- Pietro Alcionio
Pietro Alcionio, or Petrus Alcyonitus (c. 1487 – 1527), the Venetian humanist, was a classical scholar under the patronage of
Pope Clement VII , a translator ofAristotle who was hurt in theSack of Rome in May 1527, and died later that year.His origins are unknown; his eloquence was praised in
Erasmus ' letter to John Watson in 1516, the earliest surviving notice. After having studied Greek in Venice underMarcus Musurus of Candia, he was employed for some time as a proofreader by the printerAldus Manutius . Alcionio published at Venice, in 1521, a Latin translation of several of the works ofAristotle (dedicating the volume to Leo X), which was shown by the Spanish scholar Sepúlveda to be very incorrect.In 1522 Alcionio was appointed professor of Greek at
Florence through the influence of Giulio de' Medici. That year he sent back to Aldus for printing a dialogue in the nature of a eulogy on the theme of exile ("Medicis legatus, sive de exsilio"), in aCicero nian Latin so finely honed that he was charged withplagiarism by his personal enemy,Paulus Manutius . The accusation, whichGirolamo Tiraboschi 's "Storia della letterature italiana" demonstrated to be groundless but which dogs his reputation, was that he had taken the finest passages in the work from Cicero's lost treatise "De Gloria", and had then destroyed the only existing copy of the original in order to escape detection.When his patron became pope the following year under the title of Clement VII, Alcionio followed him to
Rome and remained there until his death. "Encyclopaedia Britannica" (1911) remarked that "His contemporaries speak very unfavourably of Alcionio, and accuse him of haughtiness, uncouth manners, vanity and licentiousness."Alcionio is one of the four humanists in the circle of Clement VII selected by Kenneth Gouwens to illustrate the shock of cultural discontinuity and new sense of human vulnerability caused by the Sack of Rome that put a premature end to the
High Renaissance . Of Alcionio's numerous translations of Greek classics into Latin, which included the orations ofIsocrates andDemosthenes mentioned byAmbrogio Leoni , only his Aristotle has survived (Simon Finch).References
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*Simon Finch Rare Books Ltd, 2003. "Catalogue, 52": "Aristotelis libros de Generatione..." Venice: Bernardinus Vitales, April 1521 [http://www.simonfinch.com/Catalogues/Cat52.pdf Catalogue 52]Further reading
*Kenneth Gouwens, 1998. "Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome" Includes text of Alcionio's Orations on the Sack of Rome ISBN-90-04-10969-2
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