PICCOLOMINI, ALESSANDRO. – Philologist and man of letters, born in Siena on 13 June 1508, where he died on 12 March 1578, after having lived for a long time in Padua and Rome. In Siena, under the name of Stordito, he belonged to the ‘Intronati’; and at once, not without a touch of bohemianism, he expressed the tendency proper to this and to almost all the academies of the sixteenth century to vindicate the claims of the vernacular and to substitute it for Latin.
Indeed, in his work there are only two brief scientific writings in Latin; for he was a man of versatile intelligence and varied culture. The verse is Petrarchan, while other youthful prose and poetry are negligible; of the two comedies he certainly wrote, Alessandro and Amor costante, the latter is noteworthy, since it also allows the dialects to let themselves run free. The famous Raffaella a Dialogo delle creanze delle donne (1540) even seemed to set him on the path of Aretino, and earned him among posterity an ambiguous celebrity that he does not deserve. With maturity, what was more serious and nobler in his spirit came to the surface; above all, a thoughtful love of culture, through which, and through the study of Aristotle that became second nature to him, he ultimately became one of the most significant interpreters of literary reform. More important than the too numerous books Dell'istituzione morale are the late Annotazioni alla poetica di Aristotele (1575), in which, in opposition to Castelvetro’s hedonistic frivolities, there emerges for the first time, not as a moral precept but as a reasoned aesthetic conception, the programme of Muratori and of the future Italian Romantics: “the true, the beautiful, the good.”