Fortin de La Hoguette (1585– 1668?) (Genoa: Edizioni culturali internazionali, 1988). This excellent monograph announced the publication of a complete edition of correspondence written by Fortin (Lettres aux frères Dupuy et à leur entourage [1623–1662], ed. G. Ferretti, pref. M. Fumaroli, 2 vols. [Florence: Olschki, 1997]), whose essential elements had been outlined by the author in “La corrispondenza di Fortin de La Hoguette,” Nouvelles de la république des lettres 1 (1986): 7–14. 5. For more on this academy (1619), see Mémoires of Michel de Marolles (Paris: Sommaville, 1656), 30–50. 6. Paul Pellisson-­Fontanier, Histoire de l’Académie française [1653], ed. Ch. L. Livet, the rest by Abbot Olivet (Paris: Didier, 1858). Pellison’s account of the transformation of the private academy assembled around Conrart into an academy made official by the king, then by Parlement, remains the best starting point for any study of literary sociability during the reign of Louis XIII. 7. See Entretiens . . . by Nicolas and Henri de Campion (Fumaroli, Mémoires). These Entretiens attest to the regular meetings of a private (and clandestine) academy in Paris in the last years of Richelieu’s ministry, in which gentlemen in the service of princes, magistrates, and clergymen debated “history, politics, and manners” in a spirit of freedom and equanimity unaffected by the political “engagement” of many in attendance. For more on current historical research related to these social forms (intermediaries between the family on one hand, and the state and the church on the other), see Françoise Thélamon, ed., “Sociabilité, pouvoirs et société” (conference proceedings, Rouen, France, November 24–26, 1983); Publications de l’université de

Notes to Pages 152–158 349

Rouen 110 (1987); and, for a different perspective, Laetitia Boehm and Ezio Raimondi (eds.), Università, accademie e società scientifiche in Italia e in Germania dal Cinquecento al Settecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981). 8. Aristotle, Politique, ed. and trans. J. Aubonnet (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1986), bk. 7, chap. 14, § 3, p. 101: this quotation of “poets” illustrates the situation of sages within leisure. See Cicero, De finibus, bk. 5, chap. 19, § 53, which mentions “sages liberated from all worry [. . .] who dedicate themselves to studies on the understanding of nature,” and more generally the philosophy of the classic otium in the work of Jean-­Marie André. 9. Lettres de Mademoiselle de Montpensier, de Mesdames de Motteville et de Montmorency . . . (Paris: Léopold Collin, 1806), 5. The letter, prolonging a conversation in which Madame de Motteville had suggested the idea of a “happy life”—“if one can unite Christian piety with the wisdom of philosophers and the politeness of the fabulous shepherds of Lignon”—sketches the outlines of a female Thelema Abbey, albeit one similar to a convent of Carmeline nuns, though far from the “commerce of court.” 10. See my study “La confidente et la reine: Mme de Motteville et Anne d’Autriche,” Revue des sciences humaines 115 (July–­September 1964): 265–278, repr. in “Bibliothèque des idées,” Exercices de lecture (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). 11. See chap. 1. 12. This expression is cited by G. Ferretti, Un “soldat philosophe,” 125, n. 325. 13. For more on Le Sueur’s painting, see Alain Mérot, Eustache Le Sueur (1616– 1655) (n.p.: Arthéna, 1987), 27–28. Commissioned by Anne de Chambré, it depicts this private academy of conversation and music assembled at the home of this gentleman, Monsieur le Prince, during the Fronde (1645–1658). This same group of friends also prompted the famous manuscript La Rhétorique des dieux (The Rhetoric of the Gods), lute compositions (according to the twelve Greek modes) by Denis Gaultier, dedicated to Anne de Chambré and decorated with engravings by Robert Nanteuil and Abraham Bosse, mirroring drawings by Le Sueur (Mérot, Eustache Le Sueur, 295–296). The manuscript, currently in Berlin, was published by A. Tessier (Publications de la société française de musicologie, 6–7, 1932). It dates from 1652. 14. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 125. 15. See chap. 10. 16. Virgil, Les Bucoliques, 2.65. 17. Claude Nicaise, Les Sirènes, ou Discours sur leur forme et figure (Paris: Anisson, 1691). See Brown, Scientific Organizations in Seventeenth Century France. 18. For a more detailed look at this succession, see chap. 6. Chapter 10. The Erudite Origins of Classical “Grand Goût” This text appeared for the first time in the collective work L’Intelligence du passé: Les faits, l’écriture et le sens. Mélanges offerts à Jean Lafond par ses amis, studies assembled by Pierre Aquilon, Jacques Chupeau, and François Weil (Tours: Université de Tours, 1988), 185–195.

350 Notes to Pages 159–169

1. Roméo Arbour, L’Ère baroque en France. Répertoire chronologique des éditions de textes littéraires, vol. 4 (Geneva: Droz, 1977–1985). 2. Pierre Gassendi, Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc . . . Vita, authore Petro Gassendo diniensi . . . (Paris, 1641; repr., Paris, 1647, The Hague, 1655). 3. Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, Being the Life of N. C. Fabricius, Lord of Peiresk, trans. by William Rand (London, 1657). 4. William Bates, Vitae selectorum aliquot virorum qui doctrina, dignitate, aut pietate inclaruere (London, 1681). The great Vitae of French savants represent a considerable portion of this work (out of thirty-­five, eleven are French Vies). Henri de Valois appears three times for his Orationes in memory of Denys Petau, Jacques Sirmond, and for his own Vie, written by his brother Adrien. 5. Nicolas Rigault, Viri eximii Petri Puteani regi christianissimo a consiliis et bibliothecis vita, cura Nicolai Rigaltii (Paris, 1652). 6. The Oratio in obitum by Henri de Valois, which appears in the pamphlet cited earlier (Henri de Valois, Oratio, published with Viri eximii Petri Puteani, regi christianissimo a consiliis et bibliothecis, vita . . . [Paris, 1652], work of Nicolas Rigault), is just one example of the biographical output of this great scholar. It is in that capacity that he occupies a significant role in the collection of William Bates, whom we can regard as an initiator of the great English tradition of Lives (see chap. 15). 7. Bernard Médon, author of a Carmen funebris in memory of Jérôme Bignon and two Vitae (n.p.: Cazeneuve, 1656, and n.p.: Maran, 1671), was a magistrate from Toulouse. 8. Rigault, Vita, 42. 9. Ibid., 42–43. 10. See my Âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et “res litteraria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Champion, 1980), 463–466 and 603–608. 11. Rigault, Vita, 44. 12. Maurice Magendi, La Politesse mondaine et les théories de l’honnêteté en France au XVIIe siècle, de 1600 à 1660, 2 vols. (Paris: Alcan, 1926). 13. Henri de Valois, Oratio, 95. Chapter 11. Academia, Arcadia, and Parnassus This is a modified version of a text published under the title “‘Academia,’ ‘Arcadia,’ ‘Parnassus’: Trois lieux allégoriques de l’éloge du loisir lettré,” in David S. Chambers and François Quiviger (eds.), Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1995). 1. Arnaldo Della Torre, Storia dell’Accademia platonica di Firenze (Florence: Carnesecchi, 1902). Della Torre cites a work by Scipione Bargagli, Delle lodi delle Accademie (Venice: Franceschi, 1589), 11–12, qualifying it as noiosamente retorica, though still considering it to be an authority on the existence of Bessarion’s academy in fifteenth-­century Rome.

Notes to Pages 169–172 351

2. Giovan Battista Alberti, Discorso dell’origine delle Accademie publiche e private e sopra l’impresa degli Affidati di Pavia (Genoa: Farroni, 1639), 22. 3. To support this assertion, it suffices to cite Peiresc, though he was one of the most Italianizing French scholars of the seventeenth century: “The Muses seem to have abandoned the warm countries, some time ago, in search of cool weather in our neighborhood,” Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale (BN), Département des Manuscrits (MS), Nouvelles acquisitions françaises (NAF) 517, folio 162 verso (October 8, 1635, letter to Du May). For more on the myth of the translatio studii ad Francos, one of the deepest foundations of the “French exception,” refer to Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 4. See Ugo Dotti, Vita di Petrarca (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1987), 395–398; and in French, Pétrarque, trans. J. Nicolas (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 308–310; new enhanced ed. (Turin: Aragno, 2014), 547–550. 5. Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiarum latinae linguae libri sex, 1st ed. (Venice: Jenson, 1471), pref., ed. M. Regoliosi (Padua: Antenore, 1981). 6. G. B. Alberti, Discorso dell’origine delle Accademie publiche e private, 110. 7. The seminal study on the Parnassus allegory in fifteenth- and seventeenth-­ century Rome is a work written by Elisabeth Schröter, Die Ikonographie des Themas Parnass vor Raffael. Die Schrift und Bildtraditionen von der Spätantike bis zum 15. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1977). For the Roman seventeenth century, consult my essay “L’Inspiration du poète” de Poussin. Essai sur l’allégorie du Parnasse (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux [RMN], 1989). 8. Trajano Boccalini, Ragguagli di Parnaso e Pietra del Paragone politico, ed. G. Rua, vol. 3 (Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1910). The first edition dates to 1612, Venice. See Luigi Firpo, “Allegoria e satira in Parnaso,” Belfagor 1 (1946): 673–699. 9. See Antonio Avena, Il bucolicum carmen e i suoi commenti inediti (Padua: Società cooperativa tipografica, 1906), and Petrarch, Opere latine, ed. A. Bufano, vol. 2 (Turin: Unione tipografico-­editrice torinese, 1975). 10. See, in addition to Eugène Müntz, “Le Musée des portraits de Paul Jove,” Mémoires de l’Institut national de France 36, no. 2 (1901): 249–253; Paul Ortwin Rave, “Das Museo Giovio zu Como,” Römische Forschungen der Bibliotheca Hertziana 16 (1961): 275–284; and especially, Il Rinascimento e la memoria, vol. 17, Paolo Giovio conference proceedings (Como, Italy: Raccolta della Società Storica Comense, 1985). Paul Jove was not content to merely assemble portraits of lettered men in his “museum” (simultaneously a “Parnassus,” a collection of exemplary Images, and a gathering of absent speakers invited to its own academic meetings). He gave new energy to the collection of Lives, critical to Vasari’s endeavors, and was the first to define and reconstruct the lives of Italian academicians. He was one of the great architects of the Italian Republic of Letters’ “theater of memory.” 11. A metaphor for Tuscan, which was compared to the fine flour obtained by sieving bran. 12. See Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, Le pale della Crusca: Cul-

352 Notes to Pages 172–174

tura e simbologia (Florence, Accademia della Crusca, 1983); the collection The Fairest Flower: The Emergence of Linguistic National Consciousness in Renaissance Europe (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1985); and especially Giovanni Pozzi, “Imprese di Crusca,” in La Crusca nella tradizione linguistica e letteraria italiana, proceedings from the international conference held for the quadricentary of the Accademia della Crusca (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1985), 41–63. 13. For more on the first Life of Petrarch (Boccacio’s De vita et moribus domini Francisci Petrarchi de Florentia) see Giuseppe Billanovich, Petrarca letterato (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 1947), 74–75. Jacopo Filippo Tomasini published a Petrarcha redivivus, Laura Comite in 1635 in Padua (Frambotti). The Lives of Petrach played an essential role, particularly in Italy, in creating both the ideal type and the biographic model of the humanist man of letters. These Lives were themselves modeled, in part, on the Epistola posteritati in which Petrarch emphasizes the principle of libertas (notably in regard to secular and ecclesiastical sovereigns) that governed his life as a man of letters, and which was not included by his Renaissance biographers. 14. J. Leclercq, L’Amour des lettres et le désir de Dieu: Initiation aux auteurs monastiques du Moyen Âge (Paris: Les Édition du Cerf, 1957). For more on lasting contaminatio between the humanist otium studiosum and the monastic otium studiosum, see Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Sant’Andrea degli Olivetani, un “monastero barocco” a Volterra (Volterra, Italy: Gruppo fotografico, 1982). 15. Coluccio Salutati, De laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ulmann (Zurich: Thesaurus Mundi, 1951), 1, 9, 11–20. 16. Poggio Bracciolini, Lettere, ed. H. Harth, vol. 3 (Florence: Olschki, 1987), bk. 3, Epistolarum familiarium libri secundum volumen, 467–469 (November–­December 1457, letter 19, to Prospero Colonna). 17. Francisci Barbari et aliorum ad ipsum epistolae ab anno Chr. MCCCCXXV ad annum MCCCLIII (Brixiae [Brescia], Italy: Rizzardi, 1743). 18. For more on the Neapolitan Academy founded by the Panormite and subsequently led by Pontano, see, in addition to Camillo Minieri-­Riccio, Biografie degli accademici alfonsini detti poi pontaniani dal 1442 al 1453 (Naples, 1881; repr. Bologna: Forni, 1969), Vittorio Gleijeses, ed., La storia di Napoli. Dalle origini ai nostri giorni, vol. 10 (Naples: Società editrice napoletana, 1974–1981), bk. 4, vol. 2, Napoli Aragonese (1974): Michele Santoro, “La cultura umanistica,” 4, “L’Accademia Pontaniana,” 361 ff.; Pietro Prini, “Umanesimo e accademie,” Accademie e biblioteche d’Italia, vol. 46 (1978), 32–36. 19. For more on the Roman Academy, founded by Pomponius Laetus, see, in addition to Pastor (Pius II, Sixtus IV, Julius II) and classical works by Arnaldo Della Torre, Paolo Marsi da Pescina. Contributo alla storia dell’Accademia Pomponiana (Casciano: Capelli, 1903); and Emmanuel Rodocanachi, Histoire de Rome (Paris: Picard, 1922–1933); recent studies by Fabrizio Cruciani, “Il Teatro dei Ciceroniani: Tommaso Fedra Inghirammi,” Forum italicum 14, no. 3 (1980), 356–377; “Lo spettacolo classico dei pomponiani,” in Cruciani, Teatro nel Rinascimento: Roma 1450–1550 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1983), 220–226; and Cruciani, Il Teatro del Campidoglio e le feste romane del

