Angelo Poliziano

Timeline

1. 1464–1475Florence · FlorenceAfter his father's death he went to Florence to study Latin and Greek and received philosophical instruction from Marsilio Ficino. By thirteen he was transcribing Latin letters, by seventeen composing Greek verse, by eighteen publishing a text of Catullus. In 1470 he translated Iliad II–V into Latin hexameters; Lorenzo took him into his household and soon appointed him tutor to his children, among them Piero and the future Leo X, Giovanni.
2. 1475–1480Florence · FlorenceHe wrote the Italian Stanze per la giostra for Giuliano de' Medici's 1475 joust; its humanist coloring displeased Lorenzo's wife Clarice. Giuliano was killed in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, and the poem was left unfinished. He wrote a contemporary account of the conspiracy; tradition holds that he escaped with Lorenzo in the sacristy of the cathedral. In 1479 he left for Mantua, where he completed the musical lyric drama Orfeo, then quickly returned to Florence.
3. 1480–1494Florence · FlorenceLorenzo secured him a chair at the University of Florence, where his lectures ranged over Ovid, Suetonius, Statius, the younger Pliny, and Quintilian, and he edited the text of the Digest. In 1489 he published the Miscellanea, reading ancient texts with precise evidence, regarded by Anthony Grafton as the standard of a new generation of philology. He also wrote Latin poems such as Manto and Ambra. After Lorenzo's death in 1492, he died in Florence on 24 September 1494.