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