Angelo Poliziano Simulacrum

The Life

Angelo Poliziano — in Italian Angelo Ambrogini, called Poliziano after his birthplace Montepulciano — was born in 1454. Orphaned at ten, he was brought to Florence, where his precocious gifts attracted Lorenzo de' Medici's patronage. He joined the Medici household, became tutor to Lorenzo's sons (including the future Pope Leo X), and held professorships of Greek and Latin at the Florentine Studio. He was intimate with Ficino, Pico, Landino, and Lorenzo himself. He died in 1494 at the age of forty, two months before Pico and two years after Lorenzo; the Medici era ended quickly after him.

The Thought

Poliziano's achievement was twofold. As a poet he produced, in both Latin and Italian, works of extraordinary technical accomplishment. His *Stanze per la giostra* (c. 1478), written to commemorate Giuliano de' Medici's jousting victory, is one of the masterpieces of Italian fifteenth-century poetry, blending Petrarchan lyric with mythological and philosophical ornament. His *Orfeo*, composed for the Mantuan court, is sometimes called the first secular drama in Italian.

As a classical philologist he was, in his generation, unrivalled. His *Miscellanea* — two centuries of short philological essays, of which only the first was published — demonstrated a new rigour in textual criticism: the principle that manuscripts must be classified genetically rather than counted, that readings must be weighed by the manuscripts' lineage, and that scholarly judgement about texts must rest on evidence rather than taste. These principles did not become fully standard until the nineteenth century (through Karl Lachmann), but Poliziano's practice anticipated them by three centuries.

The Legacy

Poliziano's poetry was formative for Italian Renaissance lyric and for the Elizabethan poetry that drew on it. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton all read Poliziano, directly or through intermediaries. His philological achievement is harder to measure because its effect was slow: the methods he pioneered were lost, recovered, re-lost, and finally made canonical by nineteenth-century classical scholarship. Modern textual criticism has in Poliziano its most significant late-medieval ancestor.