Sarah Gwyneth Ross - Everyday Renaissances

On June 18, 1556, a Venetian secondhand goods dealer named Francesco entrusted his shop boy, Zuanne, with an interesting errand. Zuanne was to procure two Greek manuscripts from His Magnificence, Andrea di Franceschi, a secretary of the ducal chancery whose duties included granting permission to borrow items from the collection of books and manuscripts that would, centuries later, still form the core of Venices famous library, the Biblioteca Nazionale di San Marco. The ledgers that Franceschi kept most often reveal the usual suspects of libraries: career scholars, orators, secretaries, writers, and lawyers. But a few physicians also appeared and even, on this occasion, a minor player in the world of commerce. His Magnificence may have been taken aback to find a retail merchant attempting to make use of the lending potential of this collection, but in any event he took the basin that Zuanne had brought as surety and made this note: 18 June 1556, Mr. Francesco (son of Paul), who runs a second-hand shop near the clock tower in the Piazza San Marco, has borrowed a Greek book on parchment called Proclus on Platonic Theology and also The Commentary of Hierocles on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, which his servant, Zuanne of Venice, will take to him with my permission. And I have had from him as a collateral an engraved silver basin.

Why, more particularly, might a secondhand goods dealer such as messer Francesco have wanted to consult Greek manuscripts? Like many of the sources at the heart of this book, these lending records are laconic, making the task of divining motives even more problematic than usual. But any purely practical motive we might give him would lead us to unlikelihood. If he had come into possession of similar manuscripts and wanted to verify their authenticity or completeness as part of assessing their value, it would have been more efficient to enlist the services of a humanist or grammarian. Might messer Francesco himself have possessed sufficient knowledge of Greek and philosophy? A secondhand goods dealer could have been the well-educated son of a patrician or citizen family that suffered economic decline. By the middle of the sixteenth century, many families in Venice responded to financial constriction by practicing extreme estate planning, effectively disinheriting most children to transmit the estate intact to the most capable heir. Such a strategy required monachating many daughters and sons, as well as pushing other boys either into commercial apprenticeships, or else providing the minimal support for university studies that might prepare the young men for a learned profession. Francesco might have had such a story, and in that case perhaps the requisite skills to read and comprehend the manuscripts unaided. But we would still have to ask why he did not interact with this material in printed form. Proclus, for instance, was widely available, and in 1516 had even appeared in a scholarly Aldine edition. Why go to the trouble of sending an employee to fetch these manuscripts, which required making collateral of a precious object, as well as time and inconvenience? Attempting to give this man a practical aim leads us to rationales such as an aversion to print media or a second career as a humanist that would be highly improbable (though admittedly not impossible) for a man described as a retailer.