Poggio Bracciolini
Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, usually referred to simply as Poggio Bracciolini, was an Italian scholar and an early Renaissance humanist. He is noted for rediscovering and recovering many classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries. His most celebrated finds are De rerum natura, the only surviving work by Lucretius, De architectura by Vitruvius, lost orations by Cicero such as Pro Sexto Roscio, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Statius' Silvae, Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae, and Silius Italicus's Punica, as well as works by several minor authors such as Frontinus' De aquaeductu, Nonius Marcellus, Probus, Flavius Caper, and Eutyches.
Birth and education
Poggio di Guccio was born near Arezzo, in Tuscany, in the village of Terranuova, which in 1862 was renamed Terranuova Bracciolini in his honor.Taken by his father to Florence to pursue the studies for which he appeared so apt, he studied Latin under the amanuensis Giovanni Malpaghino of Ravenna, the friend and protégé of Petrarch. His distinguished abilities and his dexterity as a copyist of manuscripts brought him into early notice of the chief scholars of Florence; both Coluccio Salutati and Niccolò de' Niccoli befriended him. He studied notarial law, and, at the age of twenty-one he was received into the Florentine notaries' guild, the Arte dei giudici e notai.
Career and later life
In October 1403, on high recommendations from Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, he entered the service of Cardinal Landolfo Maramaldo, Bishop of Bari, as his secretary, and a few months later he was invited to join the Chancery of Apostolic Briefs in the Roman Curia of Pope Boniface IX, thus embarking on 11 turbulent years during which he served under four successive popes, first as scriptor, soon moving up to abbreviator, then scriptor penitentiarius, and scriptor apostolicus. Under Martin V he reached the top rank of his office, as Apostolicus Secretarius, papal secretary. As such he functioned as a personal attendant of the Pope, writing letters at his behest and taking dictation, with no formal registration of the briefs, but merely preserving copies. He was esteemed for his excellent Latin, his extraordinarily beautiful book hand, and as occasional liaison with Florence, which involved him in legal and diplomatic work.Throughout his long career of 50 years, Poggio served a total of seven popes: Boniface IX, Innocent VII, Gregory XII, Antipope John XXIII, Martin V, Eugenius IV, and Nicholas V. While he held his office in the Curia through that momentous period, which saw the Councils of Constance, in the train of Pope John XXIII, and of Basel, and the final restoration of the papacy under Nicholas V, he was never attracted to the ecclesiastical life. In spite of his meager salary in the Curia, he remained a layman to the end of his life.
The greater part of Poggio's long life was spent in attendance to his duties in the Roman Curia at Rome and the other cities the pope was constrained to move his court. Although he spent most of his adult life in his papal service, he considered himself a Florentine working for the papacy. He actively kept his links to Florence and remained in constant communication with his learned and influential Florentine friends: Coluccio Salutati, Niccolò de' Niccoli, Lorenzo de' Medici the elder, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, and Cosimo de' Medici.
In England
After Martin V was elected as the new pope in November 1417, Poggio, although not holding any office, accompanied his court to Mantua in late 1418, but, once there, decided to accept the invitation of Henry, Cardinal Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, to go to England. His five years spent in England, until returning to Rome in 1423, were the least productive and satisfactory of his life.In Florence
Poggio resided in Florence during 1434−36 with Eugene IV. On the proceeds of a sale of a manuscript of Livy in 1434, he built himself a villa in the Valdarno, which he adorned with a collection of antique sculpture, coins and inscriptions, works that were familiar to his friend Donatello.In December 1435, at age 56, tired of the unstable character of his single life, Poggio left his long-term mistress and delegitimized the fourteen children he had had with her, scoured Florence for a wife, and married a girl of a noble Florentine family, not yet 18, Selvaggia dei Buondelmonti. In spite of the remonstrances and dire predictions of all his friends about the age discrepancy, the marriage was a happy one, producing five sons and a daughter. Poggio wrote a spate of long letters to justify his move, and composed one of his famous dialogues, An seni sit uxor ducenda.
Poggio also lived in Florence during the Council of Florence, from 1439 to 1442.
Dispute with Valla
In his quarrel against Lorenzo Valla—an expert at philological analysis of ancient texts with a hot temperament fitted to protracted disputation—Poggio found his match. Poggio started in February 1452 with a full-dress critique of the Elegantiae, Valla's major work on Latin language and style, where he supported a critical use of Latin eruditio going beyond pure admiration and respectful imitatio of the classics.At stake was the new approach of the humanae litterae in relation to the divinae litterae. Valla argued that biblical texts could be subjected to the same philological criticism as the great classics of antiquity. Poggio held that humanism and theology were separate fields of inquiry, and labeled Valla's mordacitas as dementia.
