I rise in the middle of the night, go outdoors at sunrise, but both in the fields and at home I study, think, read, and write … Every day I wander over the rocky mountains, through the dewy valleys and caverns … Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland; here I gather all the friends I now have or did have … I marvel at their accomplishments and their spirits … conversing with them more willingly than with those who think they are alive … I thus wander free and unconcerned, alone with such companions, I am where I wish to be.
This passage comes from a 1353 letter to a friend by the poet Francesco Petrarch explaining why he has remained in his small house near Avignon rather than make a planned trip to Italy and describing the pleasures of daily life in the countryside. His “friends” are his books; Rome and Athens are his private library. Petrarch told another friend that “I am unable to satisfy my thirst for books.” He amassed a sizable library and sought to donate it to the Basilica of San Marco in Venice toward the end of his life in exchange for a house. This proved unsuccessful, and his collection was split up and sold after his death.
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Petrarch was not alone in his obsession of collecting books. Bookmaking was a booming industry in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. What is new with Petrarch, Andrew Hui argues in The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, is his creation of a personal library in his home for the purpose of contemplation and “care of the self.” While most books were held by religious and civil institutions, Petrarch, Hui argues, is one of the first to create a personal library that was the site of “secular … self-care” rather than an “ecclesiastical site of spiritual devotion.” Petrarch, thus, “inaugurates a new tradition of the humanist studiolo.”
The book is in two parts. In the first part, Hui traces the rise of the private library from Petrarch to Montaigne and explains how a “well-stocked library and well-furnished study became must-have for any self-respecting, high-net-worth individuals.” In The Book of the Art of Trade (1458), the merchant Benedetto Cotrugli writes that every good house should have both an office (a scrittoio) for welcoming visitors and a private study (a studiolo) for reading great works of literature.
How a private study should be built and furnished became topics of much discussion. In On the Art of Building (1485), for example, Leon Battista Alberti remarks that private libraries should be built in the east or south side of the house to prevent “mold” or “rust” and be filled with “a large collection of rare books, drawn, preferably, from the learning of ancients.” They should be decorated with maps and various “mathematical instruments.” Paolo Cortesi, the bishop of Ubrino, argued in 1510 that a cardinal’s palazzo should have both a library and a private study. The study should be close to the bedroom, “safe from intrusion,” and have “a spiral staircase” to provide “an inside passage down into the library.”