Valla, George

, an Italian physician and professor of the belles lettres at Venice, was born at Picenza, and was a contemporary of Laurentius Valla. He was well skilled in the Latin and Greek tongues, and wrote a considerable number of books both in physic and literature. One of his books in the former has a title, which gives us no less an opinion of his honesty than of his skill in his profession: it is “De tuenda sanitate per victum;” but it is doubtful whether he practised physic. He wrote “Commentaries on some books of Cicero, Horace’s Art of Poetry, Juvenal, &c.” and “A Comment upon the second book of Pliny’s Natural History,” printed at Venice 1502, in 4to: which, however, must be certainly very scarce, since father Hardouin tells us that he could not meet with it. He was also the compiler of a work entitled “De expetendis et fugiendis rebus,” Venice, 1501, 2 vols. fol. a kind of philosophical and literary Cyclopædia, in which the articles are generally short, but many of them curious. Valla exasperated the duke of Milan so much by his too impetuous zeal for the Trivulcian faction, that the prince procured him to be committed to prison even at Venice. He suffered great hardships in that confinement, but was at last released. He died suddenly, as he was going from his lodgings, in order to read a lecture upon the immortality of the soul, about the close of the fifteenth century. ¹