BARBARO, FRANCESCO. - A most splendid figure of a humanist and statesman, born in Venice around 1398 to the senator Candiano, died there in the second half of January 1454. He was educated in the love of letters by Giovanni da Ravenna, known as the Grammarian, by Gasparino Barzizza, and then by Guarino Veronese, who also taught him Greek. At about nineteen years of age (1415) he published the Latin treatise De re uxoria, in which, starting from the choice of a wife, he leads the reader all the way to the education of children. This work won him very great credit, because he compensated for his youthful inexperience with the erudition learned from the Greek and Latin classics, arousing the admiration of men such as Pier Paolo Vergerio, Poggio Bracciolini, and Ambrogio Traversari. He married Maria Loredan at the age of 21, entered the Senate in 1419, and very soon began to be employed in the service of the Republic in offices and legations that followed one another almost without interruption.
He was twice legate to Martin V for the war against Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and war was the constant program of his political life. Under Eugene IV he was one of the most tenacious champions of religious union with the Greeks and of aid to the empire of the East. In 1438, being podestà of Brescia, he withstood a memorable siege against Niccolò Piccinino, condottiero of the Duke of Milan. In 1452 he received the coveted office of procurator of St. Mark.
Some orations delivered by B. on the most solemn occasions of his career are remembered; very numerous are his letters on quite disparate subjects—political, religious, and literary—which run from 1409 to Dec. 1453, and among his correspondents are found the most illustrious personages of the era: Nicholas V, Lodovico Trevisan cardinal camerlengo, Cardinal Francesco Condulmer, then Ambrogio Traversari, Ermolao Barbaro the elder, Flavio Biondo, George of Trebizond. Furthermore, Poggio, Valla, Niccolò, and Leonardo Bruni wanted him as intermediary and peacemaker in their disputes, an office which he strove to fulfill without offending either party.
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Pio Paschini