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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: PIG-POL |
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POLITIAN (14541494) . Angelo Ambrogini, known in literary annals as Angelo Poliziano or Politianus from his birth
chief
chief
Poliziano had few advantages of person to recommend him. He was ungainly in form, with eyes that squinted, and a nose of disproportionate length. Yet his voice was rich and capable of fine modulation; his eloquence, ease of utterance and copious stream of erudition were incomparable. It was the method of professors at that period to read the Greek and Latin authors with their class, dictating philological and critical notes, emending corrupt passages in the received texts, offering elucidations of the matter, and pouring forth stores of acquired knowledge regarding the laws, manners, religious and philosophical opinions of the ancients. Poliziano covered nearly the whole ground of classical literature during the years of his professorship, and published the notes of his courses upon Ovid, Suetonius, Statius, the younger Pliny, Quintilian, and the writers of Augustan histories. He also undertook a recension of the text of the Yandects of Justinian, which formed the subject of one of his courses; and this recension, though it does not rank high in the scale of juristic erudition, gave an impulse to the scholarly criticism of the Roman code. At the same time he was busy as a translator from the Greek. His versions of Epictetus, Herodian, Hippocrates, Galen, Plutarch's Eroticus and Plato's Charmides delighted contemporaries by a certain limpid fluency of Latin style and grace of manner which distinguished him alsoas an original
series of discursive essays on philology and criticism, first published in 1489 under the title of Miscellanea. They had an immediate, a lasting and a wide renown, encouraging the scholars of the next century and a half to throw their occasional discoveries in the field of scholarship into a form at once so attractive and so instructive. Poliziano was not, however, contented with these simply professorial and scholastic compositions. Nature had endowed him with literary and poetic gifts of the highest order. These he devoted to the composition of Latin and Greek verses, which count among the best of those produced by men of modern times in rivalry with ancient authors. The Manta, in which he pronounced a panegyric of Virgil; the Ambra, which contains a beautiful idyllic sketch of Tuscan landscape, and a studied eulogy of Homer; the Rusticus, which celebrated the pleasures of country life in no frigid or scholastic spirit; and the Nutricia, which was intended to serve as a general introduction to the study of ancient and modern poetrythese are the masterpieces of Poliziano in Latin verse, displaying an authenticity of inspiration, a sincerity of feeling, and a command of metrical resources which mark them out as original
Poliziano was great 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 hero 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 paganism to the modern world. Yet he was even greater as an Italian poet. Between Boccaccio and Ariosto, no single poet in the mother tongue of Italy deserves so high a place as Poliziano. What he might have achieved in this department of literature had he lived at a period less preoccupied with humanistic studies, and had he found a congenial sphere for his activity, can only be guessed. As it is, we must reckon him as decidedly the foremost and indubitably the most highly gifted among the Italian poets who obeyed Lorenzo de' Medici's demand for a resuscitation of the vulgar literature. Lorenzo led the way himself, and Poliziano was more a follower in his path than an initiator. Yet what Poliziano produced, impelled by a courtly wish to satisfy his patron's whim, proves his own immeasurable superiority as an artist. His principal Italian works are the stanzas called La Giostra, written upon Giuliano de' Medici's victory in a tournament; the Orfeo, a lyrical drama performed at Mantua with musical accompaniment; and a collection of fugitive 'pieces, reproducing various forms of Tuscan popular poetry. La Giostra had no plan, and remained imperfect; but it demonstrated the capacities of the octave stanza for rich, harmonious and sonorous metrical effect. The Orfeo is a slight piece of work, thrown off at a heat, yet abounding in unpremeditated lyrical beauties, and containing in itself the germ both of the pastoral
It is difficult to combine in one view the several aspects presented to us by this many-sided man of literary genius. At a period when humanism took the lead in forming Italian character and giving tone to European culture, he climbed with facility to the height of achievement in all the branches of scholarship which were then most seriously prizedin 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 success-fully to Lorenzo de' Medici's scheme for resuscitating the decayed literature of Tuscany that his slightest Italian effusions exercised a potent influence on the immediate future. He appears before us as the dictator of Italian culture in a double capacityas the man who most perfectly 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 favour 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 contributed a curious document on the death of Lorenzo de' Medici to the 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. His private life was also uneventful. He passed it as a house
For the life and works of Politian, see F. O. Mencken ( Leipzig
Leipzig
Carducci 's edition of the Italian poems (Florence, Barbera, 1863); Del Lungo's edition of the Italian prose works and Latin and Greek poems (Florence, Barbera, 1867) ; the Opera omnia (Basel, 1554) ; Greswell's English Life of Politian (1805); Roscoe's Lorenzo de' Medici (loth ed., 1851); J. Addington Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, and translations from Poliziano's Italian poems in Symonds's Sketches and Studies in Italy, which include the Orfeo. (J. A. S.)End of Article: POLITIAN (14541494) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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