Giovanni de Matociis (born probably in the second half of the 13th century and died in December 1337), commonly called Giovanni Mansionario from his administrative office in the cathedral of Verona, was an early Italian humanist, a forerunner of Petrarch. [1] [2] In about 1311 he was appointed as mansionario, [3] a role for a person in minor orders variously described by sources as a sacristan or recipient of a minor benefice from legacies: Vivaldi held such a position some four centuries later. Giovanni was also a notary. [4] From this time he began work amassing his Historia Imperialis ("Imperial History") a series of emperors' biographies, beginning with Augustus, in which his antiquarian bent and classical studies amended many misconceptions of ancient Roman history. [5] Though he depended on Isidore's Etymologiae to a degree that would have been considered naive a century later, and on the Historia Augusta , deprecated nowadays, his marginal drawings of Roman coins show that numismatics had been brought to the historian's aid perhaps for the first time in this work. Roberto Weiss has observed that "during the early Trecento [14th century] such a work as the Historia Imperialis could have been produced only in Verona", with the unrivalled library holdings of its cathedral chapter. [6] His Latin has been described as "nondescript, unadorned". [7]
By his careful reading of the Roman historian Suetonius, Giovanni detected that there were two authors named Pliny, not one, as had been believed previously. He published his findings triumphantly in a tract (Brevis adnotatio de duobus Pliniis). [8] Other works include a Gesta Romanorum Pontificum, of which only part survives, and a lost life of Saint Athanasius and a book on the Old Testament, also lost. [9]
Francesco Petrarca, commonly anglicized as Petrarch, was a scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists.
Year 1337 (MCCCXXXVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Julian calendar.
Padua is a city and comune in Veneto, northern Italy. Padua is on the river Bacchiglione, west of Venice. It is the capital of the province of Padua. It is also the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 214,000. The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area (PATREVE) which has a population of around 2,600,000.
Francesco Landini was an Italian composer, poet, organist, singer and instrument maker who was a central figure of the Trecento style in late Medieval music. One of the most revered composers of the second half of the 14th century, he was by far the most famous composer in Italy.
Italian literature is written in the Italian language, particularly within Italy. It may also refer to literature written by Italians or in other languages spoken in Italy, often languages that are closely related to modern Italian, including regional varieties and vernacular dialects. Italian literature begins in the 12th century, when in different regions of the peninsula the Italian vernacular started to be used in a literary manner. The Ritmo laurenziano is the first extant document of Italian literature.
The Rossi Codex is a music manuscript collection of the 14th century. The manuscript is presently divided into two sections, one in the Vatican Library and another, smaller section in the Northern Italian town of Ostiglia. The codex contains 37 secular works including madrigals, cacce and, uniquely among trecento sources, monophonic ballatas. The codex is of great interest for trecento musicologists because for many years it was considered the earliest source of fourteenth-century Italian music. Although other pre-1380 sources of secular, polyphonic, Italian music have now been identified, none are nearly so extensive as the Rossi Codex.
Maestro Piero was an Italian composer of the late medieval era. He was one of the first composers of the Trecento who is known by name, and probably one of the oldest. He is mainly known for his madrigals.
The Diocese of Verona is a Roman Catholic ecclesiastical territory in northern Italy. The diocese belongs to the Ecclesiastical Province of Venice. The bishop of Verona has his seat in Verona, Veneto. The episcopal throne is in the cathedral, which had originally been dedicated to S. Maria Matricolare and S. George.
De viris illustribus is an unfinished collection of biographies, written in Latin, by the 14th century Italian author Francesco Petrarca. These biographies are a set of Lives similar in idea to Plutarch's Parallel Lives. The works were unfinished. However he was famous enough for these and other works to receive two invitations to be crowned poet laureate. He received these invitations on exactly the same day, April 8, 1341, one being from the Paris University and the other from the Roman Senate. He accepted the Roman invitation.
Albertino Mussato (1261–1329) was a statesman, poet, historian and playwright from Padua. He is credited with providing an impetus to the revival of literary Latin, and is characterized as an early humanist. He was influenced by his teacher, the Paduan poet and proto-humanist Lovato Lovati. Mussato influenced many humanists such as Petrarch.
Verona Cathedral is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Verona, northern Italy, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the designation Santa Maria Matricolare. It is the episcopal seat of the Diocese of Verona.
Giacomo or Jacopo d'Angelo, better known by his Latin name Jacobus Angelus, was an Italian classical scholar, humanist, and translator of ancient Greek texts during the Renaissance. Named for the village of Scarperia in the Mugello in the Republic of Florence, he traveled to Venice where the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos' ambassador Manuel Chrysoloras was teaching Greek, the first scholar to hold such course in medieval Italy.
Spinetta Malaspina "the Great", a descendant of Obizzo Malaspina, was the Marquisse of Verrucola and the lord of Fosdinovo; he is the forefather of the marquisses of Fosdinovo and of its related imperial feud.
The Regisole was a bronze classical or Late Antique equestrian monument, highly influential during the Italian Renaissance but destroyed in 1796. It was originally erected at Ravenna, in what is now Italy, but was moved to Pavia in the Middle Ages, where it stood on a column before the cathedral, as an emblem of communal pride and Pavia's deep connection with imperial Rome.
Benzo d'Alessandria, who ended his career as head of the chancery of Cangrande Della Scala, 1325–1333, was among the earliest Italian humanists. He explored the rich library of the cathedral canons of Verona, where he found manuscripts of Catullus and the Historia Augusta, and journeyed to Ravenna in search of Roman texts.
Roberto Weiss was an Italian-British scholar and historian who specialised in the fields of Italian-English cultural contacts during the period of the Renaissance, and of Renaissance humanism.
Andrea Biglia was an Italian Augustinian humanist, known as a moral philosopher and historian.
Giovanni Pietro Toesca was an Italian academic and art historian, notable as one of the most important historians of medieval to 20th century art. His La pittura e la miniatura nella Lombardia fino alla metà del Quattrocento was the first attempt to reconstruct the course of figurative Lombard art from the Middle Ages onwards, defining its importance across Europe.
Fra Giovanni Colonna (1298? – 1343/44) was an Italian Dominican friar and scholar. Educated in France, he served as a preacher and vicar in Rome, chaplain in Cyprus and lector in Tivoli. He lived and worked in Avignon for a time and traveled widely in the Near East during his Cypriot period.
Ferreto de' Ferreti, also spelled dei Ferreti, was an Italian judge, poet and historian from Vicenza. He was one of the early Renaissance humanists and an early reader of Dante Alighieri.
