Giovanni Aurispa

Giovanni Aurispa Piciunerio (or Piciuneri) (June/July 1376 – c. 25 May 1459) was an Italian historian and savant of the 15th century. He is remembered in particular as a promoter of the revival of the study of Greek in Italy. It is to Aurispa that the world is indebted for preserving the greater part of our knowledge of the Greek classics.

Life

Aurispa was born at Noto in Sicily in 1376. A scholarship from the King of Sicily enabled him to study at Bologna from 1404 to 1410. Soon after, in 1413–14, he went to Greece as a private tutor for the sons of a Genoese merchant, Racanelli, and settled on the island of Chios. Here he learned Greek and began to collect books, including a Sophocles and a Euripides. He returned to Italy in 1414, setting in Savona, where he supported himself by teaching Greek and by selling the works he had collected in Greece.

Further items included the oldest manuscript of Athenaeus; a 10th-century codex containing seven plays by Sophocles and six by Aeschylus—the only manuscript in the world of these, plus the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes; the Iliad, works by Demosthenes, and many more. A work by Herodotus was also among the collection; also the Geography of Strabo. The texts are all listed in the letter to Traversari.

The only patristic text Aurispa had brought from Greece was a volume containing about 200 letters of St. Gregory Nazianzen. In a letter to Traversari, he explained:

I have not brought any sacred volumes from Greece except the letters of Gregory, which are, I believe, 200. This book is in faultless condition, and all the pages can be read, but its beauty is hardly such as to invite the reluctant reader. Long ago I sent from Constantinople to Sicily a good number of very choice sacred volumes, for I admit frankly that they were less precious to me, and a number of malicious persons often brought charges to the Greek emperor, accusing me of pillaging the city of sacred books. With regard to the heathen books, it seemed to them not such a great crime.

Aurispa returned to Ferrara in 1450 and died there in 1459, at the age of 83.

Legacy Considering his long life and reputation, Aurispa produced little: Latin translations of the commentary of Hierocles on the golden verses of Pythagoras (1474) and of Philisci Consolatoria ad Ciceronem from Dio Cassius (not published until 1510); and, according to Gesner, a translation of the works of Archimedes.