Notes to Pages 175–178 353

1513 (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1968). A global study of the history of the Roman Academy, its relationship with the pontifical Curia, and its research program is still needed. 20. Petrarch, De vita solitaria, in Opere latine, vol. 1, 262–565. The principle of libertas, essential to a life of letters, and ensured by solitude, reappears here. 21. See Enrico Carrara, La poesia pastorale (Milan: Vallardi, 1908), and Domenico de Robertis, “Aspects de la formation du genre pastoral en Italie au XVe siècle,” in Le Genre pastoral en Europe du XV e au XVIII e siècle (Saint-­Étienne: Presses universitaires de Saint-­Étienne, 1980), 7–14, as well as the subsequent texts. For more on the pastoral landscape in painting, see John Dixon Hunt, ed., The Pastoral Landscape (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992), which notably includes the study by David Rosand, “Pastoral topoï in the Construction of Meaning in Landscape,” 161–174. 22. See Alessandro d’alessandro, Dies geniales (Rome, 1522). 23. For more on Nicolas Frénicle and his Illustres bergers, see Maurice Cauchie, “Les Églogues de Nicolas Frénicle et le groupe littéraire des Illustres bergers,” Revue d’histoire de la philosophie, new series, no. 10 (1942), 115–133. Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana, published in Anvers in 1575, was translated into French by N. Colin and published in Reims beginning in 1578 (J. de Foigny). 24. For more on Crescimbeni’s Arcadia, see Françoise Waquet, Rhétorique et poétique chrétiennes. Bernardino Perfetti et la poésie improvisée dans l’Italie du XVIII e siècle (Florence: Olschki, 1992), 173–209, and Waquet, “La conversation en Arcadie,” in Alain Montandon (ed.), Traités de savoir-­vivre en Italie / I trattati di saper vivere in Italia (Clermont-­Ferrand, France: Association des publications de la faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, 1993), 71–89. For more on the place held by the Arcadias depicted by Sannazaro and Crescimbeni in the history of the European imagination, see Petra Maisak, Arkadien: Genese und Typologie einer idyllischen Wunschwelt (Frankfurt and Bern: Lang, 1981). 25. Petrarch, Bucolicum carmen (see note 9). 26. Coluccio Salutati, Epistolario, ed. F. Novati, vol. 4 (Rome: Forzani, 1891–1911), bk. 4 (1905), 149 ff. (July 9, 1406, letter to Leonardo Bruni). 27. Iacopo Sannazaro, L’Arcadie (Arcadia) [1990], critical edition by F. Erspamer, trans. G. Marino, pref. by Y. Bonnefoy (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2004), 244–245. 28. Ibid., vol. 10, 31–33, pp. 174–175. 29. Ibid., vol. 5, 19–20, pp. 74–75. 30. See the famous study by Erwin Panofsky “Et in Arcadia ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts. Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955). 31. See works by Amedeo Quondam, “L’istituzione Arcadia, sociologia e ideologia di un Accademia,” Quaderni storici 23 (May–­August 1973): 389–483; Quondam, “Le Arcadie e l’Arcadia: La degradazione del razionalismo,” in Cultura regionale et letterature, proceedings from the 7th meeting of the Associazione internazionale per gli studi di lingua e letteratura italiana, March 31–­April 4, 1970, Bari, Italy, 1974, 375– 385; and “L’Arcadia e la Repubblica delle lettere,” in Immagini del Settecento in Italia

354 Notes to Pages 181–191

(Bari, Italy: Laterza, 1980), 198–211. See also F. Waquet, “La conversation en Arcadie” (see note 24). 32. Ludovico Dolce, Sogno di Parnaso en terza rima, cited in Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice. Researches on Aretino and His Circle in Venice, 1527–1556 (Florence: Olschki, 1985), 233–234. 33. Ibid., 123–124. 34. See André Chastel, Le Sac de Rome, 1527. Du premier maniérisme à la Contre-­ Réforme (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 224–225. 35. For more on the beginnings of this sequence, see studies by Michel Plaisance, notably “Une première affirmation de la politique culturelle de Côme Ier: La transformation de l’Académie des “Humidi” en Académie florentine (1540–1542),” in André Rochon (ed.), Les Écrivains et le pouvoir en Italie à l’époque de la Renaissance, series 1 (Paris: Sorbonne-­Nouvelle, 1973), 361–438. Elsewhere, I have contested the notion of “cultural policy,” at least as the causal explanation of phenomena of the life of the mind by the prince. For a less Machiavellian view, see Eric Cochrane and Martin Lowry, in The Fairest Flower, 21–51. 36. Cited in Angelo Solerti, Le origini del Melodramma (Turin: Bocca, 1903), 117. See my catalog L’inspiration du poète, 49–53. 37. See the catalog Jacques Callot, 1592–1635, compiled by Paulette Choné (Paris and Nancy: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux [RMN], 1992), 192. 38. For more on the survival and “modernization” of the Parnassus allegory in eighteenth-­century Paris, see Judith Colton’s excellent work, The Parnasse françois. Titon du Tillet and the Origins of the Monument to Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). Chapter 12. Marsilio Ficino’s De Triplici Vita This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Le ‘De triplici vita’ de Marsile Ficin: Un régime de vie pour la République des Lettres?” in Les Cahiers de l’humanisme, vol. 2, Marsile Ficin ou les Mystères platoniciens, proceedings from the 42nd International Conference of Humanist Studies, held at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance, Tours, France, July 7–10, 1999 (Les Belles Lettres, 2002). 1. Ego igitur sortem eorum laboriosissimam miseratus, qui difficile Minervae minuentis nervos iter agunt, primus tanquam medicus debilibus et valetudinariis adsum. (Since I pity the burdensome lot of those who make the difficult journey of Minerva who shrinks the sinews, I am the first to attend as a physician sick and invalid scholars.): Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. C. V. Kaske, and J. R. Clark (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, in collaboration with the Renaissance Society of America, 1989), 108, lines 26–28 (this bilingual critical reference edition is henceforth cited as Three Books on Life). 2. Marsilio Ficino, Sulla vita, trad. A. Tarabochia Canavero (Milan, Rusconi, 1996), 99, n. 9.

Notes to Pages 191–198 355

3. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 103–104. 4. Ibid., 292. 5. Francesco Barbaro, Epistolario, ed. C. Griggio, vol. 2: La raccolta canonica delle “Epistole” (Florence: Olschki, 1999), 75, lines 99–106. 6. See chap. 1. 7. See chap. 1. 8. Ficino’s famous letter to Aldus was edited by P. O. Kristeller, Supplementum ficinianum, vol. 2 (Florence: Olschki, 1937), bk. 2, 95. For more on the relationship between Ficino and the Venetian publisher, see Carlo Dionisotti, Aldo Manuzio. Umanista e editore (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1995), 96, 101. 9. The dedicatory letter to Léon X was published in Giovanni Orlandi, Aldo Manuzio editore Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, vol. 2, intro. C. Dionisotti, Edizioni Il Polifilo, “Documenti sulle arti del Libro XI” (Milan, 1975), 120–123 (Ficino is cited on page 122). 10. Ficino, Three Books on Life, 112. 11. Ibid., 113. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. Ibid., 126. 14. Ibid., 128. 15. Ibid., 132. 16. Ibid., 134. 17. Ibid., 354–358. 18. Ibid., 290. 19. For more on Montaigne as a reader of Ficino (as a translator of Plato and author of De amore), see the article by Jean-­Louis Vieillard-­Baron, “Montaigne, lecteur de Platon,” in Ada Neschke-­Hentschke (ed.), in collaboration with A. Étienne, Images de Platon et lectures de ses œuvres. Les interprétations de Platon à travers les siècles (Louvain [Leuven, Belgium]: Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de philosophie; Peeters, 1997), 222–223, 234; and Françoise Joukovsky, Le Regard intérieur. Thèmes plotiniens chez quelques écrivains de la Renaissance française (Paris: Nizet, 1982), 113 ff. 20. See the famous essay by M. A. Screech, Montaigne et la mélancolie. La sagesse des “Essais,” (Paris: Presses universitaires de France [PUF], 1992); in addition to Françoise Charpentier, “La passion de la tristesse,” Montaigne Studies 9, nos. 1–2 (1997), 47. 21. “Plato orders men to attend the exercises, dances, and games of youth. . . .” Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 60. 22. Gassendi, Viri illustris. 23. See chap. 3. 24. Minerva [. . .] olivifera, olei vitalis origo (Minerva [. . .] creator of the olive tree, the origin of the oil so necessary to life), in Ficino, Three Books on Life, 168. 25. See Sebastiano Gentile’s recent analysis in Sebastiano Gentile and Carlos

356 Notes to Pages 198–206

Gilly, Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Ermete Trismegisto, exhibit catalog, October 1, 1999–­June 1, 2000, Biblioteca medicea laurenziana, Bibliotheca philosophica hermetica (Florence: Centro Di, 1999), 105–107. 26. See Alfredo Perifano, L’Alchimie à la cour de Côme I er de Médicis. Savoirs, culture et politique (Paris: Champion, 1997), 228; Sylvain Matton, “Marsile Ficin et l’alchimie. Sa position, son influence,” in Jean-­Claude Margolin and Sylvain Matton (ed.), Alchimie et philosophie à la Renaissance, proceedings from an international conference in Tours, December 4–7, 1991 (Paris: Vrin, 1993), 123–192. 27. Ficinio, Three Books on Life, 291. 28. Rémi Brague, La Sagesse du monde. Histoire de l’expérience humaine de l’univers (Paris: Fayard, 1999). Chapter 13. Venice and the Republic of Letters in the Sixteenth Century This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Venise et la Ré‑ publique des Lettres aux XVIe siècle,” in Vittore Branca and Carlo Ossola (ed.), Crisi e rinnovamenti nell’autunno del rinascimento a Venezia (Florence: Olschki, 1991). 1. For more on Daniele Barbaro, see the article in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960). 2. For more on Villa Maser, see Terisio Pignatti, Veronese. L’opera completa, 2 vols. (Venice: Alfieri, 1976), vol. 1, 56–68. 3. For more on this dialogue, see my Âge de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et “res litteraria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Champion, 1980), 85. 4. Cited by Pignatti, Veronese. L’opera completa, vol. 1, 56 (the letter was published in 1559). 5. Paolo Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, patricii genuensis, in qua studiosis bonarum artium proponitur typus viri probi et eruditi (Augustæ Vindelicorum [Augsburg]: Mangus, 1607), in quarto. 6. Jacques-­Auguste de Thou, Historia sui temporis, 1593–1614. 7. Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli, 20 ff., which also includes a portrait of J. F. Mussato, a friend of Pinelli’s (who accompanied him to Trent), and, like him, a student of Greek rhetoricians. 8. Ibid., 19. 9. Ibid., 42, 49. Curiositas is one of the primary virtues of the man of letters in the “model” drawn by Gualdo. 10. Ibid., 10. The model of Pinelli, including his love of music, influenced both Peiresc’s life and his biography (Pierre Gassendi, The Mirrour of True Nobility and Gentility, Being the Life of N. C. Fabricius, Lord of Peiresk, trans. by William Rand [London: 1657]). 11. See Giovanni Orlandi, Aldo Manuzio editore Dediche, prefazioni, note ai testi, vol. 2, intro. C. Dionisotti, Edizioni Il Polifilo, “Documenti sulle arti del Libro XI”

