Leonardo Bruni Simulacrum

The Life

Leonardo Bruni was born at Arezzo around 1370 and was educated at Florence under Coluccio Salutati, whose successor he became. He served for many years in the papal curia and then returned to Florence, where he was elected chancellor of the Republic in 1427, a position he held, with a short interruption, until his death in 1444. He was also a major figure in the Greek revival; his study with the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras in the 1390s was a pivotal moment in the transmission of Greek learning to Latin Europe.

The Thought

Bruni's achievement was historiographical, philosophical, and political, and these are not separable in his work. His *Historiae Florentini populi* (composed over thirty years, completed in the 1440s) was the first major humanist history — a twelve-book account of the Florentine people written in classicising Latin and drawing on the methodological resources of Livy and the Roman historians. It was a political document as well as a scholarly one, arguing that republican Florence stood in continuity with the republican Roman past.

He translated Aristotle's *Nicomachean Ethics*, *Politics*, and *Economics* into Latin, producing versions that displaced the thirteenth-century scholastic translations and became standard. His shorter works include the *Laudatio Florentinae urbis*, a panegyric of Florence modelled on Aelius Aristides's praise of Athens, and the *Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum*, in which the defence of the ancient classical tradition is staged against the medieval scholastic inheritance.

The Legacy

Bruni is the figure most responsible for what is called civic humanism — the use of classical learning in the service of republican political ideals. The idea that Florence was heir to Rome in its political as well as its cultural traditions passed through Bruni to Machiavelli a generation later, and through Machiavelli to the whole subsequent tradition of European republican thought. His Aristotle translations shaped the philosophical Latin of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His methods — the careful use of documentary sources, the periodisation of history, the integration of political analysis with cultural narrative — influenced historians for three hundred years.