Dante, as we have already said,
finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond
even this in the words, 'My country is the whole world.' And when his
recall to Florence was offered him on unworthy conditions, he wrote
back: 'Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and the stars;
everywhere meditate on the noblest truths, without appearing
ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people? Even my
bread will not fail me.' The artists exult no less defiantly in their
freedom from the constraints of fixed residence. 'Only he who has
learned everything,' says Ghiberti,'is nowhere a stranger; robbed of
his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every
country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.' In the
same strain an exiled humanist writes: 'Wherever a learned man fixes
his seat, there is home.'
An acute and practiced eye might be able to trace, step by step, the
increase in the number of complete men during the fifteenth century.
Whether they had before them as a conscious object the harmonious
development of their spiritual and material existence, is hard to say;
but several of them attained it, so far as is consistent with the
imperfection of all that is earthly. It may be better to renounce the
attempt at an estimate of the share which fortune, character, and
talent had in the life of Lorenzo il Magnifico.
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