Notes to Pages 207–213 357

(Milan, 1975), as well as Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). 12. Francisci Barbari et aliorum ad ipsum epistolae ab anno Chr. MCCCCXXV ad annum MCCCCLIII (Brixiae [Brescia], Italy: Rizzardi, 1743). (See chap. 1.) 13. See chap. 5. 14. See Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, entry “Conciles,” by J. Forget, bk. 3, coll. 636–676. 15. See John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602), vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 16. See by Elisabeth Schröter, Die Ikonographie des Themas Parnass vor Raffael. Die Schrift und Bildtraditionen von der Spätantike bis zum 15. Jahrhundert (Hildes­ heim and New York: Olms, 1977). 17. See the substantial collection assembled by Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 18. See my study “L’Inspiration du poète” de Poussin. Essai sur l’allégorie du Parnasse (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux [RMN], 1989). 19. See André Chastel, ed., Pierre Arétin. Lettres (n.p.: Scala, 1988), 263–271, and the quoted article, Luigi Firpo, “Allegoria e satira in Parnaso,” Belfagor 1 (1946), as well as Christopher Cairns, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice. Researches on Aretino and his Circle in Venice, 1527–1556 (Florence: Olschki, 1985), 231–249. 20. See William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of the Republican Liberty [1968] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Chapter 14. The Genesis of Classical Epistolography This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Genèse de l’épistolographie classique: Rhétorique humaniste de la lettre, de Pétrarque à Juste Lipse” in Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 112, April 2012. 1. For more on the quarrel over Cicero’s style, see Remigio Sabbadini, Storia del ciceronianismo e di altre questioni letterarie nell’etI della Rinascenza (Turin: Loescher, 1885), and Izora Scott, Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero (New York: Columbia University Press, 1910). See also Hermann Gmelin, “Das Prinzip der Imitatio in den romanischen Literaturen der Renaissance,” Romanische Forschungen, 1932, 85–360, and Eugenio Garin, L’Éducation de l’homme modern (Paris: Fayard, 1968), 105–107. 2. James J. Murphy, Rhetorics in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1974). In addition to noting the difference in “usage” between northern Europe and the Roman Curia (pp. 234–235), Murphy highlights the relationship between the medieval art of the letter and the art of the sermon. 3. For more on the history of the pontifical chancery and its epistolary style, see Reginald L. Poole, Lectures on the History of the Papal Chancery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915). For more on Bembo, secretary of briefs for Leo X, see

358 Notes to Pages 214–217

Ludwig von Pastor, Storia dei Papi dalla fine del Medioevo (Rome: Trente, Desclée, Artigianelli, 1890–1934), bk. 4, 402 ff., and Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan: Garzanti, 1971), bk. 4, chap. 1: “Il classicismo dal Bembo al Guarini,” by Ettore Bonora, 151–153. 4. The first printed edition of Petrarch’s Letters appeared in Venice in 1492. The entirety of Familiar Letters and Letters of Old Age, in French, are available in the thirteen volumes published under the direction of P. Laurens in the series Classiques de l’humanisme (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002–2014): the former in the text by V. Rossi, trans. A. Longpré; the latter in the text by E. Nota, trans. various authors; with commentary by U. Dotti. 5. Opera Omnia Desideri Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 1, bk. 2 (Amsterdam: North-­ Holland Publishing, 1971), 152–579. The first edition of this treatise was published by Froben in Basel in 1522. 6. Ibid., 209, line 7. See also 210, line 9, Qui quaeso potest tam infinitae rerum varietati simplex sermonis character accommodari? (How can a single and unique type of discourse adapt itself to this infinite variety of material?); 309, line 19; and 310, line 6. 7. Ibid., 211, lines 12–13. 8. Ibid., 210, lines 6–7. 9. Ibid., 309, line 14. 10. Ibid., 223, line 4. 11. Ibid., 223, lines 4–5. 12. Ibid., 223, lines 25–26. See also 222, lines 13–15. 13. Ibid., 301, line 7. See also 221, lines 21–22, Non damnabitur libertas, si non destituat nos consilium, cui decet artem ubique cedere. 14. Ibid., 301, lines 2–3: a consilio [. . .], non praeceptis (through judgment [. . .] not through rules), and line 10: consilium [. . .], non praeceptiunculae (judgment, not the minutiae of rules). 15. This idea is crucial. See ibid., 215, line 7: simplicitas [. . .], sed elegans (a simplicity [. . .] but elegant); 221, line 10: erudit[a] simplicit[as] (the simplicity of a savant); 225, line 10. 16. The first edition of Ciceronianus appeared in Basel, published by Froben, in March 1528. In addition to Pierre Mesnard’s translation of Erasmus, La Philosophie chrétienne (Paris: Vrin, 1970), I consulted the critical edition by Angiolo Gambaro, Il Ciceroniano o dello stile migliore (Brescia, Italy: La Scuola, 1965), and the Mesnard edition in Opera Omnia Desideri Erasmi Roterodami, 580–710. 17. See Ciceronianus, ed. Mesnard, in Erasmus, La Philosophie chrétienne, 618– 619, and Cicero’s De oratore, 3, 62–89. 18. See Jean-­Baptiste Giraldi, Joannis Baptistae Gyraldi Ferrariensis Poemata (Basel: Winter, 1543), 200–228. Cicero, according to Giraldi, must remain master of the best style. But velim unius auctoris angustiis omnia ingenia metiri? (would I want to measure all minds by the restrictive rules of one sole author?) (203). If exposure is necessary beginning in childhood, one cannot later refuse exposure to the influence

Notes to Pages 217–218 359

of other authors. Even when quaecumque excerpta fuerunt, ad unius Ciceronis imitationem convertenda censeo (but everything that one takes away must be converted to the model set by Cicero, conforming to a norm, to a canon). One must avoid the two excesses of bad style, the excessive severity of Atticists and the flowery languidity of Asianists, and find a just milieu, for which Cicero is the judicious touchstone (205). 19. Dionysii Longini de sublimi genere dicendi, in quo cum alia multa praeclara sunt emendata, tum veterum poetarum versus, qui confusi commixtique cum oratione soluta minus intelligentem lectorem fallere poterant notati atque distincti (Longinus’s On the Sublime, in which well-­known passages have been corrected, and in which verse quotations from classical poems, mixed with and confused with prose, are notably indicated and highlighted, risks abusing the unwarned readers) (Venice: Aldus, 1555). Paul Manutius’s edition pre­sents itself as a slight improvement on the one procured the previous year in Basel, published by Oporin (dedicated on August 5, 1554) by Robortello, the first printed edition of the text. 20. Tre libri di lettere volgari di Paolo Manuzio (Venice: Aldus, 1555), folios 13 ff. 21. Marc-­Antoine Muret, Opera omnia, ed. Ch. Froescher (Leipzig, 1848), vol. 1, 384, Oratio 14, November 1580. For more on Muret as a theoretician of the “best style” of prose, see Morris W. Croll, “Muret and the History of Attic Prose” and “Muret’s Progress,” 254–309, in Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966). 22. Antonii Possevini . . . Bibliotheca selecta qua agitur de ratione studiorum (Rome: Typographica Apostolica Vaticana, 1593). 23. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 185–186. The chapter “A Consideration upon Cicero,” should be read as a freethinking reflection alongside Vivès’s De conscribendis epistolis and Erasmus’s Ciceronianus. The rhetoric of the Essays is entirely Erasmian—“I have naturally a humorous and familiar style” (Montaigne, Essays), and their insistence on candidness (candor, simplicitas), variety, and “mercurial” metamorphosis echoes De conscribendis epistolis, in Opera Omnia Desideri Erasmi Roterodami, 310). Vivès’s De conscribendis epistolis offers a similar lesson, and runs counter to the “ceremonial” letters that, in imitation of Cicero and Pliny, masked the private I and human truth behind an official persona. 24. Henri Estienne, Petri Bunelli, Galli praeceptoris, et Pauli Manutii, Itali discipuli, epistolae ciceroniano stylo scriptae, aliorum Gallorum pariter et Italorum epistolae eodem stylo scriptae (Geneva, 1581). 25. In his dedication to Henri III, Estienne reminds the king of the discussion (probably held at the Académie du Palais) which prompted his request that Estienne avenge the French honor (gloria) by reminding the Italians that the French people had nothing to envy them in regard to the Ciceronian style: Bruno Longueil, Paul Manutius’s teacher, had written “Ciceronian” letters that were as good as Bembo’s. This is therefore a polemical publication, inspired by anti-­Italian nationalism, in keeping with Dialogues du français italianisé. For more on Estienne’s fundamental anti-­Ciceronianism, see, in addition to Louis Clément, Henri Estienne et son œuvre

360 Notes to Pages 218–223

française (Paris: Picard, 1898), Jean Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique. L’essor de l’humanisme érudit de 1560 à 1614 (Saint-­Étienne: Presses universitaires de Saint-­ Étienne, 1976), 235–236. 26. See Jehasse, La Renaissance de la critique, 269–273. 27. Justi Lipsi Epistolica institutio excepta e dictantis ejus ore anno 1587 mense Junio, adjunctum est Demetrii Phalerei ejusdem argumenti scriptum (The Tract of the letter of Justus Lipsius, text received from his mouth in June of the year 1587, with writing by Demetrius Phalereus on the same subject), Lugduni Batavorum, ex officina Plantiniana, apud Franciscum Raphelengium, 1591. J. Jehasse rightly observed Demetrius Phalereus’s influence on the evolution of rhetoric in the sixteenth century (Jehasse [ed.], Apologie pour M. de Balzac [Saint-­Étienne: Université de Saint-­ Étienne, 1977] intro. 15) and Hermogenes (Guez de Balzac et le génie romain [Saint-­ Étienne: Université de Saint-­Étienne, 1976] 113, 433, 482, 489). One of the essential points of the treatise translated by Lipsius and published in appendix to his Institutio is the distinction between dialogue and letters: notably, dialogue reflects oral speech, extempore dicentem (improvised), whereas the letter is a written, and therefore more literary and more ornate genre (oportet epistolam paulo magis adornari et quasi exstrui quam Dialogum [it suffices to adorn and better position, so to speak, the letter than the dialogue]). 28. Erasmus, De conscribendis, in Opera Omnia Desideri Erasmi Roterodami, 225, lines 7–8 (quote from comedian Turpilius): Est enim [. . .] epistola absentium amicorum quasi mutuus sermo (the letter [. . .] is a discourse between absent friends). The style most often accorded to the letter was humilior, comœdiæ propior quam tragœdiæ, aut si quid etiam humilius phrasi comica (a lower register, closer to comedy than tragedy, meaning a tone more banal than that of comedic discourse). Epistolary art, unreservedly compared to a dialogue between friends, is here viewed as speech and not silent writing. 29. Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, 185. 30. Jean Goulu, Lettres de Phyllarque à Ariste, 3rd ed. (Paris: Buon, 1628), 10. 31. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.4: An non eam, quae emissa optime est, hastam speciosissime contortam ferri videmus? Et arcu dirigentium tela, quo certior manus, hoc est habitus ipse formosior (Can we not see that the javelin that is thrown with skill is also brandished with elegance? Like the archer, the surer the hand, the more elegant the gesture). This metaphor is echoed in that of the “stroke” or parry, designating a well-­timed and appropriate sententia, or that of the “pointed” style, which played on an outpouring of “strokes.” 32. See Roberto Tessari, La Commedia dell’arte nel Seicento. “Industria” et “Arte giocoso” della civiltà barocca (Florence: Olschki, 1969). 33. Pierre Corneille, The Theatre of Illusion, trans. Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt, 2007), 6. 34. See René Fromilhague, “Montaigne et la nouvelle rhétorique,” in Critique et création littéraire en France au XVII e siècle, international conference proceedings (Paris: Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique [CNRS], 1977), 55–67.

