Marius Nizolius ( it, Mario Nizolio; 1498–1576) was an Italian humanist scholar, known as a proponent of
Cicero. He considered
rhetoric
Rhetoric () is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic (or dialectic), is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate parti ...
to be the central intellectual discipline, slighting other aspects of the philosophical tradition. He is described by Michael R. Allen as the heir to the oratorical vision of
Lorenzo Valla, and a better
nominalist.
Life
He was born in
Brescello
Brescello (; in the local dialect, in the Reggio Emilia dialect) is a ''comune'' (municipality) in the Province of Reggio Emilia in the Italian region Emilia-Romagna, located about northwest of Bologna and about northwest of Reggio Emilia. A ...
. He was professor of philosophy at
Parma and
Sabbioneta.
Works
His major work was the ''Thesaurus Ciceronianus'', first published in 1535 in
Brixen but not under this title, and running into many further editions. It was a lexicon of Latin words used in Cicero's works. It was adopted by Renaissance extremists who considered that writing in Latin could only be correct within this restricted vocabulary. His ''Antibarbarus philosophicus'' (original title ''De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra psudophilosophos'', Parma, 1553) was edited by
Leibniz in 1670 with an important Preface. It was a reply in a controversy with
Marco Antonio Maioragio
Marco may refer to:
People
* Marco (given name), people with the given name Marco
* Marco (actor) (born 1977), South Korean model and actor
* Georg Marco (1863–1923), Romanian chess player of German origin
* Tomás Marco (born 1942), Spanish co ...
(1514-1555), and going back to a dispute from the mid-1540s over the ''Paradoxes'' of Cicero.
[Lawrence D. Green, ''John Rainold's Oxford Lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric'' (1986), p. 414.]
He died Sabbioneta.
Notes
External links
Ignacio Angelelli, Nizolius' notion of class (multitudo) (PDF) in Anales de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Buenos Aires, XXXV(2), 2001, 575-595.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nizolius, Marius
1498 births
1576 deaths
Linguists from Italy
Italian Renaissance humanists