Poliziano

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"Politian" redirects here. For the work by Edgar Allan Poe, see Politian (play).

Poliziano
Piero II de' Medici
Poliziano and Giuliano de' Medici, from a fresco painted by Renaissance artist Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinita, Florence

Agnolo (or Angelo) Ambrogini (Italian pronunciation:

Florentine Renaissance. His scholarship was instrumental in the divergence of Renaissance (or Humanist) Latin from medieval norms[2][3] and for developments in philology.[4] His nickname Poliziano, by which he is chiefly identified to the present day, was derived from the Latin name of his birthplace, Montepulciano
(Mons Politianus).

Poliziano's works include translations of passages from

Medici family that ruled Florence
. He served the Medici as a tutor to their children, and later as a close friend and political confidant. His later poetry, including La Giostra, glorified his patrons.

He used his

didactic poem Manto, written in the 1480s, as an introduction to his lectures on Virgil
.

Biography

Early life

Poliziano was born as Agnolo Ambrogini in Montepulciano, in central Tuscany in 1454.[5] 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 Agnolo, as his eldest son, a claim on the House of Medici.

At the age of ten, after the premature death of his father, Poliziano began his studies at

Greek. From Marsilio Ficino he learned the rudiments of philosophy. At 13 he began to circulate Latin letters; at 17 he wrote essays in Greek versification; and at 18 he published an edition of Catullus. In 1470 he won the title of homericus adulescens by translating books II-V of the Iliad into Latin hexameters. Lorenzo de' Medici, the autocrat of Florence and the chief patron of learning in Italy at the time, took Poliziano into his household, made him the tutor of his children,[6] among which were Piero the Unfortunate and Giovanni, the future Pope Leo X. The humanistic content of his lessons brought him into constant conflict with their mother, Clarice. Lorenzo also secured him a distinguished post at the University of Florence
. During this time, Poliziano lectured at the Platonic Academy under the leadership of Marsilio Ficino, at the Careggi Villa.

Adulthood and teaching

Demetrius Chalcondyles (far right)[7]

Among Poliziano's 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. He also educated students from Germany, England and Portugal.

It was the method of professors at that period to read the Greek and Latin authors with their class, dictating

opinions of the ancients. Poliziano covered nearly the whole ground of classical literature during his tenure, 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 Justinian II's Digest and lectured about it. This recension influenced the Roman
code.

Proposal to King John II of Portugal

Poliziano wrote a letter to John II of Portugal paying him a profound homage:

to render you thanks on behalf of all who belong to this century, which now favours of your quasi-divine merits, now boldly competing with ancient centuries and all Antiquity.

and considering his achievements to be of merit above

Portuguese discoveries was only written almost one hundred years later by Luís de Camões.[8]

Final years

Style of Niccolò Fiorentino, Angelo Poliziano, 1454-1494, c. 1494, medallion in the National Gallery of Art

Poliziano spent his final years without financial or other worries, studying philosophy. Piero the Unfortunate even asked Pope Alexander VI to make him a cardinal.

It is likely that Poliziano was

Pico della Mirandola.[11]

But it is just as likely that his death was precipitated by the loss of his friend and patron Lorenzo de' Medici in April 1492, Poliziano himself dying on 24 September 1494, just before the foreign invasion gathering in France swept over Italy.

In 2007, the bodies of Poliziano and

Pico della Mirandola were exhumed from the Church of San Marco in Florence to establish the causes of their deaths.[12] Forensic tests showed that both Poliziano and Pico likely died of arsenic poisoning, possibly the order of Lorenzo's successor, Piero de' Medici.[13]

Legacy

Poliziano was well known as a scholar, a professor, a critic, and a Latin poet in an age when the classics were still studied with 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

Ariosto
.

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 distinguished him as a writer. Of these learned labours, 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, influencing the scholars of the next century.

