15 Facts About Poliziano

Agnolo Ambrogini, commonly known by his nickname Poliziano, was an Italian classical scholar and poet of the Florentine Renaissance.

Poliziano's scholarship was instrumental in the divergence of Renaissance Latin from medieval norms and for developments in philology.

Poliziano's works include translations of passages from Homer's Iliad, an edition of the poetry of Catullus and commentaries on classical authors and literature.

Poliziano served the Medici as a tutor to their children, and later as a close friend and political confidant.

Poliziano used his didactic poem Manto, written in the 1480s, as an introduction to his lectures on Virgil.

Poliziano was born as Angelo Ambrogini in Montepulciano, in central Tuscany in 1454.

At the age of ten, after the premature death of his father, Poliziano began his studies at Florence, as the guest of a cousin.

Poliziano covered nearly the whole ground of classical literature during his tenure, and published the notes of his courses upon Ovid, Suetonius, Statius, Pliny the Younger, and Quintilian.

Poliziano undertook a recension of the text of Justinian II's Digest and lectured about it.

Poliziano wrote a letter to John II of Portugal paying him a profound homage:.

Poliziano offered himself to write an epic work giving an account of John II's accomplishments in navigation and conquests.

Poliziano spent his final years without financial or other worries, studying philosophy.

Poliziano was well known as a scholar, a professor, a critic, and a Latin poet in an age when the classics were still studied with assimilative curiosity, and not with the scientific industry of a later period.

Poliziano was the representative of that age of scholarship in which students drew their ideal of life from antiquity.

Poliziano was known as an Italian poet, a contemporary of Ariosto.