CORNARO, LUIGI (ALVISE). – He belonged to the illustrious Corner family. Born in Venice in 1475 and died in Padua on 8 January 1566. Passionate about agriculture and hydraulics, he reclaimed uncultivated land and stimulated the Venetian Republic’s reclamation efforts. In another field, variously humanistic and artistic, he protected writers and artists, and constructed splendid buildings and villas.
But his fame rests on having taught men, in an engaging manner, the beauty and happiness of a temperate life. He owed his restored health at the age of forty to such temperance, after severe suffering; from then on he became the champion of a way of life that he continually refined, precisely like a work of art, and that enabled him to live to a very advanced age in perfect tranquillity and cheerfulness of spirit. The C. gathered the essence of this experience in a short treatise, Della vita sobria, which he published at the age of eighty-three (Padua 1558); this was followed in ’61, ’63, and ’65 (ibid.) by three other writings on the same subject. All enjoyed numerous editions and translations down to the present day, spreading a light of human sympathy around the author’s warm-hearted figure. He won his battle not by leading readers along behind him, persuaded and converted by his often sophistical arguments, but by offering them the testimony of his exceptionally vigorous old age, portrayed in a crystalline light, with an accent here and there even poetic. This lyricism of the charming little work, which is not harmed by a touch of ingenuous coquettishness, is the truest secret of its artistic as well as human validity.