Lorenzo Valla

Lorenzo Valla , known as also Laurentius della Vale (Rome, 1407 - 1457), humanistic, Philosopher and polemist Italy N.

Biography

Lorenzo Valla studied Latin and the Greek in Rome under the direction of the professors Leonardo Bruni and Giovanni Aurispa, then rhetoric and philosophy with the Université of Padoue. Tried by the diplomatic career, it however had to be solved, after two successive failures near the the Holy See (1428, 1431), to teach in the universities of Pavia, Naples and Rome.

Finally, it obtained in 1433 the protection of Alphonse V of Aragon and joined the court of Naples as private secretary. This employment left any leisure to Valla to continue its research on the writings of the Fathers of the Church. The results of its studies on the Acts of the Apostles, tending to show that this book had not been written by the Apostles themselves, was worth a committal for trial to him in front of the Enquiry, of which it drew with the support from its guard. He published then that the letter of Christ with Abgarus, as well as other documents at one time considered as crowned, was a forgery, blaming the Christian character of the monastic ideal. When in 1444 he travelled to Rome, he could escape the hatred of his many enemies only while disguising himself to flee in Barcelona, from where he took again the boat for Naples.

The wheel turned to dead of the pope Eugene IV in February 1447: Valla was at this time again in Rome when new sovereign pontiff, Nicolas V, recruited it as apostolic secretary and with the Roman Curie made it name. From now on respected for its knowledge, Valla preserved its credit under the reign of Calixte III.

The humanistic one

In its first work, it was presented in the form of a burning spokesperson of new a Humanisme having to reform the language and education. He sought forgotten texts of the traditional Antiquité, thinking that the gréco-Roman spirit which had been lost with the Moyen-âge was to be restored. Knowing as well the Greek as the Latin , it was chosen by the pope Nicolas V to translate Hérodote and Thucydide into Latin. By its focusing on humanistic disciplines, i.e. poetry, rhetoric, ethics, the history and the policy, it granted a special dignity to the life and the control of the man. In an exemplary work, Valla showed that the long text named Donation of Constantin was only one coarse counterfeit since the Latin text had been written most probably in 754, that is to say four centuries after the death of Constantin I {{er}} in 315. At 26 years, he wrote De Voluptate , a dialog in three books who analyzes the pleasure and chooses a humanistic judgment of the Scolastique and monastic asceticism. Aggressive in its tonality, this work was received with hostility. In the Arbitrio of libero it showed that the conflict between the divine prescience (grace) and the will of the free will could never be solved. But they are the six books of the Latinæ of linguæ Elegantiæ (1444) which constitute its main work. He presents a philological defense to it brilliant of traditional Latin in whom he puts in contrast the elegance of work of the ancient Rome (particularly those of Cicéron, Sénèque and Quintilien) with the awkwardness of medieval Latin of Church. This work had an enormous influence and knew 60 (D) editions as of before 1537.

The searchs for Valla on the textual errors in the Vulgate led scholars, Érasme inter alia, to study the Évangile S in the original Greek text.

Lorenzo Valla and Gothic

Since its origins, the new style born in Ile-de-France was called the “French style”. Savage adversary of the Middle Ages, Lorenzo Valla stated in 1440 that “All that is Gothic is bad, and all that is bad is Gothic”. In 1550, a disciple of Michel-Angel, Vasari, used the “Gothic” word to indicate medieval art. For Vasari, it was about a coarse style, without any direction of the proportion. Molière even spoke, in 1669, of “monstrous hideousnesses of Gothic decorations”.

Of course the Goths had nothing to do with this Article This prejudice will remain until the 19th century, when this style was rehabilitated by the Romantic ones. Purple-the-Duke, French architect, published towards 1860 its Dictionnaire reasoned of the French architecture of XI E at the 16th century in ten volumes. Today, if the “Gothic” word is always very used, some name rather it “ogival style”, in reference to intersecting ribs which characterizes the naves of churches starting from 1140.

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