Lorenzo Valla (Italian: [loˈrɛntso ˈvalla]; also latinized as Laurentius; c. 1407 – 1 August 1457) was an Italian Renaissance humanist scholar, rhetorician, educator, and Catholic priest. He is best known for his historical-critical textual analysis that proved that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery, therefore impugning and undermining the presumption of temporal power claimed by the papacy. Lorenzo is sometimes seen as a precursor of the Reformation.
Valla was born in Rome, with a family background of Piacenza; his father, Luciave della Valla, was a lawyer who worked in the Papal Curia. He was educated in Rome, attending the classes of teachers including Leonardo Bruni and Giovanni Aurispa, from whom he learned Latin and Greek. He is thought otherwise to have been largely self-taught.
Bruni was a papal secretary; Melchior Scrivani, Valla's uncle, was another. But Valla had caused offence, to Antonio Loschi, by championing the rhetorician Quintilian in an early work. In 1431, Valla was ordained as a priest; the same year he tried in vain to secure a position as apostolic secretary to China. He was unsuccessful, despite his network of contacts.
Valla went to Piacenza, and then to Pavia, where he obtained a professorship of eloquence. His tenure at Pavia was made uncomfortable by his attack on the Latin style of the jurist Bartolus de Saxoferrato. He became itinerant, moving from one university to another, accepting short engagements and lecturing in many cities.
Invited to Rome by Pope Nicholas V in 1447, Valla worked there on his Repastinatio. He became a papal scribe and, in 1455, a papal secretary.
Valla died in Rome. He was originally buried beneath the monumental bronze Lex de imperio Vespasiani behind the altar of Saint John Lateran. His tomb and epitaph were last seen by Seyfried Rybisch in 1570. In 1576, Pope Gregory XIII, a staunch believer in the Donation of Constantine, had them destroyed when he removed the bronze to the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Today, there is a memorial to Valla in the Lateran.
Older biographies of Valla give details of many literary and theological disputes, the most prominent one with Gianfrancesco Poggio Bracciolini, which took place after his settlement in Rome. Extreme language was employed. He appears as quarrelsome, combining humanistic elegance with critical wit and venom, and an opponent of the temporal power of the Catholic Church.
Luther had a high opinion of Valla and of his writings, and Robert Bellarmine called him "Luther's precursor". Erasmus stated in his De ratione studii that for Latin grammar, there was "no better guide than Lorenzo Valla".
The Danish rhetorician da:Christian Kock makes a case for the contemporary relevance of Valla's rhetorical theory. Kock highlights Valla's book, De voluptate for its Epicurean take on persuasion: not the stringent logic of the Medieval scholastics, but rather taking pleasure at the thought of the course which, according to the rhetor in question, should be taken, is what distinguishes rhetorical persuasion. In addition, Kock notes a similarity between Valla's thoughts on the common sense and practical rhetorical language with 20th century ordinary language philosophy.
On the Donation of Constantine
Between 1439 and 1440, Valla wrote the essay, De falso credita et ementita Constantini Donatione declamatio, which analyzed the document usually known as the Donation of Constantine. The Donation suggests that Constantine I gave the whole of the Western Roman Empire to the Roman Catholic Church. This was supposedly an act of gratitude for having been miraculously cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester I.
From 1435 to 1445, Valla was employed in the court of Alfonso V of Aragon, who became involved in a territorial conflict with the Papal States, then under Pope Eugene IV. This relationship possibly motivated his work; in any case, he was put on trial before the Catholic Inquisition in 1444, but was protected from imprisonment by the intervention of Alfonso V.
Valla demonstrated that the internal evidence in the Donation told against a 4th-century origin: its vernacular style could be dated to the 8th century. Valla argued this thesis in three ways:
By stating that the Emperor Constantine could not have legally given Pope Sylvester the powers that the Donation claimed.
From the absence of contemporary evidence, Valla reasoned that it was implausible that a major change in the administration of the Western Roman Empire had taken place.
Valla doubted that Emperor Constantine had given Pope Sylvester anything at all, suggesting a mistake involving an earlier Pope.
Supplementing these points, Valla argued from anachronism: the document contained the word satrap, which he believed Romans such as Constantine I would not have used. In addition, Valla believed that the quality of Latin for such a supposedly important text was undeniably poor, evidencing this by the fact that the text constantly switched tenses from "we have proclaimed" to "we decree", for instance.
A specialist in Latin translation, Valla made numerous suggestions for improving on Petrarch's study of Livy. The emendation of Livy was also a topic discussed in book IV of his Antidotum in Facium, an invective against Bartolomeo Facio. In this part of the treatise, which also circulated independently under the title Emendationes in T. Livium, Valla elucidates numerous corrupt passages and criticises the attempts at emendation made by Panormita and Facio, his rivals at the court of Alfonso V.