of Cicero (liniamenta Ciceronis).”43 Cortesi denies this. He is not Cicero’s ape, he insists, since he believes himself to have a rightful claim to the Roman’s inheritance: “The son, however, reproduces appearances, walk, posture, motion, form, voices and finally the shape of his father’s body, but still has something of his own in this likeness, something natural, something different. So when compared, they still seem dissimilar from each other.”44 Cortesi seeks a family resemblance to Cicero as a son, not as a brother of Cicero, as Poliziano had also mockingly described Ciceronians. Cortesi understands his rhetorical features (liniamenta) not on an equal footing with Cicero’s but as though he were a Roman orator displaying his imagines maiorum during the performance of his public persona. He calls on the notion of decorum to make his case and to criticize Poliziano’s own style—which is often characterized as docta varietas or eclectic—claiming that a discourse can only incorporate another’s stylistic features when it is suitable to do so. Otherwise, “one makes a sort of monstrosity when the adjacent parts of one’s discourse are badly integrated.”45 To Poliziano’s forceful “I am not Cicero. Yet I do express myself, I think,”46 Cortesi retorts: “But when a man wants to look as if he is imitating no one and pursuing praise without similarity to anyone, believe me, he demonstrates no strength or force in his writing, and someone who says that he depends on the support and power of his own talent cannot but pluck sentences from the writings of others and stuff them into his own.”47 Cortesi stands his ground on the claim that imitation cannot be avoided in language and rhetoric, nor can it be avoided in any of the arts, nor even in nature.
Since one cannot flee to a nonimitative or prediscursive authorial person it is best to follow the finest guides. To do otherwise is to imitate not no one but in a sense everyone, taking words, expressions, style, wherever and however without any discriminating taste or elegantia; such a method risks breaking decorum and resulting in poor oratory. It is thus Poliziano, Cortesi argues, who does not understand the relationship between the authorial person and the oratorical persona. If Poliziano claims only to express himself and not to imitate anyone in particular, according to Cortesi’s logic, he denies the imitative nature of the rhetorical personae that he adopts. In effect Cortesi concludes that Poliziano’s position if he were to understand its implications would equate artifice with nature and create a world of masks in which there would be no chance at delineating a prediscursive persona. Poliziano’s brilliantly varied self-expression would be simply another act.
To be sure, if one spends time reading Poliziano one finds that there is no one quite like him, yet there is nothing stable about him either. Instead, one finds him in constant flux, varying his style, stringing together the most erudite philological or carefully selected Apuleian references into an elegant and sometimes seemingly casual letter to a friend or cultural competitor. Poliziano’s prefatory letter to Piero de’ Medici (1471–1503) for his collected epistles is also telling in this regard. Responding proleptically against potential critics who might reproach his miscellaneous style for breaking all conventions and rules of decorum (and he goes through a litany of them), Poliziano ends his preface, one imagines with a clever smile, by discharging one of Cicero’s preferred terms as a projectile aimed at future critics: “In such a manner I hope to be able to wriggle my way out (tergiversari) of whatever comes my way.”48 At least, Cortesi reasons, his own style has a clear and noble lineage that expresses itself in a fitting manner at appropriate times. One wonders if Cortesi’s insistence on the filial genealogy of his rhetorical persona and on the orphaned nature of Poliziano’s style struck Poliziano on a personal note, for Poliziano himself was orphaned as a child when his father was murdered for supporting the Medici. Perhaps not. In any case, Poliziano, who found a home in the Medici’s extended familia, never responded to Cortesi’s reply.
The Philosopher’s Decorum: Giovanni Pico and Barbaro
The arguments Cortesi makes in his correspondence with Poliziano agree with his preface to his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, where he contends that even in the case of philosophy one cannot do without guidelines for rhetorical style. Contrary to those who see rhetoric and philosophy as incompatible, comparing the application of eloquence to philosophy as hiding a beautiful face behind cosmetics, Cortesi argues that philosophy should at least not be obscure.49 The question of the stylistic decorum of philosophy evokes a second important epistolary exchange from 1485 between the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) on the topic of the correct Latin style for philosophy, otherwise known as the question de genera dicendi philosophorum.50 These two friends of Poliziano and Ficino took up the question after Barbaro wrote to Pico on 5 April 1485 criticizing the uneducated and barbaric writings of scholastic philosophers. Barbaro was thus following the solidly humanist occupation, dating back to Petrarch, of critiquing medieval doctors for their lack of eloquence, learning, methods, and goals. Petrarch and Barbaro were good candidates for the task, but Pico was one of the prodigious humanists (Ficino is another) who was educated not only in the studia humanitatis but also in scholastic philosophy. Pico’s scholastic education brought him to the University of Bologna to study canon law at the age of fourteen, and a few years later to the Universities of Ferrara and Padua, where he studied philosophy until 1482—it is during a brief trip to Florence at this time that he seems to have first met Poliziano and Girolamo Benivieni (1453–1542). In 1484 he found himself residing in Florence, to which in later years he would often return to converse with Lorenzo, Poliziano, and Ficino. In 1485 the twenty-two-year-old count traveled to the University of Paris to immerse himself further in scholastic philosophy. Barbaro’s letter was therefore undoubtedly spurred by Pico’s scholastic education and perhaps even by his latest desire to study with the Parisian doctors.
Pico’s response abounds in eloquent and erudite wit, and sets the tone for the debate. Coming to the aid of scholastic philosophers, Pico writes a prosopopoeic defense expressed ex persona barbari. With a clear play on Barbaro’s name—in the Venetian’s own words “barbaros contra Barbarum defendis”—Pico writes in the persona of a barbarian philosopher defending scholasticism through an eloquent rhetorical speech.51 Pico, who admits his desire to imitate Barbaro’s own rhetorical voice, in effect doubles the personification of his letter, writing in a style that approaches Barbaro’s actual stylistic inclinations.52 In effect, Pico is personifying Barbaro, who is cast in the role of a barbarian philosopher eloquently defending the scholastics’ lack of eloquence. For his part, Barbaro responds in the persona of a certain ape from the University of Padua, where Pico had studied. Portraying Pico not as a learned philologist (grammaticus) but as a lowly schoolteacher (grammatista), the Paduan philosopher (Barbaro’s fabricated character) declaims that the scholastic method does not need the help of rhetoric.53 Barbaro’s ape bumbles his way through Cicero’s distinctions between the personae of the client, the patron, and the advocate, as well as the distinctions in registers of Attic, Asiatic, Germanic, and even Persian styles, concluding that none of them is necessary. In the end, he produces clumsy syllogisms to argue his case.
One should not dismiss the two letters, written in the genre of a paradoxical encomium, as a fictitious debate produced for the private amusement of two humanists essentially sharing the same opinion on the question. Indeed, I would stress two points: first, that since Pico was trained in both camps his exchange with Barbaro was not a simple literary game within the closed circle of humanism and, second, that the tone of the disputation is that of serioludere, or playfully communicating serious matters, often associated with Socrates’ manner of talking. Pico’s own appeal to Glaucon from the Republic underscores the Platonic nature of their exchange. Like Socrates who disavows opinions he has just expressed—one thinks, for example, of Socrates’ personification of Protagoras in the Theaetetus (164e–168c)—Pico declares after his barbarian philosopher has just finished his speech: “But I exercised myself with pleasure in this infamous matter, so to speak, like those who praise the quartan fever, not only to prove my ingenium, but also with this intention: that, just as Plato’s Glaucon praises injustice not according to his own judgment but so that he might spur Socrates to praise justice, so I, in order to hear you
