Giovanni Tortelli (1400–1466) was a Renaissance Humanist, largely responsible for the creation of the Vatican Library, together with scholars such as Bessarion and Poggio Bracciolini.
Born in Arezzo, he studied Greek with Filelfo and Carlo Marsuppini in Florence and with Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua, perfected his Greek by spending five years in Greece between 1433 and 1438.[1] In 1447 he came to Rome to work with Pope Nicholas V (Tommaso Parentucelli, 1447–1455). In 1453 he was named abbot in comenda of the abbey of San Sebastiano at Alatri, some 40 miles south of Rome, in what was then Campania. He restored and embellished the ancient monastery, where he may have spent much of the rest of his life.[2] His major work, dedicated to Nicholas V, was the De Orthografia, a vast study of ancient Greek and Latin, antiquarian and erudite.[3] Its title may have been consciously based on the homonymous sixth-century work of Cassiodorus, written in his own monastery of Vivarium.