CONTI, ANTONIO. – A scholar of mathematics and philosophy, man of letters, and poet. A Venetian patrician and abbot, he was born in Padua on 22 January 1677 and died there on 6 April 1749. He possessed an encyclopedic mind and European cultural interests; he lived in Paris between 1713 and 1715 and between 1718 and 1726, and there engaged in discussions with Malebranche; he was in England in 1715 and in 1717–18, a friend of Newton and the Court; from there, in 1716–17, he travelled in Holland and Germany. From 1726 he lived in his homeland until his death.
Of the philosophical treatises he had planned, he left only sketches. His writings, in two volumes, Prose e poesie (Venice 1739 and 1756), contain translations from classical and modern authors (Racine’s Atolio and Pope’s Il ricciolo rapito), the metaphysical poems Lo scudo di Pallade and Il globo di Venere, various poems, and philosophical and aesthetic fragments. Important are the two letters in French to the president Ferrant and the marquis Maffei, and the Dissertazione on Statius’s Thebaid, both for C.’s position against the school of the moderns and the Cartesian critics and for his insistence on historical knowledge and particular characteristics as a means of arriving at aesthetic judgment. This return to history, anticipatory of Manzoni, also inspired C.’s four tragedies: Giunio Bruto, Marco Bruto, Giulio Cesare e Bruto (Florence 1751), written under the influence of Shakespearean historical tragedy and with anti-tyrannical intentions.