The Revolution of the Hand: Scripts and Manuscripts in Poggio Bracciolini's Florence

Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concettoc'un marmo solo in sé non circonscrivacol suo superchio, e solo a quello arrivala man che ubbidisce all'intelletto.¹

—Michelangelo

The labour of the writer is the refreshment of the reader.The one depletes the body, the other advances the mind.Whoever you are, therefore, do not scorn but rather bemindful of the work of the one labouring to bring you profit.

—The Silos Beatus, twelfth century

The study of antiquity and its language led the humanists to develop new standards of calligraphy by reviving a previously used script known as the antique minuscule. At a time when Greek and Roman culture had come to matter most, scholars became occupied and preoccupied with classical texts and adopted the lower-case script used during the Carolingian Renaissance from the eighth to the twelfth century, with which most early manuscripts were copied. This essay will shed [End Page S-193] further light upon the manuscript tradition and the notion of written language, particularly in reference to fifteenth-century Florence and Poggio Bracciolini's concern for clarity in penmanship. The theme of this renovatio scriptoria can be illustrated hic et nunc by the manuscript Strozzianus 96, copied by Bracciolini himself.

Figure 15.1.

Coluccio Salutati, De verecundia, in the hand of Poggio Bracciolini (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Strozzianus 96, f. 1v)

[End Page S-194]

I will begin with an examination of the transition from the "barbaric" Gothic script, the littera moderna, which circulated until the thirteenth century, to an older and simpler script, the littera antiqua. While analyzing the re-emergence of this style of lettering, I will reflect upon the role that Bracciolini's book hand played in this historical evolution, offering possible points of reflection on the revival of various graphic conventions within the Italian peninsula, in tune with what Malcolm Parkes calls a modern "grammar of legibility": that is, "the decorum to ensure that the message of a text [is] conveyed in the written medium."²

Poggius Florentinus (1380-1459), as Bracciolini proudly called himself, was an influential intellectual, a pivotal figure in the early history of humanism, a well-known scholar, and a prolific writer. In David Rundle's words, the Florentine was "the most human of humanists."³ In 1405 Bracciolini was made scriptor in the Papal Curia; in 1410 he took the role of Papal Secretary and, finally, in 1453 he became Chancellor of Florence, serving seven pontiffs during his fifty years in the papal service. He joined the generation of civic humanists who glorified learning (studium), literacy (eloquentia), and erudition (eruditio) as the chief concerns of man, in which government is the common business of its citizens. Later, as a book hunter, Bracciolini found and identified many classical manuscripts, including Lucretius's De Rerum Natura⁴; hence we owe to his travels and his own pen the discovery and recovery of ancient texts and commentaries. Moldy and inaccessible, these texts lay hidden in various European libraries for hundreds of years. Moreover, and to the point of this essay, as a young man Bracciolini had been employed by Coluccio Salutati as a copyist in Florence and there had mastered the art of writing. His earliest surviving manuscript in the new humanistic round hand is dated around 1402-03, and by 1420 a significant number of scribes were copying books in his new hand as a scrittura chiara, which I examine here. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, the new script was also employed in an official capacity throughout Europe and was becoming the standard Roman type in printed books. I argue that humanists talked politics with their hands, by asserting not only the principle of imitatio but also a renewed graphic experience associated [End Page S-195] with its ideas. The change in their writing system reflected a political statement, as it shifted attention from the hand as the agent of writing to the hand as an ideological tool, through which these scholars could appropriate the past in all...