| Honorific Prefix: | Doctor |
| Birth Name: | Giovanni Andrea Alciato |
| Birth Date: | 8 May 1492 |
| Birth Place: | Alzate Brianza, Duchy of Milan |
| Death Place: | Pavia, Duchy of Milan |
| Nationality: | Italian |
| Occupation: | Jurist, university teacher, lawyer, writer |
| Parents: | Ambrogio Alciati and Margherita Alciati (née Landriani) |
| Relatives: | Francesco Alciati |
| School Tradition: | Mos gallicus iura docendi |
| Influences: | Seneca, Tacitus, Tribonian, Bartolus de Saxoferrato, Erasmus |
| Discipline: | Civilist, legal theorist, philosopher of law |
| Notable Students: | Bonifacius Amerbach, Viglius, François Connan, Johannes Secundus, Antonio Agustín y Albanell, Giulio Claro |
| Notable Works: | Emblemata (1531) |
| Influenced: | French school of legal humanism |
| Resting Place: | Chiesa di Sant'Epifanio |
Andrea Alciato (8 May 149212 January 1550),[1] commonly known as Alciati (Andreas Alciatus), was an Italian jurist and writer.[2] He is regarded as the founder of the French school of legal humanists.
Alciati was born in Alzate Brianza, near Milan, and settled in France in the early 16th century. He displayed great literary skill in his exposition of the laws, and was one of the first to interpret the civil law by the history, languages and literature of antiquity, and to substitute original research for the servile interpretations of the glossators. He published many legal works, and some annotations on Tacitus and accumulated a sylloge of Roman inscriptions from Milan and its territories, as part of his preparation for his history of Milan, written in 1504–05.[3]
Among his several appointments, Alciati taught Law at the University of Bourges between 1529 and 1535. It was Guillaume Budé who encouraged the call to Bourges at the time.[4] Pierre Bayle, in his General Dictionary (article "Alciat"), relates that he greatly increased his salary there, by the "stratagem" of arranging to get a job offer from the University of Bologna and using it as a negotiation point https://books.google.com/books?id=PmZZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA444.
Alciati is most famous for his Emblemata, published in dozens of editions from 1531 onward. This collection of short Latin verse texts and accompanying woodcuts created an entire European genre, the emblem book, which attained enormous popularity in continental Europe and Great Britain.
Alciati died at Pavia in 1550.