The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. Jacob Burckhardt

      We have, further, a good deal of information as to the way in which manuscripts and libraries were multiplied.444 The purchase of an ancient manuscript, which contained a rare, or the only complete, or the only existing text of an old writer, was naturally a lucky accident of which we need take no further account. Among the professional copyists those who understood Greek took the highest place, and it was they especially who bore the honourable name of ‘scrittori.’ Their number was always limited, and the pay they received very large.445 The rest, simply called ‘copisti,’ were partly mere clerks who made their living by such work, partly schoolmasters and needy men of learning, who desired an addition to their income, partly monks, or even nuns, who regarded the pursuit as a work pleasing to God. In the early stages of the Renaissance the professional copyists were few and untrustworthy; their ignorant and dilatory ways were bitterly complained of by Petrarch. In the fifteenth century they were more numerous, and brought more knowledge to their calling, but in accuracy of work they never attained the conscientious precision of the old monks. They seem to have done their work in a sulky and perfunctory fashion, seldom putting their signatures at the foot of the codices, and showed no traces of that cheerful humour, or of that proud consciousness of a beneficent activity, which often surprises us in the French and German manuscripts of the same period. This is more curious, as the copyists at Rome in the time of Nicholas V. were mostly Germans or Frenchmen446—‘barbarians’ as the Italian humanists called them, probably men who were in search of favours at the papal court, and who kept themselves alive meanwhile by this means. When Cosimo de’ Medici was in a hurry to form a library for his favourite foundation, the Badia below Fiesole, he sent for Vespasiano, and received from him the advice to give up all thoughts of purchasing books, since those which were worth getting could not be had easily, but rather to make use of the copyists; whereupon Cosimo bargained to pay him so much a day, and Vespasiano, with forty-five writers under him, delivered 200 volumes in twenty-two months.447