Pontano, Giovanni

PONTANO, GIOVANNI. - Humanist, poet, who later called himself Gioviano after the planet under which he was born and because of the character he believed he had derived from it, b. at Cerreto near Spoleto on 7 May between 1421 and 1429, d. at Naples in September 1503. Having completed his studies of grammar and rhetoric at Perugia, he went with Alfonso of Aragon to Naples, where he was to remain for all the rest of his life as in his adopted homeland. Through the channels of the Chancery, in the end, after the betrayal of Antonello Petrucci, he was appointed to the Secretariat of State. And he was a shrewd and brilliant secretary, even if in the end it fell to him to hand over the keys of the city to Charles VIII. Whatever the reasons may have been for which, at the moment of the French occupation, he did not wish to follow King Ferdinand in his flight (the Aragonese received from him perhaps more than he from them, and the resentment expressed in several places, and especially in the dialogue Asinus, appears on the whole legitimate), his fame cannot be diminished by this act.

He was a great man of letters and a distinguished politician; moreover, with the advantage of two generations, he forestalled Machiavelli's scorn for the stylists of belles-lettres and polished discourses; he called a deficiency what to certain of his colleagues seemed a refinement of humanitas; and certain Latin words in which he engraved his thought («Quodque maximum inter homines et pulcherrimum est republiquea administratio»), it will later seem possible to find them in the vernacular in the Discourses on the First Decade. This state of mind was refined in him through the reading of St. Thomas; in fact, even amid excesses and faults and not a few blemishes, one always perceives it, connected to the truly humanistic intention of reconsecrating, as gifts of God, all the goods of life, including riches and love; at least the love that he bore for Adriana Sassone and sang in the three books of elegies De amore coniugali, unique (or almost) among the humanist poets in raising the legitimate spouse to the honors of poetry. It may be said that the family enters modern poetry with that of P.; and thus the Catholic Reformation is unconsciously foreshadowed there. Versatility of soul and versatility of intellect: and he gave proof of it in that 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 at Naples, where, until the middle of the fifteenth century, culture lived in the shadow of the cloisters, centered on dialectic and almost unaware of the glory to which Platonic Florence had raised rhetoric. In fact the arrival of Panormita first and of P. afterward represented a surprise and stirred up a revolt, with a sequel of spite, insinuations and invectives between the theologians who accused classical culture of paganism, and the humanists who accused of heresy scholastic rationalism and its astrological trappings. The humanists at a certain point were represented by an illustrious friar who came from Florence, Giles of Viterbo. And of his clash with the scholastics, and of the role of conciliator that P. aspired to have in it and truly did have, it is still possible to form an idea by reading his dialogue Aegidius, one of his most successful. Still a century later Robert Greene echoed it in his Planetomachia. More curious about science and philosophy than truly a scientist and philosopher, P. nevertheless came to feel what conciliatory value in this presumed irreconcilability between science and wisdom Aristotelianism, rethought in St. Thomas, might have. From this hope of managing to wrest astrology from the impious cabals of soothsayers and place it in the hands of eternal wisdom as the key to free will, came his major poem, the Urania. And a masterpiece, such as he had dreamed of, it certainly was not. Apart from the greater or lesser soundness of the scientific arguments, to which he also devoted a large volume of prose, De rebus coelestibus, the Urania as a Lucretian poem is cold, and is saved only in a few luminous descriptive passages, such as the rapture that closes it. Because of the mobility of his imagination and the great emotionality of his heart, P. was above all a poet of feeling, whatever the motive of his song (the young spouse or, in the Amores and in the two particularly beautiful books Hendecopylloborum seu Baiorum, the many women he knew, or, in the two books of elegies, Heridanus, the woman of Ferrara, Stella, an insistent and vulgar passion of his last years). In two documents, especially, the Latin of the Renaissance redeems 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 light just as that of the neo-humanists of Romanticism would be; and then it comes naturally to him to insert into the description of nature mythological fantasies, worthy precisely of nineteenth-century taste. In the collection Lyra and in the short poem in hexameters Lepidina it is not displeasing that the fanciful breasts of the Neapolitan riviera, and Mergellina and Posillipo and Amalfi, return populated with dryads and oreads. Academic indeed is the senile short poem De Hortis Hesperidum, sive de cultu citriorum. Cradles and tombs, sorrow and joy inspired P.: from bereavements came the Tumuli, from the death of his son the Iumbici. And yet, at least as a document of a humanistic state of mind, his prose treatises (De prudentia, De fortuna, Aegidius, Actius, etc.), although not profound, can interest even more than his verses. Within them is 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.

(1932-49) to this book, by A. Vallone, Milan 1949, p. XVI. Subsequently only the essay by J. Parr, Sources of the Astrological Prefaces in Robert Greene's Planetomachia, in Studies in Philology, 46 (1950), pp. 400-10, has appeared, which confirms the importance of the dialogue Aegidius; concerning which see G. Toffanin, G. P. fra l'uomo e la natura (with the dialogue Aegidius translated by V. Grillo in the appendix), Bologna 1938.

Giuseppe Toffanin