Notes to Pages 223–255 361

35. See Zobeidah Youssef, Polémique et littérature chez Guez de Balzac (Paris: Nizet, 1972); J. Jehasse, Guez de Balzac et le génie romain and Apologie pour M. de Balzac. 36. Eugène Hatin, Bibliographie historique et critique de la presse périodique française . . . (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1866), noted that the word “gazette” had already appeared in a pamphlet entitled La Flandre conservée . . . (n.p.: Arras, 1600): “L’infanterie souffrait mille incommodités, combien que les faiseurs de gazettes assurent qu’il y a eu parmi cela quelque terreur panique” (Bibliographie . . . , p. 48, column b). Chapter 15. From Lives to Biographies This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Des ‘Vies’ à la biographie: Le crépuscule du Parnasse” in Diogène 139 (1987). 1. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 303. 2. Longinus, On the Sublime: The Greek Text Edited After the Paris Manuscript, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 83. 3. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, bk. 35. 4. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918), vi. 5. Emphasis added. 6. Sainte-­Beuve, Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme (Paris: Delangle, 1829). 7. During his Grand Tour in Italy, John Milton carried letters of recommendation written by Henry Wotton, a British diplomat and a friend of the poet George Herbert. Chapter 16. The “Familiar Letters” of President de Brosses This is a modified version of a text published as “Les ‘Lettres familières’ du président de Brosses: Le voyage en Italie comme exercice du loisir lettré,” in Jean-­Marie André, Jacqueline Dangel, et Paul Demont (eds.), Les Loisirs et l’héritage de la culture classique, proceedings from the XIIIe Congrès de l’association Guillaume Budé, Dijon, August 27–31, 1993 (Brussels: Latomus, 1996). 1. The French edition referred to here belongs to the Centre Jean Bérard: Charles de Brosses, Lettres familières, text gathered by G. Cafasso, annotated by L. Norci de Azevedo, in Mémoires et documents sur Rome et l’Italie méridionale, 3 vols., including a biography (Naples: Centre Jean Bérard; Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991). When available and when noted, the following English translation has been used: Charles de Brosses, Selections from the Letters of de Brosses, trans. Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1897). The following work was of particular value when studying this correspondence: Hermann Harder, Le Président de Brosses et le voyage en Italie au XVIIIe siècle (Geneva: Slatkine, 1981). 2. See Paul Dibon and Françoise Waquet, Johannes Fredericus Gronovius, pèlerin de la République des Lettres. Recherches sur le voyage savant au XVII e siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1984). 3. De Brosses, Lettres familières, vol. 1, 443 (October 18, 1739, letter 24, from

362 Notes to Pages 257–268

Florence, to M. de Neuilly). Horace, The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914), 152, 153. 4. For more on Dijon’s literary milieu, notably in the eighteenth century, see Marcel Bouchard, De l’humanisme à l’Encyclopédie. L’esprit public en Bourgogne sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Hachette, 1930). 5. See the bibliography of Charles de Brosses related to letters in Lettres familières, vol. 3, 1249, and his detailed bibliography on Joseph Théophile Foisset, Le Président de Brosses. Histoire des lettres et des parlements au XVIII e siècle (Paris: Olivier-­Fulgence, 1842). 6. See de Brosses, Lettres familières, vol. 2, 1131–1170 (letters 54 and 55, to Abbé Courtois). 7. Ibid., 1209 (March 23, 1740, letter 57, from Milan). 8. Ibid., vol. 1, 512 (November 24, 1739, letter 31, from Rome). 9. Ibid., vol. 1, 576 (November 28, 1739, letter 33, from Rome). 10. Ibid., vol. 2, 902 (letter 47, to M. de Neuilly). 11. De Brosses, Selections, 196. 12. Ibid., 226. 13. Ibid., 239. 14. Ibid., 128. 15. Ibid., 10. 16. The essential resource on Jean-­Marie Du Bos remains Alfred Lombard, L’Abbé Du Bos, un initiateur de la pensée moderne (Paris: Hachette, 1913). See also Abbot Du Bos’s helpful edition of Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-­Arts, 1993). 17. De Brosses, Lettres familières, vol. 1, 330 (letter 17, to M. de Quintin). 18. De Brosses, Selections, 50. 19. Ibid., 193. 20. De Brosses, Lettres familières, vol. 2, 742–743 (letter 41, to M. de Quintin). 21. De Brosses, Selections, 145. 22. De Brosses, Lettres familières, 644–646 (letter 37, to M. de Blancey and M. de Neuilly). 23. Ibid. Chapter 17. The Comte de Caylus and the “Return to Antiquity” in the Eighteenth Century This text was originally published as “Arnaldo Momigliano et la réhabilitation des ‘antiquaires’: Le comte de Caylus et le ‘retour à l’antique’ aux XVIIIe siècle” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 1. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 2. Cited by Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 110.

Notes to Pages 268–281 363

3. Ibid., 118. 4. See Jean-­Louis Quantin, Le catholicisme classique et les Pères de l’Église, un retour aux sources (1669–1713) (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1999). 5. See Bruno Neveu, “Archéolatrie et modernité dans le savoir ecclésiastique du XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe siècle, no. 131 (1981), 169–223; and “L’érudition ecclésiastique du XVIIe siècle et la nostalgie de l’Antiquité chrétienne,” in Keith Robbins (ed.), Religion and Humanism (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1981), 195–223. 6. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1921; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921). 7. Ibid., 234. 8. See Lionello Sozzi, ed., Ragioni dell-­anti-­illuminismo (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’orso, 1992); Didier Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes: l’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); Darrin M. MacMahon, The French Counter Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 9. Rouseau, Emile, 253. This and the following page offer a premonitory composite image of the revolutionary Jacobin “leader,” or its military version, which Bonaparte would incarnate. 10. Ibid., 234. 11. Ibid., 7. 12. See Henri Gouhier, Rousseau et Voltaire: Portraits dans deux miroirs (Paris: Vrin, 1983). 13. A. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 1955). 14. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948), 381. 15. See the excellent article by Jean-­Louis Jam, “Caylus, l’amateur crépusculaire,” in Jam (ed.), Les divertissements utiles des amateurs au XVIII e siècle (Clermont-­ Ferrand, France: Presses Universitaires Blaise-­Pascal, 2000), 36–37. 16. Cited in Edward Gibbon, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Edward Gibbon (London: Alex. Murray & Son, 1869), 200. 17. See Edward Gibbon, The Life of Edward Gibbon, Esq. (London: John Murray, 1839), 190. 18. The proceedings from this conference were published in the journal XVII e siècle, no. 131 (1981), which includes the text of this exchange with A. Momigliano: “Temps de croissance et temps de corruption: Les deux Antiquités dans l’érudition jésuite française du XVIIe siècle,” 149–168. 19. Cited by Jam, “Caylus,” 30. 20. See Lafont de Saint-­Yenne, Œuvre critique, ed. Étienne Jollet (Paris: École nationale supérieure des beaux-­arts, 2001). 21. We can indeed use the the pamphleting campaign led by Lafont de Saint-­Yenne to date the trend among several eminent Parisian collectors during the reign of Louis

364 Notes to Pages 283–295

XV studied by Colin B. Bailey in his book Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-­Revolutionary Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 22. See Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-­lettres, depuis son établissement jusqu’à présent, avec les mémoires de littérature tirez des registres de cette Académie, vol. 34 (Paris, 1770), 221–232; see also Recueil d’antiquités, vol. 7 (Paris, 1767). 23. This dedicatory epistle, which is included in the beginning of volume 1 of Recueil d’antiquités, was reprinted by Louis-­Joseph Jay, Recueil de lettres sur la peinture, la sculpture et l’architecture, publiées à Rome par Bottari en 1754, traduites et augmentées (Paris: Galerie des tableaux, 1817), 591–593. 24. See André Fontaine, Comte de Caylus, Vies d’artistes du XVIII e siècle, Discours sur la Peinture et la Sculpture, Salons de 1751 et de 1753, Lettre à Lagrenée (Paris, H. Laurens, 1910), 25. 25. Cited by Thomas Gaethgens and Jacques Lugand, Joseph-­Marie Vien (1716– 1809): Peintre du roi (Paris: Arthéna, 1988), 79. Chapter 18. Seroux d’Agincourt and “Literary Europe” This is a modified version of a text published under the title “Seroux d’Agincourt et ‘l’Europe littéraire,’” in Jean-­Louis Quantin and Jean-­Claude Waquet (eds.), Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne. Mélanges à la mémoire de Bruno Neveu, École pratique des hautes études, Sciences historiques et philologiques (Geneva: Droz, 2007). 1. Giovanni Previtali, La Fortuna dei primitivi. Dal Vasari ai neoclassici (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), 164–191. 2. Evelina Borea, “Le stampe dei primitivi e l’avvento della storiografia artistica illustrata,” Prospettiva 70 (1993): 50–74. 3. Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion and Collecting in England and France (London: Phaidon, 1976), 37–45. 4. Henri Loyrette, “Seroux d’Agincourt et les origines de l’histoire de l’art médié­ val,” Revue de l’art 48 (1980): 40–58. See also Maria Elisa Micheli, “‘Il “Recueil”’ di Seroux d’Agincourt,” Bollettino d’arte 80–81 (1993): 83–92. 5. The first French translation of Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden, 1764) was published in Amsterdam in 1766. See Édouard Pommier, Winckelmann, inventeur de l’histoire de l’art (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 199–244. 6. Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 7. See Jean-­Étienne Delécluze, Louis David, son école et son temps (Paris: Macula, 1983), as well as George Levitine and Melinda Curtis, Search for Innocence. Primitive and Primitivistic Art of the 19th Century, exhibition catalog, Department of Art, University of Maryland Art Gallery, October 29–­December 10, 1975 (College Park, MD, 1975). 8. Édouard Pommier, “Moyen Âge et Révolution,” in L’Art et les Révolutions, con-

Notes to Pages 295–301 365

ference proceedings from Strasbourg, 1989 (Strasbourg: Société alsacienne pour le développement de l’histoire de l’art, 1992), 15–49. 9. My study of this point was facilitated by the essay, as yet unpaginated and in manuscript form, procured and presented by Ilaria Miarelli Mariani, which was included in the reprint of Seroux d’Agincourt’s Histoire de l’Art (Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2005). 10. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Modern Library, 1934). 11. Antoine Schnapper, Le Géant, la Licorne et la Tulipe. Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 291–296. 12. Alain Erlande-­Brandenburg, “Une initiative mal récompensée. Roger de Gaignières (1642–1715),” Revue de l’art 49 (1980): 33–34. 13. Marc Fumaroli, “Les abeilles et les araignées,” in La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes: XVIIe–­XVIIIe siècles, assembled and annotated by A.-­M. Lecoq (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 14. See chap. 4 and chap. 8. 15. Scipione Maffei nell’Europa del Settecento, proceedings from a conference held in Verona on September 23–25, 1996 (Verona: Consorzio editori veneti, 1998). 16. Viola Corrado, Tradizioni letterarie a confronto. Italia e Francia nella polemica Orsi-­Bouhours (Verona: Fiorini, 2001). 17. Individual collection. 18. Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère De Quincy, Canova et ses ouvrages, ou Mémoires historiques sur la vie et les travaux de ce célèbre artiste (Paris: Le Clere, 1834), 18. 19. See Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-­lettres, depuis son établissement jusqu’à présent, avec les mémoires de littérature tirez des registres de cette Académie (Paris, 1770), vol. 34, 221–232; see also Recueil d’antiquités, vol. 7 (Paris, 1767). 20. Marc Fumaroli, “Une amitié paradoxale, Antoine Watteau et le comte de Caylus, 1712–1719,” Revue de l’art 114 (1996): 37–47; and “Un gentilhomme universel: Anne-­Claude de Tubières, comte de Caylus (1694–1765),” in Annuaire du Collège de France. Résumé des cours et travaux, lesson 6 (1992–1993), 563–581. See also Irène Aghion, ed., Caylus, mécène du roi. Collectionner les antiquités au XVIIIe siècle, exhibition catalog, Bibliothèque nationale de France, cabinet des médailles (Paris: Institut national d’histoire de l’art [INHA], 2002). 21. Pierre Crozat, Recueil d’estampes d’après les plus beaux tableaux et d’après les plus beaux dessins qui sont en France . . . , vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1729–1742); Jean de Julienne, L’Œuvre d’Antoine Watteau, peintre du Roy . . . gravé d’après ses tableaux et desseins originaux . . . , vol. 2 (n.p., n.d). 22. Marc Fumaroli, “Le comte de Caylus et l’Académie des inscriptions,” Comptes rendus des séances. Académie des inscriptions et belles-­lettres (1995), 225–250. 23. This dedicatory epistle, which is included in the beginning of vol. 1 of Recueil

