Luigi Lanzi (14 June 1732 – 30 March 1810) was an Italian art historian and

archaeologist Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...

. When he died he was buried in the church of the Santa Croce at Florence by the side of

Michelangelo Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (; 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known as Michelangelo (), was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was insp ...

Biography

Born in Treia, Lanzi was educated as a priest. He entered the Order of the Jesuits, resided at

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus (legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

and in 1773 was appointed keeper of the galleries of

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

, where he became president of the

Accademia della Crusca The Accademia della Crusca (; "Academy of the Bran"), generally abbreviated as La Crusca, is a Florence-based society of scholars of Italian linguistics and philology. It is one of the most important research institutions of the Italian language ...

. He thereafter studied Italian painting and

Etruscan __NOTOC__ Etruscan may refer to: Ancient civilization *The Etruscan language, an extinct language in ancient Italy *Something derived from or related to the Etruscan civilization **Etruscan architecture **Etruscan art **Etruscan cities ** Etrusca ...

antiquities and language. In the one field his labors are represented by his ''Storia Pittorica dell' Italia'', the first portion of which, containing the Florentine, Sienese, Roman and Neapolitan schools, appeared in 1792, the rest in 1796. In archaeology his great achievement was ''Saggio di lingua Etrusca'' (1789), followed by ''Saggio delle lingue d' Italia'' in 1806. In his 1806 memoir on the so-called Etruscan vases ''Dei vasi antichi dipinti volgarmente chiamati Etruschi'', Lanzi rightly perceived their

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

origin and characters. What was true of the antiquities would be true also, he argued, of the

Etruscan language Etruscan () was the language of the Etruscan civilization, in Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria (modern Tuscany, western Umbria, northern Latium, Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy and Campania). Etruscan influenced Latin but was eventually co ...

, and the object of the ''Saggio di lingua Etrusca'' was to prove that this language must be related to that of the neighboring peoples: Romans, Umbrians, Oscans and Greeks. He was allied with

Ennio Quirino Visconti Ennio Quirino Visconti (November 1, 1751 – February 7, 1818) was an Italian antiquarian and art historian, papal Prefect of Antiquities, and the leading expert of his day in the field of ancient Roman sculpture. His son, Pietro Ercole Visconti, e ...

in his great but never accomplished plan of illustrating antiquity altogether from existing literature and monuments. His notices of ancient sculpture and its various styles appeared as an appendix to the ''Saggio di lingua Etrusca'', and arose out of his minute study of the treasures then added to the Florentine collection from the

Villa Medici The Villa Medici () is a Mannerist villa and an architectural complex with a garden contiguous with the larger Borghese gardens, on the Pincian Hill next to Trinità dei Monti in Rome, Italy. The Villa Medici, founded by Ferdinando I de' Medici, ...

. The abuse he met with from later writers on the Etruscan language led Corssen to protest in the name of his real services to

philology Philology () is the study of language in oral and writing, written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defin ...

and archaeology. Among his other productions was an edition of

Hesiod Hesiod (; grc-gre, Ἡσίοδος ''Hēsíodos'') was an ancient Greek poet generally thought to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. He is generally regarded by western authors as 'the first written poet i ...

's ''Works and Days'', with valuable notes, and a translation in ''

terza rima ''Terza rima'' (, also , ; ) is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets (three line stanzas) with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rhy ...

''. Begun in 1785, it was recast and completed in 1808. The list of his works closes with his ''Opere sacre'', a series of treatises on spiritual subjects.

References

''Elogio dell'abate L. Lanzi''
By Onofrio Boni, Presso Niccolò Capurro, Pisa, (1816). * Giulio Natali, "Nel primo centenario dalla morte di Luigi Lanzi", in ''Real deputazione di storia patria per le provincie delle Marche, atti e memorie'', volume vi (N. S., Ancona, 1911)

Storia Pittorica dell' Italia (History of Painting in Italy; from the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the 18th-Century)

* * * * *

Sources

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External links

* * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Lanzi, Luigi 1732 births 1810 deaths People from the Province of Macerata Italian archaeologists Italian art historians 18th-century Italian Jesuits Italian curators Italian philologists