Loschi, Antonio

LOSCHI, ANTONIO. - Humanist, b. in Vicenza ca. 1368, d. there in 1441. He studied in Verona and in Florence; then he entered the court of the Visconti and there became chancellor. At that time, through diplomatic action, letters, metrical epistles and invectives, he defended Visconti policy to the point of quarreling with his friend Coluccio

Salutati, who instead defended the Florentine one; and both forgot at that moment, although they did not wish to acknowledge it, their supranational brotherhood in wisdom.

He could feel more in harmony with the universality of humanistic ideals when, under the pontificates of Alexander V, John XXIII, Martin V, and Eugene IV, he was appointed to the Roman Curia, for his diplomacy and for drafting apostolic letters in that Ciceronian Latin, to which from his youth he had aspired as the perfect expression of catholicity, and from which he had derived an Inquisitio artis in orationibus Ciceronis. Sicco Polenton will center in this Ciceronian religion of his the eighteen books of the Scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae. 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 of the old Mussato and of Gregorio Correr and Leonardo Dati, the imitation of Seneca is already brought back under the restraint of the two unities, and therefore, as one specialist, W. Cloetta, observes, the question whether Aristotle's Poetics was known or not before the sixteenth century ends up resting entirely, or almost entirely, on this single tragedy.

Giuseppe Toffanin