Federico da Montefeltro had an unusual idea of power. He believed a ruler should carry a sword. But he should also read Plato.
That combination made him one of the most fascinating figures of the Italian Renaissance.
Born in 1422, Federico became Duke of Urbino and one of the most successful condottieri (mercenary leader) of 15th-century Italy. A professional soldier. A commander for hire. A man who made much of his fortune fighting other people’s wars.
Yet the image he carefully created for himself was not simply that of a warrior. It was that of the warrior-scholar.
The famous portrait by Piero della Francesca captures this beautifully. Federico appears in profile, wearing his red cap, his badly damaged nose unmistakable. The portrait hides the right side of his face, where he had lost an eye after an injury.
But the more interesting portrait of Federico may actually be his library.
By the standards of the fifteenth century, it was staggering.
Federico wanted nothing less than one of the greatest libraries since antiquity. His bookseller and biographer, Vespasiano da Bisticci, remembered that Federico employed as many as 30-40 scribes in Urbino, Florence and elsewhere to copy books for him. Modern research broadly supports the extraordinary scale of this operation.
By Federico’s death in 1482, his collection contained roughly 900 manuscripts.
About 600 were in Latin or the Italian vernacular. There were also around 168 Greek manuscripts, more than 80 Hebrew volumes and even a small number of Arabic works. That multilingual range was unusual for a princely Renaissance library.
And Federico did not collect books merely to fill shelves. He wanted beautiful books.
Some of the finest scribes, illuminators and craftsmen of the age worked on his manuscripts. More than 260 of his Latin codices were produced in Florence alone.
The subjects were equally ambitious. History. Philosophy. Theology. Mathematics. Medicine. Military science. Classical literature. Greek and Roman authors sat alongside Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.
For Federico, this was not just bibliophilia. It was statecraft.
His palace at Urbino was designed to present him as a new kind of ruler. Soldier, administrator, patron and intellectual rolled into one.
There is, however, a wonderful myth surrounding his library that needs correcting. It is sometimes said that a century after Federico died, his magnificent collection had fallen into ruins.
That isn’t quite what happened. The library certainly suffered.
In 1502, forces belonging to Cesare Borgia seized Urbino. Books were carried away to Forli and many precious bindings disappeared. Further losses followed political turmoil in 1516.
But the library survived remarkably well. Indeed, this is one of the great happy endings in the history of book collecting. Today, the Vatican says Federico’s collection survives almost in its entirety.
So the Warrior Bibliophile’s dream did not disappear.
His duchy vanished. His dynasty vanished. The wars he fought are largely forgotten.
But his books survived. And perhaps Federico, of all people, would have appreciated the irony.
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