366 Notes to Pages 302–305

d’antiquités, was reprinted by Louis-­Joseph Jay, Recueil de lettres sur la peinture, la sculpture et l’architecture, publiées à Rome par Bottari en 1754, traduites et augmentées (Galerie des tableaux, 1817), 591–593. 24. Francis Haskell, “The Baron d’Hancarville: An Adventurer and Art Historian in Eighteenth-­Century Europe,” in Haskell, Past and Present in Art and Taste. Selected Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 30–45. 25. Achille Étienne Gigault de La Salle, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux de J. L. G. Seroux d’Agincourt,” in Jean Baptiste Louis Georges Seroux d’Agincourt, Histoire de l’Art par les Monumens, depuis sa décadence au IV e siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe, vol. 6 (Paris: Treuttel & Würtz, 1810–1823), bk. 1, p. 7. 26. Pierre Hugues d’Hancarville, Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines tirées du cabinet de M. Hamilton, vol. 4 (Naples and Florence: Morelli, 1766–1776). For more information on volumes by D’Hancarville, see Pascal Griener, Le Antichità etrusche greche romane (1766–1776) di Pierre Hugues d’Hancarville. La pubblicazione delle ceramiche antiche della prima collezione Hamilton (Rome: Ed. dell’Elefante, 1992); Alain Schnapp, “La pratique de la collection et ses conséquences sur l’histoire de l’Antiquité. Le chevalier d’Hancarville,” in Annie-­France Laurens and Krzysztof Pomian, L’Anticomanie. La collection d’antiquités aux XVIIIe et XIX e siècles (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales [EHESS], 1992), 209– 218. 27. “This collection followed on from works by Caylus, Stosch, Winckelmann . . . ,” according to the introduction to Recueil de fragments de sculpture antique en terre cuite (Paris: Treuttel & Würtz, 1814). Plate 37 of the collection depicts the Comte de Caylus’s funerary monument in the Église de Saint-Germain-­ l’Auxerrois in Paris. 28. This text is excerpted from Mariani’s essay in d’Agincourt, Histoire de l’Art. 29. Antonio Conti, Lettere da Venezia a madame la comtesse de Caylus 1727– 1729: con l’aggiunta di un Discorso sullo stato della Francia, ed. S. Mamy (Florence: Olschki, 2003). 30. De La Salle, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux . . . ,” 7. 31. Viaggio in Italia di una donna artista, I. “Souvenirs” di Élisabeth Vigée-­L e Brun, 1789–1792, critical edition presented by F. Mazzocca (Milan: Electa, 2004), 93. 32. De La Salle, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux . . . ,” 4. 33. Pierre Jean Mariette, Traité des pierres gravées [1750], anastatic repr., vol. 2 (Florence: Studio per Ed. Scelte, 1987). 34. Marie-­Noëlle Pinot De Villechenon, “Fortune des fresques de Rome au XVIIIe siècle; Pietro Sante Bartoli et le comte de Caylus,” Gazette des beaux-­arts 116, no. 1461 (1990): 105–115. 35. For more on Flaxman, see David Bindman, John Flaxman, 1755–1826: Master of the Purest Line, exhibition catalog, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 2003. For more on Piroli, see Fulvia Spesso, “Tommaso Piroli, incisore romano, 1750–1824: Proposte per un catalogo,” Nuovi annali della Scuola speciale per archivisti e bibliotecari

Notes to Pages 305–309 367

9 (1995): 79–94. For more on neoclassical engravings, see Marco Fragonara, “Incisione a contorno e l’idea del bello: Appunti sull’incisione neoclassica,” Rassegna di studi e notizie 26 (2002): 71–96. 36. Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-­Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969). 37. Bernard De Montfaucon, Les Monumens de la Monarchie françoise, qui comprennent l’histoire de France avec les figures de chaque règne que l’injure des tems a épargnées, vol. 5 (Paris: Julien-­Michel Gandouin and Pierre François Giffart, 1729– 1733). See Claudine Poulain, “L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures (1719– 1724) par Bernard de Montfaucon,” Dix-­huitième siècle 27 (1995): 43–60. 38. Henri Loyrette, “Une source pour la reconstruction du polyptyque d’Ugolino da Siena à Santa Croce,” Paragone 343 (1978): 15–23. 39. Étienne La Font de Saint-­Yenne, Œuvre critique, edition created and presented by É. Jollet (Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-­Arts [ENSBA], 2001); and Else Marie Bukdahl, Diderot, critique d’art, trans. from Danish by J.-­P. Faucher (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1980). 40. François René de Chateaubriand, Correspondance générale, vol. 1, 1789–1807, texts chosen and annotated by B. d’Andlau, P. Christophorov, and P. Riberette, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 298–314. 41. Paul-­Louis Courier, “Lettres écrites de France et d’Italie,” in Œuvres complètes, text chosen and annotated by M. Allem, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 645–927. 42. Frederick Hawkins, The French State in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), vol. 1, 41. 43. Seroux d’Agincourt, “Discours préliminaire. Objet et Plan de l’ouvrage,” in Histoire de l’Art par les Monumens, vol. 1, 2–7. 44. See Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment. The Work and World of La Curne de Sainte-­Palaye (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). 45. Bruno Neveu, “L’histoire littéraire de la France et l’érudition bénédictine au siècle des Lumières,” Journal des savants 2 (April–­June 1979): 73–113. See also Neveu, “Communication de synthèse,” in Daniel-­Odon Hurel and Raymond Rogé (eds.), Dom Bernard de Montfaucon, Carcassonne conference proceedings, October 1996 (Saint-­Wandrille, France: Éd. de Fontenelle, 1998), 127–135. 46. Mario Praz, Gusto neoclassico (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1956), 97–110. 47. Francis Haskell, “Gibbon and the History of Art,” in Haskell, Past and Present in Art and Taste, 16–29. 48. Ezio Raimondi, “Letteratura e scienza nella ‘Storia’ del Tiraboschi,” in Raimondi, I lumi dell’erudizione. Saggi sul settecento italiano (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1989), 125–141. The first edition of Storia della letteratura italiana was published in Modena in 13 vols. from 1772 to 1782.

368 Notes to Pages 310–313

49. Luigi Lanzi, Storia pittorica della Italia, in 2 vols. (Bassano, Italy: Remondini di Venezia, 1795–1796). 50. See Brendan Cassidy, The Life & Letters of Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798): Artist & Art Dealer in Eighteenth-­Century Rome (London: Harvey Miller; Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2011). 51. David Irwin, “Gavin Hamilton: Archaeologist, Painter, and Dealer,” Art Bulletin 44, no. 2 (June 1962): 87–102. 52. Peintres primitifs. Collection de tableaux apportée de l’Italie et publiée par M. le chevalier Artaud de Montor (Paris: Challamel, 1843). 53. Jacques Nicolas Paillot de Montabert, Théorie du geste dans l’art de la peinture, renfermant plusieurs préceptes applicables à l’art du théâtre, suivie des principes du beau optique . . . (Paris: Magimel, 1813). 54. Arthur Bourdeaut, “François et Pierre Cacault. Les origines du Concordat et le musée des Beaux-­Arts de Nantes,” Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne 8, no. 2 (June 1927). 55. Dominique-­Vivant Denon: l’œil de Napoléon, exhibition catalog, Louvre Museum (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux [RMN], 1999). 56. Three years later, William Y. Ottley published the volume A Series of Plates Engraved After the Paintings and Sculptures of the Most Eminent Masters of the Early Florentine School, Intended to Illustrate the History of the Restoration of the Arts of Design in Italy (London: Colnaghi, 1826). 57. See Mariani, in D’Agincourt, Histoire de l’Art. 58. For more on Superville, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Symbol and Myth: Humbert de Superville’s Essay on Absolute Signs in Art (Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware, 1979). 59. Édouard Pommier, “Le goût de la République,” in Ideologie e patrimonio storico culturale nell’età rivoluzionaria e napoleonica. A proposito del trattato di Tolentino, Tolentino conference proceedings, 1997 (Rome: Ministero per I beni e le attività culturali, 2000), 7–38. For more on Lettres à Miranda [1796], see the critical edition established by Édouard Pommier, Antoine C. Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres sur le préjudice qu’occasionneraient aux arts et à la science le déplacement des monuments de l’art de l’Italie, le démembrement de ses écoles et la spoliation de ses collections, galeries, musées . . . , referred to as Lettres à Miranda (Paris: Macula, 1996). 60. Marc Fumaroli, “Granet in Rome,” in Paesaggi perduti. Granet a Roma, 1802– 1824, exhibition catalog (Rome and Milan: Electa, 1996), 17–22. The Institut national d’histoire de l’art [INHA] library (Jacques Doucet collection) has a copy of Mémoires de Granet, écrits par lui même (ms. 1005). Other copies exist at the Arbaud Museum in Aix-­en-­Provence and at the Institut de France. The Mémoires de Granet were published in installments by the newspaper Le Temps between September and October 1872 and, with numerous breaks, also in the Revue de Marseille et de Provence 8, 136– 150. Isabelle Néto presented a critical edition of Mémoires de Granet in her doctoral thesis, “Correspondance de François Marius Granet,” under the direction of B. Foucart (Université Paris-­Sorbonne [Paris IV], 1991), vol. 6, 1642–1755.

Notes to Pages 313–331 369

61. Denis Coutagne, Granet, peintre de Rome (Aix-­en-­Provence: Association des amis du musée Granet, 1992), and, by the same author, François Marius Granet, une vie pour la peinture, 1775–1849 (Aix-­en-­Provence: Éditions Ville d’Aix-­en-­Provence: 2005). Afterword 1. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 317. 2. Ibid., 351. 3. Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. H. L. Havell (London: Macmillan, 1890), 2. 4. Ibid., 12. 5. Theodore Adorno, Spätstil Beethovens, in Moments musicaux: Neu gedruckte Aufsätze 1928–1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964); Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 564–657. 6. Longinus, On the Sublime: The Greek Text Edited After the Paris Manuscript, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 155– 157. 7. Ibid., 81. 8. Ibid., 83. 9. Ibid., 121. 10. Ibid., 97. 11. Ibid., 61.

