LAGOMARSINI, GIROLAMO. — Jesuit, humanist, and philologist, born at Puerto S. Maria (Cádiz), but of Genoese origin, on 30 September 1698, died in Rome on 18 May 1773. He spent his entire life teaching: humanities and later rhetoric at Arezzo; rhetoric at Prato, then for 20 years at S. Giovannino in Florence; Greek at the Collegio Romano.
The work to which he devoted many years with keen commitment, assiduous reading, and research into manuscripts was intended to be a critical edition of Cicero’s Opera omnia (in approximately 30 volumes), with notes, commentaries, elucidations, and all the variants found in manuscripts and earlier editions. L. prefaced it with a manifesto or prospectus, in which he explained the principles and purpose of the vast undertaking: M. Tullii Ciceronis oratio in L. Pisonem (Florence 1741); but the volumes, in fact, never appeared, both because of a lack of printers and booksellers and, even more, because of the author’s temperament, which prevented him from ultimately bringing order to the mass of variants and notes accumulated in his manuscripts. These, now preserved in the Biblioteca Vaticana, comprise 80 volumes of various formats (Vat. lat. 11616–11696), together with 11 volumes of correspondence; the most important volume, containing the description and history of the manuscripts and printed works used by the author, as well as the key to understanding the numerals by which he identified them, is in the Marucelliana of Florence (B. III, 44).
Also deserving mention are 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 several carmina; in all of them one consistently admires an exceptionally vigilant critical sense and a polished, fluent Latin marked by the most genuine Ciceronianism.