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Politian
Selection copyright © 1997 by Rictor Norton. All rights
reserved. This
edition may not be reproduced or redistributed to third parties
without
permission of the author.
[The following is the complete article on Politian which Symonds
contributed to the Encyclopaedia
Britannica in 1885, and is an example of the
"bread and butter" side of his literary life. He
dismissed the value of such an article as a mere précis
of facts, but it is a model of how such an encyclopedia entry
should be written, and he nevertheless manages to convey his
belief that Politian was homosexual. Symonds translated some of
Politian's poetry in Sketches and Studies in
Italy, including lines from
Orfeo celebrating the love of boys over
women, "This love, I swear, is sweetest, softest,
best". Symonds probably saw himself mirrored in this
humanistic scholar, critic, poet, and resuscitator of the golden
age.]
POLITIAN (1454-1494). Angelo Ambrogini, known in literary annals
as Angelo Poliziano or Politianus from his birthplace, was born
at Montepulciano in Tuscany on the 14th of July 1454. His father,
Benedetto, a jurist of good family and distinguished ability, was
murdered by political antagonists for adopting the cause of Piero
de' Medici in Montepulciano; and this circumstance gave his
eldest son, Angelo, a claim on the family of Medici. At the age
of ten the boy came to prosecute his studies at Florence, where
he learned Latin under Cristoforo Landino, and Greek under
Argyropulos and Andronicos Kallistos. From Marsilio Ficino he
imbibed the rudiments of philosophy. The precocity of his genius
for scholarship and poetry was early manifested. At thirteen
years of age he began to circulate Latin letters; at seventeen
he sent forth essays in Greek versification; at eighteen he
published an edition of Catullus. In 1470 he won for himself the
title of Homericus juvenis by
translating four books of the Iliad
into Latin hexameters. Lorenzo de' Medici, who was then the
autocrat of Florence and the chief patron of learning in Italy,
took Poliziano into his household, made him the tutor of his
children, and secured him a distinguished post in the university
of Florence. Before he reached the age of thirty, Poliziano
expounded the humanities with almost unexampled lustre even for
that epoch of brilliant professors. Among his pupils could be
numbered the chief students of Europe, the men who were destined
to carry to their homes the spolia
optima of Italian culture. Not to mention Italians,
it will suffice to record the names of the German Reuchlin, the
English Grocyn and Linacre, and the Portuguese Tessiras.
Poliziano had few advantages of person to recommend him. He
was ungainly in form, with eyes that squinted, and a nose of
disproportionate length. Yet his voice was rich and capable of
fine modulation; his eloquence, ease of utterance and copious
stream of erudition were incomparable. It was the method of
professors at that period to read the Greek and Latin authors
with their class, dictating philological and critical notes,
emending corrupt passages in the received texts, offering
elucidations of the matter, and pouring forth stores of acquired
knowledge regarding the laws, manners, religious and
philosophical opinions of the ancients. Poliziano covered nearly
the whole ground of classical literature during the years of his
professorship, and published the notes of his courses upon Ovid,
Suetonius, Statius, the younger Pliny, Quintilian, and the
writers of Augustan histories. He also undertook a recension of
the text of the Pandects of Justinian,
which formed the subject of one of his courses; and this
recension, though it does not rank high in the scale of juristic
erudition, gave an impulse to the scholarly criticism of the
Roman code. At the same time he was busy as a translator from the
Greek. His versions of Epictetus, Herodian, Hippocrates, Galen,
Plutarch's Eroticus and Plato's
Charmides delighted contemporaries by
a certain limpid fluency of Latin style and grace of manner which
distinguished him also as an original writer. Of these learned
labours the most universally acceptable to the public of that
time were a series of discursive essays on philology and
criticism, first published in 1489 under the title of
Miscellanea. They had an immediate, a
lasting and wide renown, encouraging the scholars of the next
century and a half to throw their occasional discoveries in the
field of scholarship into a form at once so attractive and so
instructive. Poliziano was not, however, contented with these
simply professorial and scholastic compositions. Nature had
endowed him with literary and poetic gifts of the highest order.
These he devoted to the composition of Latin and Greek verses,
which count among the best of those produced by men of modern
times in rivalry with ancient authors. The
Manto, in which he pronounced a
panegyric of Virgil; the Ambra, which
contains a beautiful idyllic sketch of Tuscan landscape, and a
studied eulogy of Homer; the Rusticus,
which celebrated the pleasures of country life in no frigid or
scholastic spirit; and the Nutricia,
which was intended to serve as a general introduction to the
study of ancient and modern poetry — these are the
masterpieces of Poliziano in Latin verse, displaying an
authenticity of inspiration, a sincerity of feeling, and a
command of metrical resources which mark them out as original
productions of poetic genius rather than as merely professorial
lucubrations. Exception may be taken to their style, when
compared with the best work of the Augustan or even of the Silver
age. But what renders them always noteworthy to the student of
modern humanistic literature is that they are in no sense
imitative or conventional, but that they convey the genuine
thoughts and emotions of a born poet in Latin diction and in
metre moulded to suit the characteristics of the singer's
temperament.
