Leoniceno, Nicolò

(b. Vicenza, Italy, 1428; d. Ferrara, Italy, 9 June 1524),

medicine, Philology.

Leoniceno’s father, Francesco, a physician, was from an ancient noble family of Vicenza; his mother, Madalena, was the daughter of Antonio Loschi, a humanist and secretary of Pope Alexander V. At Vicenza, Leoniceno received thorough training in Latin and Greek from Ognibene de’ Bonisoli and then studied philosophy and medicine at Padua, taking his doctorate around 1453. Little is known of his activities during the following decade, except that he is said to have traveled to England; by 1462 he was back at Padua, possibly as a teacher. In 1464 he was called to teach at the University of Ferrara, where her remained for the rest of his ninety-six years, except for a year at Bologna (1508–1509). He did not marry.

Under the celebrated Guarino da Verona, Ferrara had become a major center for the study of classical literature, and Leoniceno took his place there as one of the leading Greek scholars of his age. (He is sometimes confused with the contemporary Hellenist Nicolò Tomeo.) Among Leoniceno’s friends and correspondents were other major figures in the revival of ancient learning, including Pico della Mirandola, Giorgio Valla, Politian, Ermolao Barbaro, and Erasmus.

At Ferrara, Leoniceno taught mathematics, then Greek philosophy, and finally medicine, in which area he made his most important contribution. The teaching in European medical schools at this time was ultimately derived from the Greek physicians, especially Galen, but as interpreted and systematized by the Arabic authors. In the several stages of textual transmission, translation, and interpretation that separated European Arabist medicine from the original Greek sources, considerable distortion and corruption had been introduced; but it was obscured by the poor quality of such translations of genuine Galenic works as were generally available. Humanists had long ridiculed the Arabist medical tradition for its “barbarous” Latinity and the sterility of its scholastic disputations, but not until the late fifteenth century were serious attempts made to provide an alternative by reviving Greek medicine in its pristine form. Leoniceno was one of the chief pioneers in this effort to recover and edit the works of the Greek physicians and to prepare faithful Latin translations, and he was the first to develop this new approach into a serious rival to the established Arabist tradition. Under his leadership Ferrara became the main center for studying the revived Galenic medicine, and from there the movement spread to the other Italian medical schools and then to the rest of Europe. Among Leoniceno’s students were Giovanni Manardi, Antonio Musa Brasavola, and Lodovico Bonacciolo; and others who were influenced by him included Giovanni Battista da Monte (Montanus), Thomas Linacre, and Leonhard Fuchs.

In accordance with the general humanist credo, Leoniceno placed great emphasis on the study of individual words and their meanings as the key to understanding the works of the Greek medical authorities. In his preface to his translations of Galen (1508) he cited examples of how an error in transcribing or translating a single word could distort the meaning of an entire passage; and in other works he sought to demonstrate that the words of the Greek physicians had been so often misconstrued by the Arabists as to make the resulting medical system a menace to human life. In his tracts on the errors of Pliny he cited numerous mistakes made by the Arabists in the identification of medicinal herbs described by the Greeks, and he also pointed out many corruptions, both terminological and factual, introduced into Galenic anatomy by Ibn S?n?, Mondino de’ Luzzi, and Benedetti. He based the latter criticisms in part on such Galenic treatises as the Anatomical Procedures and Whether Blood is Naturally Contained in the Arteries that were not generally available for another generation. In his treatise on syphilis he discussed similar errors in the naming and identification of diseases.

On the more constructive side, Leoniceno supplied the texts for the first genuine Galenic works to be published in Greek (1500) and published Latin translations of eleven Galenic treatises, beginning with the Ars medica (1508) and the Commentary on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, together with the Aphorisms themselves (1509). He was very proud of these translations and in 1522 published a lengthy apologia against three men, each of whom had criticized his translation of only a single word or phrase. He also translated into Latin and Italian a number of works by nonmedical authors.

In 1497 Leoniceno published the first scholarly treatise on syphilis, a very influential work that went through numerous editions during the following century. He tried to show that although the disease had only recently appeared in Europe, it had occurred at various times in the remote past and was therefore not an essentially new disease.

Leoniceno’s work On the three ordered doctrines according to the opinion of Galen(1508) was of some importance in the discussion of method during the sixteenth century. At the beginning of Ars medica Galen had stated that there are three ways of teaching a subject in an orderly manner: analysis, synthesis, and the explication of definitions. The medieval commentators had sought, with somewhat confusing results, to relate these three ways to the various methods of demonstration and dialectic referred to by Plato, Aristotle, and other authors. Leoniceno showed that as an exegesis of the Ars medica the entire discussion was pointless, because Galen was referring simply to didactic techniques and not to methods of philosophic inquiry or demonstration. His clarification of this point seems to have been widely accepted, although around 1517 a professor at Padua (possibly Ludovico Carenzio) defended the medieval authors, leading an anonymous Roman disciple of Leoniceno (or possibly Leoniceno himself) to publish a refutation.

