PALEARIO, AONIO. — Heretical humanist (Antonio Paleari or Della Paglia), born at Veroli in 1503 to Matteo and Chiara Jannarilli, died on 3 July 1570. Having soon lost his parents, he went to Rome around 1521 to the household of Cardinal Alessandro Cesarini; he was in Perugia with Cardinal Ennio Filonardi, his fellow townsman, and then alternately in Siena and Padua. He married Marietta Guidotti of Colle Val d'Elsa, where he also resided, and had five children by her.
He was in contact with Bembo, Sadoleto, Bernardino Maffei, and perhaps Marcello Cervini. In 1540 he was accused by the Dominican fra Vittorio da Firenze concerning purgatory and defended himself with a lost apology. Because of his outward conduct, he was accused of heresy in April–May 1542 before the Curia of Siena, where he was then teaching; he defended himself with an oration that, however, was not circulated. Called to teach in Lucca in 1546, he moved there and remained until 1555, when he was invited by the magistracy of Milan to teach. He began his lectures in October and entered into relations with Basilio Amerbach of Basel, Celio Secondo Curione, Camillo
Renato, exiles from Italy, and persons suspected of heresy in the city. Accused before the Milanese Inquisition by the same fra Vittorio da Firenze on 13 January 1559, the trial ended with his acquittal on 23 February 1560. Following the new edition of his works in Basel, which P. would have preferred to be anonymous, he was summoned again before the Inquisition in April 1567 and arrested on 20 August. The Roman Inquisition demanded that he be brought to Rome, and in September he entered Tordinona; the trial lasted until 30 June 1570, when P., as a relapsed heretic, was handed over to the secular arm and hanged and then burned. He died repentant; the charges against him had been justification by faith alone, contempt for purgatory and monastic life, and denial of the Church and the power of the pope.
His works, published during his lifetime in Lyon in 1552 and in Basel in 1566, include, in three books, a poem in hexameters, De immortalitate animorum, composed in 1532–1535 on the model of Lucretius and on a subject current in the literature of the time; fourteen Latin orations in the Ciceronian manner; letters; Latin and Italian verses; Italian dialogues on grammatical subjects; and the most compromising work, the Actio in pontifices romanos et eorum asseclas, advocating a renewal of Christianity through a return to the true Gospel, by means of a council, and the eradication of abuses within the papacy and the clergy. In it P. merely repeats, without originality, what was then being repeated in circles sympathetic to the Protestant Reformation.