of them
deserve the criticism of Machiavelli, that they filled their pages too
exclusively with the wars and foreign affairs in which Florence was
engaged, failing to perceive that the true object of the historian is to
set forth the life of a commonwealth as a continuous whole, to draw the
portrait of a state with due regard to its especial physiognomy.[2] To
this critique we may add that both Lionardo and Poggio were led astray
by the false taste of the earlier Renaissance. Their admiration for Livy
and the pedantic proprieties of a labored Latinism made them pay more
attention to rhetoric than to the substance of their work.[3] We meet
with frigid imitations and bombastic generalities, where concise
details and graphic touches would have been acceptable. In short, these
works are rather studies of style in an age when the greatest stylists
were but bunglers and beginners, than valuable histories. The Italians
of the fifteenth century, striving to rival Cicero and Livy, succeeded
only in becoming lifeless shadows of the past. History dictated under
the inspiration of pedantic scholarship, and with the object of
reproducing an obsolete style, by men of letters who had played no
prominent part in the Commonwealth,[4] cannot pretend to the vigor and
the freshness that we admire so much in the writings of men like the
Villani, Gino Capponi, Giovanni Cavalcanti, and many others. Yet even
after making these deductions, it may be asserted with truth that no
city of Italy at this period of the Renaissance, except Florence, could
boast historiographers so competent. Vespasiano at the close of his
biography of Poggio estimates their labor in sentences which deserve to
be remembered: 'Among the other singular obligations which the city of
Florence owes to Messer Lionardo and to Messer Poggio, is this, that
except the Roman Commonwealth no republic or free state in Italy has
been so distinguished as the town of Florence, in having had two such
notable writers to record its doings as Messer Lionardo and Messer
Poggio; for up to the time of their histories everything was in the
greatest obscurity. If the republic of Venice, which can show so many
wise citizens, had the deeds which they have done by sea and land
committed to writing, it would be far more illustrious even than it is
now. And Galeazzo Maria, and Filippo Maria, and all the Visconti--their
actions would also be more famous than they are. Nay, there is not any
republic t