PIZZICOLLI, Cyriacus de' (Ciriaco de' Pizzicolli). - One of the most singular figures of Humanism for his versatility of genius and his curiosity for learning: painter, poet, orator, and above all archaeologist, b. at Ancona in 1391, d. at Cremona in 1452. He devoted himself very early to traveling throughout Italy and abroad.

He spent a great part of his life in the Greek lands, attentive to discovering and transcribing Greek, Latin, and Egyptian inscriptions, to collecting manuscripts, sculptures, and works of art, to sketching profiles of famous monuments. This immense and precious material, which he arranged in his voluminous Commentarii, never published, probably perished in the fire of the Sforza Library at Pesaro (1514), where they were deposited. Today only scanty remnants of autographs and of copies made by friends survive.

P. is the pioneer of epigraphic science (though not free from errors and shortcomings), whose historical value he recognized and defended against literary tradition.

Bibliography8 works

BIBL.: the fragmentary epigraphic material is in CIL. III, pp. xxii, 129; in Th. Preger, De epigrammatibus Graecis meletamata selecta, Monaco 1889, and in G. B. De Rossi, Inscript. christ., II, 1, Roma 1888, pp. 356-87; G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des klass. Alterthums, I, 2nd ed., Berlino 1893, pp. 268-86; R. Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci, I, Firenze 1905, pp. 48, 69, 123; A. Gudemann, Grundriss der Geschichte der klass. Philologie, 2nd ed., Lipsia-Berlino 1909, p. 177 ff.; P. Maas, Ein Notizbuch des C. von A. aus dem Jahre 1456, in Beiträge zur Forschung, 1 (1913), pp. 5-15; L. Berra, Per la biografia di C. d'A., in Giorn. stor. lett. it., 63 (1914), pp. 461-62; F. Pall, C. d'A. e la crociata contro i Turchi, in Bull. hist. de l'Acad. roumaine, 20

(1937), pp. 9-60; Pastor, I, pp. 43 and 393; G. Funaoli, Studi di lett. antica, I, Bologna 1946, p. 280 ff.

Benedetto Riposati

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Pizzicolli, Cyriacus de' (Ciriaco de' Pizzicolli)

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