Vespasiano da Bisticci

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Vespasiano da Bisticci (Fiorentino) (1421 – 1498) was a Florentine humanist and librarian.

He was chiefly a dealer in books, and had a share in the formation of all the great libraries of the time. When Cosimo de' Medici wished to create the Laurentian Library of Florence, Vespasiano advised him and sent him by Tommaso Parentucelli (later Pope Nicholas V) a systematic catalogue, which became the plan of the new collection. In twenty-two months Vespasiano had 200 volumes made for Cosimo by twenty-five copyists. Most of them were, under the circumstances, books of theology and liturgical chant.

He had performed important services for the diffusion of classical authors when Nicholas V, the true founder of the Vatican Library, became pope. He devoted fourteen years to collecting the library of Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, organizing it in a quite modern manner; it contained the catalogues of the Vatican, of San Marco, Florence, of the Visconti Library at Pavia, and even that of Oxford.

Vespasiano had only a mediocre knowledge of Latin, and he is one of the few writers of the time who acknowledged it. He left a collection of 300 biographies, which is a source of the first rank for the history of fifteenth-century humanism: Vite di uomini illustri del secolo XV, published by Mai, Spicilegium Romanum, I, Rome, 1839; and by Frati, Bologna, 1892. He is certainly inferior to Italian historians such as Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, but he admirably depicts the atmosphere of the period. His accounts plunge the reader into the atmosphere of Florence; they contain delicate pictures of manners, charming portraits, noble female figures, of which last point it is possible to judge by reading the biography of Alessandro Bardi (ed. Mai, 593). The general tone is that of a moralist, who shows the dangers of the Renaissance, especially for women, warns against the reading of the novelists, and reproaches the Florentines with usury and illicit gains. Vespasiano is a panegyrist of Nicholas V, the great book-lover; he is severe to the point of injustice against Pope Callistus III, the indifferent lender of books, which, however, he did not give over to pillage, as Vespasiano accuses him of doing.

[edit] References

Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance, I (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1877), 198, 236-39, 261, 354
Muntz and Fabre, La bibliotheque du Vatican au XV siecle (Paris, 1887), 116
Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, II (Cambridge, 1908), 95.
"Vespasiano da Bisticci". Catholic Encyclopedia. (1913). New York: Robert Appleton Company.