The Intellectual Interests Reflected in Libraries of the Fourteenth and ...

282 PEARL KIBRE
found in these libraries, together with the compositions in the vernacular
by poets and authors of the time. The library of the House
of Este at Ferrara, and that of the dukes of Urbino were especially
favored in this regard. In the Este collection there were the compositions
of the leading humanists, among them works of Petrarch,
Boccaccio, Leonardo Bruni, Panormita, Marsilio Ficino, Filelfo,
Poggio, Poliziano, Flavio Biondo, Guarino of Verona, Candido and
Angelo Decembrio, and Paolo Cortesi.'1' Federigo, duke of Urbino,
is reported by Vespasiano to have given generously of his wealth
to men of letters, and his library was well provisioned with (" all, "
according to Vespasiano) the works of modern writers. In addition
to the humanists listed above the library contained original
compositions and translations by Coluccio Salutati, Traversari,
Gianozzo Manetti, Niccol6 Perotti, Campano, Maffeo Vegio, Pope
Pius II, Nicol6 Secundino who acted as interpreter for both Greeks
and Latins at the Council of the Greeks in Florence, Pontano, Bartolomeo
Fazio, Gasparino Barzizza, Lorenzo Valla, Pietro Paolo
Vergerio, John Argyropulos, Giovanni Tortelli and a number of
others."12
Side by side, however, with these literary and humanistic writings
the libraries generally had a large number of works representing
the third subject of the trivium, namely dialectics or logic.
The continued regard for works in logic demonstrates that the
overwhelming victory which that branch of learning had achieved
in the battle of the seven arts that had raged at Paris and Orleans
in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was still of importance
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this field Aristotle
reigned supreme as he had in the thirteenth century. Indeed the
fifteenth century libraries testify to the fact that Aristotle was still
"the philosopher," par excellence, and that, however much his
critics might berate him in the quarrel over the relative merits of
Plato and Aristotle, it was the former, who even in the midst of
the humanistic revival required the most defense. Cardinal Bessarion,
who wrote in defense of Plato against the attack made by
George of Trebizond, was one of the few bibliophiles of the fifteenth
century to have in his library the large number of thirty-two
111 G. Bertoni, op. cit., 95 ff.; 108 ff., et passim. For humanists at the court of the
Gonzaga at Mantua see A. Luzio and R. Renier, "I Filelfo e l'umanismo alla corte
dei Gonzaga," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, VIII (1890), 119-217.
112 Vespasiano, Vite, I (loc. cit., no. 68), 292-302.
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