Learning, various and elegant, there was Messer Agnolo Poliziano, to
whom how much is owed by the Latin and Tuscan tongues, which began to
revive in him, I believe is sufficiently well known to all the world.
With him were Pietro Crinito, Giannozzo Manetti, Francesco Pucci,
Bartolommeo Fonzio, Alessandro de' Pazzi, and Messer Marcello Vergilio
Adriani, father of the most ingenious and most learned M. Giovan
Battista, now called Il Marcellino, who is still living and giving
public lectures with so much honour in our Florentine University, and
who at the commission of their illustrious Excellencies has been writing
anew the History of Florence; and there were also M. Cristofano Landini,
M. Coluccio Salutati, and Ser Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante. Nor
were there wanting certain Poets who had written in Latin, such as
Claudian, and among the more modern Carlo Marsuppini and Zanobi Strada.
Of the Historians, then, were seen M. Francesco Guicciardini, Niccolo
Macchiavelli, M. Leonardo Bruni, M. Poggio, Matteo Palmieri, and, among
the earliest, Giovanni and Matteo Villani and the very ancient Ricordano
Malespini. All these, or the greater part, for the satisfaction of all
beholders, had each his name or that of his most famous works marked on
the scrolls or on the covers of the books that they held, placed there
as if by chance; and with all of them, as with the men of war, to
demonstrate what they were come there to do, the four verses that were
painted on the architrave, as with the others, made it clearly manifest,
saying:
Artibus egregiis Latiae Graiaeque Minervae
Florentes semper quis non miretur Etruscos?
Sed magis hoc illos aevo florere necesse est
Et Cosmo genitore et Cosmi prole favente.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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