| Music Encyclopedia: Angelo Poliziano |
(b Montepulciano, 1454; d Florence, 1494). Italian humanist and poet. He spent most of his life in the service of the Medici family. His poetry was set by contemporary composers and his celebrated Fabula di Orfeo (c1480), an entertainment in various verse forms for a half-spoken, half-sung performance, looks forward to the rise of the inter-medio.
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The Italian poet Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494), or Politian, wrote works in both Latin and Italian. Although he considered himself a humanist, he advocated free artistic creation, unencumbered by reliance on the great classical writers of antiquity.
Angelo Poliziano was born Angelo Ambrogini on July 14, 1454, at Montepulciano, Tuscany, the son of a lawyer. When he was 10, his father was murdered, and the boy was sent to live with relatives in Florence, at the Studium of which he was educated by humanists. Poliziano's dedication to Lorenzo de' Medici of a partial translation of the Iliad marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship with the Medici ruler, and for some time he headed Lorenzo's chancellery and was tutor to his two sons. When he lost the latter position in 1479, Poliziano abruptly left the Medici villa at Cafaggiolo in May, and after a short stay at the Medici villa in Fiesole he moved to Mantua and the patronage of Cardinal Gonzaga. The following year, however, having made his peace with Lorenzo, he returned to Florence and at the Studium obtained the chair of Greek and Latin eloquence. In 1477 Poliziano became prior of S. Paolo, and in 1486 he was named canon of the Cathedral, S. Maria del Fiore. He carried out several political missions for Lorenzo and, with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, scouted north Italian cities for books and manuscripts for the Medici Library in 1491. The later years of Poliziano's life were spent between Fiesole, where Lorenzo had given him a villa, and Florence, where he died on Sept. 28/29, 1494.
Poliziano was a prolific writer of epigrams, both in Greek and Latin, and his partial translation of the Iliad (books 2-5) gained him the patronage of the Medici. His Latin odes and elegies revealed a true lyrical talent. His most important Latin writings, however, include the Praelectiones (or Silvae), which are introductions to classical authors treated in his courses at the Studium. The most important of them, Nutricia (1491), is an attempt at a history of poetry from the days of Orpheus to Poliziano's own time. In 1489 Poliziano published the Centuria prima miscellaneorum, consisting of textual criticism and new interpretations of doubtful passages in the classics.
Of greater interest and importance for the history of Italian literature are Poliziano's writings in the vernacular. His Stanze per la giostra were begun in 1475 in honor of Lorenzo's brother Giuliano. Written in ottava rima, the Stanze demonstrate Poliziano's eclectic approach to poetry, combining reminiscences of classical as well as vernacular poetry with a refined sense of style. Poliziano chose the Orpheus myth as the theme for his only drama in the vernacular and the first in Italian literature, La favola di Orfeo. According to its author, the play was written in 2 days in June 1480 for a celebration at the Gonzaga court in Mantua. Though the play's technique is still close to the sacra rappresentazione, the myth had lost its medieval Christian connotations and is transposed into the world of the pastoral.
Poliziano's poetry preferentially employed such popular poetic forms as the one-stanza rispetto and the ballata and avoided the more complex features of sonnet, sestina, and canzone. The subject of his poetry was the uncomplicated love of this world, and he often directly varied Petrarchan themes in an imitazione al contrario. Poliziano's activities as a translator of Greek and Roman literature were remarkable (Callimachus, Epictetus, Galen, Hippocrates, and Moschus), and his editorial attempts - such as the Pandects - remain respectable examples of early textual criticism.
Further Reading
Major studies of Poliziano are in Italian. A good discussion is in E. F. Jacob, ed., Italian Renaissance Studies (1960), and another is in Cecilia M. Ady, Lorenzo dei Medici and Renaissance Italy (1962). Other useful works recommended for general historical background are Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (3d rev. ed., trans. 1950); Paul Oskar Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (1956); and André Chastel, The Age of Humanism: Europe, 1480-1530 (trans. 1963).
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Angelo Ambrogini, commonly known by his nickname, anglicized as Politian, Italian Poliziano, Latin Politianus [1] (from his birthplace, Montepulciano, Latin Mons Politianus) (July 14, 1454 – September 24, 1494) was an Italian Renaissance 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.
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Politian was born as Angelo Ambrogini in Montepulciano, in central Tuscany in 1454; he is known in literary annals as Angelo Poliziano or Politianus, from his birthplace. 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 House of Medici.
At the age of 10, after the premature death of his father, Politian began his studies at Florence, as the guest of a cousin. There he learned Latin and 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, who was then the autocrat of Florence and the chief patron of learning in Italy, took Politian into his household, made him the tutor of his children,[2] and secured him a distinguished post in the University of Florence.
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Among Politian'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 philological and critical notes, emending corrupt passages in the received texts, offering elucidations of the matter, and teaching laws, manners, religious and philosophical 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 the Pandects of Justinian I, which formed the subject of one of his courses. This recension influenced the Roman code.
It is likely that Politian was homosexual, or at least had male lovers, and he never married[4]. Evidence includes denunciations of sodomy made to the Florentine authorities, poems and letters of contemporaries, allusions within his work (most notably Orfeo), and the circumstances of his death. The last suggests he was killed by a fever (possibly resulting from Syphillis) and exarcebated by his infatuation for a boy under whose window he insisted on standing despite being ill[5]. He may also have been a lover of Pico della Mirandola.
But it's just as likely that his death was precipitated by the loss of his friend and patron Lorenzo de Medici in April 1494. Poliziano himself dying on 24 September, just before the wave of foreign invasion which was gathering in France swept over Italy.
In 2007, the bodies of Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola were exhumed from St. Mark's Basilica in Florence. Scientists under the supervision of Giorgio Gruppioni, a professor of anthropology from Bologna, used current testing techniques to study the men's lives and establish the causes of their deaths. A TV documentary is being made of this research,[6] and it was recently announced that these forensic tests showed that both Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola likely died of arsenic poisoning. The chief suspect is Piero de' Medici, the successor of Lorenzo de' Medici and docent of Florence, but there are others.[7]
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 antiquity. He was also known as an Italian poet, a contemporary of Giovanni Boccaccio and 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 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, 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.[8]
His Latin and Greek works include:
His principal Italian works are:
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
"Politian". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Politian.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.
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