THE ROLE OF THE PHILOSOPHER IN LATE QUATTROCENTO FLORENCE: POLIZIANO’S LAMIA AND THE LEGACY OF THE PICO-BARBARO EPISTOLARY CONTROVERSY

Igor Candido

Et infoelicitatem tuam deploras? Qui foelicissimo illo saeculo videris Italiam, florente Politiano, Hermolao, Pico? (Erasmus, letter to J. Reuchlin, 29th September 1516).1 Angelo Poliziano opens his Lamia with a fable, drawn from Plutarch, describing the lamias: bloodthirsty, female creatures, they are blind at home and use their eyes only when they leave their abodes. Doing so, Poliziano aims at provoking a polemic with his opponents at the Florentine Studio: like the lamias, he insinuates, they do not possess interior knowledge; and they read Plato and Aristotle only through the lens of commentaries, failing to engage the core issues that occu- pied both philosophers. Throughout the praelectio, there is a persistent recurrence of visual metaphors. These allude to a doctrine linking sight and philosophy together in the autoptic experience of the world. And these metaphors also punctuate a link, for Poliziano, among philology, rhetoric, and dialectic, reopening as he does here an earlier debate concerning what sort of language was appropriate for philosophy. It is difficult to establish whether an academic transformation had been predicted or even encouraged by Lorenzo de’ Medici, who, eager to set a newer philological approach against Landino’s exegetical method, orchestrated Angelo Poliziano’s appointment as professor of poetics and rhetoric at the Florentine Studio in 1480.2 We can be sure, however, that when Poliziano’s philological method of reading Greek and Latin authors came to the fore, it represented an unprecedented breakthrough for the cultural environment of Medicean Florence.3 As the two Centuriae of Poliziano’s Miscellaneae show, Poliziano’s

1 Des. Erasmi Roterodami, Opus Epistolarum, ed. P.S. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), II: 350. 2 See L. Cesarini Martinelli, “Sul commento di Angelo Poliziano alle Selve di Stazio,” Interpres 1 (1978), 96–145: 99 n. 6. 3 See Branca, Poliziano, 17. 96 igor candido methods were to be enduring and later thought to exemplify some of the intellectual aims and achievements of Quattrocento humanism as a whole: the insistence upon reading in their original language texts passed down by the manuscript tradition, rather than relying on trans- lations or the most recent commentaries; the careful discussion and emendation of the same lectiones traditae; the reconstruction of any classical work’s historical context, sources, and influence; and the final step of providing the audience or readers with new interpretations. Poliziano’s philology conditioned his approach to poetry, even as it drove his intensifying interest in philosophy. If it was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola who brought his philosophical simmering to a boil, as he implicitly admitted by concluding the preface to his Centuria Prima with the praise of Pico,4 Poliziano’s four years of teaching Aristotle (1490–94) soon became a laboratory in which the new philology was put to the test and proved the best aid possible to philosophical reflec- tion, as we infer from the key role played by Aristotle within the Cen- turia Secunda.5 It is in his Praelectio in priora Aristotelis analytica or Lamia, the opening oration to his course on Aristotelian logic taught in 1492–1493, that Poliziano proudly claims to have spent his recent years interpreting the most difficult and cardinal works of Aristotle’s Organon (78): “Quite some time ago I lectured publicly on Aristotle’s Ethics, and recently I lectured on Porphyry’s Isagoge, the Categories of Aristotle himself along with the Six Principles of Gilbert of Poitiers, Aristotle’s little book called On Interpretation, then (out of the usual order) the Sophistical Refutations, which is a work untouched by the others and almost inexplicable.” Then he finally comes to the prolu- sion’s subject and to the reasons that dictated his choice of lecturing on the Prior Analytics (78–79): Because of all this, those two volumes of logical works called the Prior Analytics are calling me now. In them, every rule of reasoning correctly is contained. Although these books are rather thorny in some places, and enveloped in many difficulties regarding things and words, nevertheless, on that account I go at them all the more willingly, eagerly, and spirit- edly, because they are almost passed over in all schools by the philoso-

4 See A. Poliziano, Miscellaneorum centuria prima, in Poliziano, Op., A iiii(v), cit. in E. Garin, “L’ambiente del Poliziano,” in Id., La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano. Ricerche e documenti (Milan: Bompiani, 1994), 335–358: 338, n. 1. On Pico’s and Poliziano’s different methods of interpreting the poetry-philosophy nexus, see Garin, “L’ambiente,” 339. 5 See Branca, Poliziano, 17–18.