GUARINI, BATTISTA

GUARINI, BATTISTA. — Poet, born in Ferrara in 1538, died in Venice on 7 Oct. 1612. In 1567 he entered the service of Alfonso II d'Este and was entrusted with diplomatic missions to Venice, Turin, and in 1574 a double legation to Poland. He was chosen as orator for the homage of Ferrara to newly elected popes: in 1512 to Gregory XIII, in 1605 to Paul V, and for the funeral eulogies of Cardinal Luigi d'Este and Emperor Maximilian II.
He maintained relations with the courts of the Gonzagas, Della Rovere, Savoys, and Medici, and in favor of the latter 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* (q.V. ed. by G. Brognoligo, Bari 1744), a tragicomical pastoral, widely circulated (about 80 editions in the 17th and 18th centuries), which he staunchly defended against Aristotelian critics in the *Compendio della poesia tragicomica* (1601). Born in the midst of a courtly society, the *Pastor fido*, in its dramatic events, its abundant grace, and the musicality of its poetry, is morbidly and refinedly sensual; for the ideal of woman in the Platonic manner, it reflects the Petrarchism of the 16th century (cf. also the author’s *Rime*, Venice 1598). Lacking in Guarini, skeptical in life, was an inner religious drama, and his work, which paved the way for melodrama, succumbs to the artifice of pure aestheticism.