Gravina, Gian Vincenzo

GRAVINA, GIAN VINCENZO. - Scholar and jurist, b. at Rogiano (Cosenza) on 20 February 1664, d. at Rome on 6 January 1718. Started on classical studies by his cousin Gregorio Caloprese, a Cartesian, he also studied history and law at Naples. In 1689 he moved to Rome as secretary to Cardinal Pignatelli. In 1690 he was among the founders of the Arcadia and dictated its laws in the archaic style of the Twelve Tables: but he later disagreed with the other Arcadians, finding the prevailing literary direction too superficial, and in 1711 he left it to found the Accademia dei Quirini.

He alternated literary studies with those of the history of law, nor were specifically moral and spiritual concerns foreign to him, as is attested by the pamphlet Hydra mystica sive de corrupta morali doctrina (1691, under the pseudonym of Prisco Censorino Foti-stico), in which he denounces the dangers both of casuistry and of the Protestant heresy. In 1699 he received from Innocent XII the chair of civil law at the University of Rome, after having published the Specimen prisci iuris (1697), which revealed his juridical genius; in 1703 he moved to the chair of canon law. His originality lies in having reacted against the abstract natural law theory of Cartesian spirit, reconnecting law with history, with a genius less synthetic than that of Vico, who was his friend, but with a teaching immediately clearer and more effective; so that he can be considered a precursor and stimulator of Vico himself, and one of the sources of Montesquieu. He developed these arguments further in the De ortu et progressu iuris civilis (1701), which thus became the first book of his definitive work Origiman iuris civilis libri tres (1708).

In the field of letters his capital work is the Ragion poetica (1708; see the edition edited by G. Natali, Lanciano 1920), in which he reconnects with Aristotelian poetics in order to react against Seicento abuses, but insisting on the intimately moral value of the exercise of literature, he foreshadows and prepares the climate of the literary renewal of the eighteenth century. Unhappy, on the other hand, are his five tragedies (1712), which nevertheless helped to combat the vanity of romantic tragedies, drawing tragedy back toward history: for this purpose the treatise Della tragedia (1715) was more effective.

Also noteworthy are the discourses he wrote on the method of studies: De instauratione studiorum (1712) and the unpublished letters to Francesco Pignatelli, bishop of Naples, in which he sketches the Roman events of the late seventeenth century.

Fausto Montanari