Augusto Marinoni

Augusto Marinoni (Legnano, 15 June 1911 – Legnano, 31 December 1997) was professor of romance philology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan, a member of the Commissione Vinciana and the Accademia dei Lincei. He is considered one of the greatest scholars of Leonardo da Vinci.

Biography

After completing his classical studies, he enrolled at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore where in 1933 he obtained a degree in Literature and Philosophy. Thanks to the study in lexicography, begun during the preparation of the thesis and continued later, Marinoni was able to identify the genesis, which has its roots in the Middle Ages, of the dictionary.

In 1936 he obtained a chair of Italian and Latin at the Vittorio Veneto High School in Milan. In these years he began studying Leonardo da Vinci, thanks to his knowledge in the lexicographic field. His work in fact initially focused on the eight thousand words contained in the Codex Trivulzianus, and the result of his studies was published by Giovanni Treccani while Marinoni was a prisoner of war (1943-1946) following his participation in the World War II on the front of the North Africa.

Many companies, such as Philips and IBM, helped publish his work and many world-class cultural institutions invited him to hold seminars and meetings. We owe to Marinoni the creation of the first CD-ROM with multimedia content on Leonardo da Vinci. He studied and in 1977 disclosed the contents of the Codex Forster, preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and of the Codex Ashburnham, kept at the Institut de France in Paris. In 1982 he was appointed president of the Commissione Vinciana Authority of Milan, which still brings together the greatest Italian and foreign scholars of Leonardo da Vinci. Among the awards he received, the Hammer "for excellence", obtained by the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1987, should be mentioned.

Augusto Marinoni also studied in depth the history of his city, Legnano, and his dialect. The municipal library of Legnano is named after Augusto Marinoni, which is housed inside Villa Bernocchi.

Selected publications Leonardo the Scientist. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1980. (With Carlo Zammattio and Anna Maria Brizio)