Niccolò de' Niccoli (1364–1437) - Renaissance Personality of the Month

To many, the Renaissance was an age that looked backwards to the glory of ancient Greece and Rome, and which determined the Middle Ages as that dark slump between the fall of the great Roman Empire and its own enlightened days. Petrarch and others used 'the Middle Ages' (a phrase which he first coined) as a means to differentiate itself from what had gone before. Brian Stock in 'Listening for the text', suggests that the Middle Ages was invented during the Renaissance in order for it to define, admire and distinguish itself as a golden age separate from the inhabitants of a dark and ignorant past.

The Renaissance, though looking backwards in admiration, also looked forwards with invention, innovation and genius and it was during the early 15thC in Florence, with the new Humanist movement in full swing, that we find Niccolò de' Niccoli as an example of one of the many legacies left to us today from this period.

As one of the leading figures of the brilliant Humanist circles in Florence, Niccolò de' Niccoli is an expression of the enticing possibilities of socio-intellectual growth within 15thC Florence. Moving in the same sphere as Cosimo de' Medici, Niccolò was the son of a wealthy wool merchant, one of the many who had made their fortune in Florence during its recovery in the aftermath of the Black Death.

Niccolò was dedicated in his recovery of ancient manuscripts and in the circulation of their ideals. Peter Strathern writes, in 'The Medici; Godfathers of the Renaissance'

'Not long after he befriended the young Cosimo, they planned a trip to the Holy Land together to search for lost Ancient Greek manuscripts.'

Although he seems to be a presiding influence over much of Florence's intellectual scene during the first half of the 15thC, Strathern writes

'Niccoli was a questionable influence. Dressed in his Ancient Roman toga, and parading all the affectations of 'sensibility', he cut a slightly absurd figure'

Despite this general consensus, Niccolò proved to be a prominent authority particularly in the University of Florence where his copies of some recently discovered manuscripts of Plato, enabled the study of Ancient Greek.

Though regarded as quarrelsome, noted for his troublesome public love affairs and discredited for his inability to write fluid Latin, the latter hinderance ironically, would be his lasting legacy. His copying of hundreds of rare and ancient texts lead to a distinctively clear and slanting writing style which would later be adopted by Italian printers and came to be known as italic.

His mass collection of great and important texts and his dominance over tastes and styles not only influenced literary and intellectual movements, but would also form the tastes of contemporary artists such as Donatello and Brunelleschi. A contemporary scholar; Poggio Bracciolini describes Niccolò as the very embodiment of classical taste. After his death Niccolò's collection of some 800 manuscripts became part of the Medici Library, which was the first public library in Europe, enabling those who desired the possibility of borrowing and studying the texts themselves.

Niccolò represents both sides of the Renaissance; the looking back and ennobling of the past but also, the forward thinking of a humanist society which would provide for the public and for future generations to come, a wealth of knowledge and a new vision of the old.