Biography
Agostino Coltellini,was born in Florence on April 17,1613,of a wealthy family originally from Bologna;he studied in Florence,and afterwards attended the classes of law at the University of Pisa. He received his degree in utroque iure on October 6,1638. After taking his degree he became a lawyer. Being of weak health,he gave up the public and more laborious parts of his profession;and he seems to have been in circumstances to be independent of it.
In 1632 Coltellini founded a new Academy under the name of the Apatisti (“Dispassionates”). The Academy had grown out of meetings held by him and his young companions in his house in the Via dell'Oriuolo,during and immediately after the plague of 1630-1,for the purpose of mutual assistance and encouragement in their studies. These scholarly meetings had succeeded so well,and had been found to supply certain peculiar wants so much better than the two older Florentine academies,and than others already existing,that,about 1633,they had taken development into a society of virtuosi,which again had divided itself into a so-called "University," for grave scientific studies,and a so-called "Academy," for the cultivation of Latin and Italian literature,both under the name of the Apatisti,and with a common or at least a connecting organization.
By the year 1638,the Academy had been fully established,with its laws,its office-bearers,its patrons saints,its "protector" among the princes of the House of Medici,its device for its seal,and its motto from Dante. One of its rules (there was a similar custom in most of the Italian academies) was that every member should,in his academic connexions,be known not by his own name but by some anagram or pseudonym. Coltellini's Apatistic name was "Ostilio Contalgeni."
Coltellini died on August 26,1693,at the age of eighty years. In the course of his long life he had attained many distinctions. He had been made a member of the Accademia della Crusca in 1650;he had filled no fewer than four times,between 1659 and his death,the presidency or consulship of the Accademia Fiorentina;he had been made a member of the Academy of Arcadia under the name of Alcino Tipaniese;and he had published a series of compositions in prose and in verse,the titles of which make a considerable list. But the chief distinction of his life was his having founded the Apatisti. Such were the attractions of this academy,and so energetic was Coltellini in its behalf,that within ten or twenty years after its foundation,it had a fame among the Italian academies equal,in some respects,to that of the first and oldest,and counted among its members not only all the eminent Florentines,but most of the distinguished Italian intellectuals,besides cardinals,Italian princes and dukes,many foreign nobles and scholars,and at least one pope. John Milton was a member of the Academy during his Italian sojourn of 1638-1639.
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