Nicolò Malermi

Nicolò Malermi (c. 1422 – 1481) was an Italian Biblical scholar. He was the first translator of the Bible from Latin into Italian.

Life

Nicolò (Nicholas) Malermi (Malerba, Manerba) was born in Venice about 1422. He entered the Camaldolese Order in about 1470, quite late in his life, when he was 48 years old, and translated the Bible the next year, in the hermitage of San Matteo, on a little island near Murano in the Venetian lagoon. In 1477 he was appointed abbot of S. Michele di Lemo (San Michele above Lim), in Istria, which was then under Venetian rule. (This is the Istria just south of Trieste, which is now part of Croatia.) This monastery was between Parenzo and Rovigno, near Klostar, above the Canale di Leme and had been placed under the primacy of S. Michele di Murano in 1394. In 1480, Malermi was living in the Camaldolese monastery in Classe, near Ravenna, which was also under Venetian rule. The following year, the year of his death, he returned to Venice and became the superior of San Michele in Murano (San Michele in Isola).[1] [2]

The greatest accomplishment of Malermi was in 1471, his translation of the Bible, the so-called Malermi Bible, including the OT deuterocanonical books. It was the first printed translation of the Bible in Italian, based on the Latin text. The author (and his collaborators, Lorenzo da Venezia and Girolamo Squarciafico) completed the translation in eight months, in some cases using and adapting some previous fourteenth-century translations, even if at the expense of literary quality.[3] Malermi also wrote a history (now lost) of the Murano monastery and translated into Italian The Lives of All Saints (some composed by Malermi, some in collaboration with Girolamo Squarciafico; Venice, 1475).

Malermi died in 1481 in Venice. An 18th-century portrait of Malermi is at the Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna.

There is digital version of his Bible, from the 1490 edition of Venice preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England (Douce 244): Malermi Bible 1490 Venice. This is an illustrated edition which contains a woodcut of the translator at work in his cell (frame 18).

References
  1. "Atti e memorie". 1905.
  2. "Accademia patavina di scienze, lettere ed arti, Atti e memorie, Volume 21, 1905, pp. 240-41"
  3. Treccani.it
  • Girolamo Tiraboschi, History of Italian literature VI-1 (Venice 1795), 287-289.
  • Edoardo Barbieri, "La fortuna della Bibbia vulgarizzata di Niccolò Malerbi," in «Aevum» 53.2 (1989), 419-500
  • Edoardo Barbieri, "Malerbi, Nicolo", in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 68 (2007)
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