In 1490 Leoniceno inaugurated a famous controversy on the errors of Pliny the elder. In that year he sent to Politian a critique of Ibn S?n?, in which he noted in passing that Pliny seemed to have confused the two herbs ivy and cistus because of the similarity of their Greek names (k???óç and k???oç); Politian commended Leoniceno’s castigation of Ibn S?n? but politely challenged his criticism of Pliny. Leoniceno responded with a tract, On the errors of Pliny and others in medicine (1492), in which he not only de- fended his original point but charged Pliny with many other errors stemming from verbal confusion. This work provoked an indirect response from Barbaro in support of Pliny and a direct attack on Leoniceno by the Ferrarese lawyer Pandolfo Collenuccio. Others joined in the fray on both sides, with Leoniceno himself contributing three additional tracts in 1493, 1503, and 1507, the latter in response to Alessandro Benedetti. (Leoniceno’s tracts were apparently circulated in manuscript before being printed.

This polemic was primarily an internal dispute among humanists, in contrast to Leoniceno’s attacks on the Arabists. Pliny’s Natural History was avowedly a compilation from earlier sources, chiefly Greek, and Leoniceno charged that he had often garbled the information that he transcribed. The controversy stemmed from the reluctance of some humanists to admit that an authentic Roman, who wrote in “eloquent” Latin and was fluent in Greek, could have made the same kinds of linguistic errors as the despised “barbarous” authors. To soften the blow Leoniceno sought to show that the Arabs had made even worse errors than Pliny in interpreting the Greeks and that the medieval Latin authorities were worse still. However, this argument did not placate his opponents, who thought that textual emendation and sympathetic interpretation would absolve Pliny of Leoniceno’s charges. In this assumption they were partly justified, since some of the errors that Leoniceno singled out were in fact due to corruptions of the text he had used, and some of his interpretations of Pliny were unnecessarily harsh. Collenuccio also objected strongly to Leoniceno’s assumption that the testimony of the Greek authorities, unconfirmed by observation, was an adequate standard of the truth of Pliny’s statements, but the immediate outcome of the dispute, as of most of Leoniceno’s work, was to enhance the authority of the Greeks at the expense of their Roman, Arabic, and medieval Latin followers. (Leoniceno eventually concluded that Celsus had similarly misinterpreted the Greek medical writers on whom he had relied.) Serious criticism of the Greeks themselves, based on independent observation and reasoning, was to begin a generation later, but it was to take many generations to overthrow completely the Hellenist tradition in medicine that Leoniceno had done so much to establish.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.Original Works.De Plinii et aliorum in medicina erroribus (Ferrara, 1492) is the of first Leoniceno’s tracts on Pliny; De Plinii, and Plurimum aliorum medicorum in medicina erroribus (Ferrara, 1509) contains all four, as do subsequent eds. His other works are Libellus de epidemia, quam vulgo morbum gallicum vocant (Venice-Milan-Leipzig, 1497); De tiro seu vipera and De dipsade et pluribus aliis serpentibus(Venice, ca. 1497), both repr. as De serpentibus (Bologna, 1518); De virtute formativa (Venice, 1506); In libros Galeni e greca in latinam linguam a se translatos prefatio communis. Ejusdem in artem medicinalem Galeni... prefatio. Galeni ars medicinalis Nicolao Leoniceno interprete.... Ejusdem de tribus doctrinis ordinatis secun- dum Galeni sententiam opus (Venice, 1508), repr. with Galeni in aphorismos Hippocratis, cum ipsis aphorismis, eodem Nicolao Leoniceno interprete (Ferrara, 1509); Medici Romani Nicolai Leoniceni discipuli antisophisia [antisophista] (Bologna, 1519), of uncertain authorship; and Contra obtrectatores apologia (Venice, 1522). Most of Leoniceno’s works went through one or more subsequent editions; all except his translations, thePrefatio communis, and the Prefatio in artem medicinalemare included in Opuscula, D. A. Leennium, ed. (Basel, 1532). A facs. of the first ed. of De morbo gallico, with intro., is included in K. Sudhoff, The Earliest Printed Literature on Syphilis, adapted by C. Singer, Monumenta Medica, III (Florence, 1925). Loris Premuda edited De Plinii... erroribus, with intro. and Italian trans. (Milan-Rome, 1958). R. J. Durling, “A Chronological Census of Renaissance Editions and Translations of Galen,” in Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes, 24 (1961), 230–305, lists Leoniceno’s trans. of Galen, p. 297. P.O. Kristeller gives references to Italian archival material about Leoniceno in Iter italicum, 2 vols. (London-Leiden, 1963–1967).

II. Secondary Literature The only full-length study is D. Vitaliani, Della vita e delle opere di Nicolo Leoniceno Vicentino (Verona, 1892); see also Premuda’s intro. to his ed. of De Plinii... erroribus. On the Galenic revival and Leoniceno’s role in it, see Durling’s intro. to his “Chronological Census,” esp. p. 236. On Leoniceno’s influence, esp. in Germany, see Luigi Samoggia, Le ripercussioni in Germania dell’ indirizzo filologico-medico leoniceniano della scuola Ferrarese per opera di Leonardo Fuchs, Quaderni de Storia Della Scienza e Della Medicina, IV (Ferrara, 1964). On method, see N. W. Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York, 1960), pp. 102–104. On the errors of Pliny, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, IV (New York, 1934), 593–610; A. Castiglioni, “The School of Ferrara and the Controversy on Pliny,” in E. A. Underwood, ed., Science, Medicine, and History (London, 1953), I , 269–279; and F. Kudlien, “Zwei medizinisch-philologische Polemiken am Ende des 15,. Jahrhunderts,” in Gesnerus, 22 (1965), 85–92.

Jerome J. Bylebyl