LOSCHI, ANTONIO

LOSCHI, ANTONIO. - Humanist, b. in Vicenza c. 1368, d. there in 1441. He studied in Verona and Florence, then entered the court of the Visconti and became their chancellor. Through diplomatic action, letters, metrical epistles, and invectives, he defended Visconti policy, even going so far as to quarrel with his friend Coluccio

He could feel more in harmony with the universality of humanist ideals when, under the pontificates of Alexander V, John XXIII, Martin V, Eugene IV, he was appointed to the Roman Curia for his diplomacy and for drafting apostolic letters in that Ciceronian Latin which since his youth he had aimed at as the perfect expression of catholicity, and in which he had produced an Inquisitio artis in orationibus Ciceronis. Sicco Polenton would center the eighteen books of his Scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae on this Ciceronian religion of his. L.'s most curious work is the youthful tragedy (perhaps from the Florentine period) Achilles. It is of interest not for its artistic merits, but because in it, more than in analogous works by the elder Mussato and by Gregorio Correr and Leonardo Dati, the imitation of Seneca is already brought back under the restraint of the two unities, and therefore, as a specialist, W. Cloetta, observes, the question of whether Aristotle's Poetics was known or not before the sixteenth century ends up revolving entirely, or almost entirely, around this single tragedy.