**NICCOLI, Niccolò.** – Humanist, born in Florence in 1364, died there on 3 February 1437. An indefatigable seeker of manuscripts, he vied with his Florentine friends in restoring the patrimony of classical culture.
Among the first to possess a rare Plautine codex owned by Cardinal Orsini, he transcribed, among other works, Petrarch’s *Africa*, and succeeded in assembling a library of about 800 volumes, which at his death Cosimo de’ Medici rescued from creditors and placed in the convent of San Marco. He left no writings: he had the singular fate of living on brilliantly in the works of his humanist friends. Poggio often recalls him (and calls him *vir in dicendo liber*) and chose him as the protagonist of *De nobilitate*, to have him vindicate true human nobility, which resides in personal virtue. Bruni reports some of his judgments and casts him as an elegant and skilful detractor and champion of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in the dialogues *Ad Petrum Histrum*, almost as if to have him sum up the prevailing attitude of the time toward the three great fourteenth-century writers. But perhaps the most significant role assigned to him in humanist thought was that given by Valla in the third book of *De voluptate* (1431): here Niccoli passionately points to the spirit of Christian religion as the surpassing of pagan philosophies (Stoicism and Epicureanism). On his pious death, see Pastor, I, p. 17.