The Swerve: Italy Reborn

In the winter of 1417, a small, affable, sharp-eyed Italian in his late thirties rode through the wooded hills of southern Germany toward a monastery he would never name. He was, by profession, a papal secretary — a master of elegant Latin who had spent years drafting the correspondence of popes — but at that particular moment he had no pope and therefore no job. The Council of Constance, the great ecclesiastical traffic jam then trying to untangle three rival claimants to the throne of St. Peter, had deposed his employer, and while cardinals schemed and delegations feasted, Poggio Bracciolini had discovered a more interesting way to spend an unemployment: he went hunting.

Not for deer. Poggio hunted books — and he was the finest book hunter of his generation, perhaps of any generation. He and his circle of Florentine friends had convinced themselves of something that sounds obvious now and was very nearly heresy then: that the monastic libraries of Europe, moldering behind their chained doors, were full of prisoners. Somewhere in those cupboards, they believed, lay the lost voices of Rome — speeches Cicero had given and no living person had read, histories, poems, treatises on architecture and law and farming — copied by Carolingian monks six centuries earlier and then forgotten, misfiled, left to the worms and the damp. The monks who guarded them often could not read them, or did not care to; to many an abbot the old pagan volumes were simply inventory, valued by weight of parchment. To Poggio they were survivors of a shipwreck — the shipwreck of the entire ancient world — still breathing, still calling out, if anyone would row toward the sound.

He had already made spectacular rescues. At the abbey of Cluny he had turned up orations of Cicero unknown for centuries. At St. Gall, the summer before, he and two friends had descended into what he described as a dungeon — a dark tower cell at the bottom of which, he wrote, lay books ‘in a sort of foul and gloomy prison’ — and had come up with, among other treasures, the first complete text of Quintilian, the greatest Roman authority on education and eloquence, which scholars had known for a thousand years only in mutilated fragments. Poggio had sat down and copied the whole enormous manuscript himself, in fifty-four days, in a hand so clear and beautiful that it would later become the model for the Roman typefaces in which nearly every book — including this one — is still printed. It is one of history’s better jokes: the font you are reading is, at bottom, one unemployed papal secretary’s handwriting.

But the find of his life, and arguably of the millennium, came that January, in the unnamed German house. We can reconstruct the scene only in outline: the letter of introduction presented to a wary abbot; the flattery, at which Poggio was professionally expert; the ledger of the library checked against the hunter’s mental list of the missing; and then the shelves themselves, the smell of cold stone and old vellum, the titles read sideways one by one. Somewhere in that room his finger stopped on a name he knew only from other men’s admiration — Titus Lucretius Carus. Roman poet. First century before Christ. Praised by Cicero, echoed by Virgil, quoted by Ovid — and then, for the better part of a thousand years, silence. The book was called De Rerum Natura. On the Nature of Things.

Poggio could not have known precisely what he held, because no one alive did; the poem’s contents survived only in reputation, a rumor of brilliance. He did know, though, that a Roman voice unheard since antiquity was speaking under his hand. He also knew the abbot would never let the volume leave the house—and here the story turns on the kind of practical detail history usually forgets to record. Poggio could not simply take it. He hired a scribe. A copy was made, at his expense, and dispatched over the Alps to his friend Niccolò Niccoli in Florence, the most obsessive book collector of the age. And then — the detail that gives the whole episode its retrospective vertigo — the original vanished. The monastery’s manuscript was never seen again. The scribe’s copy itself eventually disappeared too, though not before Niccoli had transcribed it in his own exquisite hand. Every text of Lucretius in the world today — every printed edition, every translation, every quotation in every classroom — descends from that chain of two copies, one of them lost. The poem that would help tilt the modern mind crossed the fifteenth century the way a single ember crosses a night of wind: cupped, carried, and very nearly out.

What made the rescue more than an antiquarian triumph was what the poem contained. De rerum natura is seven and a half thousand lines of the most dangerous ideas of antiquity, set to some of its most beautiful verse — the philosophy of Epicurus, sung in Latin hexameters with missionary fervor. Its claims, delivered fourteen centuries before the instruments existed to test them, read today like a prophecy filed under poetry.

