Poliziano alone of the Medicean Academy has lived into modern times for reasons with which he would not be wholly content; for though the first of the Classicists to use his genius on behalf of his own tongue, he regarded his editions of the Classics as more important, as, indeed, in themselves they were. Fortunately, like his patron and intimate Lorenzo, Poliziano was very modern, also he was a born poet, and his easy Greek and Latin made these languages live. His work was no mere imitation of Horace in verse or Livy in prose; he was so saturated in the classical learning and yet so wholly modern that he really embodied the spirit of antiquity in a living person, singularly unlike the higher and dryer scholars of his own and succeeding times. It is possible to have a vast erudition and yet to lack the spirit of the old world, and it is possible to miss the highest scholarship and yet to have a mind informed with antiquity. Poliziano was certainly not the greatest scholar of the Renaissance, but he was the most original and the most brilliant interpreter of the ancient to the modern world.

Erasmus, a far more profound scholar and thinker and human withal, regarded Poliziano’s scholarship as inaccurate; but his conscientiousness is apparent in his collating and editing of Justinian's Pandects from the Pisan MS., a gigantic undertaking, in which he never resorted to emendations unless the text seemed hopeless.