702 william eamon
The Power of Traditionin the renaissance, the authority of tradition manifested itself in the
strength of the universities, in the church, and above all in the humanist
movement, which aimed to retrieve ancient knowledge in its pure form,
unadulterated by scholastic commentary. in Venice, as elsewhere in
europe, the renaissance was an age of both intellectual conservatism and
dynamic innovation. nowhere was the power of tradition and the shock
of the new more evident than in the understanding of the natural world.
The humanist movement in Quattrocento Venice centered around a
group of highly cultivated young patricians who regarded literary activity
as a form of public service.4 The Venetian humanists looked back to the
example of Petrarch, who, a century earlier, from his opulent palace on the
riva degli Schiavoni, polemicized against the “sophistry of the moderns”
and committed himself to a program of rediscovering the ancient philoso-
phers in their own words, recovered in long-neglected manuscripts rather
than through scholastic commentaries.
Venice played an important role in the recovery of the ancient legacy,
especially the classical scientific tradition.5 Venetian humanism’s civic
orientation channeled its energies into practical pursuits and instilled a
conviction that the study of nature could not be divorced from the study
of humanity.6 Venetian humanists—including many foreigners attracted
by the city’s libraries and printing industry—were avid collectors of clas-
sical texts. The city’s printers, above all aldus Manutius (1449–1515), who
had immigrated to Venice from carpi in 1494, were admired throughout
europe for producing Greek texts of the highest quality.7
The Mathematical Renaissanceit was largely through the efforts of the Greek cardinal Bessarion (1403–
72), who immigrated to italy in 1439, that Greek studies became the focus
4 Vittore Branca, “ermolao Barbaro and late Quattrocento Venetian Humanism,” in
J. r. Hale, ed., Renaissance Venice (london, 1973), pp. 218–43. in addition, see Felix Gilbert,
“Humanism in Venice,” in Villa i Tatti, Florence and Venice: Comparisons and Relations,
2 vols (Florence, 1976), 1:13–26.
5 Margaret l. King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton,
1986), p. 6.
6 Branca, “ermolao Barbaro,” p. 237.
7 on Manutius, see Martin lowry, World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in
Renaissance Venice (oxford, 1979).