AURISPA, GIOVANNI. - Humanist, b. perhaps at Noto, in Sicily, probably in 1569, d. in Ferrara in 1459. He studied at Naples, where he was in the time of Ladislaus of Anjou-Durazzo, in the first decade of the fifteenth century. Immediately afterward he made journeys to the East. On returning to Italy, he kept a school at Savona until 1419. Then he was at the court of the new pope Martin V, whom he left in order to carry out a mission to Constantinople for Gian Francesco Gonzaga. He then went as a lecturer to Bologna (1424) and passed from there to Florence (1425). But the raging of war soon drew him (1427) to Ferrara, a safer harbor: as tutor to the son of the Este marquis, he received from the latter missions to Rome (1433) and to the Council of Basel (1433). From then until the closing of the Council at Florence in 1443, while remaining attached to the Este, he was secretary of the papal Curia. The last years of his life were spent industriously in the service of the Curia and of the marquises, at whose court he was to die.
Not great as a teacher, a contemporary of Vittorino and of Guarino Veronese, mediocre as a poet, a passable translator from Greek, he was nevertheless a very active and fortunate hunter of codices. In Germany he discovered the Panegyrics and the Commentary on Terence by the grammarian Donatus, and from his journeys to the East he brought back precious Greek codices (among them the Palatine Anthology; the two volumes of the Iliad, later deposited at the Marciana; Aeschylus, Sophocles and Apollonius of Rhodes, later at the Laurentian; the Homeric Hymns; the Moralia of Plutarch; Plato, Pindar, Empedocles).
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Pier Fausto Palumbo