GUARINI, BATTISTA. - Poet, b. in Ferrara in 1538, d. in Venice on 7 Oct. 1612. Having entered the court of Alfonso II d'Este in 1567, he held diplomatic posts in Venice, in Turin and in 1574 a twofold legation in Poland. He was chosen as orator for Ferrara's homage to newly elected pontiffs: in 1512 to Gregory XIII, in 1605 to Paul V, and for the funeral eulogies to Card. Luigi d'Este and to the emperor Maximilian II.
He had relations with the courts of the Gonzaga, the Della Rovere, the Savoy, the Medici and, in favor of the latter, he wrote the Trattato della pubblica libertà (Venice 1818). A document of his court life is the work Il Segretario (ibid. 1594). In his house at S. Bellino (Padua), having gathered "the few relics of his shipwreck," he devoted himself to letters and in 1590, in emulation of Tasso's Aminta, published in Venice the Pastor fido (v. ed. edited by G. Brognoligo, Bari 1914), a pastoral tragicomedy, greatly admired (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were about 80 editions of it), which he tenaciously defended against the 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 vicissitudes, in the soft grace and musicality of its poetry, is morbidly and refinedly sensual; through its ideal of woman in the Platonic manner it reflects the Petrarchism of the sixteenth century (v. also G.'s Rime, Venice 1598). G. lacked, a skeptic in life, the intimate religious drama, and his work, which opens the way to melodrama, is subject to the artifice of pure aestheticism.
Bibliography4 works
Giovanni Fallani