Poggio's series of five Orationes in Laurentium Vallam were countered, line by line, by Valla's Antidota in Pogium. It is remarkable that eventually the belligerents acknowledged their talents, gained their mutual respect, and prompted by Filelfo, reconciled, and became good friends. William Shepherd, author of Poggio's most extensive biography, finely comments on Valla's advantage in the literary dispute: the power of irony and satire versus the ploddingly heavy dissertation. These sportive polemics among the early Italian humanists were famous, and spawned a literary fashion in Europe which reverberated later, for instance, in Scaliger's contentions with Scioppius and Milton's with Salmasius.
Erasmus, in 1505, discovered Lorenzo Valla's Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum, which encouraged him to pursue the textual criticism of the Holy Scriptures, free of all academic entanglements that might cramp or hinder his scholarly independence—contributing to Erasmus's stature of leading Dutch Renaissance humanist. In his introduction, Erasmus declared his support of Valla's thesis against the invidia of envious scholars such as Poggio, whom he unfairly described as "a petty clerk so uneducated that even if he were not indecent he would still not be worth reading, and so indecent that he would deserve to be rejected by good men however learned he was.".
Later years and death
After the death in April 1453 of his intimate friend Carlo Aretino, who had been the Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, the choice of his replacement, mostly dictated by Cosimo de' Medici, fell upon Poggio. He resolved to retire from his service of 50 years in the Chancery of Rome, and returned to Florence to assume this new function. This coincided with the news of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans.Poggio's declining days were spent in the discharge of his prestigious Florentine office—glamorous at first, but soon turned irksome—conducting his intense quarrel with Lorenzo Valla, editing his correspondence for publication, and in the composition of his history of Florence. He died in 1459 before he could put the final polish to his work, and was buried in the church of Santa Croce. A statue by Donatello and a portrait by Antonio del Pollaiuolo remain to commemorate a citizen who chiefly for his services to humanistic literature deserved the notice of posterity. During his life, Poggio kept acquiring properties around Florence and invested in the city enterprises with the Medici bank. At his death, his gross assets amounted to 8,500 florins, with only 137 families in Florence owning more capital. His wife, five sons and daughter all survived him.
Search for manuscripts
After July 1415—Antipope John XXIII had been deposed by the Council of Constance and the Roman Pope Gregory XII had abdicated—the papal office remained vacant for two years, which gave Poggio some leisure time in 1416/17 for his pursuit of manuscript hunting. In the spring of 1416, Poggio visited the baths at the German spa of Baden. In a long letter to Niccoli he reported his discovery of an "Epicurean" lifestyle—one year before finding Lucretius—where men and women bathe together, barely separated, in minimum clothing: "I have related enough to give you an idea what a numerous school of Epicureans is established in Baden. I think this must be the place where the first man was created, which the Hebrews call the garden of pleasure. If pleasure can make a man happy, this place is certainly possessed of every requisite for the promotion of felicity."Poggio was marked by the passion of his teachers for books and writing, inspired by the first generation of Italian humanists centered around Francesco Petrarch, who had revived interest in the forgotten masterpieces of Livy and Cicero, Giovanni Boccaccio and Coluccio Salutati. Poggio joined the second generation of civic humanists forming around Salutati. Resolute in glorifying studia humanitatis, learning, literacy, and erudition as the chief concern of man, Poggio ridiculed the folly of popes and princes, who spent their time in wars and ecclesiastical disputes instead of reviving the lost learning of antiquity.
The literary passions of the learned Italians in the new Humanist Movement, which were to influence the future course of both Renaissance and Reformation, were epitomized in the activities and pursuits of this self-made man, who rose from the lowly position of scribe in the Roman Curia to the privileged role of apostolic secretary.
He became devoted to the revival of classical studies amid conflicts of popes and antipopes, cardinals and councils, in all of which he played an official part as first-row witness, chronicler and critic and adviser.
Thus, when his duties called him to the Council of Constance in 1414, he employed his forced leisure in exploring the libraries of Swiss and Swabian abbeys. His great manuscript finds date to this period, 1415−1417. The treasures he brought to light at Reichenau, Weingarten, and above all St. Gall, retrieved from the dust and abandon many lost masterpieces of Latin literature, and supplied scholars and students with the texts of authors whose works had hitherto been accessible only in fragmented or mutilated copies.