Celtis, Celtes, Konrad, Conradus Protucius, Protacius, born Konrad Bickel or Pickel, *1 February 1459 Wipfeld (near Würzburg), †4 February 1508 Vienna, German humanist, writer and poet.
From 1477 or 1478, he studied philosophy, philology, rhetoric and poetry at the University of Cologne, and from 1484 with Rudolf Agricola the Elder in Heidelberg; between 1485 and 1487, he stayed in Erfurt, Rostock, Leipzig, Rome, Florence, Bologna and Ferrara. In 1489–90, he studied mathematics and astronomy under Wojciech z Brudzewa at the Krakow Academy. Here, he became closely associated with the Polish humanist community, maintaining close contacts with, among others, F. Kallimach, and gave extra-mural lectures on rhetoric and poetics.
Around 1489, he founded Sodalitas Litteraria Vistulana – a society of enthusiasts of humanist ideas – where discussions were held and theatrical and musical performances were discussed; the members of the society included Wojciech z Brudzewa, Jan Sommerfeld the Elder, Jan Beer-Ursinus, Wawrzyniec Korwin (Laurentius Corvinus).
He also organised similar societies in Mainz, Vienna, Lübeck and Buda. Celtis’s stay in Poland had a significant impact on his work, as it was here that his poetic talent developed and his writing technique and style took shape; he left Krakow in 1490 or 1491. Between 1492 and 1497, he was a professor of rhetoric and poetry at the University of Ingolstadt. In 1497, he was appointed by Emperor Maximilian I to the University of Vienna and named supervisor of the imperial library. In 1502, he organised and ran the university’s Collegium Poetarum et Mathematicorum there.
Celtis left behind works of a didactic and historical nature, dramas, and above all numerous poetic compositions (elegies, odes, epigrams); some of them are thematically connected with his stay in Kraków. His most important collections include Quatuor libri amorum (Nuremberg 1502) and Libri odarum quatuor (Strasbourg 1513). Two of his dramas have retained particular significance: Ludus Dianae in modum comoediae coram Maximiliano (…) actus (1500, performed in 1501) and Laudes Maximiliani (1504). Celtis is regarded as the founder of German humanism; he influenced the development of Polish humanist culture and the scholarly and literary movement at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He contributed to the emergence and development of the so-called humanist ode, which spread at the end of the fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century in Latin schools in German territories, finding application primarily in the concluding sections of school dramas. During his lectures on Horace in Ingolstadt, he presented Horace’s odes in four-part, homorhythmic musical settings composed by his student P. Tritonius. The subordination of all voices to the requirements of classical metre was intended to realise the aims of the German humanists, aims that stemmed more from philological than musical principles regarding a new organisation of word–sound relationships. In 1507, a collection of four-part musical settings of Horace’s odes (Melopoiae sive Harmoniae tetracenticae super XXII genera carminum heroicorum elegiacorum lyricorum et ecclesiasticorum hymnorum), prepared through Celtis’s initiative and published in Augsburg, appeared. These settings adhered to the metrical (quantitative) structure of the chosen strophic forms and enjoyed popularity in Poland as well, where some contrafacta of the songs have survived, along with analogous settings of other Latin poets, including Boethius. Celtis’s ideas were propagated by his distinguished student, the Silesian scholar Laurentius Corvinus, who included musical examples in the same style in his two published works (Leipzig 1516, Wrocław 1521).
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