Poliziano

Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano (July 14, 1454 – September 24, 1494) was a Florentine 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.

Lasting Effect

Poliziano was skilled as a scholar, as a professor, as a critic, and as a Latin poet at an age when the classics were still studied with the passion of 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 and fondly dreamed that they might so restore the past as to compete with the classics in production and bequeath a golden age of resuscitated Daganism to the modern world. Yet he was also skilled as an Italian poet, among the ranks of Boccaccio and Ariosto.

Related Topics:
Curiosity - Antiquity - Golden age - Daganism - Poet - Boccaccio - Ariosto

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At a period when humanism took the lead in forming Italian character and giving tone to European culture,Poliziano climbed with facility to the height of achievement in all the branches of scholarship which were then most seriously prized in varied knowledge of ancient authors, in critical capacity, in rhetorical and poetical exuberance. This was enough at that epoch to direct the attention of all the learned men of Europe on Poliziano. At the same time, almost against his own inclination, certainly with very little enthusiasm on his part, he lent himself so successfully to Lorenzo de Medicis' scheme for resuscitating the decayed literature of Tuscany that his slightest Italian effusions exercised a potent influence on the immediate future.

Related Topics:
Epoch - Enthusiasm

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He appears before us as the dictator of Italian culture in a double capacity as the man who most expressed the Italian conception of humanism, and brought erudition into accord with the pursuit of noble and harmonious form, and also as the man whose vernacular compositions were more significant than any others of the great revolution in favor of Italian poetry which culminated in Ariosto. Beyond the sphere of pure scholarship and pure literature Poliziano did not venture. He was present, indeed, at the attack made by the Pazzi conspirators on the persons of Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici, and wrote an interesting account of its partial success. He also coxitributed a curious document on the death of Lorenzo de Medici to tile students of Florentine history. But, he was not, like many other humanists of his age, concerned in public affairs of state or diplomacy, and he held no office except that of professor at Florence.

Related Topics:
Noble - Ariosto - Pazzi - Diplomacy - Professor

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