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

FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURY LIBRARIES 263
Among other conspicuous Greek collections, attention has
already been called23 to Pico della Mirandola's collection of one
hundred and fifty-seven Greek books, also to that of George Valla,
consisting of some two hundred and twenty Greek books of which
seventy were printed. However, the inventory of the library of
George Valla, noted encyclopedist and translator, dates from the
sixteenth century and may therefore include a number of books
added after his death.24 Attention has been called, too, to the Greek
collection of Federigo, duke of Urbino, with ninety-three such
manuscripts to its credit.25
Only a scattering of Greek books on the other hand is revealed
in the inventories of several other humanist collectors. There was
only one Greek text in 1467 in the library of the physician and
epigrapher, Giovanni Marcanova.26 Pietro da Montagnana in 1478
had fourteen,27 and a few are noticeable among the books belonging
to Demetrio Guazzelli of Lucca, the first custodian of the Vatican
library (1481-1511), and in the collection of Palla Strozzi who left
his books at his death to the library of S. Giustina of Padua, where
he had gone after his expulsion from Florence.28 In still other
libraries of Italy, Greek authors and writings continued in the fifteenth
century to be found only in translations, many of them by
contemporary humanists. There was also a host of vernacular
translations of Greek works little known in the preceding centuries,
which is indicative of the importance of the Greek tradition even
to those for whom the barrier of either the Greek or Latin might
otherwise have been insurmountable. Such translations were especially
conspicuous in the library of the dukes of Este at Ferrara,
where the writings of such Greek historians and other authors as
Herodotus, Dion Cassius, Diodorus Siculus, Xenophon, Isocrates,
Lucian, Procopius, Appian and Strabo are listed among the ver-
23
P. Kibre, The library of Pico della Mirandola, 23-24.
24 J. L. Heiberg, "Beitraige zur Gesehichte Georg Vallas und seiner Bibliothek,"
Centralblatt fiur Bibliothekswesen, Beiheft XVI (1896), 1-3.
25
P. Kibre, op. cit., 24, and the references noted there.
26 Frati, Dizionario bio-bibliografico, 331; Sabbadini, Scoperte dei codici (1905),
187, note 19.
27 Sabbadini, op. cit. (1905), 187, note 20.
28 Zippel, Nicolo Niccoli, 41; Pietro Guidi, "Pietro Demetrio Guazzelli da Lucca
il primo custode della biblioteca Vaticana (1481-1511) e l'inventario dei suo libri,"
Miscellanea Fr. Ehrle, V (1924), 192-218; Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici (1905),
55; Vespasiano, Vite, III (Coll. di op. ined. o rare, vol. 71), 9 ff.
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