Filippo Buonaccorsi, born in San Gimignano, in…
1492 CE
Filippo Buonaccorsi, born in San Gimignano, in Tuscany, in north-central Italy, had first appeared in Venice and Rome, where he was secretary to Bishop Bartolomeo Roverella.
He moved to Rome in 1462 and became a member of the Rome Academy of Julius Pomponius Laetus.
Having taken part in a supposed assassination attempt upon Pope Paul II in 1468, he had fled to Poland, where he had found work with the Bishop of Lwów, Gregory of Sanok.
Pomponius implied he was homosexual and referred to his "perverted habits".
The homo-erotic verses (including one addressed to the then Bishop of Segni, Lucio Fazini) which will be found in his papers, while earning him a reputation as a sodomite, seem to have been restricted to his youth.
This seems to have reflected the aims of the Rome Academy to revive the concept of homosexual love as the ideal, drawing on the precedents set by antiquity.
but Buonaccorsi appears to have been particularly active within the group in writing about sexual infatuation between men.
However, later once in Poland he seems to have turned his attention to heterosexual love instead; perhaps a cautious reaction to the violent events in Rome.
Buonaccorsi had later become tutor to the sons of Polish King Casimir IV Jagiellon and took part in diplomatic missions.
Named royal secretary in 1474, he had served as ambassador to Constantinople in 1476, and in 1486 he became the King's representative in Venice.
With the accession to the Polish throne of Buonaccorsi's former pupil as John I of Poland, his influence peaks.
In his writings Buonaccorsi argues for the strengthening of the king's power at the expense of the aristocracy.
In Kraków he joins Conrad Celtis' Sodalitas Vistuliana.
Callimachus writes poems and prose in Latin, and is best remembered for his biographies of Bishop Zbigniew Oleśnicki, Bishop Gregory of Sanok, and King Wladyslaw III of Poland.