Ambrogio Traversari Research Articles

Xenophanes and the Pythagoreans (D.L. IX, 20 = 21 A 1 DK)

According to Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Xenophanes of Colophon, poet and philosopher of the 6th–5th centuries BC, was sold into slavery by the Pythagoreans Parmeniscus and Orestades (D.L. IX, 20 = 21 A 1 DK). This testimony has long been a source of concern to Hellenists, taking into account the high reputation that Pythagoras and his school gained in the history of European culture and philosophy. The paper provides a critical review of all the proposed corrections to the fragment in question. In the first part it considers conjectures and emendations made by the editors and translators Diogenes Laertius’ text since the Renaissance. Particular attention is paid to Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439), the first translator of the Vitae philosophorum, whose translation already reveals a reluctance to follow the literal meaning of the testimony. The second part of the paper examines the restoration of the text proposed by Hermann Diels, which is still the most influential. The third part discusses the position of some modern scholars who, while refusing to correct the text of Diogenes Laertius, continue to suspect him to be mistaken. As a result, the paper shows that all corrections of Diogenes’ testimony, according to which Xenophanes was sold into slavery by the Pythagoreans, are vulnerable to criticism, and that consequently its literal reading may be correct.

Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy: The Decline of a Tradition?

Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy:The Decline of a Tradition? Feisal G. Mohamed The Dionysian arrangement of the angels was dismantled on the one hand because its author was increasingly regarded as a "counterfait," and on the other hand because Protestants upheld the Bible's supremacy over all the "vain babblings of idle men." In consequence, those who like Spenser celebrated the "trinall triplicities," look back upon a great past that had provided a vision hallowed by time and graced by an impressive array of intellects. —C. A. Patrides1 It has been some forty years now since C. A. Patrides first argued in these pages that English Renaissance views on the celestial hierarchy constitute "the decline of a tradition," an argument made so convincing by his encyclopedic articles on the subject that scholars have been content to accept it. Indeed there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that the tradition of the ninefold hierarchy of angels associated with the Pseudo-Dionysius suffered serious injury at the hands of the Renaissance and Reformation. Subjected to the scrutiny of Renaissance scholarship and in light of the rediscovery of several Neoplatonists, particularly Proclus, it became quite clear that the Corpus Dionysiacum had been written centuries later than its author pretended. In the mid-fifteenth century Lorenzo Valla argued that because the Areopagus was a legal rather than a philosophical assembly, because none of the Greek or Latin fathers make mention of Dionysius, and because the claim in the letter to Polycarp to have witnessed [End Page 559] in Heliopolis the solar eclipse at the moment of Christ's death is a clear fabrication, placement of the Corpus in the first century should be doubted.2 These suggestions went largely unnoticed until Desiderius Erasmus, returning from England (where William Grocyn had begun murmurs regarding the Areopagitic origin of the Corpus), discovered in Louvain a manuscript of Valla's commentary on the book of Acts and incorporated its conclusions in his influential annotations on the New Testament.3 The discovery of Dionysius's pseudonymity and Erasmus's suggestion that Dionysian ceremonies could no longer be connected to the apostolic church would damage permanently the now Pseudo-Areopagite's influence. In a classic case of complicity between Renaissance humanism and Reformation theology—both Protestant and Catholic, it must be stressed—the sixteenth century turned away from Dionysian thought in general and from The Celestial Hierarchy in particular. The interrogation of apostolic origin begun by prominent Catholic thinkers like Erasmus and Cardinal Cajetan was most convenient to reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, both of whom described the author of the Corpus as "Dionysius, whoever he was."4 Such an open-and-shut presentation of sixteenth-century Dionysiana, however, ignores several factors. One of them is that Renaissance scholars were not the first to question the dating of the Corpus: Peter Abelard fueled general perception of his heretical tendencies by suggesting that Dionysius may not have been the Pauline convert mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.5 Much more important, however, is the number of Renaissance scholars for whom Dionysius was a formative influence. Despite his stance on the authenticity of the Corpus, Lorenzo Valla describes Dionysius in the peroration to his Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis as playing the flute in a celestial symphony before the throne of God.6 For Nicholas Cusanus, as F. Edward Cranz describes [End Page 560] it, "Dionysius is the most important Christian theologian with no runner-up who is even close."7 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola saw Dionysius's writings as following directly from the teachings of Paul.8 Marsilio Ficino employed Dionysius in his comments on angels in the Theologia Platonica, translated and commented on The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, and consistently endorsed first-century dating of the Corpus Dionysiacum.9 Ambrogio Traversari, who described Dionysius as "Apostoli disciplus," would also produce a fresh translation acceptable to humanist tastes in 1437, which would receive wide dissemination in the 1499 edition produced by Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples.10 Lefèvre saw the Corpus as apostolic in origin and authority and went so far as to endorse the traditional conflation of Dionysius with Saint...

