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| Niccolò Niccoli italic handwriting |
Italian humanist, born (1363) and died at Florence (3-Feb-1437). He was one of the chief figures in
the company of learned men which gathered round Cosimo de
Medici, who played the
part of Augustus to Niccoli's Maecenas. Niccoli's chief services to classical
literature consisted in his work as a copyist and collator of ancient
manuscripts; he corrected the text, introduced divisions into chapters, and
made tables of contents. His lack of critical faculty was compensated by his
excellent taste; in Greek (of which he knew very little) he had the assistance
of Ambrogio Traversari. Many of the most valuable manuscripts in the Laurentian
library are by his hand, amongst them those of Lucretius and of twelve comedies of Plautus. Niccoli's private library was the largest and
best in Florence; he also possessed a small but valuable collection of ancient
works of art, coins and medals. He regarded himself as an infallible critic,
and could not bear the slightest contradiction; his quarrels with Francesco Filelfo, Guarino and especially with Traversari created a
great sensation in the learned world at the time. His hypercritical spirit
(according to his enemies, his ignorance of the language) prevented him from
writing or speaking in Latin; his sole literary work was a short tract in
Italian on Latin Orthography, which he withdrew from circulation after it had
been violently attacked by Guarino.
He was also an accomplished
calligrapher whose slightly inclined antica corsiva script influenced the development of
italic type.
