CASTELVETRO, LUDOVICO. - Born in 1505 and raised in Modena, where the Reformation did not lack supporters, he appears to have been among them, and it seems to have been his work to produce a certain summary version of Melanchthon's Loci communes, published anonymously in 1534 (Principi della teologia by Ippolito Terra Negra). But he had no need to worry about the dangers posed by the Inquisition before 1555; in 1557 he fled and withdrew to Chiavenna, where he lived the rest of his life and died on 21 February 1571. Nevertheless, as a man of thought, C. remains almost insignificant; his very adherence to the Reformation, if it existed, is not clearly seen in what it consisted. He did write a famous Poetica in which, in contrast with the interpreters of the Counter-Reformation, he attributed to Aristotle the principles of a hedonistic aesthetics entirely to the advantage of fragmentariness and pure fantasy; but in these ideas the religious polemic, if there is any, is very much veiled. In reality, in him, as moreover in his great rival Annibal Caro, only the passion for the Italian language became fruitful; which, in the soul of certain philologists, then took the place of that for the Latin language; and inspired for the early writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that curious and fanatical reverence which would soon culminate in the Accademia della Crusca.
In Modena, in this linguistic and philological fervor, C. had had predecessors; and certainly more from it than from love of poetry he derived his commentary on Petrarch; only in it was informed his famous and base polemic with Caro. Born from an entirely grammatical censure of his on the latter's canzone Venite all'ombra dei bei gigli d'oro, its developments were ample and murky. Alberto Longo, a young admirer and partisan of Caro, was found dead in Bolognese territory; and complicity on the part of C. was suspected; the Inquisition was stirred up to the detriment of the latter, and Caro was suspected. In both cases, one hopes wrongly. In any case, on the literary plane, the fundamental difference between the two remains that the linguistic sensibility in Caro is artistic, in C. scientific. His way of loving and savoring the language ended by making him a pioneer, one does not know how consciously, of the modern science of etymology. This is the best merit of those Correzioni d'alcune cose nel «Dialogo delle lingue» del Varchi (written in one sitting in 1570 following this book and published posthumously by his brother Giammaria in 1571), where the prejudice of names imposed
"not from nature, but at pleasure, that is, from the will of men," as if every word were an island and etymological science a kind of astrology worthy of laughter. Again, for his fragmentary but brilliant intuitions, his Giunte (and objections) to Bembo's Prose (composed between 1549 and 1563 and published posthumously in 1572) are also worth preserving, even though the central idea that the vernacular language also existed in the time of Rome is so stale.
Bibliography5 works
Giuseppe Toffanin