POLIZIANO, ANGIOLO. — Born in Montepulciano on 14 July 1454, whence he later took the name Politianus, ANGIOLO AMBROGINI soon came to Florence, to relatives who were somewhat less impoverished, and who directed him toward his studies. Very quickly he found a way to distinguish himself in the humanist milieu of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Of a most lively and witty intellect, his extraordinary power of assimilation and his ever more refined taste were immediately demonstrated by his translation into Latin hexameters, sustained by Virgilian elegance, of certain books of the *Iliad*, continuing the work of "piety" already desired by Nicholas V and begun with the translation of Book I by Carlo Aretino.
The P. was able to give fine proof of his ability to grasp the most varied harmonies and techniques, and to adhere with refined precision to the originals, which he rendered, as he himself would say,
1693
POLIZIANO ANGIOLO
in the service of the Medici for the fair Simonetta; but, though interrupted at the middle of Book II (either because of the death of the young friend or because of the evident weariness of the subject), they remain of exceptional importance for the history of our vernacular poetry. An early expression of the humanism of the P., they transform the initial epic movement into a chivalric atmosphere that has not yet acquired the smiling detachment of Ariosto, and soon loses momentum and runs aground in the exaltation of nature, now with popular freshness (in the footsteps of Sacchetti), now with melancholic accents, now with a refinement of detail inspired by the Latin poets of decadence. The mythological apparatus is here re-experienced with grace, without apparent artifice, in an ottava rima that is chiseled, harmonious, and flashing with classical reminiscences. So much so that one cannot conceive of Ariosto’s ottava rima without that of the P., nor can the history of our poetic language be separated from Poliziano’s refinement. Simonetta remains, as has been well said, “between the human and the divine,” as in the pure transfiguring forms of Botticelli’s *Primavera* and in the Magnificent’s commentary on his own sonnets: these were works, moreover, all conceived in the same humanist atmosphere. In the P., it is true, the themes of love and death are dimmed in a “sweet-bitter” yearning for spiritual and physical feminine beauty; this was then his personal way of inserting himself, with his Latin and vernacular poetry, into the Neoplatonic tradition theorized by Ficino: the divine theory of love. The *Stanze* already contain much of the humanist spirituality of the *Orfeo* and the *Sylvae*: their limits lie in an excess of contemplativeness and intellectualism and in a certain preciosity of chiseling that partakes of both the medieval and the classical.
No less importance, as Carducci already saw, attaches to the popular poetry of the P., the *Nugae* in the vernacular, which the author shows little regard for in the *Miscellanea*. These poems of the P., continuous and scattered responses, ballad-songs and little songs, which continue, moreover, the Tuscan popular traditions, preserve a certain elegance, a particular technical refinement. Without harsh melancholy, without difficult and intractable allegorizing, without spiritual contemplation or suffering vicissitudes, they constitute the development of the usual themes of love sought, denied, or conquered, amid the joyous consent of all nature. Even in their achieved simplicity, the technique is rich in impeccably cadenced rhythms. The vernacular language, after the classicism of the great Trecento poets, seems to have attained with the P. that maturity which responded to the desire and hope of the Magnificent, who as early as 1466 had been a collector of Tuscan poetry and a defender of the vernacular, not poor, not rough, but abundant and most pure. To these qualities the P. alone knew how to add elegance and freshness.
In 1480, having been driven from Florence by pedagogical disagreements with Lorenzo’s consort, the P. arrived in Mantua. There, on the occasion of festivities at the Gonzaga court and at the request of Cardinal Francesco, he composed for the theater a pastoral fable, the *Orfeo*: “in volgare style so that it might be better understood by the spectators,” which proves once more how the vulgar and the Latin form were equivalent in his artistic experience, though he believed in the latter as a universal medium of wisdom. The *Orfeo* is a framework for a lyric drama set against a bucolic background; it follows the forms of the ballad (the opening episode of Aristeus and Mopsus is a true and proper *gloria*; the closing one, the orgiastic bacchanal for the killing of the Thracian singer, is a carnalesque song), interweaving it with a Latin song sung by Orpheus and vernacular stanzas of lament and prayer to Pluto.
Even more than in the *Stanze per la Giostra*, in this pastoral fable, woven of Ovidian, Virgilian, and popular motifs, the echoes of the Neoplatonic allegorism that was then flourishing resound, of the mythic symbolism that Landino was interpreting in those same years from the text of the *Divine Comedy* (1481) and had theorized in the *Disputationes Camaldulenses* (c. 1475) and in his commentary on the *Aeneid* (1478). The P., that is, brings into the Mantuan milieu and transmutes into poetry the conciliatory tendency of classical and Christian elements that was traditional in humanism, and which he found both in the divine allegories of the *Divine Comedy* and in the poetic fables restudied by Boccaccio in the *Genealogies*; in the latter, for example, Book V, the myth of Orpheus is still explained, on the authority of Lactantius and Fulgentius, in a universal and Christian sense; as the Florentine Neoplatonists understood II. Indeed, in the *Altercation* of the Magnificent and in the *Miscellanea* of the P., Orpheus is expressly compared to Ficino.
