Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study — The Public Domain Review

From Augustine onward, the Christian tradition posits that reading is a dialogue with God. Machiavelli (and before him Petrarch) marked a change: in this new practice, reading became instead a dialogue with the voices of antiquity. In the 1330s, in Vaucluse, a remote valley in southern France, Petrarch constructed a little villa with a small study, in modest imitation of the ancients. While there were already private studies in the Burgundian courts and the papal palace in Avignon, Petrarch was one of the first to construct one unattached to any institutions. “Meanwhile here I have established my Rome, my Athens, and my spiritual fatherland”, he wrote. “Here I gather all the friends I now have or did have, not only those who have proved themselves through intimate contact and who have lived with me, but also those who died many centuries ago, known to me only through their writings.” Petrarch inaugurated the idea of reviving classical antiquity as a transhistorical conversation between the living and the dead. The studiolo thus becomes a sort of chronotope, an ingathering of time and space, where the perception of the past, present, and future accelerates or dilates at the will of the reader. In their tiny corners of the world, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Du Bois each in their own ways conjure a utopia of friends, binding together the far and near, the long-ago and recent past into the plenitude of the here and now.