Everything, Lucretius wrote, is made of atoms — minute, indivisible, indestructible particles, moving forever through an infinite void. The variety of the world is combination: atoms hooking, clustering, breaking apart, recombining, so that a dying oak and the soil it becomes and the wheat that grows from the soil are one matter in different arrangements. Nothing is created from nothing; nothing is ever truly destroyed. The universe was not made for us, or by anyone; nature is not a kingdom but a process, ceaseless, purposeless, and fertile. The gods, if they exist at all, dwell far away in perfect serenity and take no interest in human affairs — they do not send plagues, answer prayers, or read hearts. The soul is made of atoms like everything else, and dies with the body; and this, the poem insists, is not the terrible news but the liberating news, because it means there is nothing to fear after death — no judgment, no torment, no eternity of either kind. Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not. The proper business of a human life is therefore not to appease invisible powers but to diminish pain, seek understanding, and take pleasure — soberly understood — in the one world we are given.

And at the heart of the system, one strange and consequential detail. If atoms simply fell through the void in straight parallel lines, Lucretius reasoned, they would never meet, and nothing would ever happen. So they must, at no fixed time and no fixed place, deviate — an unpredictable, infinitesimal wobble, just enough to cause a collision, which causes another, which cascades into worlds. He called it the clinamen: the swerve. It was physics, of a speculative sort; it was also, as Stephen Greenblatt saw in choosing it as the title of his account of Poggio’s find, the perfect emblem for what the poem itself did to history—a minute deviation — one manuscript, one reader, one winter — and the collisions cascade.

Read across the following century by Ficino and Machiavelli, More and Montaigne — who copied lines of Lucretius into the beams of his study — the poem did not convert Europe to atomism. Its influence was subtler and more corrosive: it demonstrated, in unanswerably beautiful Latin, that a complete, coherent, morally serious account of the world was possible without providence, without punishment, and without priests. It reopened a door that had been walled up for a thousand years and disguised as masonry. The Renaissance did not walk through that door all at once. It was enough, at first, that men remembered the door was there.

The rebirth had two midwives, and the second was a disaster. While Poggio and his friends were prying Latin out of northern monasteries, the other half of the classical inheritance — the Greek half, the older and richer half — sat in the libraries of a dying empire. Byzantium had been shrinking for centuries, a thousand-year Roman rump state contracting around its capital; but within the walls of Constantinople, scholars still read Homer and Plato in the original as living literature, in an unbroken line of teachers and copyists running back to antiquity. Western Europe, for its part, had lost its Greek almost entirely. Petrarch, the father of the whole humanist movement, owned a Homer he could not read; he used to kiss the binding.

The remedy began politely. In 1397 the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati invited a Byzantine diplomat and scholar named Manuel Chrysoloras to come and teach Greek — the first such professorship in the West in seven hundred years. The lecture hall was full of grown men, some of them eminent, sitting like schoolboys over their alphabets: the tongue of Plato being spelled out, letter by letter, to a civilization that had forgotten it. Chrysoloras stayed only a few years, but his students became the translators, and his students’ students the teachers, of a movement; the trickle of Greek manuscripts westward — bought, copied, begged from Byzantine contacts — became a steady stream.

Then the stream became a flood, for the worst possible reason. On the twenty-ninth of May, 1453, after a seven-week siege conducted with the largest cannon the world had yet seen, the army of the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmed II broke through the land walls of Constantinople. The last Roman emperor died fighting in the breach; the city that had guarded the Greek inheritance for eleven centuries was sacked; and the scholars who could get out got out, carrying what they could. What they could carry was, disproportionately, books. Refugee scholars had been drifting west for two generations as the empire failed, but 1453 turned drift into diaspora — grammarians, philosophers, and copyists scattering into Italy with the working library of Greek civilization in their baggage. Cardinal Bessarion, a Byzantine convert to the Roman church who understood exactly what was being lost, spent his fortune buying up the refugees’ manuscripts and willed the collection — the greatest Greek library in the West — to Venice, where it remains. He called it, in his deed of gift, something close to what this book would call it: a flame that should not be allowed to go out among the ruins.

It is one of history’s standing ironies that the fall of the second Rome helped resurrect the first. The catastrophe did not cause the Renaissance — Poggio’s generation was already digging. Still, it force-fed the movement at precisely the moment Italy was rich enough, curious enough, and vain enough to receive it. Plato arrived in bulk just as a city of bankers was looking for something magnificent to spend itself on.

