Francesco Filelfo

Background

He was born in 1398 at Tolentino, in the March of Ancona.

Education

Filelfo studied law and rhetoric at the University of Padua. After university, he led a wandering lifestyle, for some time was in the service of the Venetian Republic, then at the court of the Duke of Milan, in the Roman Curia. Most of the time Filelfo devoted to teaching in various Italian universities. In 1420 he accompanied the Venetian envoy to Constantinople. In Constantinople, Filefo began studying Greek.

Career

His earliest studies in grammar, rhetoric and the Latin language were conducted at Padua, where he acquired so great a reputation for learning that in 1417 he was invited to teach eloquence and moral philosophy at Venice. According to the custom of that age in Italy, it now became his duty to explain the language, and to illustrate the beauties of the principal Latin authors, Cicero and Virgil being considered the chief masters of moral science and of elegant diction. Filelfo made his mark at once in Venice. Immediately after his arrival in Constantinople, Filelfo placed himself under the tuition of John Chrysoloras, whose name was already well known in Italy as relative of Manuel, the first Greek to profess the literature of his ancestors in Florence. At the recommendation of Chrysoloras he was employed in several diplomatic missions by the emperor John Palaeologus. Before very long the friendship between Filelfo and his tutor was cemented by the marriage of the former to Theodora, the daughter of John Chrysoloras. He had now acquired a thorough knowledge of the Greek language, and had formed a large collection of Greek manuscripts. There was no reason why he should not return to his native country. Accordingly, in 1427 he accepted an invitation from the republic of Venice, and set sail for Italy, intending to resume his professorial career. From this time forward until the date of his death, Filelfo's history consists of a record of the various towns in which he lectured, the masters whom he served, the books he wrote, the authors he illustrated, the friendships he contracted, and the wars he waged with rival scholars. When Filelfo arrived at Venice with his family in 1427, he found that the city had almost been emptied by the plague, and that his scholars would be few. He therefore removed to Bologna; but here also he was met with drawbacks. The city was too much disturbed with political dissensions to attend to him; so Filelfo crossed the Apennines and settled in Florence. At Florence began one of the most brilliant and eventful periods of his life. During the week he lectured to large audiences of young and old on the principal Greek and Latin authors, and on Sundays he explained Dante to the people in the Duomo. In addition to these labors of the chair, he found time to translate portions of Aristotle; Plutarch, Xenophon and Lysias from the Greek. Nor was he dead to the claims of society. At first he seems to have lived with the Florentine scholars on tolerably good terms; but his temper was so arrogant that Cosimo de' Medici's friends were not long able to put up with him. Filelfo here upon broke out into open and violent animosity; and when Cosimo was exiled by the Albizzi party in 1433, he urged the signoria of Florence to pronounce upon him the sentence of death. On the return of Cosimo to Florence, Filelfo's position in that city was no longer tenable. His life, he asserted, had been already once attempted by a cut-throat in the pay of the Medici; and now he readily accepted an invitation from the state of Siena. In Siena, however, he was not destined to remain more than four years. His fame as a professor had grown great in Italy, and he daily received tempting offers from princes and republics. The most alluring of these, made him by the duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, he decided on accepting and in 1440 he was received with honor by his new master in the capital of Lombardy. Filelfo’s life at Milan curiously illustrates the multifarious importance of the scholars of that age in Italy. It was his duty to celebrate his princely patrons in panegyrics and epics, to abuse their enemies in libels and invectives, to salute them with encomiastic odes on their birthdays, and to compose poems on their favourite themes. For their courtiers he wrote epithalamial and funeral orations; ambassadors and visitors from foreign states he greeted with the rhetorical lucubrations then so much in vogue. The students of the university he taught in daily lectures, passing in review the weightiest and lightest authors of antiquity, and pouring forth a flood of miscellaneous erudition. No satisfied with these outlets for his mental energy, Filelfo went on translating from the Greek, and prosecuted a paper warfare with his enemies in Florence. On the death of Filippo Maria Visconti, Filelfo, after a short hesitation, transferred his allegiance to Francesco Sforza, the new duke of Milan; and in order to curry favor with this parvenu, he began his ponderous epic, the Sforziad, of which 12, 800 lines were written, but which was never published. When Francesco Sforza died, Filelfo turned his thoughts towards Rome. Crossing the Apennines and passing through Florence, he reached Rome in the second week of 1475. The terrible Sixtus IV now ruled in the Vatican and from this pope Filelfo had received an invitation to occupy the chair of rhetoric with good emoluments. At first he was vastly pleased with the city and court of Rome but his satisfaction turned to discontent, and he gave vent to his ill-humor in a venomous satire on the pope's treasurer, Milliardo Cicala. Sixtus himself soon fell under the ban of his displeasure and when a year had passed he left Rome never to return. Filelfo reached Milan to find that his wife had died of the plague in his absence, and was already buried. His own death followed speedily. For some time past he had been desirous of displaying his abilities and adding to his fame in Florence. Years had healed the breach between him and the Medicean family and on the occasion of the Pazzi conspiracy against the life of Lorenzo de' Medici, he had sent violent letters of abuse to his papal patron Sixtus, denouncing his participation in a plot so dangerous to the security of Italy. Lorenzo invited him to profess Greek at Florence, and thither Filelfo journeyed in 1481. But two weeks after his arrival he succumbed to dysentery, and was buried at the age of eighty-three in the church of the Annunziata.

