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Updated: May 25, 2025
II., Revival of Learning, p. 212. Nothing is known about Mantegna's stay in Florence. He went to meet the Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga at Bologna. This Cardinal, a great amateur of music and connoisseur in relics of antiquity, came to Mantua in August, 1472, where the "Orfeo" of Messer Angelo Poliziano was produced for his amusement.
If the son was such an exact counterpart of the father in evil- speaking, as borne testimony to by that admirable and accurate historian, Poliziano, it follows that Bracciolini confirmed by his tongue and pen the words put by Shakespeare into the mouth of the Duke in "Measure for Measure": "Back-wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes: What king so strong Can tie the gall up in a slanderous tongue?"
Especially on every thirteenth of November, reputed anniversary of Plato's death, it had looked down from under laurel leaves on a picked company of scholars and philosophers, who met to eat and drink with moderation, and to discuss and admire, perhaps with less moderation, the doctrines of the great master: on Pico della Mirandola, once a Quixotic young genius with long curls, astonished at his own powers and astonishing Rome with heterodox theses; afterwards a more humble student with a consuming passion for inward perfection, having come to find the universe more astonishing than his own cleverness: on innocent, laborious Marsilio Ficino, picked out young to be reared as a Platonic philosopher, and fed on Platonism in all its stages till his mind was perhaps a little pulpy from that too exclusive diet: on Angelo Poliziano, chief literary genius of that age, a born poet, and a scholar without dulness, whose phrases had blood in them and are alive still: or, further back, on Leon Battista Alberti, a reverend senior when those three were young, and of a much grander type than they, a robust, universal mind, at once practical and theoretic, artist, man of science, inventor, poet: and on many more valiant workers whose names are not registered where every day we turn the leaf to read them, but whose labours make a part, though an unrecognised part, of our inheritance, like the ploughing and sowing of past generations.
And this is not a time for scholarly integrity and well-sifted learning to lie idle, when it is not only rash ignorance that we have to fear, but when there are men like Calderino, who, as Poliziano has well shown, have recourse to impudent falsities of citation to serve the ends of their vanity and secure a triumph to their own mistakes.
Of this institution the first public professor was Joannes Argyropoulos, who, having enjoyed the patronage of Cosmo and Piero, and directed the education of Lorenzo, was selected by the latter as the fittest person to be the earliest occupant of the chair. During his tenure of it he sent out such pupils as Poliziano, Donato Acciaiuoli, Janus Pannonius, and the famous German humanist Reuchlin.
We must not, however, confound with the servile imitators of Petrarch those who took nothing from his school but purity of language and elegance of style, and who consecrated the lyre not to love alone, but to patriotism and religion. First of these are Poliziano and Lorenzo de' Medici, in whose ballads and stanzas the language of Petrarch reappeared with all its beauty and harmony.
But an angel upon earth shewed me the secret, even Angelo Poliziano, the glory of his age and country.
The Latin of Bracciolini, though not equal in its elegance to that of his splendid successor, Poliziano, was, nevertheless, superior to the Latin of any of his great contemporaries, none of whom, besides, had his versatility and varied attainments nor his wisdom and philosophy.
I suspect, however, that we ought not to understand by these phrases anything like a real familiarity with Greek literature, but rather such superficial knowledge as would enable a reader of Latin books to understand allusions and quotations. Poliziano, it may be remarked, thought it worth while to flatter Guidobaldo in a Greek epigram.
The study of Roman law would have missed those labours on the Pandects, with which the name of Politian is honourably associated. From the Florentine society of the fifteenth century would have disappeared the commanding central figure of humanism, which now contrasts dramatically with the stern monastic Prior of S. Mark. Benedetto's tragic death gave Poliziano to Italy and to posterity.
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