CASTELVETRO, Ludovico. — Born in 1505 and raised in Modena, where the Reformation had its supporters, he seems to have been among them and was responsible for a certain abridged version of Melanchthon’s Loci communes, published anonymously in 1534 (Principi della teologia di Ippolito Terra Negra). However, he did not concern himself with the dangers posed by the Inquisition until 1555; in 1557 he fled and took refuge in Chiavenna, where he spent the rest of his life and died on 21 Feb. 1571. All the same, as a man of thought, CASTELVETRO remains almost insignificant; even his adherence to the Reformation, if it existed, is not clearly evident in what it consisted. He did, however, write a famous Poetica in which, in contrast to the interpreters of the Counter-Reformation, he attributed to Aristotle the principles of an aesthetic of hedonism, entirely to the advantage of fragmentarism and pure fantasy; but in these ideas, if there is any religious controversy, it is very veiled. In reality, in him, as indeed in his great rival Annibal Caro, only the passion for the Italian language bore fruit; and this, in the minds of some philologists, took the place of the other passion for the Latin language; and it inspired in them that curious and fanatical reverence for the early writers of the 13th and 14th centuries which soon led to the Accademia della Crusca.
In Modena, in this linguistic and philological ferment, CASTELVETRO had had predecessors; and it was certainly more from this than from love of poetry that he derived his commentary on Petrarch; only in this did his famous and bitter controversy with Caro take shape. Born from a purely grammatical criticism of the latter’s canzone “Venite all’ombra dei bei gigli d’oro,” its developments were extensive and murky. Alberto Longo, a young admirer and partisan of Caro, was found dead in Bolognese territory; and CASTELVETRO was suspected of complicity; the Inquisition turned its attention to him, and Caro was also suspected. In both cases, the suspicion proved groundless. In any case, on the literary plane, the fundamental difference between the two men remains that Caro’s linguistic sensitivity is artistic, while CASTELVETRO’s is scientific. His way of loving and savouring language ended by making him, whether consciously or not, a pioneer of modern etymological science. This is his best merit.
Those Corrections of certain things in the “Dialogo delle lingue” of Varchi (written in one go in 1570 in response to that book and published posthumously by his brother Giammaria in 1571), in which he contests the prejudice of names imposed not by nature but by agreement, i.e., by the arbitrary will of men, as if every word were an island and etymological science a kind of astrology worthy of ridicule. Also noteworthy for his fragmentary and brilliant insights are his Additions (and Oppositions) to the Prose of Bembo (composed between 1549 and 1563 and published posthumously in 1572), in which the central idea that the vernacular language was also in use in Rome at that time is equally untenable.