CEBÀ, ANSALDO. — Poet, born in Genoa in 1565, died there in 1623. A pupil first of the Jesuits and later of Speroni at the University of Padua, he cultivated poetics, moral philosophy, and the Greek language. He was a member of the local Accademia degli Addormentati. In his youth he sang of love, but after the monastic profession of a mistress he turned to religious and heroic themes with didactic intent.
Mediocre in lyric poetry, where he imitated Petrarch and Ronsard, in tragedy and in epic (Furio Camillo, Esther, Lazarus the Beggar), he introduced inopportune realistic scenes even into works of sacred subject and fell far short of his intentions. Learned are his glosses on the Characters of Theophrastus, which he translated.
BIBL.: G. B. Spotorno, Elogi di liguri illustri, II, Genoa 1846, pp. 65 ff.; P. Restagno, Di un letterato genovese del sec. XVII e le sue opere, Sampierdarena 1906; E. Zanette, Su A. C., in Convivium, 4 (1932), pp. 94-123; D. Bianchi, Chiabrera e C. poeti pindarici, Pavia 1941.