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INDEX OF NAMES

Adelphes. See Dupuy brothers Adorno, Theodor, 329 Africano, Canstantino, 191 Alain (philosopher), 190 Alberti, Giovan Battista, 75, 169–72 Alberto III Pio (prince of Carpi), 18 Alcuin, 18 Aldrovandi, 42 Aldus Manutius. See Manutius, Aldus Aleandro, Girolamo, 81 Alexandar I (tsar of Russia), 314 Alfonso the Magnanimous, 77 Allatius, Leo, 34, 332 Ambrogini, Angelo. See Politian (Angelo Ambrogini) Ambrosius, Tranquillo, 130 Amerbachs, 80 Anguillara, Orso dell’, 84 Aphthonius, 175 Aquinas, Thomas (saint), 198 Arbour, Romeo, 159 Arendt, Hannah, 53–54 Aretino, Leonardo. See Bruni, Leonardo (Leonardo Aretino) Aretino, Pietro, 178, 182–83, 184, 189, 210 Argyropoulos, Jean, 7, 69, 93 Ariosto, 97 Aristides, Aelius, 270 Aristophanes, 79, 235 Aristotle, 235, 238; mentioned, 5, 8, 25, 56, 111, 126, 130, 152, 191 Armogathe, Jean-Robert, 125 Arnauld, Antoine, 108, 146 Aron, Raymond, 279 Athenaeus of Naucratis, 88, 126, 157, 264 Aubrey, John, 248, 251

Augustine (saint), 70, 73, 87, 93, 214 Aulus Gellius, 88, 126, 130, 166, 230, 245, 264 Auzout, Adrian, 120–21 Bacon, Sir Francis, 24, 31, 32, 98, 131, 189, 248 Baillet, Adrien, 23, 118, 160, 243 Balland, Hubert, 20 Balzac, Honoré de, 246 Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de. See Guez de Balzac, Jean-Louis Barbaro, Daniele, 42, 201–4, 206 Barbaro, Ermolao, 203 Barbaro, Francesco, 5–6, 16–17, 34, 69– 72, 193, 207; mentioned, 15, 18, 82, 90, 174 Barberini (cardinal), 46 Barberini, Maffeo, 57 Barberini family, 28, 43, 161 Barcinio, 177 Barclay, John, 54–64, 105, 113, 134, 159, 185 Barclay, William, 57 Bardi, Giovanni Maria dei, 187 Barnes, Anne, 15, 66–67 Baron, Hans, 90 Barthélémey, Jean-Jacques, 281, 289, 292, 320 Bartoli, Pietro Santi, 288, 290 Bary, René, 146 Barzizza, Gasparino, 207 Bates, William, 34, 160, 350n6 Baudelaire, Charles, 325 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 320 Bayle, Pierre, 24, 26, 29, 31–32, 65, 131, 136–37, 184, 224, 268, 274; mentioned, 13, 23, 34, 37, 143, 249

371

372 Index of Names

Beaumont, Pauline de, 307 Beauval, Basnage de, 281 Beccadelli, Antonio, 77 Bell, Quentin, 250 Bellefonds, Madame de, 243–44 Bellegarde, Morvan de, 145–46 Bellori, Gian Pietro, 333 Bembo, Pietro, 98, 183, 320; mentioned, 36, 37, 39, 42, 71, 184, 204, 206, 211 Benci, Francesco, 184–85 Benda, Julien, 51–52 Benedict XIV Lambertini (pope), 253, 258 Bernard (saint), 74 Bernier, François, 31, 33 Bernis, Cardinal de, 310 Bessarion (cardinal), 85 Béthune family, 117 Beyle, Marie-Henri. See Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) Bignon, Abbot, 116, 278 Bignon, Jérôme (attorney general), 116 Bignon family, 117 Biondi, Flavio, 75 Bismarck, Otto von, 53 Bisticci, Vespasiano dei, 75 Blancey, 263 Bloom, Allan, 276 Boccaccio, 75, 133; mentioned, 7, 69, 82, 83, 94, 172, 186, 214 Boccalini, Trajano, 22–23, 170, 183–85, 189, 210; mentioned, 171–72, 178 Bodin, Jean, 56, 58, 105 Bodley, Thomas, 34 Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius), 93 Boileau (Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux), 166, 182, 246, 249, 250, 256, 298, 324, 325, 329–30 Bolzoni, Lina, 55 Bonfatti, Emilio, 67 Bonifacio, Giovanni, 63 Bonneveau, Madame de, 120 Bonneville, Nicolas de, 23, 67 Borea, Evelina, 293 Borromeo, Charles, 261

Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 13, 266 Boswell, James, 34, 160, 239, 249–50 Bots, Hans, 67, 68 Bouchardon, Edme, 282, 283, 285, 286, 287, 301, 303, 305, 307 Boucher, François, 275, 292, 303, 305 Boucherat, Chancellor, 243 Bouhier, Jean, 124, 256, 257, 258, 259 Bouhours, Dominique, 145–46, 243– 44 Boulainvilliers, 287 Boulliau, Samuel, 119 Bourdelot, Abbot, 107, 121, 158 Bourget, 145 Boyle, Sir Robert, 120 Bracciolini, Poggio, 15–16, 34, 69–70, 71, 74, 174, 193, 202, 207; mentioned, 6, 76, 83, 90, 123, 191, 207, 322 Brague, Rémi, 200 Braudel, Fernand, 50, 51 Bresson, Agnès, 30, 33, 44 Brignon, Abbot, 117 Brossette, 250 Brunel, 218 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 248 Bruni, Leonardo (Leonardo Aretino), 6, 16, 17, 72, 75, 90, 193 Budé, Guillaume, 20, 21, 37, 81, 117, 124, 337n28 Buffon, 257 Bussy-Rabutin, 297 Cacault, François, 311 Caccini, Guilio, 99, 188 Calasso, Roberto, 246 Callot, Jacques, 188 Calvet, Esprit (abbot), 288 Campanella, Tommaso, 73, 106 Campion, Henri de, 152 Camuccini, Vincenzo, 312 Canavero, A. Tarabochia, 191 Canova, Antonia, 305, 310, 312 Capella, Martianus, 93, 178, 179 Carcavy, Pierre de, 119, 121 Carlyle, Thomas, 250 Carpaccio, 309

Index of Names 373

Carrache, Annibal, 291 Casaubon, Isaac, 128, 130 Cassiano, 333 Cassini, Giovanni, 147 Castiglione, Baldassare, 55, 59, 111, 202, 323; mentioned, 56, 71, 90, 98, 113, 127, 156, 188, 189 Catherine of Siena, 5 Caylus, Anne Claude, Comte de, 268– 69, 278–92, 300–306; mentioned, 139, 264, 272, 294, 296, 297, 303, 305, 308, 332 Caylus, Madame de, 146, 284 Cesi, Federico, 97 Cézanne, Paul, 313 Chalcondyle, 79 Chambray, Fréart de, 333 Chambré, Anne de, 349n13 Chapelain, Jean, 26, 115, 119, 120, 154, 161 Chapelle, 165, 253 Charles I (king of England), 60 Charles II (king of England), 120, 147 Charles III (king of Spain), 288 Charles VIII (king of France), 77, 323 Charron, Pierre, 149, 150 Chastellux, François-Jean de, 247–48 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 245, 247, 258, 267–68, 277, 307; mentioned, 326 Châtelet, Madame du, 147 Chavannes, Puvis de, 185 Chesterfield, Lord, 147–48 Chevreau, Urbain, 245 Chiaramonti, Scipione, 129 Chichele, Henry (archbishop of Canterbury), 34 Choiseul-Gouffier, Count, 306 Chrysolara, Manuel, 85 Cicero, 70, 72, 178, 212, 213, 216, 217, 320; mentioned, 5, 8, 21, 25, 76, 83, 88, 130, 135, 152, 156, 157, 222, 317, 321 Clavière, Marquis de, 288 Clerserlier, Claude, 119 Clodion, 305

Clovis, 287, 308 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 120, 121, 262, 281–82, 289, 321 Colonna, Francesco, 5, 177 Colonna, Giovanni, 73 Colonna, Prospero (cardinal), 174 Colonna, Vittoria, 182 Comte, August, 267, 269 Condé, Prince of. See Louis I, Prince of Condé Conrart, Valentin, 114, 152, 156, 158 Conti, Antonio Schinella (abbot), 281, 284, 303 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 198, 321 Corbinelli, Jacques, 205 Cordorcet, 241 Corneille, Pierre, 223, 307, 325 Corvin, Matthias (king of Hungary), 191 Cosimo the Elder. See Medici, Cosimo de’ Coulanges, 297 Courcelle, Pierre, 73 Courcelles, Étienne de, 69 Courier, Paul-Louis, 307 Coutagne, Denis, 313 Coypel, Charles, 281, 282, 286, 301 Crébillon, Prosper, 307 Crébillon family, 145 Crescimbeni, Giovanni Mario, 171, 176, 178 Crozat, Pierre, 301, 304, 305; mentioned, 280, 282–83, 285, 287, 288 Cujas, Jacques, 117 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 52, 171 Dacier, 325 Dacier, Madame, 275 d’Agincourt, Seroux, 289, 293–315 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 275; mentioned, 34, 148, 241, 248, 275, 276, 306 d’Alessandro, Alessandro, 175 Damaskios (philosopher), 229 Dangeau, Abbot, 117, 158 d’Angiviller, Comte, 291, 292, 293, 310

374 Index of Names

Dante Alighieri, 83, 84, 93, 133, 179, 320; mentioned, 86, 94, 98, 182 Darwin, Charles, 33 d’Auvergne, Jacques, 161 David, Jacques-Louis, 271, 276, 291–92, 295, 305, 310, 312 De Brosses, Charles, 252–65, 307, 313 de Bueil, Honorat. See Racan, Honorat de Bueil, marquis de Decembrio, Angelo, 17, 88–92, 96, 126, 193–94 De Chaulieu, 140 De Fénelon, 256 Deffand, Madame du, 283 De Fontelle, 143 de Huet, 165 Delacroix, Eugène, 333 Delay, Jean, 250–51 d’Elbene, Bartolommeo, 134 Della Casa, Giovanni, 127 Della Porta, Giovanni Battista, 27, 42, 63 Della Rovere, Francesco (duke of Urbino). See Sixtus IV della Rovere (pope) Della Torre, Arnaldo, 169 de Ménage, 165 De Mesmes family, 117, 257 Democritus, 215 Demosthenes, 212, 232, 329, 330 Denon, Dominique-Vivant, 311, 312 de Piles, Roger, 285 de Sales, Francis (saint), 105, 111, 113–14, 154 Desargues, Girard, 109, 119, 135 Descartes, René, 8, 31, 43–44, 69, 110– 11, 135–36, 139, 196, 243; mentioned, 32, 33, 46, 73, 109, 118, 164, 189, 256, 278 Desmaizeaux, Pierre, 34, 249 de Staël, Madame, 112, 247 d’Este, Leonello (marquis), 17, 89–92, 96 de Suède, Christine, 121 De Thou, Jacques-Auguste, 22, 37, 154, 165, 204; mentioned, 14, 30, 38, 160, 185, 206

De Thou family, 117, 257 d’Hancarville, Pierre-François Hugues, 289, 302 d’Herbelot, Monsieur, 158 Dibon, Paul, 13, 14–15, 25, 67, 68, 201 Dickinson, Emily, 246 Diderot, Denis, 271, 278–79, 287, 290, 302, 305, 306; mentioned, 276, 295, 319 Dionisotti, Carlo, 71 Dolce, Ludovico, 181, 182 Dolet, Etienne, 99 Dorat, Jean, 100 Douay, Françoise, 146 Du Bos, Abbot, 253, 262, 263, 287 Duclos, Charles Pinot, 265 Dufourny, Léon, 311 du Maine, Duchess, 147 Dumarsias, 146 Du May, 38 Dupront, Alphonse, 51, 54 Dupuy, Claude, 161 Dupuy, Clément, 161 Dupuy, Jacques, 30, 116, 160–61; mentioned, 107, 161, 209 Dupuy, Pierre, 30, 37, 115, 160, 161– 65 Dupuy brothers (aka “Adelphes”), 30, 113, 115–17, 124–25, 154, 157, 158; mentioned, 14, 38, 43, 89, 100, 107, 118, 123, 131, 156, 205 d’Urfe, Honoré, 114, 175, 176, 325 Du Vair, Guillaume (abbot of Guîtres), 38, 43, 47–48, 163, 165 Edel, Leon, 250 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 1–2 Elias, Norbert, 109 Ellmann, Richard, 250 Enzensberger, 54 Erasmus, 15, 20, 35–36, 50, 80–81, 95, 97, 122, 133–34, 193, 213, 214–17, 219–20, 221, 224–25, 324; men‑ tioned, 29, 33, 42, 43, 69, 107, 124, 157, 161, 182, 184, 208, 218, 223, 253, 254

Index of Names 375

Erycius Puteanus. See Pozzo, Enrico dal (Erycius Puteanus) Esprit, Jacques, 115 Falconet, Étienne Maurice, 278, 302 Faret, Nicolas, 107 Félibien, André, 197, 242 Feltre, Vittorino da, 80, 85–86 Fénelon, 234, 262, 284, 298, 302, 320 Ferretti, Guiliano, 150 Ficino, Marsilio, 191–200, 211; mentioned, 7, 8, 69, 76, 77, 78, 85, 93, 203 Flaubert, Gustave, 53, 238 Flaxman, John, 287, 305 Fontaine, 279 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 138, 142, 242, 244; mentioned, 34, 136, 146, 160, 234, 241, 248, 256 Forbes, 250 Forbin, Auguste de, 313 Forster, John, 250 Foucault, Michel, 146 Foucquet, 255, 262 Frances I (king of France), 321, 323 Frederick II of Prussia, 148 Frénicle, Nicolas, 175–76 Friedrich, Caspar David, 314 Frobenius, 80 Fromilhague, René, 223 Gabriel, Ange, 307 Gaburri, Niccolò, 255, 281, 288 Gaignières, François Roger de, 297, 307 Galen of Pergamon, 56, 191 Galilei, Vincenzo, 97, 187 Galileo Galilei, 206; mentioned, 45, 46, 97, 98, 120, 135, 189, 198 Gamaches, 146 Gambara, Veronica, 182 Garin, Eugenio, 192 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 250 Gassendi, Pierre, 26–27, 29–30, 31, 33, 38–39, 40–41, 42, 44–46, 48–49, 116, 118, 124, 160, 196–97; mentioned, 34, 111, 128, 135, 146, 161, 165, 253

