Lorenzo Valla

Valla, Lorenzo 

Born 1405 or 1407, in Rome; died there on Aug. 1, 1457. Italian humanist. From 1445 secretary of the Papal Court.

Valla proved the counterfeit nature of The Donation of Constantine; thus, he was one of the forerunners of historical textual criticism. In the treatise On Pleasure as the True Good (1431) he defended the philosophy and ethics of Epicurus, which he contrasted with Christian asceticism and Stoic ethics. Valla sharply attacked medieval Scholastic logic and dialectics (in his Dialectic Refutations, 1439; published in 1499); he also subjected monasticism to sharp criticism. He strove for a revival of classical Latin (The Elegance of the Latin Language, books 1-6, 1471).

WORKS

Scritti filosofici e religiosi. Florence, 1953.
“O naslazhdenii” (excerpt). In Istoriia estetiki, vol. 1. Moscow, 1962. Pages 485-97.

REFERENCES

Korelin, M. S. “Eticheskii traktat L. Vally Ob udovol’stvii i ob istinnom blage,’” Vopr. filosofii i psikhologii, 1895, books 29 and 30.
Khometovskaia, A. I. Lorentso Valla—velikii ital’ianskii gumanist. Moscow-Leningrad, 1964.
Gaeta, F. Lorenzo Valla. Naples, 1955.

Z. N. MELESHCHENKO