Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (11 February 1380– 30 October 1459), usually referred to simply as Poggio Bracciolini, was an Italian scholar and an early Renaissance humanist. He is noted for rediscovering and recovering many classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries. His most celebrated finds are De rerum natura, the only surviving work by Lucretius, De architectura by Vitruvius, lost orations by Cicero such as Pro Sexto Roscio, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Statius' Silvae, Ammianus Marcellinus' Res Gestae (Rerum gestarum Libri XXXI), and Silius Italicus's Punica, as well as works by several minor authors such as Frontinus' De aquaeductu, Nonius Marcellus, Probus, Flavius Caper, and Eutyches.
. . .Poggio was marked by the passion of his teachers for books and writing, inspired by the first generation of Italian humanists centered around Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), who had revived interest in the forgotten masterpieces of Livy and Cicero, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) and Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406). Poggio joined the second generation of civic humanists forming around Salutati. Resolute in glorifying studia humanitatis (the study of "humanities", a phrase popularized by Leonardo Bruni), learning (studium), literacy (eloquentia), and erudition (eruditio) as the chief concern of man, Poggio ridiculed the folly of popes and princes, who spent their time in wars and ecclesiastical disputes instead of reviving the lost learning of antiquity.
. . .He became devoted to the revival of classical studies amid conflicts of popes and antipopes, cardinals and councils, in all of which he played an official part as first-row witness, chronicler and (often unsolicited) critic and adviser.
Thus, when his duties called him to the Council of Constance in 1414, he employed his forced leisure in exploring the libraries of Swiss and Swabian abbeys. His great manuscript finds date to this period, 1415−1417. The treasures he brought to light at Reichenau, Weingarten, and above all St. Gall, retrieved from the dust and abandon many lost masterpieces of Latin literature, and supplied scholars and students with the texts of authors whose works had hitherto been accessible only in fragmented or mutilated copies.
. . .Poggio, like Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (who became Pius II), was a great traveller, and wherever he went he brought enlightened powers of observation trained in liberal studies to bear upon the manners of the countries he visited. We owe to his pen curious remarks on English and Swiss customs, valuable notes on the remains of ancient monuments in Rome, and a singularly striking portrait of Jerome of Prague as he appeared before the judges who condemned him to the stake.
In literature he embraced the whole sphere of contemporary studies, and distinguished himself as an orator, a writer of rhetorical treatises, a panegyrist of the dead, a passionate impugner of the living, a sarcastic polemist, a translator from the Greek, an epistolographer and grave historian and a facetious compiler of fabliaux in Latin.
. . .His Liber Facetiarum (1438−1452), or Facetiae, a collection of humorous and indecent tales expressed in the purest Latin Poggio could command, are the works most enjoyed today: they are available in several English translations. This book is chiefly remarkable for its unsparing satires on the monastic orders and the secular clergy. "The worst men in the world live in Rome, and worse than the others are the priests, and the worst of the priests they make cardinals, and the worst of all the cardinals is made pope." Poggio's book became an internationally popular work in all countries of Western Europe, and has gone through multiple editions until modern times.
In addition Poggio's works included his Epistolae, a collection of his letters, a most insightful witness of his remarkable age, in which he gave full play to his talent as chronicler of events, to his wide range or interests, and to his most acerbic critical sense.
An excerpt from, "Roberta Ricci Travels to Italy to Study the Work of Poggio Bracciolini" Bryn Mawr College, July 30, 2013:
Paleography is the discipline that has as its focus the history of the writing itself, in particular the manuscript tradition before the invention of the press in the 15th century, in all its different phases, techniques, and products. The art of writing beautifully, which constitutes the center of this project, is known as ‘calligraphy.’ Humanists’ pursuit of the study of classical antiquity and its language, brings them to articulate a belief not only in beautiful writing, but in the revival of the old script. The tension between past production and the awareness of promoting a remarkable change in professional writing by training future generations of humanists is accompanied by inquiries about any codex, its knowledge, its legibility, and its transmissibility.
Beyond the controversial details of this crucial shift in writing, the basic idea is clear: language can easily lead to the wrong interpretation precisely because of the corruption of the text, but with a correct understanding of the letters, scholars could recognize the root of many errors made in the previous decades by less skilled and less philologically trained scribes. Here we can see not only the Humanist belief on the power of language to shape human thoughts, but most to the point of this research, the power of calligraphy. In this project, I will look precisely at the passage from the barbaric script, the littera Gothica as a part of the Medieval graphic system, to the old script, littera antiqua, analyzing specifically the emergence of calligraphy with which 14th and 15th century manuscripts are now composed, while reflecting on the role that Poggio Bracciolini’s book-hand played in this historical transition.
Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) explicitly distances himself from the writing tradition on which he draws. Although his position as a father of the new script has been acknowledged, his legacy remains to be studied and examined in light of his calligraphy. Poggio’s role within Florentine Humanism with specific attention to his handwriting based on the lower cases Carolingian letters, the so-called minuscola corsiva, deserves more attention and in this new study I argue that Poggio was the initiator of the Humanistic graphic reform both for the lower and the upper case scripts.
Video Title: Poggio Bracciolini: Travel and Treasure Hunting in the Age of Humanism. Source: TheBiflorence. Date Published: April 23, 2021. Description:
Zoom Lecture by Jeremy Boudreau
