LAGOMARSINI, GIROLAMO. - Jesuit, humanist and philologist, b. at Puerto S. Maria (Cadiz), but of Genoese origin, on 30 Sept. 1698, d. in Rome on 18 May 1773. He spent his whole life in teaching: humanities and then rhetoric at Arezzo; rhetoric at Prato, then for 20 years at S. Giovannino in Florence; Greek at the Collegio Romano.
The work, on which he labored for many years with keen commitment, assiduous reading and research into codices, was to have been a critical edition of the Opera omnia of Cicero (in about 30 vols.), with notes, commentaries, elucidations and all the variants found in the codices and in earlier editions. L. had it preceded by a manifesto or prospectus, in which he explained the norms and the purpose of the vast work: M. Tullii Ciceronis oratio in L. Pisonem (Florence 1741); but the volumes, in reality, never appeared, both for lack of printers and booksellers and, even more, because of the author's temperament, which never managed to bring final order to the mass of variants and notes accumulated in his manuscripts. These, now preserved at the Vatican Library, comprise 80 vols., of various formats (Vat. lat. 11616-11696), plus 11 vols. of correspondence; the most important volume, containing the description and history of the codices and printed books that the author used, and the key for understanding the ciphers that marked them, is at the Marucelliana in Florence (B. III, 44).
Mention should also be made of the copious annotations to the work of Antonio M. Graziani; De scriptis invita Minerva libri XX (2 vols., Florence 1745-46) and those to the works of Giulio Pogiani: Epistolae et Orationes (4 vols., Rome 1762-68); various Orationes and Inscriptiones and some carmen; in which one always admires a very vigilant critical sense and a terse and fluid Latin, marked by the purest Ciceronianism.
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