Gaultier, Denis, 155 Gaultier, Théophile, 186 Gaza, Theodore, 85 Gelée, Claude, 185 Genet, Jean, 238 Genette, Gérard, 146, 222 Geoffrin, Madame, 142, 147, 299–300, 303 George III (king of Sweden and Goethe), 310 George of Trebizond, 85 Gibbon, Edward, 267, 270–71, 275, 278– 80, 309 Gide, André, 250–51 Giles of Viterbo (cardinal), 94 Giocosa, Giuseppe, 326 Giorgio, Francesco di, 203, 209 Giovio, Paolo, 240 Girodet, 287, 290 Giustiniani, Vincenzo, 187–88 Goclenius, Conrad, 36 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 249–50 Gombaud, Antoine. See Méré, Chevalier de (Antoine Gombaud) Goncourt brothers, 279 Gori, P. Antonio Maria, 255, 262 Gouget, Abbot, 241 Goulu, Jean, 222, 223–24 Gournay, Mademoiselle de, 222 Gracián, Baltasar, 62, 151 Gracq, Julien, 265 Granet, François Marius, 313 Gravina, 284 Gray, Hannah, 192 Grégoire, Abbé, 23 Gregory, Tullio, 201 Grimarest, 243 Grimm, Baron von (Friedreich Melchior), 147 Grocyn, William, 18, 80 Gronovius, 253 Grotius, Hugo, 106 Guade de Frontenac, Marie Henriette de, 118 Gualdo, Paolo, 39–40, 124, 184, 204–6; mentioned, 34, 128, 160, 207

376 Index of Names

Gualengius, Joannes, 91 Guarini, Guarino, 16, 17, 193 Guazzo, Stefano, 111, 113, 114, 127, 156 Guerchin (painter), 177 Guez de Balzac, Jean-Louis, 26, 30, 125, 163–64, 165, 223–24; mentioned, 107, 112, 156, 161, 166 Guise, Duchess of, 297 Guise, Duke of (François de Lorraine), 244 Gusdorf, Georges, 117 Gutenberg, 4–5 Habert, Germain, 118 Habert, Philippe (abbot of Cerisy), 118 Habert de Montmore, Henri Louis, 113, 117, 118 Hadrian, 233 Halévy, Élie, 52 Hall (moralist), 62 Hallé, Pierre, 161 Hamilton, Gavin, 290, 310 Harvey, Gabriel, 107 Haskell, Francis, 279, 293 Hazard, Paul, 13, 14, 65 Hegel, Georg, 23, 33 Heinsus, Nicholas, 161 Henri, François, 118 Henri III (king of France), 218 Henri IV (king of France), 37, 57, 99, 135 Hermogenes, 220, 322 Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 119, 248 Homer, 94, 182, 232, 248, 266, 275, 284, 288, 330 Horace, 255, 264 Huarte de San Juan, Juan, 56, 113 Huber, Michel, 288 Huet, Pierre Daniel, 30, 33, 117, 135 Hugo, Victor, 246 Humbert de Superville, David Pierre, 312 Hume, David, 147 Huppert, George, 117 Huyghens, Christiaan, 119–20, 121

Inghirami, Tommaso, 94, 96 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 185, 313 James, Henry, 145 James I (king of England), 57, 60, 63, 64 Jerome (saint), 5 Jesus Christ, 326, 327 John XXIII (antipope), 71, 207 Johnson, Samuel, 249–50 Joubert, Joseph, 246 Jove, Paul, 75, 97, 172, 351n10 Jovianus. See Pontano, Giovanni (Jovianus Pontanus) Joyce, James, 5 Julienne, Jean de, 301 Julius II (pope), 93, 94, 95, 181, 202, 207, 208 Julius Caesar, 55 Justel, Henri, 158 Justinian (Emperor), 8, 76 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 53, 320–21 Kapuściński, 54 Kauffman, Angelica, 310 Kelley, Donald, 117 Kepler, Johannes, 198 Keyserling, Hermann von, 53–54, 64 Kipling, Rudyard, 271 Kirschstein, Max, 66 Koselleck, Reinhart, 268 Koyre, Alexandre, 117 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 74 Kühlmann, Wilhelm, 67 La Blache, Vidal de, 52 La Boderie, Guy Le Fèvre de, 196 La Boétie, Étienne de, 218 Laboureur, Louis Le, 30–31 La Bruyère, 62, 141, 248 Laertius, Diogenes, 230, 240 La Fare, 140 La Fayette, Comte de, 115 La Fayette, Madame de, 115, 244 Lafond, Jean, 159, 165

Index of Names 377

La Fontaine, Jean de, 140, 146, 165, 166, 249 Lagrenée, 286, 303 La Hoguette, Fortin de, 115, 116, 125, 149–58, 346n16, 348n2 Lallermand, Jean, 21 La Luzerne, Gabary de, 161 Lambartini (cardinal). See Benedict XIV Lambertini (pope) Lambert, Madame de, 115, 142, 146, 147, 257 Lamoignon family, 117 La Mothe Le Vayer, François, 150 La Motte, 256 Lamy, Bernard, 146 Landino, Christoforo, 90, 126 Lang, Matthias, 95 Lanson, Gustave, 65–66, 248 Lanzi, Luigi, 309–10 La Poterie, Antoine de, 118 La Rivière, Jacques de, 116, 158 La Rochefoucauld, François de (moralist), 62, 115, 132, 140 La Rochefoucauld, Monsieur de (statesman), 26, 339n2 Larroque, Tamizey de, 30, 150 La Sablière, Madame de, 158 La Salle, Gigault de, 302, 303–4 La Serre, Puget de, 149 Lassalle, Roger, 34 Latimer, William, 80 Laurens, Pierre, 159 Le Beau, Abbot, 300 Le Blanc, Abbot, 283 Le Brun, Charles, 285, 291 Leclercq, Jean (monk), 73, 173 Le Gallois, 121 Leibniz, Gottfried, 23, 33, 284 le More, Ludovic, 77 Lemoyne, François, 307 Leo X Medici (pope): mentioned, 19, 79, 95, 181, 194, 202, 207 Leonardi, Monsignor, 178, 182–83 Leonardo da Vinci, 89, 283 Leopold (grand duke of Tuscany), 120 Le Roy, Louis, 34, 128

Le Sueur, 291 Leto, Pomponio. See Pomponius Laetus (Pomponio Leto) L’Hopital, Michel de, 43 Liddell, H. G., 229 Ligorio, Pirro, 280, 332 Linacre, Thomas, 18, 79, 80 Lipsius, Justus, 29, 37, 39, 92, 217, 218– 23; mentioned, 38, 42, 100, 205 Löber, Christian, 24 Locke, John, 266 Longinus, Cassius, 275, 324–33 Longueil, Bruno, 218 Lorenzo the Magnificent, 98 Lorraine, Christine de, 188 Lorraine, Duchess of, 297 Lorraine, François de (duke of Guise), 244 Louis I, Prince of Condé, 121, 239 Louis XII (king of France), 77 Louis XIII (king of France): mentioned, 43, 57, 60, 63, 64, 109, 114, 115, 121, 152, 154 Louis XIV (king of France), 23, 24, 31, 34, 79, 80, 116–17, 135, 138, 140, 153, 242, 243, 281–82, 289, 301, 318, 320, 324 Louis XV (king of France), 143, 258, 282, 285, 291, 296, 300, 303, 320 Louis XVI (king of France), 296, 310 Louis XVIII (king of France), 314 Lovati, Lovato, 84 Loyrette, Henri, 293, 306 Lucan, 270 Lucien, 138, 182, 234 Luther, Martin, 20, 208 Lüthy, Hubert, 52 Mabillon, Jean, 253–54, 298 Mably, Gabriel Bonnet, abbé de, 318–19, 320 Macchiavelli, Gian Giacomo, 312 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 3, 185, 270, 323–24 Macrobius, Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius, 88, 126, 157, 264 Maffei, Scipione, 255, 299, 332

378 Index of Names

Magalotti, Lorenzo, 119, 195 Magendie, 165 Maintenon, Madame de, 280, 301 Malebranche, Nicolas, 135, 137, 256, 266 Malézieu, Nicolas de, 147 Malherbe, François de, 107, 114, 156, 165, 243 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 72 Mallet, 278 Manning, Henry Edward (cardinal), 242 Mantuano, Battista, 74 Manutius, Aldus, 5, 17–20, 76, 78–81, 194, 206, 207; mentioned, 9, 82, 98, 131, 211 Manutius, Paul, 217 Manutuano, Battista, 180 Marais, Mathieu, 124 Margolin, Jean-Claude, 214 Mariani, Miarelli, 312, 365n9 Mariette, Pierre Jean, 282, 283, 288, 303, 304, 305, 306 Marin, Joseph Charles, 307 Marino, Giambattista, 189 Marivaux, Pierre de, 112, 139, 143, 145 Marmontel, 279 Marolles, Michel de, 152 Marriette, Pierre-Jean, 280–81, 281 Martelli, Ugolino, 99 Marx, Karl, 279, 296 Massii (cardinal), 333 Maucroix, 165 Maurois, André, 229, 251 Mazarin (cardinal), 56, 89, 140, 150, 297 Mazarin, Duchess, 147, 244 McLuhan, Marshall, 1 Mead, Richard, 281 Medici, Catherine de’, 90 Medici, Cosimo de’, 77, 85, 99, 187, 192 Medici, Ferdinand de’, 188 Medici, Giovanni de’. See Leo X Medici (pope) Medici, Giuliano de’, 96 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 96, 191, 192 Medici, Marie de’, 99 Médon, Bernard, 161 Mei, Girolamo, 97, 187

Mellan, Claude, 45 Ménage, Gilles, 112, 116, 158, 161, 166 Mencke, Johannes Burckhardt, 131–32, 224–25 Mencke, Otto, 131, 224–25 Méré, Chevalier de (Antoine Gombaud), 120, 141–42, 146 Mersenne, Marin, 31, 47, 117, 122; mentioned, 29, 107, 109, 125, 135 Michelangelo, 99, 186, 187, 312, 331, 332 Michelet, Jules, 51, 246 Mignard, Nicolas, 289 Mirandole, Pic de la, 78, 203 Mitton, 120 Molé, Mathieu, 162 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 140; mentioned, 112, 136, 146, 165, 166, 243 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 266, 267, 271, 272, 277, 279, 292, 319 Monconys, 119 Moncrif, Paradis de, 142, 143–45 Montabert, Paillot de, 310–11 Montaigne, 33, 86, 152, 156, 196, 197, 198, 217–18, 221–22, 223, 230–31, 234, 253, 297, 324–25; mentioned, 6, 38, 68, 105, 108, 112, 118, 126, 128, 130, 131, 136, 138, 149, 150, 206, 249, 250 Montemayor, Jorge de, 176 Montesquieu, Charles, 52–53, 53, 320 Monteverdi, Claudio, 188 Montfaucon, Bernard de, 253–54, 270, 282, 305, 307 Montmaur, Pierre de, 112, 166 Montmore, Henri Louis Habert de. See Habert de Montmore, Henri Louis Montor, Artaud de, 310, 311, 313 Montpensier, Mademoiselle de, 153, 158 Moray, Robert, 120 More, Thomas, 21, 73, 134 Morelli, Jacopo (abbot), 309 Morhof, Daniel Georg, 23, 62, 125, 127– 31 Motteville, Madame de, 153 Murat, Caroline, 313 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 91, 255