The banker was Cosimo de’ Medici, and he is one of the most consequential patrons in the history of thought precisely because he was not a thinker. He was a money-changer’s son who built the Medici bank into the financial engine of Europe — branch offices from London to Rome, the papal account in his ledgers — and who understood, with a banker’s instinct for undervalued assets, that the recovered learning flooding into Italy was the cheapest greatness money could buy. Palaces crumble and dynasties sour, but a man who funds the return of Plato purchases a kind of immortality no condottiere could win with cannon.

The conversion moment, if it deserves the word, came in 1439, when the councils of the church met in Florence — at Cosimo’s expense — to attempt a last-minute reunion of East and West against the Turks. The theology failed; the sideshow succeeded. Among the Byzantine delegation was the aged philosopher Gemistos Plethon, who gave the Florentines something they had never heard: lectures on Plato from a man for whom Plato was not a rumor but a living system. Cosimo, then in his fifties, sat in the audience. Twenty years later, near the end of his life, he acted on what he had heard. He installed the young son of his physician — a frail, brilliant, melancholy scholar named Marsilio Ficino — in a villa at Careggi, in the hills above Florence, handed him manuscripts of the complete Plato, and gave him history’s most enviable job description: translate everything.

Ficino did — thirty-six dialogues, the first complete Plato in a Western language — but the sequence of his labors tells us something wonderful about the age. Partway into the great project, Cosimo ordered him to stop. Another manuscript had arrived from the East: the Corpus Hermeticum, the collected revelations of Hermes Trismegistus — ‘thrice-great Hermes’ — an Egyptian sage believed to be older than Moses, the fountainhead of all wisdom, of whom Plato himself was supposedly a late student. Plato could wait; the older magic could not. Dying, Cosimo wanted Hermes first. Ficino obediently set aside the Republic to translate what was, though no one would prove it for another century and a half, a collection of Greek mystical texts written centuries after Christ — a forgery of antiquity, as it were, mistaken for its source.

The episode is usually told as a joke on the Renaissance. It is better read as a diagnosis. These men were not doing what we call classical scholarship, coolly sorting the genuine from the spurious; they were prospecting for revelation, convinced that the further back you dug, the closer you came to the pure original fire from which all knowledge had degenerated. The Renaissance looked backward with an intensity that ended up propelling everything forward — a civilization walking into the future while facing the past.

Around Ficino and his villa gathered the loose constellation of scholars, poets, and gilded young men that posterity calls the Platonic Academy of Florence. It had no charter, no degrees, no building — it was a conversation, sustained across decades, about the soul, beauty, love, and the dignity of man, conducted over dinners a banker paid for. It may be the most influential dinner party in Western history. Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cosimo’s grandson, grew up inside it; Botticelli painted out of it; and through Ficino’s letters — he was among the great correspondents of the age — its ideas traveled to every court in Europe. The flame, which survival had kept in monasteries for a thousand years, had found a new kind of keeper: not the scribe preserving what he barely understood, but the patron and the philosopher deliberately blowing on the coals to see how bright they could burn.

What the coals produced, at the movement’s high noon, was a new model of the human being — and its first full prototype was Leon Battista Alberti. The illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine merchant house, Alberti made himself, by force of will and appalling energy, into the pattern that later ages would name after his era: the Renaissance man. The anonymous life of him written in his own circle — probably, scholars wink, by Alberti himself — records the specifications with a straight face. He could, it claims, leap over the shoulders of a standing man from a flat-footed start. He could ride the wildest horses, throw a coin so that it rang against the high vault of the cathedral, endure heat and cold with indifference, and master any art or science he turned to. He was a lawyer by training, a papal functionary by employment, and by vocation everything else: author of the first modern treatise on painting, which taught artists the geometry of perspective; author of the first great modern work on architecture since Vitruvius; designer of church facades that still organize the face of Italian cities; writer of comedies, dialogues on the family, treatises on the horse and on cryptography — he devised the first polyalphabetic cipher in the West, centuries ahead of its systematic use. Somewhere in the flood of it he set down the sentence that serves as the whole era’s epitaph, and this chapter’s: ‘A man can do all things if he but wills them.’

The sentence matters more than the résumé. Medieval civilization had been, among many other things, a machine for teaching humility: man was fallen, his nature fixed, his station assigned, his knowledge bounded by revelation. Alberti’s boast — and the careers of the men who made it plausible — announced a different anthropology. The human being was not a fixed quantity but a project; not a creature completed at creation but a self under construction. It was the most consequential idea the Renaissance produced, and within a generation it received its manifesto.

