AURISPA, GIOVANNI. - Humanist, born perhaps at Noto, in Sicily, probably in 1569, died at Ferrara in 1459. He studied at Naples, where he was at the time of Ladislao of Angio Durazzo, in the first decade of the fifteenth century. Shortly thereafter he undertook journeys to the East. On returning to Italy, he taught at Savona until 1419. He then went to the court of the new pope Martino V, whom he left in order to carry out a mission to Constantinople for Gian Francesco Gonzaga. He subsequently became a lecturer at Bologna (1424) and from there moved to Florence (1425). But the outbreak of war soon drew him (1427) to Ferrara, a safer haven: tutor to the son of the Este marquis, he received from him 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 family, he was secretary to the papal Curia. The final years of his life were actively spent in the service of the Curia and of the marquises, at whose court he was to die.
Not great as a teacher, though contemporary with Vittorino and Guarino Veronese, mediocre as a poet, and a fair translator from Greek, he was nevertheless a most active and successful seeker of manuscripts. In Germany he discovered the Panegirici and the Commento on Terence by the grammarian Donato, and from his journeys in the East he brought back valuable Greek manuscripts (among them the Antologia Palatina; the two volumes of the Iliade, later deposited at the Marciana; Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Apollonius Rhodius, later at the Laurenziana; the Inni Omerici; Plutarch’s Moralia; Plato, Pindar, Empedocles).