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No Cheese Please
The library made possible a new kind of intellectual life. Machiavelli, when he’d been exiled from Florence, described...
Learned men used them for lively conversation on such irresistible topics as the philosophies of Hermes, Zoroaster and Pythagoras or relations between the later Roman Empire and the Persian king Shapur II, which Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and others debated in the new Florentine library of San Marco. Even Joseph Scaliger, the model polymath of the late Renaissance, who worked longer days than his supposedly industrious Dutch neighbours and complained that he could not afford all the books he wanted, boasted of the stuffed bird of paradise that Amsterdam merchants had given him – though he also noted that it lacked a head. Seth Kimmel tells the story of two collections that aspired to universal coverage: the vast library that Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus, amassed in the first decades of the 16th century as he travelled across Europe before settling in Seville, and the even richer one that Philip II of Spain created as part of the Escorial, the huge, grim complex that he built in the 1560s on a plateau around fifty kilometres from Madrid, to serve as a monastery, school and palace.
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