Poliziano
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Angelo Ambrogini, best known as Poliziano (July 14, 1454 – September 24, 1494) was a Florentine classical scholar and poet, one of the revivers of Humanist Latin. He used his didactic poem Manto, written in the 1480s, as an introduction to his lectures on Virgil.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Known in literary annals as Angelo Poliziano or Politianus from his birthplace, he was born at Montepulciano, in central Tuscany. His father, Benedetto, a jurist of good family and distinguished ability, was murdered by political antagonists for adopting the cause of Piero de Medici in Montepulciano; this circumstance gave his eldest son, Angelo, a claim on the family of Medici.
At the age of ten, after the premature death of his father, Poliziano came to prosecute his studies at Florence, guest of a cousin. Here he learned Latin and Greek. From Marsilio Ficino he imbibed the rudiments of philosophy. The precocity of his genius for scholarship and poetry was early manifested. At thirteen years of age he began to circulate Latin letters; at seventeen he sent forth essays in Greek versification; at eighteen he published an edition of Catullus. In 1470 he won for himself the title of homericus adulescens by translating books II-V of the Iliad into Latin hexameters. Lorenzo de Medici, who was then the autocrat of Florence and the chief patron of learning in Italy, took Poliziano into his household, made him the tutor of his children, and secured him a distinguished post in the university of Florence. Lorenzo led the way himself, and Poliziano was more a follower in his path than an initiator.
[edit] Adulthood and teaching
Before he reached the age of thirty, Poliziano expounded the humanities with almost unexampled lustre even for that epoch of brilliant professors. Among his pupils could be numbered the chief students of Europe, the men who were destined to carry to their homes the spolia opima of Italian culture. Not to mention Italians, he educated students from Germany, England, and Portugal.
Poliziano did not have the good looks that could survive him in Italy, yet his voice was rich and capable of fine modulation; his eloquence, ease of utterance and copious stream of erudition were incomparable. It was the method of professors at that period to read the Greek and Latin authors with their class, dictating philological and critical notes, emending corrupt passages in the received texts, offering elucidations of the matter, and pouring forth stores of acquired knowledge regarding the laws, manners, religious and philosophical opinions of the ancients. Poliziano covered nearly the whole ground of classical literature during the years of his professorship, and published the notes of his courses upon Ovid, Suetonius, Statius, Pliny the Younger, and Quintilian. He also undertook a recension of the text of the Pandects of Justinian I, which formed the subject of one of his courses. However, this recension, though it does not rank high in the scale of juristic erudition, gave an impulse to the scholarly criticism of the Roman code.
[edit] Works and influence
At the same time he was busy as a translator from the Greek. His versions of Epictetus, Hippocrates, Galen, Plutarch's Eroticus and Plato's Charmides delighted contemporaries by a certain fluency of Latin style and grace of manner which distinguished him as an original writer. Of these learned labors, the most universally acceptable to the public of that time were a series of discursive essays on philology and criticism, first published in 1489 under the title of Miscellanea. They had an immediate and lasting effect, encouraging the scholars of the next century and a half to throw their occasional discoveries in the field of scholarship into a form at once so attractive and so instructive. Poliziano was not, however, contented with these simply professorial and scholastic compositions. He devoted himself to the composition of Latin and Greek verses, which count among the best of those produced by men of modern times in rivalry with ancient authors.
His Latin and Greek works include:
- The Manto, in which he pronounced a panegyric of Virgil;
- The Ambra, which contains a beautiful idyllic sketch of Tuscan landscape and a eulogy of Homer;
- The Rusticus, which celebrated the pleasures of country life in no frigid or scholastic spirit;
- The Nutricia, which was intended to serve as a general introduction to the study of ancient and modern poetrythese are the masterpieces of Poliziano in Latin verse, displaying an authenticity of inspiration, a sincerity of feeling, and a command of metrical resources which mark them out as original productions of poetic genius rather than as merely professorialism.
Exception may be taken to their style, when compared with the best work of the Augustan or even of the Silver age. But what renders them always noteworthy to the student of modern humanistic literature is that they are in no sense imitative or conventional, but that they convey the genuine thoughts and emotions of a born poet in Latin diction to suit the characteristics of the singer's temperament.
While his principal Italian works are:
- The stanzas called La Giostra, written upon Giuliano de Medicis' victory in a tournament. This work was left unfinished following the assassination of its protagonist;
- The Orfeo, a lyrical drama performed at Mantua with musical accompaniment;
- A collection of Tuscan songs, reproducing various forms of popular poetry distinguished by a roseate fluency.
[edit] Final years
His private life was uneventful until the end. He passed it as a house-friend and dependant of the Medicis and as a simple man of letters for whom (with truly Tuscan devotion to the Saturnian country) rural pleasures were always acceptable. He was never married; and his morals incurred suspicion, to which his own Greek verses lend a certain amount of plausible coloring. He died, half broken-hearted by the loss of his friend and patron Lorenzo de Medici, on the 24th of September 1494, just before the wave of foreign invasion which was gathering in France swept over Italy.
[edit] Lasting effect
Poliziano was skilled as a scholar, as a professor, as a critic, and as a Latin poet at an age when the classics were still studied with the passion of assimilative curiosity, and not with the scientific industry of a later period. He was the representative of that age of scholarship in which students drew their ideal of life from antiquity and fondly dreamed that they might so restore the past as to compete with the classics in production and bequeath a golden age of resuscitated Daganism to the modern world. Yet he was also skilled as an Italian poet, among the ranks of Boccaccio and Ariosto.
At a period when humanism took the lead in forming Italian character and giving tone to European culture,Poliziano climbed with facility to the height of achievement in all the branches of scholarship which were then most seriously prized in varied knowledge of ancient authors, in critical capacity, in rhetorical and poetical exuberance. This was enough at that epoch to direct the attention of all the learned men of Europe on Poliziano. At the same time, almost against his own inclination, certainly with very little enthusiasm on his part, he lent himself so successfully to Lorenzo de Medicis' scheme for resuscitating the decayed literature of Tuscany that his slightest Italian effusions exercised a potent influence on the immediate future.
He appears before us as the dictator of Italian culture in a double capacity as the man who most expressed the Italian conception of humanism, and brought erudition into accord with the pursuit of noble and harmonious form, and also as the man whose vernacular compositions were more significant than any others of the great revolution in favor of Italian poetry which culminated in Ariosto. Beyond the sphere of pure scholarship and pure literature Poliziano did not venture. He was present, indeed, at the attack made by the Pazzi conspirators on the persons of Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici, and wrote an interesting account of its partial success. He also coxitributed a curious document on the death of Lorenzo de Medici to tile students of Florentine history. But, he was not, like many other humanists of his age, concerned in public affairs of state or diplomacy, and he held no office except that of professor at Florence.
[edit] Sources
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
[edit] Further Reading
There is no biography of Poliziano in English currently in print, but Stanley Meltzoff, Botticelli, Signorelli and Savonarola, Theologia Poetica and Painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano (Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1987) gives an excellent portrait of Poliziano the scholar and his opposition to Savonarola.
- Linda Proud, A Tabernacle for the Sun (Godstow Press, 2005), a literary novel set in Florence during the Pazzi Conspiracy features Poliziano as a major character and adheres closely to known facts.
- Linda Proud, Pallas and the Centaur (Godstow Press, 2004), deals with the aftermath of the Pazzi Conspiracy and Lorenzo de Medici's strained relations with his wife and with Poliziano. It is partly narrated by Poliziano's sister, Maria.
