The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library. Edward Wilson-Lee

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      Giovanni Battista Palumba, ‘Diana Bathing with Her Attendants’, c.1500; Hernando’s inventory number 2150.

      Life at court not only introduced Hernando to a bewildering variety of people and things but also to a world of complex and often contradicting ideas. He would have attended lectures by the great scholars recruited to train the aristocracy at court, probably from a very early age, like the little boy who, much younger than the rest, kneels at the feet of the great humanist Antonio de Nebrija in a contemporary manuscript illumination of Juan’s court. It may have helped that two opposing camps of ideas were embodied in the two tutors who were in charge of the education of the Infante and (more importantly, given his lack of interest) of the pages of the court. The first of these was the Dominican friar Diego de Deza, a theologian educated at Spain’s greatest seat of learning, the University of Salamanca, who had risen through the church hierarchy as Bishop of Zamora and then of Salamanca itself, even if his duties at court gave him little time for church business. Deza seems to have been among Columbus’ earliest and most reliable supporters, and Hernando would quickly have learned to count him among the faction at the court who spoke well of his father and his projects. Yet Deza’s backing may have been slightly confusing to the young Hernando: the friar was, after all, a staunch Thomist, meaning that he dedicated his scholarly life to championing the work of Thomas Aquinas and his use of Aristotelian logic to understand and explain the mysteries of the Christian faith. An extraordinary addition to Deza’s teachings may have come in the person of Beatriz Galindo, a rare female scholar whose prodigious talents had made her a celebrated Aristotelian at Salamanca, and who was also brought to court to teach, though likely only the princesses and their households. Deza and Galindo taught their charges to read nature firstly as the Book of God, in which the divine was revealed through the order installed at creation. Though as this scholastic kind of learning was focused on the cloister, the university and the library, it would have had less obvious connection to the world of ships and islands inhabited by Hernando’s father.4

      The other tutor, however, represented a wholly different attitude to learning: this was Peter Martyr, the letter-writing man of arms who was to become one of the first and most important historians of the New World. Martyr was very much a humanist in the mould created during the Italian Renaissance of the previous hundred years: someone who valued beautiful speech and writing and had little time for the knotty problems of the Thomists, someone who believed in the worth of the active life rather than the contemplative one, and who moved easily between roles as author, tutor, diplomat, soldier and citizen of the Republic of Letters that connected men of the same grain across Europe. His teaching, as suggested by one eyewitness account, consisted of having his pupils recite the poetry of Horace and Juvenal, absorbing by repetition the rhythms and the values of classical Rome. Martyr counted among his chief correspondents the genius of the Roman intellectual scene, Guilio Pomponio Leto, a pioneering humanist whose devotion to the learning of pre-Christian Rome led him to affect classical dress and set up an academy among the ruins of the Quirinal Hill, from which he led his disciples on tours of the half-buried Roman monuments and even under them to the catacombs that had lain hidden for a thousand years. So great was Leto’s success in fostering this culture that his academy was disbanded in 1468 by Pope Paul II amid accusations that would have made their guiding spirit Socrates proud: republican conspiracy, sexual immorality, anti-clericalism and even pagan irreligion. As one of Leto’s disciples, Martyr provided Juan’s household with a direct link to the most daring currents of Italian humanism, from a Rome that would later play a central part in Hernando’s own life. Indeed, Hernando would have seen this neoclassicism springing up all around him, as at Burgos, where inside the miraculous Gothic cathedral the Roman-trained French artist Felipe Bigarny was carving classical buildings into the transept, and across the street where the printer Fadrique de Basilea was switching from Gothic fonts in his books to Roman ones, freshly imported from Italy where humanists copied their letter-forms from the inscriptions on ancient ruins. Peter Martyr in turn directed many of his most important letters on the New World discoveries to Leto, creating a strange symbiosis between the new learning and how the expanding world СКАЧАТЬ