34. Angelo Poliziano. Omnia opera (1498)

Poliziano was the outstanding humanist of his day, a talented scholar whose breadth of reading was very great and whose range of interests included history, politics, jurisprudence, architecture, botany, and even cooking. Although titled Omnia opera, the book is not, in fact, complete. Prominently absent is Poliziano's history of the Pazzi conspiracy, De pactiana coniuratione commentarium. Some speculate that Aldus deliberately omitted it because he feared Rome's disapproval, since the history implicated Pope Sixtus IV in the conspiracy. This explanation seems doubtful given the fact that the Holy See was occupied, at the time of the book's publication, by the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, who probably would not have been overly concerned about any book that made the family of Sixtus, the della Rovere, look bad. Nonetheless the omission was not made good until the 1553 edition of Poliziano's complete works at Basel.

The status of Poliziano as a scholar of note may be observed in BYU's copy by the fact that some of the more significant treatises in the volume have marginal notes written in five different hands.