Sabellico Marco Antonio

Marcantonio da Coccio, better known as Marcantonio Sabellico, was born of poor parents in Vicovaro (northeast of Rome). He received his early schooling in his native town and then continued his studies in Rome under Pomponio Leto, Gasparino Barzizza, Domizio Calderini, and Porcelio Pandone. While in Rome he took part in the life of Leto's Roman Academy and adopted his humanistic ‘nom de plume': Sabellico. In 1473 he was called to Udine to teach rhetoric but also continued his studies in dialectics, mathematics, and Greek. In 1482 appeared his first work in print De vetustate Aquileiae patriae. He was dismissed from his employment in Udine, and spent over a year in Verona, where he completed twenty-two of the thirty-three books of his history of Venice. In 1487 he presented this work (printed in 1487) to the doge and senate, and soon afterwards he was appointed to the second public lectureship in the humanities at the school of San Marco (cf. F.Lepori, La scuola di Rialto dalla fondazione alla metà del Cinquecento, in: “Storia della cultura veneta. Dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento”, G. Arnaldi & M. Pastore Stocchi, eds., Vicenza, 1980/81, pp. 600-605).

On the death of Giorgio Valla (1500), who had the first lectureship, Sabellico took over his position. He also served as librarian to the collection of books which Cardinal Bessarion had given Venice, but which was as yet without a permanent home. Sabellico repaid the republic's largesse by writing and publishing further works in praise of Venice as well as a description of the city in three books and a dialogue on the Venetian magistrates (1489). In addition he continued his literary studies and produced commentaries on Pliny the Elder, Valerius Maximus, Livy, Horace, and other classical authors. Several of his orations and his philosophical, moral, and historical minor works attest to both his productiveness and his rise to considerable prominence in Venice. Toward the end of his life he published his historical magnum opus, a universal history from the Creation, under the title Enneades seu rhapsodiae historiarum (1498). A second part was printed in 1504.