Roberto de' Rossi

Roberto de' Rossi was an early humanist in Florence, [He is one of the eleven Florentine humanists studied in detail by Lauro Martines, "The Social World of the Florentine Humanists 1390-1460" (Princeton University Press) 1963.] a follower of Coluccio Salutati and, as the first pupil of Manuel Chrysoloras, one of the first Florentines to read Greek. Roberto de' Rossi was a wealthy patrician who never married and avoided public office but devoted his life to books and his studies in his house and garden in the Oltr'Arno district of Florence. [Charles Garfield Nauert, "Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe", 1995:29] His translations of Aristotle and other classical Greek writers made them widely available to the Latin-reading public, but his modern claim to fame is as the tutor of Cosimo de' Medici, a role for which he was selected by Giovanni di Bicci. Roberto's friends Leonardo Bruni and Niccolo Niccoli were inherited by Cosimo and formed part of his circle.

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