Vegio, Maffeo

VEGIO, MAFFEO. - Humanist, b. at Lodi in 1407, d. at Rome before 29 June 1458; he was buried in the chapel of St. Monica in the church of St. Augustine.

At Pavia, where he had gone to study jurisprudence, he met Valla and Panormita and turned to the study of the classics. Among the poets he preferred Virgil and even wrote a Supplementum to the Aeneid (1427) that ended with the assumption of the Trojan hero into Olympus. He also composed epigrams, elegies, mythological and epic poems (Astyanax, 1430; Velleris aurei libri IV, 1430, etc.) and an important little dictionary of legal words illustrating the Digest (De verborum significatione, 1433). Unable to find a position in Lombardy, he entered the service of the pontifical Curia and followed its wanderings with the office of datary and abbreviator. At Bologna, in 1437, he completed the poem Antoniados libri IV, already begun at Pavia and inspired by episodes from the life of St. Anthony Abbot; a typical example of that recreation in a Christian sense of ancient epic which constitutes one of the most fervent motifs of humanistic literature, and at the same time a foretaste of the conversion that was to be accomplished in him above all through the influence of the Confessions of St. Augustine. In 1443 he was appointed by Eugene IV canon of St. Peter's. In 1455 he entered among the Augustinians, and to the cult of the Saint of Hippo and of St. Monica he consecrated his last years, made serene by the reading of the Psalms, which in his youth he had himself judged worthless but in old age [valued]. Documents of the religious fervor that dominates the whole second part of his life are the De perseverantia religionis, composed in 1448 for a sister who was a nun, and the De rebus memorabilibus Basilicae S. Petri (1453-57), which applies to Christian archaeology the methods followed by Poggio and Biondo for ancient Rome.

V. is a distinguished representative of that humanistic current which, fusing the classical ideal and the Christian ideal, finds in the harmony between sacred and profane letters the secret of every higher spiritual formation.

Gioacchino Paparelli

The pedagogue. - V.'s pedagogical work, in 6 books, is one of the best and most Christian produced by Humanism: De liberorum educatione clarisque eorum moribus, written between 1445 and 1448, shows all the beneficial effects of his conversion, which had occurred about 10 years earlier.

In fact, while it embraces the whole educational process from before birth and the physical care of rearing up to the higher levels of instruction, he aims at the formation of the perfect and complete citizen; therefore he insists not only on the humanistic element, inasmuch as he wishes it to be adorned with the culture drawn from the classics, but also and more on the spiritual and Christian element, in which he recognizes better than other humanists the principle of a higher moral demand and the consequent respect for the human person. Hence his sources are the classics: Quintilian and Plutarch, but also the letter of St. Jerome to Laeta, the teachings drawn from Scripture, from the Fathers, especially from St. Augustine.

In the 1st book V. speaks of the duties of parents: physical care of pregnancy and of nursing, which must not be mercenary except in case of extreme necessity; possession and practice of the principles of a sound eugenics toward children, so that they may grow firm, hardened to toil and pain, sensitive to duty, spurred more by love than by fear, although punishments too have, when needed, their own beneficial efficacy; good example and reserve in words and speech. In the 2nd book he treats of teachers (public schools are to be preferred to private ones for the stimulus of emulation; study of the characters and abilities of pupils for a better adaptation of the subjects; recourse from time to time to the method of mutual teaching) and of the subjects of study (among the pagan classics Homer, Cicero, Sallust, Aesop, with a preference for Virgil; the lyric and elegiac poets excluded as too spied upon; some books of Sacred Scripture, especially the Psalms, Proverbs, Wisdom; but above all self-instruction, creativity through declamations, oral and written critical expositions on the authors, exercise of memory). In the 3rd he treats of education (study of inclinations toward the various branches of knowledge, on the dangers of self-sufficiency, on the educational value of music, drawing, gymnastics, which is relief and development of the body, of games and of philosophy, understood as moral philosophy). Here V.'s thought concerning the education of women is noteworthy: girls better endowed should be pushed as far as the highest studies: and for them too, as for young men, music, drawing, gymnastics, play, philosophy have their formative value. In the last 3 books he speaks of "modesty" considered a fundamental virtue, which is at once shame and decorum in bearing, reverence toward God, grace and delicacy toward one's neighbor.

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