BRACCIOLINI, POGGIO (POGGIO FIORENTINO). — Born at Terranova Valdarno, near Arezzo, c. 1380. Lacking in family wealth, he found his early studies difficult. In Florence, at the school of Giovanni da Ravenna, he soon became known for his lively wit and aptitude for letters; and much to his advantage were the support of Coluccio Salutati and the friendship of the most prominent humanists. When he arrived in Rome in 1403 his literary reputation was already secure; the following year, Boniface IX appointed him secretary, an office he held almost uninterruptedly for about fifty years, despite the turbulent events of the Roman pontificate in those years.
B. may be considered a privileged figure: his travels from one council to another enabled him to make fruitful searches for manuscripts in the monasteries of half of Europe. Important among these was his discovery of the Lucretian poem.
After an unfruitful stay in England, B. returned to Rome and his office; in his later years he left the Curia to become chancellor and historian of the Florentine Republic, and prior. He was thus able to spend his final years in peace at his villa in the Valdarno, where he died in 1459, completing his last literary work, the Historia florentina, which was later vulgarized by his son Iacopo.
His works, numerous and interesting, generally lack depth but are certainly not lacking in liveliness. His epistolary writings, among the best of the time, contain various travel descriptions and notes on the customs and usages of foreign peoples; fame attached to one of his letters to Bruni concerning the torture and death of Jerome of Prague. His dialogues (De avaritia [1429]; De nobilitate [1446]; De infelicitatae principum [1440]; De varietate Fortunae [1448]; Contra hypocritas [1449]; Historia convivialis [1450]; De miseria humanae conditionis [1455]) are rather slow in development and poor in philosophical content, but skillfully woven with pleasant anecdotes and acute observations, and imbued with a genuine aversion for impostors, idlers, and the depraved. Particular circulation was enjoyed by the Facetiae, a collection of anecdotes imagined as recounted in the papal antechamber (the bugiale, as he called it) by the attendants to pass the time; in which, unfortunately, coarse and licentious language is not lacking, as indeed it is not absent from his other works. The Historia florentina, written as a continuation of Bruni’s, remains far from the Livian model in stylistic artifice and breadth of inquiry.
Famous, and often scurrilous, were B.’s invectives against Valla, Filelfo, and the antipope Felix: such was the custom of the age. Mediocre were his translations from Xenophon, Lucian, and Diodorus.
Works by B.: Poggii Opera (Strasbourg 1513); Poggii Opera (Basel 1538); Poggii Epistolae, ed. T. Tonelli, 3 vols. (Florence 1832–61). V. also some unpublished letters published by Walser in his cited work.