Leonardo Bruni and Biography: The Vita Aristotelis

This article presents theVita Aristotelis(1429) as an extension of Bruni's campaign to win acceptance for his new view of Aristotle as an independently valid guide to the secular life. The dynamics and structure of theVitaare traced to Brum's attempt to counter the impact of the imminent publication of theLivesof Diogenes Laertius in a Latin translation by Ambrogio Traversari. In refuting the negative aspects of the portrait offered by Diogenes, Bruni developed and defended a selective, rhetorically based approach to biography that was novel in relation to classical and medieval interpretations of the genre.

John‐Jerome of Prague (1368–1440) and the Errores Graecorum: Anatomy of a Polemic Against Greek Christians

This paper discusses the anti‐Greek writings of the Camaldolese John‐Jerome of Prague from 1409 to 1433. It demonstrates how his varied experiences in Poland and the Middle East helped shape his views on eastern Christians, and how these views were further affected by the role Greek theology played in the thought of his great opponents, the Hussites. His hostile statements about the Greeks provide some indication of the depth of the antipathy between the two sides, as well as the limited knowledge of many in the Latin West about the details of ecclesiastical history and Greek theology on the eve of the Council of Florence. A discussion of his writings over a quarter century illustrates how John‐Jerome’s opinions about Greek Christians changed as he experienced different aspects of the relationship between the Latin and Greek churches. It is interesting to compare John‐Jerome’s views with two contemporaries whom he knew personally, the Camaldolese humanist Ambrogio Traversari and the Greek Dominican theologian Andrew Chrysoberges.

Ambrogio Traversari: artistic adviser in early fifteenth‐century Florence?

Ambrogio Traversari: artistic adviser in early fifteenth‐century Florence?

