The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
and none fraught with more important consequences for the liberal culture of the world, than the school-training, based on the ideas of humanism, which took shape at that period. A place of special honour in the history of education is due to the founder of that system, Vittorino da Feltre. Born in 1378 at Feltre, a small town of Venetia, he went at eighteen to the University of Padua, then second in Italy only to the University of Bologna, and sharing with Pavia the distinction, still rare at that time in Universities, of being comparatively favourable to the New Learning. At Padua, Vittorino was the pupil of Giovanni di Conversino and afterwards of Gasparino da Barzizza, scholars whose important services to the study of Latin have already been noticed. Another Paduan teacher of that day whose influence Vittorino doubtless felt was Vergerius, the author of an essay on the formation of character (De Ingenuis Moribus) which remained a classic for two centuries, passing through some forty editions before the year 1600. The Renaissance was fertile in educational treatises; but this tractate was the clearest, as it was the earliest, statement of the principles on which humanistic training rested. Vittorino, after holding a chair of rhetoric at Padua, and then teaching privately at Venice, was invited by Gian Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, to undertake the tuition of his children. In 1425 he took up his residence in a villa assigned to him for that purpose at Mantua, where he remained till his death in 1446. Here he created a school of a type previously unknown.
His aim was to develop the whole nature of his pupils, intellectual, moral, and physical; not with a view to any special calling, but so as to form good citizens and useful members of society, capable of bearing their part with credit in public and private life. For intellectual training he took the Latin classics as a basis; teaching them, however, not in the dry and meagre fashion generally prevalent in the medieval schools, where their meaning as literature was too often obscured by artificial and pedantic methods, but in the large and generous spirit of Renaissance humanism. Poetry, oratory, Roman history, and the ethics of Roman Stoicism, were studied in the best Latin writers, and in a way fitted to interest and stimulate boys. By degrees Vittorino introduced some Greek classics also. The scholars were practised in Latin composition, and to some extent in Greek; also in recitation, and in reading aloud. He further provided for some teaching of mathematics, including geometry (a subject which the, humanists preferred to the schoolmen’s logic), arithmetic, and the elements of astronomy. Nor did he neglect the rudiments of such knowledge as then passed for natural philosophy and natural history. Music and singing also found a place. Unlike some of the contemporary humanists, Vittorino was an orthodox, even a devout churchman, and one whose precepts were enforced by his practice. He was a layman, and the type of education which he was creating might even be contrasted, in some respects, with the ecclesiastical type which had preceded it. But he was entirely exempt from any tendency to neopaganism in religion or ethics; and his ethical influence as a teacher seems to have been thoroughly sound.
With great insight and tact, Vittorino saw how far social education could be given in a school with advantage to morals and without loss to manliness; he inculcated a good tone of manners, and encouraged the acquirement of such social accomplishments as the age demanded in well-educated men. As to physical training, he provided instructors in riding, swimming, and military exercises. He also promoted every kind of healthy outdoor activity. This was a new thing in schools. The ecclesiastical schoolmaster of the Middle Ages had not usually concerned himself with it. The medieval provision for physical training had been chiefly in the households of princes or nobles, where horsemanship, hunting, and martial sports were in vogue. Vittorino was in some sort continuing this old training; many of his pupils were young nobles destined to the life of courts and camps. But his point of view was a novel one. The idea which dominated his whole system was the classical, primarily Greek, idea of an education in which mind and body should be harmoniously developed. The force with which this idea appealed to the humanists was partly due to its contrast with medieval theory and practice. The new type of school-education developed by Vittorino is rightly called humanistic; but the reason for so calling it is not solely or chiefly that the intellectual part of it was based on the Greek and Latin classics. It was humanistic, in a deeper sense, because it was at once intellectual, moral, and physical. Vittorino was resolved that the advantages of his school should be open to all boys who were fitted to profit by them. Pupils were sent to him from several of the Italian Courts to be educated with the young Mantuan princes. But he also maintained at his own cost a large number of poorer scholars, for whom lodgings were found near the villa. The rules of life and study were the same for all. Many of the most distinguished scholars of the century had enjoyed his teaching. Among these were George of Trebizond, Valla, Nicholas Perotti and John, Bishop of Aleria, who prepared for the Roman press (in 1469-71) the editlones prindpes of many Latin classics.
