William Roscoe and the Wonders of Not Travelling

A thought came to me as I moved from slumber to wakefulness this unEnglishly warm Sunday morning. As the title suggests it is about William Roscoe, the Liverpudlian banker and Renaissance scholar at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

It is nearly a year since the day-conference dedicated to Roscoe in his hometown, at which I spoke on his friend and Poggio’s first modern biographer, William Shepherd. The proceedings of that conference are to be edited by the indomitable Stella Fletcher. A couple of weeks ago, I was involved in organising a rather different workshop, in Oxford and under the aegis of the Europaeum, on historical approaches to Europeanisation. At that workshop, fleeting mention was made to the Grand Tour as a process of Europeanising — and that set me thinking about our Liverpudlian friend.

If Roscoe’s name is remembered, it will be — I suspect — most often recalled for the curious fact that the author of two volumes on the Medici never set foot in the city of their birth or even visited any part of the Italian peninsula. I say ‘curious’: for some scholars, it seems simply inexplicable, for others, it is a source of gentle mockery.  For much of his life, Roscoe had the money to travel and he expressed the desire to see Florence but he never put the effort into actually crossing the Channel and heading towards the Mediterranean. He relied on friends to visit archives and gather information for him in Italy. How could, it is sometimes implied, a man who had never seen the Palazzo Vecchio or the Medici church of San Lorenzo consider himself competent to write about them?

A recent attempt has been made to answer that question; it can be described as the diachronic justification. Roscoe may have chosen not to travel across Europe; he could not but fail to travel across time. And the inability to visit Florence or Rome as they actually were in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was a much greater barrier to comprehension than not touring contemporary Italy. Roscoe, on this analysis, was little more hampered than all historians in appreciating the subject of their studies.

That argument may be correct in logic, though it fails to grapple with an intellectual context that would see a cityscape as the reflection of its people’s spirit. In other words, walking the Florentine streets, however transformed they were from their pristine Renaissance state, would still be able to imbue the perceptive viewer with a sense of the identity that was moulded by and, in turn, moulded its inhabitants.

I do not know whether Roscoe read or knew of Herder, and whether he subscribed to similar ideas of a people’s genius — he certainly did have a sense of Florence’s particular identity, in a way which is a forerunner to Hans Baron’s concept of civic humanism. And he could develop this thinking at a desk far removed from the location about which he was writing. There is, it strikes me, another and more positive way to describe Roscoe’s failure to travel: he may have perceived that culture had developed so far that he did not need to make the journey. After all, his mercantile contacts could ensure that Italian ‘primitive’ paintings could arrive at his door, as could other objets d’art as well as continental books. Those paintings, including  a beautiful-beyond-words Simone Martini now hang in the Walker, not directly by Roscoe’s gift but by the generosity of those who purchased his estate when he fell into dire financial difficulty. The rationale for such a gallery, public or private, as with museums of the same period, was to have available artefacts evocative of distant lands: why would one need to travel abroad when the foreign travelled to England? Or, to put this another way, is it Europeanisation when cultural commerce is so vibrant that Europe can stay at home?

There is the over-used passage from Machiavelli’s letters where he describes retiring in the evening from his daily chores, putting on (metaphorically, we understand) classical garb and conversing in his study with the ancients. He conjures up an image of time-travel through solitude. Perhaps, for Roscoe the non-conformist, there was a similar retreat into contemplation, surrounded by the things of the other world which he visited in his imagination, as he evoked pen-potraits of a place he had seen only in his mind’s eye — if ‘only’ is the right word.

For those of you who have not yet met Poggio

Following on from my last posting about William Shepherd’s Life of Poggio, I realise that I have been frightfully ill-mannered and have not introduced to you its ‘hero’, Poggio Bracciolini (1380 – 1457). I am sure many of you have already met him, but in case you are uncertain whether you would recognise him, I provide a portrait:

The image is, obviously, a nineteenth-century drawing. It is taken from the frontispiece of Tommaso Tonelli’s translation of Shepherd’s Lives, published in two volumes in 1825. It is a set of volumes which, through the miracle of e-Bay, I now own, sold to me by Gail Tothill of New York for a price which pleased my bank-balance but saddened my soul, to think in what low esteem such works must presently be held.

More of you will have met Poggio than think you have: as you walked through the Duomo in Florence, and turned to your left, averting your gaze from the English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, you would have seen a statue of one of the saints which is said to have been modelled on Poggio in cadaverous old age.