From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance Mark Vessey N. G. Wilson . From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. xi + 200. $49.95 The subtitle of Nigel Wilson's new book could be thought misleading, did he not immediately qualify the work as a sequel to his Scholars of Byzantium (London: Duckworth, 1983), which "described the preservation of the classical heritage and the use made of it by the intellectuals of Byzantium" (ix). For Wilson, "Greek studies" means primarily "classical scholarship" applied to Greek texts. As the earlier book excluded early Christian writings unless they happened to bear on the literary curriculum or attract the attention of a classicizing writer like Michael Psellos, so this one treats only obiter of Greek patristic studies in the Italian Renaissance. As we should expect, Wilson draws special attention to Leonardo Bruni's pioneering translation (c.1403) of Basil's protreptic Ad iuvenes, emphasizing both the continuing power of that text as a sanction for the predominantly pagan literary curriculum of Christian Byzantium and its new-found utility in the West "as a weapon in controversy with opponents brought up in a less liberal tradition" (14). There is brief mention of the important patristic translations of the Camaldolese monk Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439), already the subject of a major study by Charles L. Stinger, and some discussion of the activity of Cardinal Bessarion as a textual critic in the tradition of Jerome. Valla is remembered for his version of Basil's Nineteenth Homily as well as his work on the Greek New Testament. Evidence that Pope Nicholas V (1397-1455) was concerned with the question of the authenticity of the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite serves to remind us that "for all his humanistic interests [sic!] both he and his successors up to and including Sixtus IV (1471-84) attached importance to [the patristic] part of the Greek heritage" (80). The suggestion that humanist and Christian ideals were somehow at odds with each other, consistent with the older view of Italian [End Page 509] humanism as a basically secular phenomenon, surfaces again in Wilson's commentary on Aldus Manutius' record as a publisher of Greek texts. Noting that a 1501 volume contained poems of Prudentius with the hymns of John Damascene "and some lesser authors," he protests that "[w]hen so much remained to be done for the central areas of Greek literature the choice of such texts can only be characterised as eccentric" (142, emphasis added). Since Aldus presumably knew his market, the charge of eccentricity must recoil on the historian who knows better than he did where to place the center of Greek literature. Another problem is raised by the statement that Marcus Musurus' edition (also for the Aldine Press) of selected orations of Gregory of Nazianzus revived a Byzantine pattern of study, those texts having "made little impact" in Italy, where "other patristic literature had greater claims on scholars' attention" (155). So it may be. But the point is hard to grant when neither the claims of patristic literature nor the scholarly attention accorded it have been any part of the foregoing account. Wilson draws his book to a close in 1515. That was the year in which Raffaele Maffei of Volterra (1451-1522), formerly the translator of Homer, Xenophon and Procopius, published his Latin version of the works of Basil the Great, the basis of all subsequent Latin editions of the Opera omnia (see now Iréna Backus, Lectures humanistes de Basile de Césarée: Traductions latines (1439-1618) [Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1990], 15-27). Maffei's role in the adaptation of humanist ideals to the Roman ecclesiastical and theological milieu has been skilfully documented by the late John F. D'Amico (Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], Ch. 9). His name does not appear in From Byzantium to Italy. Readers interested in the textual tradition of the Church Fathers will once again be grateful to Nigel Wilson for supplying, conveniently and elegantly, so much of the philological, curricular and bibliographical context of their subject. They should beware...

:Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and the Revival of Patristic Theology in the Early Italian Renaissance

:<i>Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and the Revival of Patristic Theology in the Early Italian Renaissance</i>

Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance. Charles L. Stinger

<i>Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance</i>. Charles L. Stinger

Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance

Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance

Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance. By Charles L. Stinger. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. xvii + 328 pp. $30.

Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance. By Charles L. Stinger. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. xvii + 328 pp. $30. - Volume 47 Issue 1

Charles L. Stinger. Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. 12 pls+xix+328 pp. $30.

Charles L. Stinger. Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. 12 pls+xix+328 pp. $30. - Volume 31 Issue 3

Intellectual Repercussions of the Council of Florence

At Ferrara and Florence, Western intellectuals met with the greatest Greek scholarly and theological delegation that ever came to Latin soil. The Greeks did not come empty-handed. They brought with themde luxeeditions of Greek sacred and, above all, secular authors—coveted treasures for Renaissance Italians. To judge by the letters in which Ambrogio Traversari announced the arrival of the Greeks, Christian Humanists were as much interested in the codices of Plato, Plutarch, Euclid and Ptolemy, brought by the Emperor and Bessarion, as in the cause which brought the Greeks to Italy.

The Inventory of Niccolò Niccoli

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Inventory of Niccolò NiccoliRodney P. RobinsonRodney P. Robinson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 16, Number 3Jul., 1921 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/360362 Views: 9 Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Claudia Klodt Die Überlieferung des Textes, (Jan 1992): 77–88.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-11994-4_4 Paul Lawrence Rose Humanist Culture and Renaissance Mathematics: The Italian Libraries of the Quattrocento, Studies in the Renaissance 20 (Oct 2015): 46–105.https://doi.org/10.2307/2857013PAUL BOTLEY Fifteenth-Century Translators on their Art: Leonardo Bruni and Giannozzo Manet, ().https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110896657.61