Niccoli, Niccolò

NICCOLI, NICCOLÒ. - Humanist, b. in Florence in 1364, d. there on 3 February 1437. A tireless researcher of codices, he vied with his Florentine friends in reconstructing the heritage of classical culture. He was among the first to copy a rare Plautine codex owned by Cardinal Orsini; he transcribed, among other things, Petrarch's Africa, and succeeded in building for himself a library of about 800 volumes, which at his death Cosimo de' Medici saved from his creditors and placed in the convent of S. Marco. He left no writings: he had the singular fate of living luminously in the works of his humanist friends. Poggio often recalls him ("vir in dicendo liber") and chose him as the protagonist of De nobilitate, to have him vindicate true human nobility, which lies in personal virtue. Bruni reported some of his judgments and presented him as an elegant and skillful detractor and exalter of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio in the dialogues Ad Petrum Histrum, as if to have him sum up the complex attitude of the age toward the three great fourteenth-century writers. But perhaps the most significant task of humanist thought was entrusted to him by Valla in the third book of De voluptate (1431): here N. passionately indicates in the spirit of the Christian religion the overcoming of pagan philosophies (Stoicism and Epicureanism). On the religious death of N., v. Pastor, I, p. 17.

Giulio Vallese