The meaning of the P.’s work (if the author himself did not prefer to veil his fable in mystery) may escape us; but the Ficinian inspiration that animates it must be considered not as profane matter or as a free play of the imagination, but as a vulgarized synthesis of the classical and the Christian, each anticipating and complementing the other.
The learned, critical, philological, and philosophical scholar, a writer of fervent Sermons (1467–78) delivered before a learned company (On the Sacrament of the Eucharist, On the Passion of Jesus Christ, On the Humility of Jesus Christ), in a strong and rich vernacular, and of sacred hymns (nearly ternary iambic, *In Divam Virginem*, which would not be out of place, though rather scholastic, in a history of biblical inspiration from Petrarch to Manzoni), admirably integrates the personality of the poet of the *Stanze*, the *Orfeo*, and the *Ode*. His wealth of philological culture and his vivid aesthetic intuitions he expounds, albeit somewhat disorderly, in the *Miscellanea*, published in a century in 1489. This is a collection of essays and learned observations: now the author corrects a passage or interprets an obscure word in manuscripts, now revises a judgment on writers and works, now implicitly polemicizes (as he would continue in the twelve books of the *Epistolae*, which he arranged a few months before his death and which others published in ’98) with numerous adversaries; all enlivened by a sincere faith in the eternal values of wisdom. Nothing could be more inaccurate than to deny the author religious interests or problems of thought. The patristic literature he knew and meditated upon, as did every humanist; this is evident not only from his Sermons and his Aristotelian prolusions but also from his letters and the *Miscellanea*; and among his translations from Greek into Latin is also the *Commentary on the Psalms* by Athanasius. It is obvious that in his confident, optimistic humanism the wisdom of God already appears to have shone upon the minds of pagan poets and philosophers; thus Homer and Aristotle, Plato and Cicero, the ancient theologians, as Ficino taught, are for him also prophets, first possessors of the single wisdom that Christianity later received and revived in the light of divine love for the salvation of mankind. His Homer, therefore, in the *Praefatio ad Homerum* and in the *sylva* *Ambra*, is both a prophet and a theologian, who received and explained to the peoples the notion of divine omniscience and providence; like Cicero, he is seen by him with the same eyes as the Saint of the *Confessions*, that is, a true intermediary of God. Thanks to the Ciceronian *Hortensius*, he recalls, among other things, that Saint Augustine was able to ask God for “the immortality of wisdom, with an incredible ardor of feeling,” and was able to “depict the affections and passions of a time and every vain hope, and place every thought in God.”
The author took a very lively part in the controversy over Cicero and Ciceronianism, especially in his *Epistolae*. He, who had elevated imitation to an art and desired to see in style “the long leavening of hidden erudition, of manifold readings, of ancient habit of study,” could certainly not tolerate that others should see in Cicero only “stylum, non pectus” and mimic his cadences, clausulae, and vocabulary. For the author was fully aware of the problem of the irrepeatability of a given language and of the evolution of style: thus he considered the Latinity of Quintilian not “corrupted” in comparison to that of Cicero, but simply “changed”; not contaminated by decadence, but different, according to the variation of minds, tastes, and environments.
In Florence, where he had returned in the same year 1480, the author regained, amid the renewed favor of Lorenzo, his priorate of San Paolo, entrusted to him three years earlier, and became a public professor at the Florentine *Studio*. He was also a canon of the Metropolitan Church. Of his literary teaching—always, moreover, in the guise of a poet or philologist—remain the *Praelectiones* on Homer, Suetonius, Persius, Quintilian, and Statius, as well as his *Sylvae*—that is, impromptu compositions—in harmonious hexameters: *Manto*, in praise of Virgil (1482), *Rusticus* (1483), on the Georgic poetry of Hesiod and Virgil, *Ambra* (1485), in praise of Homer, and *Nutricia* (1491), in which he extols ancient and modern poetry and poets. His philosophical teaching he conducted from ’92 until a violent fever prematurely took him from life (Sept. ’94); and his Aristotelian courses on the *Prior Analytics* and on Dialectic are preserved, as well as his general treatises (*Lamia*, *Panepistemon*, *Dialectica*), which were certainly inspired by his Pico della Mirandola. But a true philosopher he was not; even if he could say that he renewed the study of philosophy with his philological expertise, in perpetual polemic with his predecessors, all “arid” or “jejune”: they had so devalued the name of philosopher that he would perhaps prefer for himself that of “grammarian” or “philosophaster.”
The author was keenly aware of what he represented in Florentine and European culture. With him, the times were not ripe for a more worthy and conscious life: the medieval darkness, he affirms, can be said to have ended; he is proud to illuminate the present more clearly with the voice of the ancient writers who “at last, as they were much lacerated and truncated and greatly altered from their original state, have returned to their homeland.” If with his philological work he belongs to the humanist tradition that runs from Valla to Erasmus, his *Stanze* remained a model for all vernacular poetry of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, his *Sylvae* are a singular example of humanist mysticism, and his *Orfeo* provided material for imitation in the theater of the entire Renaissance, from Rucellai to Trissino. And even as the tastes of our vernacular changed, his language would be considered a marvelous acquisition not only by theorists like Bembo but by poets and critics of every age.
