SALUTATI, LINO COLUCCIO. – Humanist and statesman, b. at Stignano in Valdinievole on 16 February 1331, d. at Florence on 4 May 1405. At Bologna, where from childhood he had followed his exiled father, he devoted himself to legal studies. His vocation was poetry, but after his father’s death he found himself in straitened circumstances and had to enroll in the notarial apprenticeship.
After leaving Bologna following the fall of the lordship of the Pepoli (1351), protectors of the exiles, he returned with his family to his native valley, where he practiced as a notary for some time. In 1367 he was, for a few months, chancellor of the commune of Todi; he then followed the papal Curia of Urban V for approximately two years, without finding a stable position there, and resumed the same office at Lucca (1371). He finally attained peace and security at Florence, where he was perhaps elected notary of the Tratte at the beginning of 1374, and chancellor of the Signori the following year. It was he who conferred dignity upon that office, lavishing in it for approximately thirty years the treasures of a vast culture and of an experience sustained by rare inner balance and great moral integrity. His official letters—which represent a genuine humanist reform of chancery style, until then bound to the formulas of a barbarous medieval Latin—seemed to the Duke of Milan more dangerous than a thousand armed knights. Deeply religious, he violently attacked the antipope and the schismatic cardinals, but he was a convinced opponent of papal temporalism and tenaciously defended the independence of the Florentine government from papal interference. At his death he was awarded the title of poet, and his laurel-crowned body received honorable burial in S. Reparata.
The office of chancellor represented for S. the conscious realization of that intimate fusion between humanism and civic life which constitutes the synthesis of his thought. A passionate seeker of manuscripts—he considered himself blessed on the day when he realized that he had discovered Cicero’s letters Ad familiares—he was the first to practice the collation of manuscripts by scientific methods, thus initiating the textual criticism that was to remain one of the most important fruits of our humanism. He passionately defended the sanctity of poetry, as a synthesis of wisdom and revelation, and the educational value of classical studies in famous controversies with the Bolognese chancellor Giuliano Zonarini, with Carlo Malatesta, with Giovanni di Duccio da S. Miniato, and with b. Giovanni Dominici, author of the Lucula noctis. A disciple and continuator of Petrarch, he gathers and develops his aspirations in the direction of more active participation in life and a keener historical understanding
of the present. Certain of his anti-scholastic attitudes proceed from a belief in the primacy of the will over reason, and of active life over knowledge. Against the sancta rusticitas of mystics and hermits he sets the social value of the studia humanitatis; he recognizes the superiority of laws over medicine precisely because the end of the former is the common good. Within the cultural framework of the period, S. is also of considerable importance as a political thinker, owing to a certain reconciliation of democracy and principality centered on respect for legality, and to a breadth of vision that leads him to live, with far greater concreteness of purpose, the dream of Petrarch and Cola of a confederated Italy bound to Rome tamquam membra cum capite.
Of S.’s numerous works, the most important is the Epistolario in 4 vols., published by F. Novati in Ponti per la storia d'Italia (Rome 1891-1911; but for the official letters the old collection by L. Mehus and G. Rigacci, Florence 1741-42, is still useful). The Invectiva in Antonium Luschum in defense of Florence, edited by D. Moreni (there 1826). The De nobilitate legum et medicinae and the De verecundia, in a single volume edited by E. Garin (there 1947). The De tiranno with an Italian translation edited by F. Ercole (Bologna 1942). The De Hercule eiusque laboribus in 2 vols., edited by Ullman (Zurich 1951). Unpublished are the De saeculo et religione and the De fato, fortuna et casu. Latin verses in Carmina Illustr. poet. ital., VIII, Florence 1721, pp. 293-300. Eight youthful eclogues are lost.