Portraits of Learned Men
Description:... "The works for which Paolo Giovio is best known today are his two volumes of Elogia: one concerning notable literati (1546), the other surveying prominent military and political figures (1551). The first of these, entitled Portraits of Learned Men (Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus), is here newly edited and translated. Taken as a whole, Portraits of Learned Men provides an insightful synopsis of the contours, mentality, and trajectory of humanistic culture in Italy and Europe from the fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. As he watched the foreign invasions of the Italian peninsula and the conquests that ensued, Giovio came to believe that the high culture of the Italian Renaissance-in which he had participated not only in Rome but in Florence, Milan, Naples, and elsewhere-was in rapid decline, a perspective he had voiced nearly two decades before in Notable Men and Women. We may view the Portraits as a mature and more systematic effort than that dialogue to capture and commemorate a bygone period of efflorescence. Unlike others' catalogues, however, Giovio's Portraits of Learned Men was but an offshoot of a far more ambitious project of commemoration. At least since 1521, he had been collecting likenesses of learned men, and the following year he began procuring portraits of outstanding rulers and men of arms. Tireless in supplicating potential patrons, he rapidly expanded his collection, and in 1537 he began construction on the southwest shore of Lake Como of a villa custom-made to display what he called his musaeum (literally, a "home of the Muses," but here carrying something resembling the modern sense of "museum"). Initially, he had planned just to identify the subjects in brief; but in perhaps his most creative move, he decided to enlarge the inscriptions to the point that they became biographical sketches, many of them several hundred words in length. Few of the biographical sketches in Portraits of Learned Men are eulogies; many verge on character assassination. Most lie in between, mixing praise and blame in a way that resembles the oratorical genre of epideictic favored by humanists in their sermons before the popes. Giovio sought to impart an appreciation for each man as a flesh-and-blood human being whose foibles were integral to making him who he was, and who, each in his own distinct way, contributed to making the Republic of Letters what it was. Viewed collectively, these capsule biographies (as the Latin elogia may best be rendered) can be seen to trace the arc of the development of learned culture in the Renaissance"--
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