Angelo Poliziano and his didactic instruments in the Florentine Studium

This proposal intends to focus on Angelo Poliziano’s use of the Quintilian work for his lessons at the Florentine Studium in the academic year 148081 and on the motivation for this choice that he provides in the Oratio super Fabio Quintiliano et Statii Sylvis, including in the Opera Omnia published in 1498 in Venice. Introducing the Institutio oratoria assumed the 274 value of a break with the Florentine university establishment which had always favored classical authors such as Cicero. The young Poliziano thus stood in clear contrast with other more established teachers, both for the new philological method that he applied, and for the value inherent in the adoption for his lessons of works withheld (wrongly) minors. In October 1480 he began his university courses in Latin Philology at the Florentine Studium: Angelo Poliziano (14541494), who had been entrusted with the prestigious post of teacher, was a wellknown scholar and poet, albeit still young:, enfant prodigy for his knowledge of classical languages and considerable philological skills, friend of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, was a person of considerable depth and fame in the Florentine milieu of the time. The authors who would have been the subject of Poliziano’s careful analysis and his cultured textual annotations were the poet Publio Papinio Stazio and the rhetorician Marco Fabio Quintiliano, focusing the lessons respectively on the Sylvae and the Institutio oratoria.