Achievements

• He was admitted to the society of the first scholars and the most eminent nobles of that city; and in 1419 he received an appointment from the state, which enabled him to reside as secretary to the consul-general of the Venetians in Constantinople. This appointment was not only honorable to Filelfo as a man of trust and general ability, but it also gave him the opportunity of acquiring the most coveted of all possessions at that moment for a scholar-a knowledge of the Greek language. In addition to a fixed stipend of some 700 golden florins yearly, he was continually in receipt of special payments for the orations and poems he produced; so that, had he been a man of frugal habits or of moderate economy, he might have amassed a considerable fortune. He was honored with the friendship of princes, recognized as the most distinguished of Italian humanists, courted by pontiffs, and decorated with the laurel wreath and the order of knighthood by kings. Filelfo deserves commemoration among the greatest humanists of the Italian Renaissance, not for the beauty of his style, not for the elevation of his genius, not for the accuracy of his learning, but for his energy, and for his complete adaptation to the times in which he lived.

Works

More photos

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  • Due Orazioni di Francesco Filelfo in Lode Dello Illustrissimo Poeta Dante Alighieri: Con l'Aggiunta di Alcune Lettere Dello Stesso Filelfo, Testo del Secolo XV (Classic Reprint) (Italian Edition)

    (Excerpt from Due Orazioni di Francesco Filelfo in Lode De...)

  • Odes (The I Tatti Renaissance Library)

    ( Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), one of the great scholar...)

  • Cent Dix Lettres Grecques de Francois Filelfe (Ed.1892) (Langues) (French Edition)

    (Cent dix lettres grecques de François Filelfe / publiées ...)

  • On Exile (The I Tatti Renaissance Library)

    (Francesco Filelfo's philosophical dialogue On Exile (ca. ...)

  • Vita Di Francesco Filelfo Da Tolentino, Volume 2 (Italian Edition)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Satyrae vol. 1 - Decadi I-V
  • Francesco filelfo

Politics

He wrote political pamphlets on the great events of Italian history.

Personality

He was a man of vast physical energy, of inexhaustible mental activity, of quick passions and violent appetites; vain, restless, greedy of gold and pleasure and fame; unable to stay quiet in one place, and perpetually engaged in quarrels with his compeers. He spent his money as fast as he received it, living in a style of splendor ill befitting a simple scholar, and indulging his taste for pleasure in more than questionable amusements. In consequence of this prodigality, he was always poor. His letters and his poems abound in impudent demands for money from patrons, some of them couched in language of the lowest adulation, and others savoring of literary brigandage. To all his three wives, in spite of numerous infidelities, he seems to have been warmly attached; and this is perhaps the best trait in a character otherwise more remarkable for arrogance and heat than for any amiable qualities.

His erudition was large but ill-digested; his knowledge of the ancient authors, if extensive, was superficial; his style was vulgar; he had no brilliancy of imagination, no pungency of epigram, no grandeur of rhetoric.

Connections

During the second year of his Milanese residence Filelfo lost his first wife, Theodora. He soon married again; and this time he chose for his bride a young lady of good Lombard family, called Orsina Osnaga. When she died he took in wedlock for the third time a woman, of Lombard birth, Laura Magiolini.

Wife:

Laura Magiolini

Wife:

Orsina Osnaga

Wife:

Theodora

References

• La terza condotta di Francesco Filelfo all'Universita' di Bologna.
• Renaissance Quarterly : Articles- Francesco Filelfo & the Ethics of World Citizenship; Margherita Datini and Letter Writing; Music as Erotic Magin in Renaissance;
• A REASSESSMENT OF THE CHARACTER OF FRANCESCO FILELFO (1398-1481)
• Francesco Filelfo educatore e il "Codice sforza" della Biblioteca Reale di Torino
• Francesco Filelfo nel 5º Centenario della morte. Atti del Convegno (Tolentino, 27-30 settembre 1981)