Sicco Polenton

Sicco Polenton (Italian pronunciation: [ˈsikko polenˈtɔn; -ton]; 1375–1447) was an Italian jurist, Neo-Latin author, and Renaissance humanist. His last name is also spelled Polentone, Polentonus. His first name is also spelled Xico, or Xicho. Sometimes his name also contains "Patavinus" meaning "of Padua".

Sicco Polenton
Born1375 (1375)
Died1447 (aged 71–72)
Padua, Italy
Resting placeChurch of San Leonardo, Padua
NationalityItalian
EducationGiovanni Conversini
Vittorino da Feltre
Occupation(s)Jurist, author, Renaissance humanist
SpouseAntonia Enselmini

His son is named Polydorus, and he dedicated his De scriptoribus to his son, as the first page of his book started with "Sicconis Polentoni Liber Scriptom Illustrium Latinae Linguae Incipit Primus ad Filium Polydor Feliciter" ["Here begins Sicco Polentone's First Book on the Illustrious Writers of the Latin Language, for his Son Polydorus"][note 1] (plate IV [1]).

Sicco Ricci (Rizzi) was born at Levico Terme in either 1375 or 1376. He took the name "Polenton" (Polentonus) from his father Bartolomeo. His first name "Sicco" probably came from that Sicco's father was commander of the guard at Borgo, and named his son after his employer, Siccone di Telvana (vii, [1]).

He studied grammar and rhetoric at Padua under Giovanni Conversini and periodically with Vittorino da Feltre. In 1396, he began his career as a notary of the ruling Carrara family, and then sometime later became a public notary. He obtained Paduan citizenship sometime around 1402 -- 1403. He became the chancellor of the Comune sometime between 1413 and 1424.

In 1408 Sicco married Antonia Enselmini and thereafter his life was devoted mostly to literary endeavours. In 1413 he completed his first Latin work, the Argumenta super aliquot orationibus et invectivis Ciceronis ["Arguments on some speeches and invectives of Cicero"]. In 1419 he published his most successful work, Catinia, a comedy in seven scenes. Thereafter he worked on his Scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae, the first history of the Latin language and its literature, which he had begun by 1425 but did not finish until 1437. He erroneously attributed a piece De puellis ("On girls"), perhaps De tribus puellis, to Ovid.

in 1430, he resigned from chancellorship, due to low salary. In 1431 he ceased to act as notary. After that, he devoted himself to literary pursuits, but still he held various public offices, including that of mayor in 1440-1441. He spent his final years writing various tracts expounding religious arguments and died in Padua in 1446 or 1447. He was buried in the church of San Leonardo, now disappeared.

He understood that classical learning had gone to sleep for a thousand years, but the Muses were waking up again (Ullman, 1928, xv).

Works
  • Argumenta super aliquot orationibus et invectivis Ciceronis (1413) ["Arguments on some speeches and invectives of Cicero"]
    • Printed in Commentarii in orationes Ciceronis / Quintus Asconius Pedianus / De artificio Ciceronianae orationis Pro Quinto Ligario / Georgius Trapezuntius / Inquisitio super xi orationes Ciceronis / Antonius Luschus / Argumenta super xii orationibus et invectivis Ciceronis / Sicco Polentonus [184] h. ; Fol. -- Sign.: a10, b6, c-g8, a8, b10, c8, d6, a10, b8, c10, d-e8, f6, g-l8, m6. Printed in 1477 by Johannes de Colonia and Johannes Manthen de Gerretzheim,[2][3] edited by Hieronymus Squarzaficus.[4]
      • It is a collection of 4 commentaries by four authors, all on Cicero. In particular, Sicco's version commented on 16 speeches by Cicero not commented upon by Luschus.[5][6]
      • pdf file available for download at.[3]
  • La Catinia (1419)[7]
    • A recent edition is published as Arnaldo Segarizzi, La Catinia, le Orazioni e le Epistole di Sicco Polenton umanista Trentino del secolo XV (Bergamo 1899), freely available on Google Books.[8]
    • A more recent edition is published in Catinia. Con testo latino a fronte. Traduzione italiana, introduzione e note di PAOLO BALDAN, (Anguillara Veneta, 1996), 281 pp.[9]
  • De ratione studendi (1415) seems lost ([8] p. XLII).[10]
  • Sancti Antonii Confessoris de Padua vita (1435)[7][11]
  • De scriptoribus illustribus latinae linguae libri XVIII ["On Famous Writers of the Latin Language, with 18 books"][12]
  • See footnote 1 of [15] for some unpublished/minor works.

It contained the first biography of Horace composed in the fifteenth century, and in composing it, Sicco relied on the biography of Horace written by Suetonius, which existed only in very few rare manuscripts then and even now.[16]

The De scriptoribus it is often considered the first history of Latin literature It took around 25 years to complete, and is preceded by an epitome with a subject index of the authors cited in the work. His stated intent was to gather all biographical information of the great Latin writers up to the 14th century.[17] It was never published in its entirety until Ullman's 1928 edition, though excerpts had been copied and published previously (preface to [1]).

