BRACCIOLINI, Poggio (Poggio Fiorentino). - Born at Terranova Valdarno, near Arezzo, ca. 1380. Not rich in family property, he had a difficult time in his early studies. In Florence, at the school of Giovanni da Ravenna, he was soon known for his liveliness of mind and aptitude for letters; and Coluccio Salutati and the friendship of the best-known humanists greatly helped him to make his mark. When he arrived in Rome in 1403 his literary fame was already assured; the following year he was appointed secretary by Boniface IX, and he then held this office almost uninterruptedly for about fifty years, even amid the troubled vicissitudes of the Roman pontificate in those years.
B. could consider himself privileged: his travels from one council to another allowed him fruitful searches for codices in the monasteries of half of Europe. Important among other things was his discovery of the Lucretian poem.
After an fruitless stay in England, B. returned to Rome, to his office; in his last years he left the Curia to become chancellor and historian of the Republic in Florence, and prior. He was thus able to await death in peace (1459), in his villa in Valdarno, attending to his last literary labor, the Historia fiorentina, later translated into the vernacular by his son Iacopo.
His works, numerous and interesting, generally lack depth, but certainly not liveliness. The epistolary, among the best of the time, contains various travel descriptions and notes on the customs and usages of foreign peoples, and a letter of his to Bruni on the torture and death of the Hussite heretic Jerome of Prague acquired celebrity. His dialogues (De avaritia [1429]; De nobilitate [1440]; De infelicitate principum [1440]; De varietate Fortunae [1448]; Contra hypocritas [1449]; Historia convivialis [1450]; De miseria humanae conditionis [1455]) are rather slow in their development, and poor in philosophical content, but skillfully woven with pleasant anecdotes and acute observations, and full of genuine aversion for impostors, idlers and the vicious. Particular diffusion was enjoyed by the Facetiae, a collection of anecdotes imagined as told in the papal antechamber (the bugiale, as he calls it) by the household members to pass the time; in which unfortunately coarse and licentious speech is not lacking, as, for that matter, it is not lacking in his other works. The Historia florentina, written as a continuation of that of Bruni, remains very far from the Livian model, in fineness of style and breadth of inquiry.
Famous, and often scurrilous, are B.'s invectives against Valla, Filelfo, the antipope Felix: it was the custom of the century. His translations from Xenophon, from Lucian, from Diodorus are mediocre.
Works of B.: Poggi Opera (Strasbourg 1513); Poggi Opera (Basel 1538); Poggi Epistolae, edited by T. Tonelli, 3 vols. (Florence 1832-61). See also some unpublished epistles published by Walser in the work cited.
Bibliography3 works
Giulio Vallese