NEGRI, FRANCESCO. - A monk who became a Protestant, b. at Bassano in 1500 into the noble Buonamonti family (a surname he abandoned for that of Negri), d. at Kraków in 1563. He professed among the Benedictines at S. Giustina (Padua); he passed openly into heresy in 1525 and was at Strasbourg from 1529 to 1531.
He translated into Latin Paolo Giovio's Commentari delle cose de' Turchi, and Philip Melanchthon wrote its preface. In 1538 he went as a teacher of classical languages to Chiavenna, where he composed the short poem Rhaetia, sive de situ et moribus Rhaetorum (1549); he had already written the satirical tragedy entitled Libero arbitrio (1546 or 1547), enlarged in 1550, translated twice into French, then into Latin by N. himself, and in 1589 into English. In the controversy between Agostino Mainardi (v.) and Camillo Renato (v.), N., although his ideas were less extreme than Renato's, openly sided with him. In 1546, N. went to Zurich to see Bullinger, and in the same year he also took part in certain secret meetings of Anabaptists at Vicenza and, while continuing his dispute with Mainardi, he finally broke away from Renato. In 1550, N. appears to have gone secretly to Venice to take part in a secret assembly of sixty Anabaptists. In that same year N. composed the writing De Fanini Faventini ac Dominici Bassanensis morte, in which, taking as his starting point the death sentence of Fanino Fanini and Domenico Cabianca (cf. A. Casadei, F. Fanini da Faenza, in Nuova rivista storica, 18 [1934], pp. 168-99), he violently attacked the Inquisition. In 1552 he celebrated the exploits of Maurice of Saxony, hoping to see him advance upon Italy to support the cause of the "reformation." From 1555 to 1559 he was at Tirano; perhaps, like not a few Italians, he already inclined toward anti-Trinitarianism, and in 1562, with his son Giorgio, he set out for Poland; he nevertheless maintained good relations with the Swiss leaders. He died the following year at Kraków, while he was preparing to return to Switzerland, where he left his wife and children in the greatest poverty.