Diary: (2) Andrew Hui on the Birth of the Private Library
The Renaissance library was an aperture through which you contemplate the world and a retreat wherein you cultivate the self
Inscriptions from ancient authors and the Bible on the ceiling of the library of Montaigne’s tower. Photo by Jacques Bodin. Creative Commons
Read Part One of this post here!
Renaissance humanists created an intimate healing place of the soul—the studiolo—as a personal library of self-cultivation and self-fashioning. Cocooned within its four walls (or, if you’re Montaigne, a circular tower), the studiolo was an aperture through which you contemplate the world and a retreat wherein you cultivate the self. In order to know the world, one must begin with knowing the self, as ancient philosophy instructs. In order to know the self, one ought to study other selves too, preferably their ideas as recorded in texts. And since interior spaces shape the inward soul, the studiolo—the diminutive of studio in Italian—became a sanctuary and a microcosm. The study thus mediates the world, the word, and the self.
As idea and infrastructure, the studiolo enacts a basic hope of humanism: to reach out and commune with the voices of the past. In an evocative letter written by Machiavelli in 1513, the disgraced writer finds himself fallen from the apex of power. He’s been rusticated to his family villa outside Florence. In the day, he’s bored. He takes walks in the countryside, catches some birds, loiters with the villagers, plays cards at the local tavern. But nothing compares to the thrill of what he does at the end of the day:
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study [scrittoio]. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity [umanità] reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.
W.E.B. Du Bois must have been thinking about Machiavelli when he writes in The Souls of Black Folk (1903):
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.
Du Bois’s evocation is as riveting as any Italian humanist’s: his conversations with authors—dead and white—are possible and necessary because they all share a pursuit of truth that is beyond any historical divide or racial schism. He finds in books a transhistorical umanità that offers him horizons of thinking beyond the limits of segregation and bigotry that beset his country. Du Bois and Machiavelli alike find friendship and equanimity in the classics instead of elitism and exclusion. Books offer them an escape, a temporary detachment from the stupidity of the times.
The idea of the library as a place of refuge reaches back to antiquity. In a letter, Pliny describes in loving detail his villa by the Bay of Naples. His favorite place of all is his library: it “catches the sun on all its windows as it moves through the heavens” and contains the books “which I read and read again.” In this he heeded the caution of Seneca: “What is the point of countless books and libraries when their owner can scarcely read their labels in a lifetime? … It is much better to entrust yourself to a few authors than be misled by an abundance of them.” Cicero, amidst his busy political life, devotes considerable energy to the care of his books. He possesses multiple libraries across his Palatine house in Rome and his villas in Antium and Tusculanum. He hires a dedicated librarian: “After Tyrannio has arranged the books for me, a soul seems to have been added to my house” (mens addita videtur meis aedibus, Letters to Atticus 4.4a.1). (This seems to be the source of the commonplace “a room without books is a body without a soul.” He also wrote to a friend, “If you have a garden and library, you have everything you need,” Letters to Friends). It seems only fitting that his personal bibliotheca serves as the setting for the latter parts of his work On the Ends of Good and Evil (De finibus bonorum et malorum). The dialogue is set in his library in his sprawling villa, nestled within a complex of courtyards, fishponds, groves, and gardens—an ideal place for pleasant philosophical dialogues between friends, real and imagined.
In the Middle Ages, the monastic cell—the cubiculum—was the place for reading, prayer, and contemplation. The scriptorium was a place where scribes copied and illuminated manuscripts. The bibliotheca, holding pagan and sacred texts, constituted the archive of the known world’s knowledge. From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Petrarch marked a change: in his practice, reading becomes instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity. In the 1330s, in Vaucluse, a remote valley in southern France, he constructed a little villa with a small study, in modest imitation of the ancients. While there were already private studies in the Burgundian courts and the papal palace in Avignon, Petrarch was one of the first to construct one unattached to any institutions. “Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland [patriam ipsam mente],” he wrote. “Here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings.” Petrarch inaugurated the idea of reviving classical antiquity as a transhistorical conversation between the living and the dead. The studiolo thus becomes a sort of chronotope, an ingathering of time and space, where perception of the past, present, and future accelerates or dilates at the will of the reader. In their tiny corners of the world, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Du Bois each in their own ways conjure a utopia of friends, binding together the far and near, the long-ago and recent past into the plenitude of the here-and-now.
Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature. This post is drawn from his new book, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries.
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And don't forget Ruskin, who placed select authors above people (he knew).