Name Nicolo Malermi | ||
Nicolò Malermi (ca. 1422 – 1481) was an Italian Biblical scholar. He was the first translator of the Bible into Italian from the Latin text.
Life
Nicolò (Nicholas) Malermi (Malerba, Manerba) was born in Venice about 1422. He entered the Camaldolese Order (ca. 1470), quite late in his life, when he was 48 years old. In 1480 he was appointed abbot of St. Michele di Lemo, at Class near Ravenna. The following year he became the superior of San Mattia in Murano, near Venice.
The greatest accomplishment of Malermi was in 1471 his translation of the Bible, the so-called Malermi Bible, including the OT Apocrypha. It was the first printed translation of the Bible into 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. Malermi also wrote a History (now lost) of the Murano monastery and, in 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.