Poliziano was great as a scholar, as a professor, as a
critic, and as a Latin poet at an age when the classics were
still studied with the passion of assimilative curiosity, and not
with the scientific industry of a later period. He was the
representative hero of that age of scholarship in which students
drew their ideal of life from antiquity and fondly dreamed that
they might so restore the past as to compete with the classics
in production and bequeath a golden age of resuscitated paganism
to the modern world. Yet he was even greater as an Italian poet.
Between Boccaccio and Ariosto, no single poet in the mother
tongue of Italy deserves so high a place as Poliziano. What he
might have achieved in this department of literature had he lived
at a period less preoccupied with humanistic studies, and had he
found a congenial sphere for his activity, can only be guessed.
As it is, we must reckon him as decidedly the foremost and
indubitably the most highly gifted among the Italian poets who
obeyed Lorenzo de' Medici's demand for a resuscitation of the
vulgar literature. Lorenzo led the way himself, and Poliziano was
more a follower in his path than an initiator. Yet what Poliziano
produced, impelled by a courtly wish to satisfy his patron's
whim, proves his own immeasurable superiority as an artist. His
principal Italian works are the stanzas called La
Giostra, written upon Giuliano de' Medici's victory
in a tournament; the Orfeo, a lyrical
drama performed at Mantua with musical accompaniment; and a
collection of fugitive pieces, reproducing various forms of
Tuscan popular poetry. La Giostra had
no plan, and remained imperfect; but it demonstrated the
capacities of the octave stanza for rich, harmonious and sonorous
metrical effect. The Orfeo is a slight
piece of work, thrown off at a heat, yet abounding in
unpremeditated lyrical beauties, and containing in itself the
germ both of the pastoral play and of the opera. The Tuscan songs
are distinguished by a "roseate fluency", an exquisite
charm of half romantic, half humorous abandonment to fancy, which
mark them out as improvisations of genius. It may be added that
in all these departments of Italian composition Poliziano showed
how the taste and learning of a classical scholar could be
engrafted on the stock of the vernacular, and how the highest
perfection of artistic form might be attained in Italian without
a sacrifice of native spontaneity and natural flow of language.
It is difficult to combine in one view the several aspects
presented to us by this many-sided man of literary genius. At a
period when humanism took the lead in forming Italian character
and giving tone to European culture, he climbed with facility to
the height of achievement in all the branches of scholarship
which were then most seriously prized — in varied knowledge
of ancient authors, in critical capacity, in rhetorical and
poetical exuberance. This was enough at that epoch to direct the
attention of all the learned men of Europe on Poliziano. At the
same time, almost against his own inclination, certainly with
very little enthusiasm on his part, he lent himself so
successfully to Lorenzo de' Medici's scheme for resuscitating the
decayed literature of Tuscany that his slightest Italian
effusions exercised a potent influence on the immediate future.
He appears before us as the dictator of Italian culture in a
double capacity — as the man who most perfectly expressed
the Italian conception of humanism, and brought erudition into
accord with the pursuit of noble and harmonious form, and also
as the man whose vernacular compositions were more significant
than any others of the great revolution in favour of Italian
poetry which culminated in Ariosto. Beyond the sphere of pure
scholarship and pure literature Poliziano did not venture. He was
present, indeed, at the attack made by the Pazzi conspirators on
the persons of Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici, and wrote an
interesting account of its partial success. He also contributed
a curious document on the death of Lorenzo de' Medici to the
students of Florentine history. But he was not, like many other
humanists of his age, concerned in public affairs of state or
diplomacy, and he held no office except that of professor at
Florence. His private life was also uneventful. He passed it as
a house-friend and dependant of the Medici, as the idol of the
learned world, and as a simple man of letters for whom (with
truly Tuscan devotion to the Saturnian country) rural pleasures
were always acceptable. He was never married; and his morals
incurred suspicion, to which his own Greek verses lend a certain
amount of plausible colouring. In character Poliziano was
decidedly inferior to the intellectual and literary eminence
which he displayed. He died, half broken-hearted by the loss of
his friend and patron Lorenzo de' Medici, on the 24th of
September 1494, just before the wave of foreign invasion which
was gathering in France swept over Italy.
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