(Gian Francesco) Poggio Bracciolini was born February 11, 1380 and died October 30, 1459. He was an Italian scholar, writer, and humanist. He recovered.

PoggioModern Author

Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini

• (Gian Francesco) Poggio Bracciolini was born February 11, 1380 and died October 30, 1459.

• He was an Italian scholar, writer, and humanist.

• He recovered a great number of classical Latin texts.

Bio

• Poggio di Duccio was born at the village of Terranuova near Arezzo in Tuscany.

• His father took him to Florence where he studied Latin and later, Greek in Rome.

• At the age of twenty-one he was received into the Florentine notaries' guild and in the year 1404, he passed from the service of the Roman Curia, to Cardinal Rudulfo Maramori, Pope Boniface IX.

• He remained a layman to the end of his life.

Continued

• Most of Poggio's life was spent in attendance to his duties in Rome. Around 1452, he retired to Florence and in 1453 was appointed chancellor and historiographer to the Republic.

• In 1434, he built a villa adorned with works approved by his friend Donatello. In 1435-36 he married.

• His declining days were spent in the discharge of his Florentine office and he died in 1459. A statue by Donatello and a portrait by Antonio del Pollaiuolo remain to commemorate him.

Methods

• He devoted his heart and soul to the resuscitation of classical studies. When he was called to Konstanz in 1414, he employed his leisure in exploring the libraries. The treasures he brought to light restored many lost masterpieces of Latin literature.

• In his epistles he describes how he recovered parts of books and manuscripts and copied them himself. Wherever Poggio went he carried on the same industry of research.

• If a codex could not be obtained by fair means, he was ready to use fraud. Resolute in recognizing erudition as mans chief concern, he sighed over the folly of popes and princes.

Works

• Poggio was a great traveler and wherever he went he brought enlightened powers of observation. It is necessary to dwell upon Poggio's devotion to recovering the classics because these were the most marked features of his character and career.

• In literature he embraced all contemporary studies and distinguished himself. On his moral essays it may suffice to notice the dissertations On Nobility, On Vicissitudes of Fortune, On the Misery of Human Life, On the Infelicity of Princes and On Marriage in Old Age.

Continued

• Poggio's History of Florence exemplifies by its defects, the weakness of that merely stylistic treatment which deprived so much work of it’s historical weight. His Facetiae, a collection of humorous and indecent tales expressed in the purest Latin, are the works most enjoyed today. This book is chiefly remarkable for its unsparing satires.

• Poggio wrote only in Latin and while he was a fluent and copious writer in the Latin tongue, he was not an elegant scholar.

Continued

• Among contemporaries he passed for one of the most fearsome rhetoricians; and a considerable number of his extant works are invectives. His most famous compositions in this kind are the personal invectives which he discharged against Francesco Filelfo and Lorenzo Valla.

• In Filelfo and Valla, Poggio found his match. To dwell upon such literary infamies would be below the dignity of the historian, were it not that these habits of the early Italian humanists imposed a fashion upon Europe which extended to the later age of Scaliger's contentions with Scioppius and Milton's with Salmasius.

On Vicissitudes of Fortune(Historia de varietate fortunae

libri quatuor)• ubi primum,

serenisseme princeps, mihi non valde erudito homini, sed eruditionis doctrinaque amantissimo, aditum in familiam tuam ultro aperiendum esse consuisti, singulari hac tua benignitate tam praclare mecum actum putavi, ut satis uberem hactenus in studiis traducta vita fructum me percepisse judicaverim, eamque consecutum fortunam, qua ad reliquum atatis mea tempus honeste transigendum nulla amplior atque opportunior optanda mihi esse in posterum nideatur.

Legacy

• Poggio was famous for his beautiful and legible handwriting. The formal humanist book hand he invented developed into Roman type, which remains popular as a printing font today (as his friend Niccolò de' Niccoli's script developed into the Italic type first used by Aldus Manutius in 1501).

A sample of Poggio’s handwriting.