Sicco Polenton

Sicco Polenton (; 1375–1447) was an Italian jurist, Neo-Latin author, and Renaissance humanist. His last name is also spelled Polentone, Polentonus. His first name is also spelled Xico, or Xicho. Sometimes his name also contains "Patavinus" meaning "of Padua".

His son is named Polydorus, and he dedicated his De scriptoribus to his son, as the first page of his book started with "Sicconis Polentoni Liber Scriptom Illustrium Latinae Linguae Incipit Primus ad Filium Polydor Feliciter" ["Here begins Sicco Polentone's First Book on the Illustrious Writers of the Latin Language, for his Son Polydorus"] (plate IV edited by Hieronymus Squarzaficus. It is a collection of 4 commentaries by four authors, all on Cicero. In particular, Sicco's version commented on 16 speeches by Cicero not commented upon by Luschus. pdf file available for download at. A recent edition is published as Arnaldo Segarizzi, La Catinia, le Orazioni e le Epistole di Sicco Polenton umanista Trentino del secolo XV (Bergamo 1899), freely available on Google Books. A more recent edition is published in Catinia. Con testo latino a fronte. Traduzione italiana, introduzione e note di PAOLO BALDAN, (Anguillara Veneta, 1996), 281 pp. De ratione studendi (1415) seems lost ( Sancti Antonii Confessoris de Padua vita (1435) De scriptoribus illustribus latinae linguae libri XVIII ["On Famous Writers of the Latin Language, with 18 books"] First edition (1426?): Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS Riccardianus 21, folios 23v–30v. Second edition (1437?), freely available at the Internet Archive. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, autograph manuscript, from the Codex Ottobonianus, found in 1915. edited by B. L. Ullman, and published in 1928 as the Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome, Vol. VI. American Academy in Rome, 1928. Pp. lii + 520. 5 plates and a page of errata. See footnote 1 of for some unpublished/minor works. It contained the first biography of Horace composed in the fifteenth century, and in composing it, Sicco relied on the biography of Horace written by Suetonius, which existed only in very few rare manuscripts then and even now.

The De scriptoribus it is often considered the first history of Latin literature. It took around 25 years to complete, and is preceded by an epitome with a subject index of the authors cited in the work. His stated intent was to gather all biographical information of the great Latin writers up to the 14th century. It was never published in its entirety until Ullman's 1928 edition, though excerpts had been copied and published previously (preface to

Polenton himself explicitly places it in the tradition of the "De viris illustribus" and always refers to it as "vita scriptorum illustrium".

There are two editions. The first edition was worked on until around 1426, and it is preserved in an incomplete and non-autograph in the manuscript Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, 121 (R), as well as in four loose folios used as endpapers in another codex. The second edition was probably finished by 1437, and contains the autograph from Codex Ottobonianus, and about twenty manuscripts that descend from it one (on the possible existence of an intermediate version, see once again Ullman 1928, xvi-xx).

Due to the comprehensiveness of the book, there was a legend that Sicco secured the only existing copy of Suetonius' De Viris Illustribus and, after copying from it all that he wanted, destroyed it (Ullman 1928, xiii).

For contrastive examples of the two editions, one may compare the two vitas of Virgil, reprinted and translated in Ziolkowski and Putnam, pp. 321–45 and 369-96.