The Polish Castiglione: Łukasz Górnicki, Padua, and the Education of the ‘Domestic Pole’ (original) (raw)
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Florentine calendar) has been much explored in studies dedicated to the Medici theatre of the early Seicento and its diffusion in Europe, 1 owing chiefly to the staging of the most important spectacle offered in the crown prince' s honour, La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina, 2 a production that has been investigated extensively in the critical literature. 3 Less known is Ladislas' s visit to Naples, which preceded his arrival in the Medicean city. From 8 to 13 January 1625, the Polish prince was the guest of the Spanish Viceroy Don Antonio Álvarez of Toledo, 5th Duke of Alba, who commissioned a series of events designed to entertain and win the goodwill of the young Vasa. Scipione Guerra' s Diurnali-a chroniclehistory of the main events taking place in the city of Naples between 1574 and 1627-has until now been the only source cited in the literature on Ladislas' s Neapolitan stay. 4 Contrary to his stay in Naples, the days spent by the prince in Florence are documented in fine detail in the famous diary of Cesare Tinghi, 5 personal assistant to the Medici Grand 1
The Florentine Scolari Family at the Court of Sigismund of Luxemburg in Buda
By the beginning of the fifteenth century, European commercial centers had already been filled with trading colonies founded by Florentine merchants. A few of them settled down for life in their host country, developing economic and social ties with local families. During Sigismund of Luxemburg’s reign (r. 1387-1437) as King of Hungary only a handful of these merchants achieved political positions. Undoubtedly the most fortunate among these Florentine citizens was Filippo di Stefano Scolari, known as Pippo Spano (c. 1369-1426), who was granted the significant honor of becoming a member of a small inner circle in the royal court. This article argues that the special status attained by Florentines in Hungarian politics and economy during the first three decades of the fifteenth century can be attributed largely to Pippo Spano’s influence. As cultural mediators, Pippo Spano and his family helped to facilitate relations between their native Florence and their adopted home. This case study focuses on the Scolari family’s migration to the Hungarian Kingdom in order to explore on a small scale the possible push-pull factors of migration flow and its impact on the relationship between the Florentine Republic and the Hungarian Kingdom.
Polish Libraries, 11, pp. 153-188, 2023
The analysis of the library of Piotr Wolfram, a bachelor of laws educated in Prague, Padua, and Bologna, professor of the Kraków Academy, participant of the Council of Constance, and the collector of Peter’s Pence in Poland, reveals the tools which he used in building his career, surprisingly brilliant for a son of a burgher. The degree to which his library was typical for the period – library understood not only as a collection of codices but also a collection of texts – has been evaluated through the analysis of the popularity of individual works among the Kraków bar. The very presence of works by Italian lawyers in the collection does not unambiguously point to Italian intellectual education, as some Italian commentaries were included in the canon of literature taught at European universities. It has been determined that a clear indication of Wolfram’s Italian formation is provided by such texts as Apostillae to Francesco Zabarella’s commentary on the Liber Sextus or rhetorical texts by Italian authors – Bolognese university speeches or a letter by Petrarch yet unidentified in the catalogue of manuscripts of the Jagiellonian Library. In comparison to the library of Mikołaj Kicki, a lawyer with similar educational background (law studies in Bologna and Padua), Piotr Wolfram’s collection is rather limited, as it lacks some significant collections of canon law or most of the 13th-century commentaries on the Decretales. It mostly comprises legal dictionaries, concordances, repertories, and indices. The library is tailored to a practitioner rather than a creative commentator of law, but the presence of rhetorical Italian texts makes it stand out from other contemporary libraries of Polish lawyers.
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The elites of Renaissance Poland were, as generations of Polish historians have been since, extremely proud of their country's humanist credentials, seeing these as evidence of its cultural sophistication, vigorous links with Italy and robustly European historical identity. Standard Polish histories of the University of Kraków (f. 1364) without hesitation define the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as a time of humanist ascendancy at the institution. For Henryk Barycz (1935), this was "the age of humanism" in the Polish capital, while for Józef Garbacik (1964) it was the point at which the university became "a crucible of Renaissance learning and culture." 1 If the early sixteenth century was Poland's much-vaunted "Golden Age," a moment of dynastic triumph and geopolitical expansion under Zygmunt I Jagiellon (1506-1548), this must in turn, so the argument goes, have been accompanied by an appropriate artistic and intellectual flowering. Since the University of Kraków occupied an almost iconic status in Polish national historiography of the Renaissance, the city's claims to be a hotbed of humanism have rarely been subjected to serious criticism or challenge. Patronage and Humanist Literature in the Age of the Jagiellons approaches the question of humanism both at Kraków and other cities in the Jagiellonian bloc from a new and fruitful angle, asking how hospitable international humanists really found these towns and courts. A scholar of Polish neo-Latin literature, Glomski takes as her subject three foreign humanists who travelled to Kraków in search of income, employment and glory-in short, patronage. The men trying "to convert themselves from outsiders to insiders," Rudolf Agricola Junior (ca. 1490-1521), Valentin Eck (1494-1556?) and Leonard Cox (ca. 1495ca. 1549), are identified by Glomski as the most prolific of the itinerant humanists active in early sixteenth-century Kraków, whose hagiographic verse, panegyric poetry, dedicatory letters, orations, and treatises on subjects as diverse as marriage and crusading passed through the printing presses of Johannes Haller,
In his always stimulating The Florentine Enlightenment 1400-50, the historian George Holmes vigorously emphasized the decisive role of a "Florentine-curial axis" in the rise of the humanist movement at the turn of the fifteenth century. 1 Holmes pointed out that many young humanists left Florence for Rome at the end of the Western Schism and found employment in the papal chancery, especially under the pontificate of John XXIII (r. 1410-1415), to the extent that "during this pontificate the papal court became a center of Florentine humanism to rival if not surpass Florence itself." 2 Holmes further argued that this relative "brain drain" not only provided professional and economic opportunities, but was also a sine qua non factor for the prestige and the influence of the new culture of the studia humanitatis. The paradigm sketched by Holmes, tended to de-compartmentalize the history of Florentine humanism, and to temper an enduring campanilismo, by taking into account intellectual relations and circulations beyond the city, articulated with other socio-political contexts, in this case the Roman curia. Our argument is about pushing such a logic further, and showing that it allows us somehow to reverse the point of view: in other words, to leave Florence, in order to observe the global and reticular dynamics of development of the humanistic culture in Europe. Within this, in return, we can re-register the itineraries and activities of the Florentines, at various levels. This effort of realignment leads us, in a first step, to reflect on the fact that Florentine humanism developed at least partly outside Florence, through a decisive movement of emigration. It leads us, moreover, to go beyond a territorialized and, in a sense, regionalized vision of the birth of the humanist movement, to arrive at thinking about the web itself-certainly structured by networks, hubs, and clusters-as a decentralized space of identity creation. 3 Such a perspective aligns with the direction of current historiography that favors a multipolar approach to the development of humanism. In particular, this perspective, while recognizing the prominence of Florence, integrates the city into an