GUARINI, BATTISTA

GUARINI, BATTISTA. — Poet, born at Ferrara in 1538, died at Venice on 7 October 1612. Having entered the court of Alfonso II d’Este in 1567, he held diplomatic appointments in Venice and Turin, and in 1574 undertook a twofold mission to Poland. He was chosen as orator for Ferrara’s homage to the newly elected pontiffs: in 1512 to Gregorio XIII, in 1605 to Paolo V, and for the funeral eulogies of Cardinal Luigi d’Este and Emperor Massimiliano II.
He maintained relations with the courts of the Gonzaga, Della Rovere, Savoia, and Medici families and, in favor of the latter, wrote the Trattato della pubblica libertà (Venice 1818). A record of his court life is provided by the work Il Segretario (there 1594). In his house at S. Bellino (Padua), having gathered together the “few relics of his shipwreck,” he devoted himself to letters and in 1590, in emulation of Tasso’s Aminta, published the Pastor fido at Venice (v. ed. edited by G. Brognoligo, Bari 1914), a pastoral tragicomedy, greatly admired (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it went through approximately 80 editions), which he tenaciously defended against Aristotelian men of letters in the Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601). Born in the midst of a courtly society, the Pastor fido, in its dramatic episodes, its languid grace, and the musicality of its poetry, is morbidly and exquisitely sensual; in its ideal of woman in the Platonic manner, it reflects the Petrarchism of the sixteenth century (v. also by G. the Rime, Venice 1598). G., skeptical in life, lacked an intimate religious drama, and his work, which opens the way to melodrama, remains subject to the artifice of pure aestheticism.