CASTELVETRO, LUDOVICO. – Born in 1505 and raised in Modena, where the Reformation had no shortage of supporters, he seems to have been one of them and to have produced a certain brief translation of Melanchthon’s Loci communes, published anonymously in 1534 (Principi della teologia by Ippolito Terra Negra). But he did not have to concern himself with the dangers posed by the Inquisition before 1555; in 1557 he fled and settled in Chiavenna, where he lived out the rest of his life and died on 21 February 1571. Nevertheless, as a man of thought, C. 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 opposition to the interpreters of the Counter-Reformation, he attributed to Aristotle the principles of a hedonistic aesthetic, to the full advantage of fragmentarism and pure imagination; but in these ideas the religious polemic, if present at all, is very subdued. In reality, in him, as likewise in his great rival Annibal Caro, the only fruitful passion became that for the Italian language; among certain philologists, this then took the place formerly occupied by the passion for the Latin language, and inspired, for the primitive writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that curious and fanatical reverence which would soon flow into the Accademia della Crusca.
In Modena, amid this linguistic and philological fervor, C. had had predecessors; and it was certainly from this rather than from any love of poetry that he derived his commentary on Petrarch. It was solely in this field that his famous and sordid polemic with Caro took shape. Originating in a wholly grammatical criticism of his own directed at Caro’s canzone Venite all'ombra dei bei gigli d'oro, its developments were extensive and dark. Alberto Longo, a young admirer and partisan of Caro, was found dead in Bolognese territory; and C. was thought to have been an accomplice. The Inquisition was stirred up against him, and Caro was suspected. In both cases, it is hoped, wrongly. In any event, on the literary plane, the fundamental difference between the two remains that Caro’s linguistic sensibility is artistic, whereas C.’s is scientific. His manner of loving and savoring the language ultimately made him a pioneer—though it is impossible to say how consciously—of modern etymological science. This is the chief merit of those Correzioni d'alcune case nel «Dialogo delle lingue» del Varchi (written at a single sitting in 1570, following the publication of this book, and published posthumously by his brother Giammaria in 1571), in which the prejudice concerning names imposed