Index of Names 379

Muret, Marc-Antoine, 185, 217 Murphy, James, 213 Mussato, Albertino, 84 Musurus, Marco, 18, 79 Naipaul, V. S., 54 Naudé, Gabriel, 34, 38, 129, 150, 161, 245 Nepo, Cornelius, 231 Neuilly, Comte de, 254–55, 259, 261 Neveu, Bruno, 68 Newton, Sir Isaac, 13, 33, 242, 284 Nicaise, Claude (abbot), 116, 117, 158 Niccoli, Niccolo, 16 Nicholas V (pope), 207 Nicolas of Clairvaux (monk), 72 Nicole, Pierre, 132, 141–42, 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 272 Nisard, Charles, 279, 289 Nodier, Charles, 295 Nora, Pierre, 51 Noris (cardinal), 255 Oedipus, 230–31, 232 Ogier, François, 158 Oldenburg, Henry, 119 Orsi, Giovan Gioseffo, 299 Ottley, William Young, 311–12 Oudin, Father, 257 Ovid, 18, 19 Paciaudi, Paolo, 289 Palissot, Charles, 132 Parigi, Giulio, 188 Pâris, Pierre Charles, 311 Pascal, Blaise, 107, 110–11, 120, 135, 136, 140, 141, 224–25, 299; mentioned, 109, 119, 142, 146, 165, 246, 297 Pasquier, Etienne, 52 Passionei, Domenico Silvio (cardinal), 253, 257 Patin, Guy, 34, 89, 121, 123, 245 Patrizi, Francesco, 209 Paul of Tarsus (saint), 87, 213, 326 Paul II (pope), 77, 95 Paul III Farnese (pope), 36, 208–9 Paul V Borghese (pope), 184, 206

Paulinus of Nola, 93 Pavai, Antonio Guainerio da, 191 Pecquet (doctor), 119 Peiresc, Nicolas Claude Fabri de, 26–49, 107, 116, 122, 124, 196–97, 198, 199, 205; mentioned, 57, 60, 131, 150, 159, 161, 165, 206, 253, 254, 280, 288 Pellison-Fontanier, Paul, 152, 156, 348n6 Peri (artist), 99 Peri, Jacopo, 188 Pericles, 137 Perrault, Charles, 27, 242, 282 Perrault, Claude, 107 Perrault brothers, 121 Perrot, Jacques Auguste, 161 Petit, 120 Petrarch, 3–4, 6, 7, 70, 72, 73–74, 83– 85, 88, 130, 133–34, 172–75, 176, 178, 179, 214, 252, 299, 320, 352n13, 358n4; mentioned, 21, 35, 39, 68, 69, 82, 94, 95, 124, 131, 170, 182, 185, 188, 206, 254, 269, 317 Phalerum, Demetrius de, 130 Phélypeaux family, 118 Philippe II, 56 Philostratus, 231 Pierius. See Salutati, Coluccio (Pierius) Pigalle, 285, 303 Pignoria, 42 Pinchesne, Marc, 114 Pinelli, Gian Vincenzo, 37, 39–40, 42, 124, 184, 203–6; mentioned, 29, 30, 38, 43, 196, 209, 211 Pintard, René, 13–15, 66, 109, 150, 160 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 36 Piroli, Thomas, 305, 312 Pisan, Christine de, 112 Pius II Piccolomini (pope), 89, 207 Pius VI Braschi (pope), 310 Plaisance, Michel, 187 Plato, 194, 235, 322; mentioned, 2, 5, 8, 25, 76, 77, 79, 126, 137, 178, 191, 232, 326 Plautus, 77, 95, 96, 223 Plethon, Gemistus, 85 Pliny the Elder, 76, 233, 240, 288

380 Index of Names

Plotinus, 192, 198 Plutarch, 233; mentioned, 126, 152, 163, 231, 240, 248, 249 Poggio. See Bracciolini, Poggio Politian (Angelo Ambrogini), 98; mentioned, 44, 71, 78, 188, 203 Poliziano, Angelo. See Politian (Angelo Ambrogini) Polybius, 270 Pomian, Krzysztof, 67 Pomponius Laetus (Pomponio Leto), 77, 93, 94, 95 Pontano, Giovanni (Jovianus Pontanus), 77, 177, 322–23 Ponte, Giulia da, 203 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste (Molière). See Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) Possevino (monk), 217 Poussin, Nicolas, 197, 199, 332–33; mentioned, 177, 185, 196, 233, 242, 243, 265, 291, 332–33 Pozzi, Giovanni, 172 Pozzo, Cassiano dal, 29, 205, 289, 332 Pozzo, Enrico dal (Erycius Puteanus), 39, 42 Previtali, Giovanni, 293 Prit, George, 24–25 Proust, Marcel, 53, 114, 145, 248 Puccini, Giacomo, 326 Quaï, Maurice, 295 Quincy, Quatremère de, 8, 289, 295, 300, 302, 310, 312–13, 332 Quinet, Edgar, 319–20 Quint, Charles, 56 Quintilian, 7, 331; mentioned, 8, 95, 130, 165, 193, 212, 215, 222, 323, 324 Quintin, Louis Quarré de, 259, 260, 263 Rabelais, François, 99, 123, 126 Racan, Honorat de Bueil, marquis de, 243 Racine, Jean, 165, 239, 256 Rambouillet, Marquise de, 113–15, 154 Ramus, Petrus, 100 Rand, William, 33–34, 48–49

Raphael (painter), 93–95, 181, 202, 203, 208, 263; mentioned, 77, 174, 178, 202, 207, 233, 323 Renan, Ernest, 51, 54, 236, 267, 269, 272 Renaudot, Théophraste, 107, 121, 224 Requier, 33 Rhenanus, Beatus, 34 Riario (cardinal), 20, 95, 96 Riccoboni, Luigi, 285 Richelieu, Alphonse-Louis du Plessis de (cardinal), 43 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis (cardinal and statesman), 43, 61–62, 129, 224; mentioned, 60, 80, 106, 107, 156, 159, 321 Rigault, Adrien, 34, 160 Rigault, Nicolas, 30, 34, 123, 124, 154, 161–65 Robault, 119 Robert, Hubert, 299–300, 303 Robert of Anjou (king of Naples), 84 Roberval (mathematician), 119 Rocheblave, 279 Rohan, Charles de, 303 Rohault, 120 Rollin, Charles, 318, 320 Ronsard, Pierre de, 100 Rosenblum, Robert, 305 Roslin, 303 Rossi, Paolo, 55 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 269, 270, 271– 76; mentioned, 148, 278, 291, 292, 318, 319, 320 Rubens, Peter Paul, 92, 332 Rubens, Philip, 92 Ruscelli, Giacomo, 202 Sablé, Madame de, 115 Sainte-Albine, Remond de, 143–44 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 114–15, 245–48, 249, 250 Sainte-Palaye, La Curne de, 307 Saint-Évremond, Charles de, 146, 147, 249 Saint-Mard, Toussaint Rémond de, 138– 39, 146, 284

Index of Names 381

Saint-Réal, Abbot of, 244 Saint-Yenne, Lafont de, 281–82, 284, 306 Sallo, Denis de, 23, 224 Sallust, 223, 258, 259–61 Salmasius, 29 Salmon, M., 116 Salmon family, 158 Salutati, Coluccio (Pierius), 174, 176; mentioned, 6, 7, 69, 70, 83 Sangallo, Giuliano da, 202 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 174, 175, 176, 177– 78, 181–82; mentioned, 170, 171, 180, 184 Santi Bartoli, Pietro, 303–4 Sanuto, Marino, 18, 19, 79 Sarpi, Paolo, 22, 100, 184, 206 Sarrau, Ismaël, 161 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 238 Saumaise, Claude, 30, 37, 44, 129, 246n18, 280 Savonarola, 77 Scaliger, Joseph Justus, 37, 38, 55; mentioned, 29, 42, 44, 100, 128, 259, 280 Schalk, Fritz, 20, 68 Schnapp, Alain, 279 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 297 Scott, R., 229 Scudéry, Mademoiselle de, 154 Séguier family, 117 Seneca, 72–73, 92, 214, 223 Sermain, Jean-Paul, 146 Sévigné, Marquise de, 297–98 Shaftsbury, Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), 147 Sidney, Philip, 176 Sieburg, Friedrich, 52 Sixtus IV della Rovere (pope), 95, 181, 183 Socrates, 63, 235, 321, 322, 326 Sophocles, 230 Sorbière, Samuel, 25, 118–20 Speroni, Sperone, 42, 99, 183, 202, 205 Spinoza, Baruch, 25, 266 Spitzer, Leo, 86–87, 93 Stanhope, Philip, 148 Statius, 18

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 54, 252, 262, 310, 313 Strachey, Lytton, 241–42, 248, 251 Strauss, Leo, 235, 266, 267, 271–72, 276, 292, 319 Suetonius, 233, 235, 238–39, 242, 248, 249 Sulpitius, Johannes (Sulpizio da Verolo), 95–96 Summonzio, 177 Swift, Jonathan, 298 Tacitus, 55, 92, 184, 212, 221, 223, 234, 270 Taine, Hippolyte, 51, 248 Tallemant des Réaux, Gédéon, 113, 114 Tasso, 97 Tencin, Madame de, 139, 345n4; mentioned, 115, 142, 146, 147 Terence, 77, 95, 223 Testi, Fulvio, 332 Textor, Ravisius, 55 Thévenot, Melchisédech, 120 Thucydides, 54, 55, 230, 232 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, 309 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 51, 52, 279, 280 Tomasini, Jacopo Filippo, 42, 172 Torricelli, 120 Traversari, Ambrogio, 74 Trissino, 183 Trublet, Abbot, 142–43 Tunstal, Cuthbert, 80 Turnèbe, 44 Urban V (pope), 170 Urban VIII (poet-pope), 298 Valéry, Paul, 190, 248 Valincour, Jean-Baptiste-Henri de, 242, 244 Valla, Lorenzo: mentioned, 33, 39, 44, 170, 188, 252, 322 Valois, Henri de, 122–23, 160, 161, 165, 166 Valori, Philippe, 191 Van Delft, Louis, 55

382 Index of Names

van Loo, Carle, 275, 292, 303 Varchi, Benedetto, 99, 183, 186 Vasari, Giorgio, 186, 187, 240–41; mentioned, 8, 75, 97, 181, 242, 307 Vassé, 286, 290, 303 Vaugelas, 115, 137 Veblen, Thorstein, 296 Vecchi, Orazio, 188 Venosa, Gesualdo da, 221 Venuti, 288 Vergerio, Pier Paulo, 16, 17 Veroli, Giovanni Sulpizio da. See Sulpitius, Johannes (Sulpizio da Verolo) Verona, Guarino da, 80, 90, 92, 207 Veronese, Paolo, 203, 263 Vico, Gianbattista, 44, 269, 270, 277–78 Vien, Jean-Marie, 286, 287, 290, 291–92, 305; mentioned, 286, 287, 290, 303 Vigée-Le Brun, Élizabeth, 304, 305 Vigneul-Marville, 23, 98 Villars, Montfaucon de, 145–46 Vilvault, M. de, 116–17 Vilvault family, 158 Virgil, 176, 305; mentioned, 84, 94, 157, 172, 178, 182, 290 Vitruvius, 95 Vivaldi, Antonio, 262 Vivant Denon, Dominique. See Denon, Dominique-Vivant Vivès, Juan Luis, 21–22 Vivonne, Catherine de (marquise de

Rambouillet). See Rambouillet, ­ arquise de M Voiture, 114, 158 Voltaire, 23, 52, 112, 245, 268, 282; mentioned, 51, 53, 80, 132, 143, 146, 147, 200, 248, 272, 276, 299, 320 Wagner, Richard, 186 Walker, 192 Walpole, Horace, 309 Waquet, François, 68 Watteau, Antoine, 143, 158, 280–81, 282, 284, 285, 301, 314 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 267, 275, 288, 302, 307, 325–26; mentioned, 291, 292, 294, 295, 320 Wood, Anthony A., 248 Woolf, Virginia, 239 Wotton, Henry, 248 Wouwer, Jan van den (Woverius), 92 Woverius. See Wouwer, Jan van den (Woverius) Xenophon, 230, 235 Yates, 192 Yates, Frances, 55 Zabarella, Francesco (cardinal), 210–11 Zanetti, 281, 288 Zuber, Roger, 159

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Marc Fumaroli is a leading scholar of French classical rhetoric and art and a professor emeritus at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne. He is a member of the Académie française, the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Société d’histoire littéraire de la France, and is president of the Société des Amis du Louvre.

Lara Vergnaud is an editor and translator. Her translations from the French include works by Ahmed Bouanani, Zahia Rahmani, Joy Sorman, Marie-­ Monique Robin, Geoffroy Lagasnerie, and Scholastique Mukasonga, among others. She lives in Washington, DC.