And, if you have not met Poggio there, you are well acquainted with his works. He is famous for his re-discoveries of ancient texts, ‘liberating’ Quintilian and others from monastic ‘dungeons’ (aka libraries), for reviving the art of the Ciceronian dialogue and, most enduringly, for inventing the script known as littera antiqua, the humanist bookhand which was supposedly a return to ancient elegance and which you will all recognise since, when manuscripts were joined in the world by printed books, it became the basis for Roman type — the ancestor of modern Times New Roman.

Poggio also had a lively sense of humour and an eye for the ladies. He knew how to live and when you next raise a glass of Chianti, think of him.

Liverpool, the Renaissance and a little-known manuscript of Poggio Bracciolini

This being conference season, when I flew away from Dublin, I had four days to prepare a paper for a second conference. This was a one-day event, organised in Liverpool by my friend, Stella Fletcher, and sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies, entitled ‘William Roscoe and Italy.’ Stella can be proud of herself for arranging what proved to be a highly successful occasion, held in the refined surroundings of The Athenaeum Club, and attracting both academics and a range of interested local people. It was also an an event from which I learnt greatly.

William Roscoe, Liverpudlian banker, political liberal, art collector and biographer of both Lorenzo de’ Medici, the so-called Magnifico (1796), and his corpulent son, Leo X (1805), is himself far beyond my usual intellectual stomping ground. The furthest my studies have previously reached in the history of scholarship has been the antiquaries of the early eighteenth century, in particular Thomas Hearne. But my task for the day was to discuss the work of Roscoe’s self-declared disciple, Rev. William Shepherd (1768 – 1847), who penned the first – and, so far, only – English Life of Poggio, first published in 1802, with a second revised edition in 1837. That second edition was informed by the Italian translation of Sheperd’s biography, which appeared in 1825, augmented with detailed footnotes – and undertaken by no less a person than Cavaliere Tommaso Tonelli who went on to produce the edition of Poggio Bracciolini’s letters which remained the standard work until the 1980s.

The role of Roscoe and his circle in developing British studies of the Renaissance has received some popular notice recently, including a name-check on Bettany Hughes’ BBC radio programme. It struck me from last week’s proceedings, however, that its significance may still be underestimated. In terms of the history of British scholarship, Roscoe and Shepherd – religious dissenters and political radicals wedded to their North-western identity – seem to me to mark out a particular approach to learning, quite distant from that of the antiquaries in either of the university towns or in London. In terms of the historiography of the Renaissance, these English authors, and their Italian enthusiasts, provide a perspective which has been too often overlooked because their approach was largely superseded by what could be called the Swiss school, comprising such divergent figures as Jean Charles Sismonde de Sismondi and Jacob Burckhardt. Burckhardt’s Civilisation of Italy in the Renaissance, like the works of Karl Marx in a different field, had an influence that was immense but is now increasingly incomprehensible. Burckhardt’s evocative image of the discovery of individualism, in which everything became a work of art created for one’s own use, has proven an engrossing mythology. Perhaps, though, if scholarship had not gone down that particularly beguiling path, and continued with the approach of Roscoe and Shepherd, which saw an association between mercantile cities and cultural achievement, but did not dress it up in tales of individualism, less ink may have been wasted. Roscoe was father of other myths, certainly, but perhaps they would have proven less corrosive.

My time in the Athenaeum – of which Roscoe was a founder member – was made all the more productive because I had chance to see a manuscript there. William Shepherd was given a manuscript of Poggio’s Epistolae which was sold at auction the year after his death. The manuscript survives, though it is not listed in Neil Ker’s Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, nor is it mentioned in Helene Harth’s 1980s edition of Poggio’s Lettere. The oversight might not be that surprising: when I visited the Athenaeum, they were not sure that they had any such thing but I was certain it was there as it had been seen by that exacting scholar, Martin Davies, who mentioned it in print in Italian Studies in 1993. And, sure enough, the helpful staff at the Athenaeum kindly hunted out the volume and I had a happy half-hour studying it. It had been bought by the Athenaeum at the auction of Shepherd’s library. It may not be of great textual value, but its interest lies not just in the fact that it owned by Poggio’s nineteenth-century biographer and annotated in pencil by him. The manuscript was produced in Italy in the third quarter of the century and may have spent its first years there, but what I discovered is that it has marginalia by an English hand, demonstrating it was in this country by the early sixteenth century at the latest. It is witness, then, to the English interest in that most human of humanists, Poggio Braccolini – an interest to which William Shepherd was a worthy heir.