In 1486 a twenty-three-year-old count named Giovanni Pico della Mirandola — rich, beautiful, arrogant, and learned to a degree that alarmed his contemporaries — announced that he would defend, in public disputation at Rome, nine hundred theses drawn from every tradition he could reach: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic; Plato and Aristotle reconciled; the Kabbalah enlisted for Christianity; Zoroaster and Hermes seated beside the church fathers. It was the intellectual equivalent of challenging all comers at once, and the pope, sensibly alarmed, banned the event — thirteen of the theses smelled of heresy, and Pico spent a season in a French prison for his trouble before Lorenzo de’ Medici extracted him and installed him safely in Florence, where extraordinary young men were a protected species.

The debate never happened, but its opening speech survived, and the speech conquered the future under a title Pico never gave it: the Oration on the Dignity of Man. In it, Pico stages the creation again. God, having distributed every quality to every creature — instinct to the beasts, contemplation to the angels, each nature sealed within its law — comes to man last, when nothing determinate is left to give. And so, in Pico’s astonishing invention, God gives man the one remaining gift: indeterminacy itself. You alone, the Creator tells Adam, are confined by no limit; you shall fix the boundaries of your own nature by your own free will. You may sink to the brute or rise toward the divine — not by station, but by choice. We made you neither of heaven nor of earth, so that you might be the maker and molder of yourself.

Strip away the theological staging and the modern reader will recognize the cargo, because we are all carrying it: self-invention as the human vocation. Every commencement address, every immigrant’s gamble, every reinvention memoir and every start-up founder’s pitch descends, by routes long forgotten, from a banned speech written by a twenty-three-year-old in 1486. Pico himself burned out like everything else that brilliant: dead at thirty-one — arsenic, the exhumers concluded five centuries later — having lately fallen under the spell of the bonfire-preaching friar Savonarola, as if even the apostle of self-making could not decide, in the end, what to make. But the Oration had already escaped him. The flame does not ask its keepers to be consistent.

Nowhere was the new anthropology made more visible than in the transformation of a class of men the Middle Ages had ranked with masons and saddlers. A painter, in 1400, was an artisan: guild-bound, workshop-trained, paid by the square foot and the pound of ultramarine, his name rarely attached to his work and his work rarely signed. By 1550, when Giorgio Vasari published his Lives of the Artists — the first great work of art history, organized as biography — the painter had become something European civilization had never before contained: the artist as hero, a figure whose gifts licensed him to negotiate with popes, keep dukes waiting, and be spoken of, without blasphemy and in print, as divine.

The two men who effected the promotion could hardly have been less alike. Leonardo da Vinci — illegitimate like Alberti, a notary’s son from a hill town, apprenticed to a Florentine workshop because the universities were closed to bastards — turned his exclusion into a method. Having little Latin and less Greek, he could not inherit the bookish knowledge of the schools; so he interrogated the world directly, and wrote what it told him into some seven thousand surviving pages of notebooks, in mirror script, illustrated with a draftsmanship no one has matched: the coiling of water, the gearing of machines, the anatomy of the human heart dissected by candlelight in defiance of custom and stomach, the flight of birds analyzed wingbeat by wingbeat four hundred years before anyone flew.

The notebooks were, famously, a magnificent dead end — disorganized, unpublished, largely unread for centuries; Leonardo hoarded his fire, and much of it had to be rekindled by others who never knew he had been there first. He is this book’s great cautionary tale wrapped inside its great exemplar: knowledge that is not passed on, however brilliant, is not yet knowledge — it is a private sunrise, seen by one man, followed by night.

Michelangelo Buonarroti hoarded nothing; he detonated. The David, carved before he was thirty from a botched block of marble other sculptors had rejected, made the human body itself into an argument — Pico’s Oration in stone, man poised at the instant of self-determination, the sling still loose on his shoulder. The Sistine ceiling, four years of solitary labor on a scaffold of his own design, paint dripping into his eyes, put the manifesto overhead: God and Adam, finger to finger, the spark about to jump — as pure an image of transmission as our species has produced. And Michelangelo’s own celebrity completed the promotion of his class. Popes bullied and begged him by turns; princes competed for his hand; when he died at eighty-eight, Florence stole his body back from Rome and buried him like a state. The artisan had become a hero, the hero something more; contemporaries called him, flatly, il divino. A society that could describe a stonecutter’s son as divine had already, whether it noticed or not, revised its answer to the question of what a human being is and could be.

