found Jason’s Argonauticon, written by C. Valerius Flaccus in verse that
is both splendid and dignified and not far removed from poetic majesty.
Then we found some discussions in prose of a number of Cicero’s
orations.... In fact we have copies of all these books. But when we
carefully inspected the nearby tower of the church of St. Gall in which
countless books were kept like captives and the library neglected and
infested with dust, worms, soot, and all the things associated with the
destruction of books, we all burst into tears.^11
Cicero, Varro, Livy: these provided the models of Latin and the rules of
expression that Cincius and his friends admired. To them the monks of St. Gall were
“barbarians” for not wholeheartedly valuing ancient Latin rhetoric, prose, and poetry
over all other writings. In the course of the fourteenth century Italian intellectuals
turned away from the evolved Latin of their contemporaries to find models in the
ancients. Already in 1333 the young Petrarch (1304–1374) had traveled through the
Low Countries looking for manuscripts of the ancient authors; he discovered Cicero’s
Pro Archia, a paean to poetry, and carefully copied it out.
Petrarch’s taste for ancient eloquence and his ability to write in a new, elegant,
“classical” style (whether in Latin or in the vernacular) made him a star. But he was
not alone, as Cincius’ letter proves; he was simply one of the more famous exemplars
of a new group calling themselves “humanists.” There had been humanists before:
we have seen Saint Anselm’s emphasis on Christ’s saving humanity, Saint Bernard’s
evocation of human religious emotion, and Thomas Aquinas’s confidence in human
reason to scale the heights of truth (see pp. 192 and 266). But the new humanists
were more self-conscious about their calling, and they tied it to the cultivation of
classical literature.
As Cincius’ case also shows, if the humanists’ passion was antiquity, their
services were demanded with equal ardor by ecclesiastical and secular princes.
Cincius worked for Pope John XXIII. Petrarch was similarly employed by princes:
for several years, for example, he worked for the Visconti family, the rulers of Milan.
As Italian artists associated themselves with humanists, working in tandem with them,
they too became part of the movement.
Historians have come to give the name Renaissance to this era of artists and
humanists. But the Renaissance was not so much a period as a program. It made the
language and art of the ancient past the model for the present; it privileged classical
