GIOVANNI PONTANO. — Humanist, poet, who later called himself Gioviano after the planet under which he was born and whose character he believed he had inherited, was born at Cerreto near Spoleto on 7 May between 1421 and 1429, and died at Naples in September 1503. After completing his studies in grammar and rhetoric at Perugia, he went with Alfonso of Aragon to Naples, where he was to remain for the rest of his life as in his chosen homeland. Through the ranks of the Chancellery, he was eventually, after the treachery of Antonello Petrucci, appointed to the State Secretariat. He was an astute and brilliant secretary, even though it fell to him in the end to hand over the keys of the city to Charles VIII. Whatever the reasons may have been that at the time of the French occupation he did not wish to flee with King Ferdinand (the Aragonese perhaps received more from him than he from them, and the resentment he expressed in several places, notably in the dialogue Asinus, seems on the whole justified), this act cannot diminish his reputation.
He was a great man of letters and a distinguished statesman; moreover, with the advantage of two generations, he anticipated Machiavelli’s scorn for writers of elegant letters and polished speeches; he called refinement what some of his colleagues regarded as the refinement of humanitas; and certain Latin phrases in which he expressed his thought («Quodque maximum inter homines et pulcherrimum est reipublicae administratio») would later seem commonplace in the Discorsi sulla Prima Deca. This state of mind was refined in his reading of St Thomas; indeed, despite his excesses, faults, and shortcomings, one senses in him a genuine humanistic intention to reconsecrate, as gifts of God, all the good things of life, including wealth and love; at least that which he felt for Adriana Sassone and celebrated in the three books of elegies De amore coniugali, unique (or almost) among humanist poets in elevating the legitimate spouse to the honours of poetry. It may be said that the family enters modern poetry with P.; and thus unconsciously it foreshadows the Catholic Reformation. Versatility of spirit and versatility of intellect: he gave proof of this in the conflict between science and wisdom, between scientific studies and «divine rhetoric, which is as it were innate to the history of Humanism, but has a particular resonance in Naples, where, until the mid-fifteenth century, culture lived in the shadow of the cloisters, centred on dialectic and almost unaware of the glory to which Platonic Florence had elevated rhetoric. Indeed, the arrival first of the Panormita and then of P. represented a surprise and provoked a revolt, followed by pettiness, insinuations, and invectives between the theologians, who accused classical culture of paganism, and the humanists, who accused them of fostering scholastic rationalism and its astrological adjuncts. At a certain point, the humanists were represented by a distinguished friar who came from Florence, Giles of Viterbo. And of his clash with the scholastics, and of the conciliatory role that P. aspired to and truly played, one can still form an idea by reading his dialogue Aegidius, one of his most successful works. Even a century later, Robert Greene echoed it in his Planetomachia. More curious about science and philosophy than truly a scientist or philosopher, P. nevertheless came to sense what conciliatory value the Aristotelianism rethought in St Thomas might have in this supposed irreconcilability between science and wisdom. From this hope of wresting astrology from the impious cabals of the soothsayers and restoring it to the hands of eternal wisdom as the key to free will came his major poem, the Urania. It is certainly not a masterpiece as he had envisaged II. Apart from the greater or lesser soundness of the scientific arguments, to which he also devoted a substantial prose volume, De rebus coelestibus, the Urania as a Lucretian poem is cold, and only saves itself in a few luminous descriptive passages, such as the rapture that closes II. For the mobility of his imagination and the great emotion of his heart, P. was above all a poet of feeling, whatever the subject of his song (his young wife or, in the Amores and the two particularly fine books of Hendecasyllaborum seu Baiarum, the many women he knew, or, in the two books of elegies, Heridamus, the Ferrarese Stella, the insistent and vulgar passion of his last years). In two works in particular, Renaissance Latin frees itself from the charge of being bookish and academic: in the poetry of P. and in the prose of Erasmus. When this romantic sentiment of classicism moves him, his hand becomes as light as that of the neo-humanists of Romanticism; and then he spontaneously inserts into his descriptions of nature mythological fantasies, worthy indeed of nineteenth-century taste. In the collection Lyra and in the short poem in hexameters Lepidina, one does not disdain the fanciful coves of the Neapolitan coast, and Mergellina and Posillipo and Amalfi return populated with dryads and nymphs. Truly academic is the senile poem De Hortis Hesperidum, sive de cultu citriorum. P. was inspired by cradles and tombs, by sorrow and joy: from his bereavements came the Tumuli, from the death of his son the Iambici. And yet, at least as a document of a humanistic state of mind, his prose treatises (De prudentia, De fortuna, Aegidius, Actius, etc.), though not profound, may even interest more than his verses. There is within them that great faith in the Christian value of wisdom! He also wrote a witty treatise De sermone. In the six books of De bello neapolitano he narrated the war of King Ferdinand with John of Anjou.