Jacopo Mazzoni

Jacopo Mazzoni (Latinized as Jacobus Mazzonius) (27 November 1548 – 10 April 1598) was an Italian philosopher, a professor in Pisa, and friend of Galileo Galilei. His first name is sometimes reported as "Giacomo".

Giacopo (Jacopo) Mazzoni was born in Cesena, Italy in 1548. Educated in Bologna in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Rhetoric, and Poetics, Mazzoni later attended the University of Padua in 1563 where he studied Philosophy and Jurisprudence.

One of the most eminent savants of the period, Mazzoni was reported to have an excellent memory, which made him adept at recalling passages from Dante, Lucretius, Virgil, and others in his regular debates with prominent public figures. It also allowed him to excel at memory contests, which he routinely won. He had the distinction, it is said, of thrice vanquishing the Admirable Crichton in dialectic.

Later in life, Mazzoni would teach at universities in Rome, Paris, and Cesena, and was partly responsible for the establishment of the Della Crusca Academy.

He was an authority on ancient languages and Philology, and gave a great impetus to the scientific study of the Italian language. Mazzoni died in Ferrara, Italy, in 1598.

Though Mazzoni considered himself primarily a philosopher (Adams, 178), his major work of philosophy – an attempt to reconcile the theories of Plato and Aristotle called De Triplici Hominum Vita, Activa Nempe, Contemplativa, et Religiosa Methodi Tres (On the Three Ways of Man’s Life: the Active, the Contemplative, and the Religious, published in 1576) – is not widely read. Mazzoni is most known for his work on literary criticism, particularly his defenses of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Discorso in Difesa Della Commedia Della Divino Poeta Dante (The Discourse in Defense of the Comedy of the Divine Poet Dante), published in 1572 and a second effort, Della Difesa Della Comedia Di Dante (On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante), which was not published until 1688.

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