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Through life-long energy, persuasive charm, and unstoppable enthusiasm, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) brought book collecting into the Florentine Renaissance. He served under seven popes, as a Florentine/Roman scholar, writer and an early humanist. He recovered a great number of classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries, including the only surviving Lucretius, and disseminated manuscript copies among his learned friends. The present manuscript contains his work "De varietate fortunae".
In the papal curia in the 1420s and after, some papal secretaries became expert archaeologists. The splendid miniature of Poggio on folio 2r of the manuscript represents one of the most adventurous of all the fifteenth- century explorers of the classical past. Poggio Bracciolini walked the streets and inspected the stones of Rome, intent on preserving and recording every detail and "stupefied" by the continuing destruction of important ancient buildings. In this book he makes the theme of fortune's power to destroy the pretext for a detailed firsthand survey of Rome's ruins. It begins dramatically, with Poggio and a friend surveying the scene visible from the top of the Capitoline, and includes detailed study of such technical matters as the composition of the city's walls.
Francesco di Antonio del Chierico's portrait shows Poggio in old age holding open a manuscript of his own book.
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