Demetrios Chalkokondyles

Demetrios Chalkokondyles (

Demetrios Chalkokondyles was born in

A Greek has just arrived, who has begun to teach me with great pains, and I to listen to his precepts with incredible pleasure, because he is Greek, because he is an Athenian, and because he is Demetrius. It seems to me that in him is figured all the wisdom, the civility, and the elegance of those so famous and illustrious ancients. Merely seeing him you fancy you are looking on Plato; far more when you hear him speak.^[12]

Among his pupils were

"Just as she [Greece] had empended in their behalf [the Latins] all of her most precious and outstanding possessions liberally and without any parsimony, and had restored with her hand and force of arms the state of Italy, long ago oppressed by the Goths, they [the Latins] should in the same way now be willing to raise up prostrate and afflicted Greece and liberate it by arms from the hands of the barbarians."^[15]

It was during his tenure at the Studium in Florence that Chalkokondyles edited

Chalkokondyles married in 1484 at the age of sixty-one and fathered ten children.[9] Finally, invited by Ludovico Sforza, he moved to Milan (1491/1492), where he taught until he died.

Work

He wrote in Ancient Greek the grammar handbook "Summarized Questions on the Eight Parts of Speech With Some Rules" (Ἐρωτήματα συνοπτικὰ τῶν ὀκτὼ τοῦ λόγου μερῶν μετὰ τινῶν κανόνων).^[17] He translated Galen's Anatomy into Latin.^[18]

As a scholar, Chalkokondyles published the

lexicon (1499).

• Greek Grammar, edited 1546 by Melchior Volmar in Basel
• Latin translation of the Anatomical Procedures of Galen, edited and published in 1529 by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi
• Ἡ τοῦ Ὁμήρου ποίησις ἅπασα, 1488, editio princeps of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, edited by Bernardus Nerlius and Chalkokondyles, appeared in Florence, not before 13 January 1489, in two folio volumes. It was the first Greek book to be printed in Florence.^[19] The Greek type used to print the 1488–1489 Homer is believed to have been cast by the Cretan Demetrius Damilas from the type that he had used to print Constantine Lascaris’ Erotemata (Milan 1476), the first book to be printed entirely in Greek, based upon the hand of Damilas’s fellow scribe Michael Apostolis.^[20]

See also

• Chalkokondyles family
• Greek scholars in the Renaissance

Notes

1. OCLC 312685884
   . MARSILIO FICINO, CRISTOFORO LANDINO, ANGELO POLIZIANO, and DEMETRIUS CHALCOCONDYLES. Reproduced (by permission) from part of Alinari's photograph of Ghirlandaio's fresco on the south wall of the choir in Santa Maria Novella, Florence (ep. p.64 n.6)… A fresco in Santa Maria Novella painted by Ghirlandaio (d.1498) represents an apparently friendly group of scholars who have been identified as Ficino, Landino, Politian and Demetrius.
2. OCLC 3983429
   .
3. OCLC 7123855
   . DEMETRIO CALCONDILA Ritratto: copia dall'originale di Domenico Ghirlandaio negli affreschi della cappella Tornabuoni in SM Novella (1490)
4. ISBN 978-0-669-00868-5
   . This detail of a fresco by the painter Ghirlandaio in Santa Maria Novella, Florence.... Poliziano and Landino, and the Byzantine Demetrius Chalcocondyles, at the extreme right. The latter explained difficult passages in Plato to Ficino.
5. ISBN 978-88-89527-17-7
   . Demetrio Calcondila in un particolare dell'Apparizione dell'angelo a Zaccaria di Domenico Ghirlandaio, Firenze
6. ^
   OCLC 44529765
   .
7. ^ Petrucci, Armando (1973). "CALCONDILA (Calcocondila, Χαλκονδύλης Χαλκοκανδύλης), Demetrio". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (in Italian). Vol. 16.
8. ^ "Demetrius Chalcocondyles". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 25 September 2009.
9. ^
   ISBN 978-0-472-11055-1
   .
10. OCLC 11666932
    .
11. ISBN 978-1-4179-4223-7
    .
12. ^
    ISBN 978-0-554-22523-4
    . Another Greek of importance was Demetrius Chalcocondyles of Athens (1424–1511), who reached Italy in 1447. In 1450 he became professor of Greek at Perugia.
13. ^ ^{a b c} Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Chalcondyles, Laonicus s.v. Demetrios Chalcondyles" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 5 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 804.
14. OCLC 44529765
    .
15. ^
    ISBN 978-0-8122-1976-0
    .
16. ISBN 978-1-85109-772-2
    .
17. ^ "All Scholars: Chalkokondyles, Demetrius". Database of Classical Scholars. Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
18. ISBN 978-1-890951-67-2
    .
19. ^ "Homer Editio Princeps". Chetham's Library. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
20. S2CID 212932139
    .

References

• Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance humanists and the Ottoman Turks, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, pp. 113–15.
  ISBN 978-0-8122-1976-0
• Deno J. Geanakoplos, "The discourse of Demetrius Chalcocondyles on the inauguration of Greek studies at the University of Padua", Studies in the Renaissance, 21 (1974), 118–44 and in Deno J. Geanakoplos, Interaction of the ‘Sibling’ Byzantine and Western Cultures in the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance (330–1600), New Haven and London, 1976, pp. 296–304
• Jonathan Harris, Greek Émigrés in the West, 1400–1520, Camberley: Porphyrogenitus, 1995.
  ISBN 978-1-871328-11-0
• Robert Proctor, The Printing of Greek in the Fifteenth-Century, London, 1930, pp. 66–9.
• Fotis Vassileiou & Barbara Saribalidou, Short Biographical Lexicon of Byzantine Academics Immigrants to Western Europe, 2007.
• N.G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy. Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance, London, 1992.
  ISBN 978-0-7156-2418-0

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Demetrios Chalkondyles.

• Demetrios Chalkokondyles at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• The "First Edition" of the Iliad, article about the textual history the Iliad