Plutarch and Poliziano

chapter 24 Plutarch and Poliziano Fabio Stok 1 Poliziano Poet and Philologist One of the most incisive scholars of Plutarch at the beginning of the age of print was Poliziano. His real name was Angelo Ambrogini, born in 1454 in Montepulciano (Tuscany). The nickname of “Poliziano” was taken from the Latin name of his birthplace, Mons Politianus.1 He was interested in Plutarch’s works throughout his scholarly career as a reader, a philologist and a translator. When Poliziano was 13, his father was murdered and shortly afterwards his mother sent him to Florence, where his teachers were Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino and the Greek masters John Argyropoulos and Andronicus Callistus. At the age of 15 he began the translation of Homer’s Iliad and dedi- cated the second and third books to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence from 1469 (he later also translated the fourth and fifth books).2 In 1474 he became Lorenzo’s secretary and his son Piero’s tutor (later also of Giovanni, born in 1475 and the future Pope Leo X). Poliziano’s early works were mainly poetic: he wrote several poems in Latin, Italian, and Greek. In 1473 he wrote an obituary of Albiera degli Albizi, a young Florentine woman who had suddendly died after an open-air dance given in honour of Eleonora of Aragon in July of that year. Another of his first Latin poetic compositions was the long letter in elegiac verses to Bartolomeo Fonzio.3 Some years later Poliziano wrote the Sylva in scabiem,4 an experimental poem in Latin hexameters in which he describes in anatomical details the physical degradation caused by scabies. His greatest work in Italian is the Stanze, a poem on the joust won in 1475 by Lorenzo’s brother, Giuliano de’ Medici (and on the latter’s love for Simonetta Vespucci).5 The poem remained unfinished because Giuliano was murdered by the Pazzi (25 April 1478). A few months later Poliziano wrote a chronicle, in 1 On Poliziano’s biography, see Maïer (1966). 2 See Rubinstein (1983). 3 Both works have been published by Bausi (2003). 4 Published by Orvieto (1989). 5 See Quint (1993). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004409446_026 Plutarch and Poliziano 405 Latin prose, of the conspiracy, the A report on the Pazzi conspiracy (Pactianae coniurationis commentarium).6 In 1479 Poliziano’s relations with Lorenzo were undermined by the en- mity of Clarice Orsini, Lorenzo’s wife, perhaps because she disapproved of Poliziano’s liberal approach in teaching Piero. He therefore abandoned the Medicean court and travelled in Northern Italy, visiting Venice, Padua and then Mantua, where he was welcomed by the Marquis Francesco Gonzaga. In Mantua Poliziano wrote the Fabula di Orfeo, the first important theatrical work of Italian literature.7 In 1480 there was a reconciliation with Lorenzo, and Poliziano was ap- pointed professor of poetics and rhetoric in the Studium of Florence (in the first years he also taught Greek). His courses were highly innovative, in com- parison with those of his predecessor Cristoforo Landino: in his first course he commented on post-classical authors such as Quintilian and Statius (whose Silvae he read) and adopted a philological approach, abandoning Landino’s allegorism. In the following years he read Ovid’s Fasti, Persius’ Satires, Virgil’s Georgics, Suetonius’ Caesars and other works, as well as Greek authors such as Hesiod and Homer.8 His prolusions in verses – which he called Sylvae, like those of Statius: Manto (1482) on Virgil’s Bucolics; Rusticus (1484) on Virgil’s Georgics; Ambra (1486) on Homer; and Nutricia (1487) on poetry – were also highly innovative.9 He then collected a selection of his philological studies in the Miscellaneorum centuria prima (First collection of one hundred various notes) published in 1489 in Florence.10 He also worked on a second Centuria, but it remained unfinished and was only published in 1972.11 Some of the com- mentaries prepared by Poliziano for his courses have also been published in recent decades. In the late 1480s Poliziano gave more time to his philosophical interests and became a friend of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, a follower of Ficino and a philosopher. His last courses (1490–1492) concerned Aristotle, as did his last prolusions (in Latin prose): Introduction to logic (Praelectio de dialectica, 1491); Lamia, Introduction to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics (Lamia, praelectio in Priora 6 Published by Perosa (1958). 7 See Fantazzi (2001). 8 See Mandosio (2008). 9 The four Silvae have been translated by Fantazzi (2004). 10 The work was then published in the Basel edition of Poliziano’s Opera omnia (1553), repr. in Maïer (1971: I 213–311). See also the edition of Katayama (1982) and that of the preface to Lorenzo de Medici provided by MacPhail (2015). 11 Branca-Pastore Stocchi (1972)..

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