Pietro Alcionio
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Pietro Alcionio, or Petrus Alcyonitus (ca. 1487-1527), the Venetian humanist, was a classical scholar under the patronage of Pope Clement VII, a translator of Aristotle who was hurt in the Sack of Rome in May 1527, and died later that year.
His origins are unknown; his eloquence was praised in Erasmus' letter to John Watson in 1516, the earliest surviving notice. After having studied Greek in Venice under Marcus Musurus of Candia, he was employed for some time as a proofreader by the printer Aldus Manutius. Alcionio published at Venice, in 1521, a Latin translation of several of the works of Aristotle (dedicating the volume to Leo X), which was shown by the Spanish scholar Sepúlveda to be very incorrect.
In 1522 Alcionio was appointed professor of Greek at Florence through the influence of Giulio de' Medici. That year he sent back to Aldus for printing a dialogue in the nature of a eulogy on the theme of exile (Medicis legatus, sive de exsilio), in a Ciceronian Latin so finely honed that he was charged with plagiarism by his personal enemy, Paulus Manutius. The accusation, which Girolamo Tiraboschi's Storia della letterature italiana demonstrated to be groundless but which dogs his reputation, was that he had taken the finest passages in the work from Cicero's lost treatise De Gloria, and had then destroyed the only existing copy of the original in order to escape detection.
When his patron became pope the following year under the title of Clement VII, Alcionio followed him to Rome and remained there until his death. Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) remarked that "His contemporaries speak very unfavourably of Alcionio, and accuse him of haughtiness, uncouth manners, vanity and licentiousness."
Alcionio is one of the four humanists in the circle of Clement VII selected by Kenneth Gouwens to illustrate the shock of cultural discontinuity and new sense of human vulnerability caused by the Sack of Rome that put a premature end to the High Renaissance. Of Alcionio's numerous translations of Greek classics into Latin, which included the orations of Isocrates and Demosthenes mentioned by Ambrogio Leoni, only his Aristotle has survived (Simon Finch).
[edit] References
- Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911: "Pietro Alcionio" This present article is based in part on this text.
- Simon Finch Rare Books Ltd, 2003. Catalogue, 52: Aristotelis libros de Generatione... Venice: Bernardinus Vitales, April 1521 Catalogue 52
[edit] Further reading
- Kenneth Gouwens, 1998. Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome Includes text of Alcionio's Orations on the Sack of Rome ISBN-90-04-10969-2
