Life

Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) did not have an easy life. Equipped with a sharp and polemical mind, an even sharper pen, and a sense of self-importance verging on the pathological, he made many enemies not only among his scholastic contemporaries but also among his humanist colleagues. Born in Rome in a family with ties to the papal curia, Valla hoped to succeed his uncle as papal secretary, but he had already aroused the anger of some major humanists at the court. In 1431, he moved to Pavia where he taught rhetoric and wrote the first version of his controversial dialogue on pleasure. He also started to work on his attack on scholastic philosophy and on his handbook of the Latin language. After having attacked the jurists for their mediocre learning and lack of the linguistic skills necessary to study law, he had to flee Pavia. He then worked in the court of King Alfonso of Aragon who was campaigning against Pope Eugenius IV. As court humanist, Valla wrote a series of anticlerical treatises, the most famous of which was On the Donation of Constantine, in which he exposed that document to be a forgery, thereby exploding one of the pillars of the papal claims to worldly power. In 1447, Valla returned to Rome to work at the Papal curia, first as apostolic scriptor and later as a papal secretary. He taught rhetoric and translated Thucydides and Herodotus. His last years were marred by further unedifying polemics with other humanists. He died in 1457 and was buried in the Lateran, somewhat surprisingly for a man who had spent so much time fighting the clerical establishment.