CARO, ANNIBALE. - Born at Civitanova in the Marche in 1507. He flourished at a moment particularly favorable to his genius as a refined assayer of words.
An aristocrat, learned, bookish, he would have liked to live free precisely among books; but he was not rich, and he too had to bear the cross of courtiership, as secretary and tutor in the household of Msgr. Gaddi first, then as secretary of Cardinal Farnese from 1542; and only at the end, and for a short time, could he enjoy the longed-for good of freedom. In the classical languages he was as well versed as a humanist, and particularly inclined to write in prose; and since the publicity genius of Aretino had by then launched and made fashionable the literary genre of "vernacular letters," it is no surprise that those highly elaborate letters which he kept writing on his own account or on his master's, once they became known and perhaps even famous, should have tempted publishers (or, as they were then called, "booksellers") for their "collections."
Tormented by the demon of perfection, intolerant of trivial or compromising company, he could not but be annoyed by such a literary genre, or at least by the custom of it; but in the end he too gave in; yet the collection consisted of four hundred letters, all highly elaborate and perfect (even too much so), and it came out posthumously at Venice, published by Manuzio (1572-73). Contrary to what one finds in those of Aretino, in these you perceive, and perhaps deplore, an excess of discretion, and therefore, one must admit, of interest. But what a marvel of language and style (albeit with a vague whiff of the dictionary) in all of them and in the other six hundred or so that scholars of subsequent centuries kept adding to the first! If one considers that an extremely refined taste triumphs in them almost to the same degree as the two opposing prejudices: imitation and popularity, it is perhaps fair to say that modern Italian prose begins with them. Moreover, C. announces, or rather anticipates, that type of literary man who was later to become characteristic of Italy, and not only of Italy, down to the age of Romanticism and even to that which followed.
An academician to his fingertips, yet when he sets about satirizing the Academy there is no one who surpasses him; covertly, or not, he collaborates with the others in the close scrutiny of Aristotle's Poetics in order to extract from it and refine its neoclassical decalogue; but for it, and in mockery of its authors, he has ready in his drawer the Commento of Ser Agosto and La Nasea, or of the Noses, and other rigmaroles; he is enthusiastic about antiquities as a humanist, but with a feeling by now predominantly archaeological. This twofoldness of temperament also underlay his famous polemic with Castelvetro (v.), which, at bottom, represents nothing but a clash between two grammarians, but with the advantage (or disadvantage) on his side of a sensibility to the linguistic fact that was less scientific and more artistic.
In his last years he devoted himself to translating the "Aeneid" in order to make known the richness and capacity of the Italian language. He died in a small villa of his in the Tusculan territory on Nov. 17, 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. Cian and commentary by E. Spadolini (Milan 1912); F. Pastonchi, Le più belle pagine di A. C. (ibid. 1923).
Bibliography6 works
Giuseppe Toffanin