On the contents of the books, Polenton was particularly enamored with Cicero. Of the 18 books, 7 (x-xvi) are devoted to Cicero. As he said, "Quippe res magna est Cicero" ["Indeed, Cicero is a great matter"]. He liked Cato the Elder and Seneca especially also.[18] Lucretius and Martial were barely mentioned, while Petronius, Valerius Flaccus, Frontinus did not appear. Book 6 contains many details on the life of Sicco himself. Book 18 was unfinished.[19]

Polenton himself explicitly places it in the tradition of the "De viris illustribus" and always refers to it as "vita scriptorum illustrium".[20]

There are two editions. The first edition was worked on until around 1426, and it is preserved in an incomplete and non-autograph in the manuscript Firenze, Biblioteca Riccardiana, 121 (R), as well as in four loose folios used as endpapers in another codex. The second edition was probably finished by 1437, and contains the autograph from Codex Ottobonianus, and about twenty manuscripts that descend from it one (on the possible existence of an intermediate version, see once again Ullman 1928, xvi-xx).[20]

Due to the comprehensiveness of the book, there was a legend that Sicco secured the only existing copy of Suetonius' De Viris Illustribus and, after copying from it all that he wanted, destroyed it (Ullman 1928, xiii).

For contrastive examples of the two editions, one may compare the two vitas of Virgil, reprinted and translated in Ziolkowski and Putnam, pp. 321-45 and 369-96.

Notes
  1. Polentone, Sicco; Ullman, B. L. (Berthold Louis) (1928). Sicconis Polentoni Scriptorum [microform] illustrium latinae linguae libri XVIII. Internet Archive. [Rome] : American academy in Rome.
  2. "Commentarii in orationes Ciceronis / Quintus Asconius Pedianus". www.europeana.eu. Retrieved 2023-07-01.
  3. Asconio Pediano, Quinto; Trebizonda, Jorge de; Loschi, Antonio; Polentone, Sicco (1477). "De artificio Ciceronianae orationis Pro Quinto Ligario / Georgius Trapezuntius". Bg/I. 253.
  4. Kind, Helmut; Mittler, Elmar; Göttingen, Niedersächsische Staats-und Universitätsbibliothek (1995). Incunabula Gottingensia: Abteilung Adagia bis Biblia (in German). Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 106. ISBN 978-3-447-03495-1.
  5. Classen, C. Joachim (1993). "The Rhetorical Works of George of Trebizond and Their Debt to Cicero". Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 56: 75–84. doi:10.2307/751365. ISSN 0075-4390. JSTOR 751365. S2CID 171305145.
  6. Witt, Ronald G. (2003). In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni. BRILL. page 390, footnote 139. ISBN 978-0-391-04202-5.
  7. Paolo Viti (2015). "Polenton, Sicco". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 84: Piovene–Ponzo (in Italian). Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. ISBN 978-8-81200032-6.
  8. Polentone, Sicco; Segarizzi, Arnaldo (1901). La Catinia: le orazioni e le epistole di Sicco Polenton ... (in Italian). Istituto italiano d'arti grafiche.
  9. Russo, Giuseppe (2000). "Review of Catinia". Lares. 66 (4): 749–751. ISSN 0023-8503. JSTOR 44630431.
  10. Siccone Polenton (A proposito dei suoi "Scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae libri") (23. XII. 1928), Torino Vol. 93, Iss. 279,  (Apr 1, 1929): 313.
  11. Gasparotto, C. "Sant’Antonio in Giotto e nella prima tradizione iconografica." Santo 7 (1962): 207-217.
  12. Ziolkowski, Jan M.; Putnam, Michael Courtney Jenkins (2008). The Virgilian tradition: the first fifteen hundred years. New Haven (Conn.): Yale university press. ISBN 978-0-300-10822-4.
  13. Mustard, W. P. (1929). "Review of Sicconis Polentoni Scriptorum Illustrium Latinae Linguae Libri XVIII". The American Journal of Philology. 50 (1): 102–104. doi:10.2307/289734. ISSN 0002-9475. JSTOR 289734.
  14. Lockwood, Dean P. (1929). "Review of Sicconis Polentoni Scriptorum Illustrium Latinae Linguae libri XVIII". Classical Philology. 24 (2): 211–213. doi:10.1086/361129. ISSN 0009-837X. JSTOR 262651.
  15. Viti, Paolo. "Aspetti della tecnica compositiva nei" Scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae libri" di Sicco Polenton." Studi trentini di scienze storiche 55 (1976): 249-275.
  16. Comiati, Giacomo (2019-06-04), "Humanistic Biographies of Horace and His Inclusion in the Fifteenth-century Literary Canon", Building the Canon through the Classics, Brill, pp. 96–125, ISBN 978-90-04-39803-0, retrieved 2023-07-01
  17. Luigi, Piacente (2010). "Ovid in the Early Latin Literary Historiography". Analele Universităţii Ovidius din Constanţa. Seria Filologie. XXI (21): 135–143. ISSN 1223-7248.
  18. Mustard, W. P. (1929). "Review of Sicconis Polentoni Scriptorum Illustrium Latinae Linguae Libri XVIII". The American Journal of Philology. 50 (1): 102–104. doi:10.2307/289734. ISSN 0002-9475. JSTOR 289734.
  19. Gragg, Florence A. (1929). "Review of Sicconis Polentoni Scriptorum Illustrium Latinae Linguae Libri XVIII". The Classical Journal. 24 (6): 458–460. ISSN 0009-8353. JSTOR 3289623.
  20. Arzalluz, Iñigo Ruiz (2019). "Epitome = Compilatio: Paolino Veneto, Lombardo Della Seta, Sicco Polenton". Aevum. 93 (2): 559–574. ISSN 0001-9593. JSTOR 26906710.
  1. "Incipit ... Feliciter" is a formulaic expression often placed at the beginnings of texts. It roughly means "here it starts, may it go well". It is often used by Cicero.

Sources
  • Robathan, Dorothy M. (1932). "A Fifteenth-Century History of Latin Literature." Speculum, 7:2 (April), pp. 239–248.
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