CARO, ANNIBALE. – Born at Civitanova in the Marches in 1507. He flourished at a particularly propitious moment for his genius as a refined assessor of words.
Aristocratic, learned, bookish, he would have liked to live freely among books; but he was not wealthy, and he too had to take up the burden of courtly service, first as secretary and tutor in the household of Monsignor Gaddi, then as secretary to Cardinal Farnese from 1542; only at the end, and for a short time, was he able to enjoy the longed-for good of freedom. In the classical languages he was as well trained as a humanist, and particularly inclined to write prose; and since Aretino’s advertising genius had by then launched and popularized the literary genre of the “vernacular letters,” it is hardly surprising that the highly elaborate letters he was writing either on his own behalf or for his master, once known and perhaps famous, should have whetted the appetite of publishers (or, as they were then called, “booksellers”) for their “collections.”
Tormented by the demon of perfection, intolerant of banal or compromising company, he could hardly fail to dislike such a literary genre, or at least its conventions;
but in the end he too yielded; the collection, however, consisted of four hundred letters, all highly elaborate and perfect (perhaps too perfect), and was published posthumously in Venice by the Manuzio press (1572–73). Unlike those of Aretino, they display—and perhaps one may even deplore this—an excess of discretion and therefore, it must be acknowledged, of restraint in interest. But what a marvel of language and style (despite a faint scent of the dictionary) in all of them, and in the approximately six hundred others that scholars in subsequent centuries gradually added to the first collection! Considering that an exceedingly refined taste triumphs in them almost to the same degree as the two opposing prejudices—imitation and popularity—it may perhaps be said that modern Italian prose begins with them. Moreover, C. announces, or rather anticipates, that particular kind of man of letters who would later become characteristic of Italy, and not only of Italy, through the age of Romanticism and even beyond II.
An academician to his fingertips, when he sets about satirizing the Academy there is no one who surpasses him; whether openly or covertly, he collaborates with the others in combing through Aristotle’s Poetics in order to extract and refine from it the neoclassical decalogue; yet, for its sake and in mockery of its authors, he has Commento by Ser Agosto and La Nasea, or dei Nasi, as well as other rhymes ready in his drawer; he is enthusiastic about antiquities as a humanist, but with a sentiment that is by now predominantly archaeological. CASTELVETRO, LUDOVICO (v.) also derived from this duality of temperament; fundamentally, it represents nothing more than a clash between two grammarians, though on his side there was the advantage (or disadvantage) of a sensitivity to linguistic facts that was less scientific and more artistic.
In his final years he devoted himself to translating the Aeneid, in order to demonstrate the richness and capacity of the Italian language. He died in a small villa of his in the Tuscolano on 17 November 1566 and was buried in Rome in the church of S. Lorenzo in Damaso.
Among C.’s works: Scritti scelti, with an introduction by V. E. Spadolini (Milan 1912); F. Pastonchi, Le più belle pagine di A. C. (ibid. 1923).