It would be tidy to say that the Renaissance recovered ancient reason and handed it, gleaming, to the age of science. The truth is stranger and more interesting: the age also recovered ancient magic, and for over a century the two were nearly indistinguishable — practiced by the same men, funded by the same patrons, pursued with the same texts. Ficino cast horoscopes and composed astral music to draw down planetary influences; Pico’s nine hundred theses leaned on Kabbalah; and the figure who haunted the era’s imagination was neither the scholar nor the artist but the magus — the learned magician, half philosopher and half performer, who promised that the right words, the right numbers, the right alignment of sympathies could give man operative power over nature. Anthony Grafton’s studies of these figures make the essential point: the magus was not the enemy of the coming science but one of its ancestors. The conviction that nature is a system of hidden forces which the prepared mind can learn to command passed directly from the magicians to the mechanics; astrology’s ambition became astronomy’s program; the alchemist’s laboratory, with its furnaces and patience, taught the experimental method its manners. Newton, a century later, would practice alchemy in secret all his life — the last of the magicians, as John Maynard Keynes said, as much as the first of the scientists.

The magus tradition also produced the era’s most spectacular martyr. Giordano Bruno — runaway Dominican, memory artist, philosophical bomb-thrower — took the new Copernican astronomy and did to it what no cautious astronomer dared: he universalized it. If the earth is a planet, then the sun is a star; if the sun is a star, the stars are suns; and if the stars are suns, then the universe is infinite, sown with innumerable worlds, each perhaps inhabited, none of them the center, because an infinite universe has no center and needs none. He preached this cosmology across Europe for twenty years — Geneva, Paris, London, Wittenberg — trailing controversy like a comet’s tail, welcome nowhere for long. In England he dined and dueled wits with the court circle around Sir Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicated two of his boldest books: the perfect emblem of the torch passing north, the Italian fire lighting English candles. Sidney’s generation — courtier, poet, soldier, dead at thirty-one with a legend of handing his water bottle to a dying man — would naturalize the Renaissance ideal in English, and the generation after Sidney would include Shakespeare and Bacon. The relay was working.

Bruno’s own leg of the race ended in Rome. Lured back to Italy, he was handed to the Inquisition and held for seven years while it tried to extract retractions; he retracted, retracted the retractions, and at last refused entirely — reportedly telling his judges that they pronounced sentence against him with greater fear than he received it. On the seventeenth of February, 1600, in the Campo de’ Fiori, the flower market of Rome, he was stripped, bound to a stake with his tongue in a gag, and burned. His offense-sheet was theological, but his cosmology burned with him, and the lesson was not lost on the era’s other keepers: when Galileo faced the same tribunal thirty-three years later, he recanted. The statue of Bruno that stands today in the Campo de’ Fiori, hooded and glowering, was raised in 1889 over the Vatican’s protest, and it faces — deliberately — toward St. Peter’s. The flower-sellers set up their stalls around its base every morning, which Bruno, who believed the universe was infinite and life irrepressible, might have counted as the better monument.

Step back from the two centuries this chapter has crossed, and the shape of the swerve is visible. A civilization that in 1400 understood itself as the aging heir of a completed revelation had become, by 1600, something else: a civilization of makers — of self-makers after Pico, of world-describers after Leonardo, of heaven-expanders after Bruno — convinced that the ancients were not a ceiling but a floor, and increasingly suspicious that direct experience might outrank inherited authority. None of this was yet science; the method would be built in the next century, largely by men standing on this one. What the Renaissance supplied was the audacity — the revised estimate of what human beings are for.

And yet everything in this chapter, from Poggio’s find to Bruno’s fire, was still running on the old transmission system: the handwritten copy, the personal letter, the patron’s dinner table, the scholar on horseback with a manuscript in his saddlebag. The fire was burning higher than it had in a thousand years, but it was still being passed hand to hand — still vulnerable to the abbot’s neglect, the collector’s jealousy, the inquisitor’s match. Even as Ficino translated at Careggi, a goldsmith in Mainz was assembling the machine that would change the physics of the flame itself: no longer one candle lighting another, but fire cast broadside, a thousand torches at a stroke. What the press would do to the keepers — and what it would cost the powers that had always controlled the fire — is the next chapter’s story.

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