Anthony Grafton writes that Poliziano's "conscious adoption of a new standard of accuracy and precision" enabled him "to prove that his scholarship was something new, something distinctly better than that of the previous generation":

By treating the study of antiquity as completely irrelevant to civic life and by suggesting that in any case only a tiny elite could study the ancient world with adequate rigor, Poliziano departed from the tradition of classical studies in Florence. Earlier Florentine humanists had studied the ancient world in order to become better men and citizens. Poliziano by contrast insisted above all on the need to understand the past in the light of every possibly relevant bit of evidence — and to scrap any belief about the past that did not rest on firm documentary foundations ... [But] when he set ancient works back into their historical context Poliziano eliminated whatever contemporary relevance they might have had.[14]

Works

His Latin and Greek works include:

  • the poem Manto, in which he pronounced a panegyric of Virgil;
  • the Ambra, which contains an idyllic sketch of Tuscan landscape and a eulogy of Homer;
  • the Rusticus, which celebrated country life;
  • the Nutricia, which was intended to serve as a general introduction to the study of ancient and modern poetry.

His principal Italian works are:

  • his most highly regarded work in Italian,
    Giuliano de' Medici's victory in a tournament in 1475. This work was left unfinished following the 1478 Pazzi conspiracy, which resulted in the assassination of its protagonist. In addition, Lorenzo's wife Clarice strongly disapproved of the humanistic nature of the poem, causing Politian to resign, leave Florence in 1479 and settle in Mantua, where he set to work on the Fabula di Orfeo [it
    ].
  • 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.

His philosophical works are:

  • Praelectio de dialectica (1491), an introduction to Aristotelian logic;
  • Lamia. Praelectio in Priora Aristotelis Analytica (1492);
  • Dialectica (1493), an introduction to a course on Aristotelian philosophy.

English translations

  • Poliziano, A. (1979). The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano. David Quint (ed. trans.). University of Massachusetts Press.
    ISBN 9780870231452
    .
  • Poliziano, A. (2004). Silvae. C. Fantazzi (ed. trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    ISBN 0-674-01480-4
    .
  • Poliziano, A. (2006). Letters. S. Butler (ed. trans.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    ISBN 0-674-02196-7
    .
  • Poliziano, A. (2010). Angelo Poliziano's Lamia. C. S. Celenza (ed. trans.). Leiden: Brill.
    ISBN 978-90-04-18590-6
    .

Notes

  1. ^ Kraye (1997) 192.
  2. ^ Celenza (2009).
  3. ^ For an interpretation of changes between classical and humanist Latin, and the controversy among Renaissance scholars, see: Moss (2003) 271.
  4. ^ Daneloni (2001).
  5. ^ His most extensive biography may be found in Orvieto (2009), others in: Nativel (1997) and Leuker (1997) 1–7.
  6. ^ Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Politian" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
  7. ^ Società editrice Fiorentina (1910) 81. "The admirable frescoes now to be seen are by Domenico Ghirlandaio : they were executed by order of John Tornabuoni and costed more than 1000 gold florins ... The patriarch Zachariah in the Temple : the four half-figures at left hand are the portraits of Agnolo Poliziano, Cristopher Landino, (in red cloak), Demetrius Calcondila, and Marsilio Ficino, (in purple robe)"
  8. ^ Manuel Bernardes Branco (1879). Portugal e os Estrangeiros. Lisboa: Livraria de A.M.Pereira. pp. 415–417. (Translation of the Latin by Teófilo Braga) "render-vos graças em nome de todos quantos pertencemos a este século, o qual agora, por favor dos vossos méritos quasi-divinos, ousa já denodadamente competir com os vetustos séculos e com toda a antiguidade."
  9. ^ Strathern (1993).
  10. ^ The account is set out in a letter by Antonio Spannocchi, writing in latin on 29 September 1494. Found in: Del Lungo (1897) 265f.
  11. ^ The Ugly Renaissance, Lee, A., (2013), p.3
  12. ^ Medici writers exhumed in Italy. BBC News, 28 February 2007. Accessed June 2013.
  13. ^ Malcolm Moore (7 February 2008). "Medici philosopher's mysterious death is solved" The Daily Telegraph. London. Accessed June 2013.
  14. ^ Grafton (1994) 72f.

References

Further reading

External links

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