Next to Vittorino must be named the other great schoolmaster of the time, his contemporary and friend Guarino da Verona. Guarino, after studying Latin under Giovanni di Conversino, had learned Greek at Constantinople, where for five years he lived in the house of Manuel Chrysoloras (1403-8). No other Italian of that day was probably Guarino’s equal as a Greek scholar. Filelfo and Aurispa were indeed the only contemporary Italians who shared his facility in speaking and writing Greek. It was in 1414 that Guarino opened at Venice the first humanistic school which had been established in that city. Vittorino studied Greek with him there for a year and a half. In 1418 Guarino finally left Venice. He was subsequently invited by Niccolo d’ Este, Marquis of Ferrara, to undertake the education of his son and heir, Lionello. After the early death of Lionello, a youth of great promise, Guarino remained at Ferrara, where he enjoyed the highest repute as a teacher, drawing pupils from all parts of Italy. He died there in 1460, aged ninety.
Thus, before the middle of the fifteenth century, school and lecture-room had diffused the influences of humanism throughout Italy. The spirit of humanistic study had given a new bent to the intellectual interests of cultivated society, and had become a potent factor in the education of youth. In all the principal cities there were men who found themselves drawn together by a common taste for ancient literature and art. The time was ripe for raising the new studies to a somewhat higher level by the exercise of a keener criticism, such as is generated by the play of mind upon mind within a limited social circle, to which the only passport is a recognised standard of attainment or genius. The age of Academies was at hand. Florence, the metropolis of humanism, was the place where the earliest of such societies arose. We have seen that the visit of Gemistos Plethon in 1438 had stimulated the Florentine study of Plato, and had impelled Cosmo de’ Medici to found his Platonic Academy. But the palmy days of that institution were rather in the time of his grandson, Lorenzo de1 Medici, who became head of the State in 1469, and died in 1492.
Lorenzo was remarkable for versatility even among the men of the Renaissance. Few can ever have been more brilliantly qualified, by natural abilities and by varied accomplishments, to adorn the part of a Maecenas. The Platonic Academy usually met in his palace at Florence, or in his villa on the heights of Fiesole. Only a few members of the society can be named here. Platonic studies were more especially represented by Marsilio Ficino, who had given a great impulse to them, though he had no critical comprehension of Plato. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola brought to Lorenzo’s circle those varied gifts of mind and character which so strongly impressed his contemporaries. A keen interest in ancient philosophy, and a desire to harmonise it with Christian doctrine, were distinctive of him. He was destined to die, at the age of thirty-one, in 1494. Leo Battista Alberti, architect, musician, painter, an excellent writer in both Latin and Italian, contributed an example of versatile power almost comparable to that of Lionardo da Vinci. There, too, was Michelangelo, already a poet, but with his greatest artistic achievements still before him. Scholarship had several representatives. Foremost among them was Politian, who has commemorated in Latin verse the gatherings at his patron’s villa. Another was Cristoforo Landino, an able Latinist, the author of some dialogues, on the model of Cicero’s Tusculans, which aid us in imagining the kind of discourse to which the meetings of the Academy gave rise. These are the well-known Disputationes Camaldunenses, so called because the conversations are supposed to take place at a house of the Camaldulite Order in the Apennines. Landino introduces us to Lorenzo de’ Medici and a party of his friends, who have sought refuge there from the summer heat of Florence. The conversation turns on the merits of that active life which they have left behind them in the fair city on the Arno, as compared with the contemplative life of the philosopher or the monk. Alberti argues in favour of the contemplative