NAVAGERO, ANDREA. – Poet, historiographer, orator, and politician, born in Venice into a patrician family in 1483, died at Blois on 8 May 1529. At the University of Padua he had M. Musuro as his teacher of Greek and P. Pomponazzi in philosophy, and refined his taste through the study of the classics. Bembo admired the mellifluence of his verse, Ramusio the charm of his conversation, and Aldo Manuzio regarded him as a friend and collaborator in the criticism of classical texts.
The Republic of Venice entrusted him with the funeral orations for Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus (1510), for the general Bartolomeo d’Alviano (1515), and for Doge Loredan (1521); and, after Sabellico’s death, placed him in charge of the Library of S. Marco, with the task of continuing the Storia di Venezia, which he left unfinished. But his numerous commitments, his various diplomatic missions in Italy and abroad (Spain, France), and his premature death while at the court of Francis I prevented him from completing what he had envisioned.
Dedication epistles, written in a lucid Ciceronian style, to Leo X, Bembo, and Sadoleto precede the Aldine texts
of Quintilian, Virgil, Lucretius, Ovid, Terence, Horace, Cicero, and others. Classical turns of phrase and a flavor of Caesarean bareness, even though in the vernacular, characterize his annotations on the Viaggio in Spagna e in Francia, and the five Epistole to Ramusio, a valuable documentary source for historical and private information. He gained fame as a poet through his Latin lyrics (Lusus), composed according to the purest classical style, as an «antiquae simplicitatis semulator». Fracastoro celebrated him as a man, humanist, and man of letters in the well-known dialogue Naugerius.