Poliziano

Poliziano (born July 14, 1454, Montepulciano, Tuscany [Italy]—died September 28/29, 1494, Florence) was an Italian poet and humanist, a friend and protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and one of the foremost classical scholars of the Renaissance. He was equally fluent in Greek, Italian, and Latin and was equally talented in poetry, philosophy, and philology.

The murder of Poliziano’s father in May 1464 left the family poverty-stricken, and not later than 1469 Poliziano was sent to Florence. (The name Poliziano is derived from his place of birth; Politianus is its Latin form, and Politian is Anglicized.) He started to write Latin and Greek epigrams and attracted the attention of Lorenzo, to whom Poliziano dedicated the first two books of his Latin translation of the Iliad. About 1473 he entered the Medici household and was able to study in the Medici library until, in 1475, he was entrusted with the education of Lorenzo’s eldest son, Piero, who was then age three. In 1477 Poliziano was given as a benefice the priory of San Paolo. His translation of the Iliad, Books II–V, into Latin hexameters (1470–75) brought him his first renown. Between 1473 and 1478 he produced Latin and Greek verses that are among the best examples of humanist poetry: they include elegies, odes, and epigrams; of particular merit are the elegies In violas (“In Violets”) and In Lalagen and the ode In puellam suam (“In Regard to One’s Daughters”). To the same period belong the strange and poetically experimental Sylva in scabiem (1475; “Trees with Mildew”), in which he describes realistically the symptoms of scabies.

Poliziano’s poetic masterpiece of this period is, however, a vernacular poem in ottava rima, Stanze cominciate per la giostra del Magnifico Giuliano de’ Medici (“Stanzas Begun for the Tournament of the Magnificent Giuliano de’ Medici”), composed between 1475 and 1478, which is one of the great works of Italian literature. In it he was able to synthesize the grandeur of classical literature with the spontaneity of Florentine vernacular poetry. The poem describes the love of “Julio” (i.e., Giuliano de’ Medici) for “Simonetta” (i.e., Simonetta Cattaneo; died 1476) by means of a poetic transfiguration in which beauty is glorified according to humanist ideals. Stylistically, it is influenced by Latin epic and encomiastic poems and reveals the author’s taste for refined poetry. It was interrupted at Book II, stanza 46, probably because of Giuliano’s death in 1478.

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Poliziano was, with Lorenzo, one of those mainly responsible for the revaluation of vernacular literature. It is generally believed that it was he who wrote the dedicatory letter, tracing the history of vernacular poetry and warmly defending it, that accompanied the so-called Raccolta Aragonese (“The Aragon Collection”), a collection of Tuscan verse sent by Lorenzo to Federico d’Aragona about 1477.

Poliziano was with Lorenzo and Giuliano when the latter was killed by the Pazzi on April 26, 1478; on this episode he wrote the dramatic report Pactianae coniurationis commentarium (1478). In May 1479, as a result of a quarrel with Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice Orsini, he was expelled from the Medici household. In December, instead of accompanying Lorenzo on a difficult diplomatic mission to Naples, he undertook a series of journeys in northern Italy. After visiting Venice and Verona he was attracted to Mantua, where, in the Gonzaga court, he found a new patron in Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga. It was for a court occasion that he wrote in Mantua Orfeo (1480; “Orpheus”), a short dramatic composition in the vernacular, based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and inspired by the same humanist ideal of beauty that pervades his Stanze. Orfeo is less refined than the Stanze, but it nevertheless reveals the author’s poetic genius. During his stay in Mantua, Poliziano repeatedly wrote to Lorenzo asking to be recalled to Florence, and in August 1480 he was at last invited to return and was again entrusted with Piero’s education. Thanks to Lorenzo he was appointed to the Florentine chair of Latin and Greek (autumn 1480) but was not readmitted to the Medici household and went to live outside of Florence.

At the Florentine university Poliziano gave four inaugural lectures in verse, known collectively as the Sylvae (“The Trees”): Manto (1482; “The Cloak”), on Virgil’s poetry; Rusticus (1483; “The Countryside”), on the bucolic poems of Hesiod and Virgil; Ambra (1485; “Amber”), on Homer; and Nutricia (1486; “The Foster Mother”), on the different genres of Greek and Latin literature.

In 1488 he took part in a diplomatic mission to Pope Innocent VIII, and in 1491 he traveled to Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, and Venice to trace manuscripts for the Medici library. Otherwise he spent the last years of his life in Florence. His writings of this last period include a Latin translation of Epictetus’s Manual (1479); Detti piacevoli, a collection of witty sentences, composed in the vernacular between 1477 and 1479; Greek epigrams; a number of vernacular canzoni a ballo (“songs for dancing”) and rispetti (“regards”), which show his taste for popular poetry; and Latin letters on problems of style and literature.

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His most important work on classical philology is the Miscellanea (1489), two collections, each consisting of about 100 notes (centuria) on classical texts: these and other works laid the foundations for subsequent scholarly studies in classical philology.