Valla, LAURENTIUS, a great humanist of the Renaissance, born in 1405 at Rome, where, and afterwards at Florence, he studied the classics, which he taught chiefly at Pavia. Having incurred many enmities, he shifted his quarters from one university town to another, much to their advantage and his own, till he found a protector at Naples in King Alfonso V., whose military fortunes he shared by sea and land. Rehabilitating Epicurus against scholastic depreciation, he was expelled from Rome, whose claims to temporal power he attacked. Continuing to lead an actively controversial and scholarly life, he was prosecuted by the Inquisition in the diocese of Naples, but underwent neither condemnation nor punishment. In 1448 we find him again in Rome as apostolic secretary to Nicholas V., whom he eulogised as 'the common father of the learned.' He died 'worn out by continual alternations of humiliation and redress,' in the flower of his age, in 1457. His vagrant, agitated life considered, he wrought marvels for scholarship and literature. Latin style (as commemorated by George Buchanan in two famous epigrams) owes him the deepest debt, while his versions of Xenophon, Herodotus, and Thucydides, made from texts which he had himself to purify, if not actually construct, extort even still the admiration of philologists. His scientific insight into language and idiom was only less than his gift of eloquence and invective. New Testament criticism he signally advanced by his comparison of the Greek original with the Vulgate. His Élegance of Latin speech was long a class-book in the schools; while his De Donatione Constantini Magni remains a weapon valued by assailants of the temporal power.
See Mancini's brilliant and exhaustive monograph (Florence, 1891) for the investigation and settlement of disputed points in Valla's life, and Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy (1877).