PONTANO, GIOVANNI. — Humanist and poet, later calling himself Gioviano because of the planet under which he was born and the character he believed he had derived from it, born at Cerreto near Spoleto on 7 May sometime between 1421 and 1429, died at Naples in September 1503. Having completed his studies of grammar and rhetoric at Perugia, he went with Alfonso d'Aragona to Naples, where he was to remain for the rest of his life, as in his adopted homeland. After passing through the various stages of the Chancery, he was eventually appointed to the Secretariat of State, following the treason of Antonello Petrucci. And he was a shrewd and gifted secretary, even though in the end it fell to him to surrender the keys of the city to Charles VIII. Whatever the reasons why, at the time of the French occupation, he refused to follow King Ferdinando in his flight (the Aragonesi perhaps received more from him than he from them, and the resentment expressed in several places, 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 an eminent politician; moreover, with the advantage of two generations, he anticipated Machiavelli’s indignation at writers of fine literature and polished speeches; he called deficiency what to certain of his colleagues seemed refinement of humanitas; and certain Latin words in which he engraved his thought («Quodque maximum inter homines et pulcherrimum est republiquea administratio») would later seem to be found in vulgar form in the Discorsi sulla Prima Deca. This state of mind was refined through his reading of s. Tommaso; indeed, despite excesses, faults, and no few shortcomings, it is always perceptible in him, connected with the truly humanistic intention of reconsecrating, as gifts of God, all the goods of life, including riches and love—at least the love he felt for Adriana Sassone and sang in the three books of elegies De amore coniugali, being the only (or almost the only) humanist poet to raise his legitimate wife to the honors of poetry. One may say that the family enters modern poetry with that of P.; and thus the Catholic Reformation is unconsciously foreshadowed in II. Versatility of spirit and versatility of intellect: and he demonstrated both in that conflict between science and wisdom, between scientific studies and «divine» rhetoric, which is as if innate in the history of Humanism, but has a particular resonance in 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 elevated rhetoric. Indeed, the arrival first of Panormita and then of P. represented a surprise and provoked a revolt, followed by spite, insinuations, and invectives between the theologians who accused classical culture of paganism, and the humanists who accused scholastic rationalism and its astrological accessories of heresy. At a certain point the humanists were represented by an illustrious friar who had come from Florence, Egidio da Viterbo. And of his clash with the scholastics, and of the role of conciliator which P. aspired to assume and genuinely did assume in it, one can still form an idea by reading his dialogue Aegidius, one of his most successful works. Even a century later it was echoed by Robert Greene in his Planetomachia. More curious about science and philosophy than truly a scientist and philosopher, P. nevertheless came to perceive what conciliatory value Aristotelianism, rethought in s. Tommaso, might have in this presumed irreconcilability between science and wisdom. From this hope of wresting astrology from the impious cabals of diviners and placing it in the hands of eternal wisdom as the key to free will came his major poem, the Urania. And it certainly was not the masterpiece he had envisioned. Leaving aside 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 is saved only in certain luminous descriptive passages, such as the rapture that concludes II. Because of his mobile imagination and the great emotionality of his heart, P. was above all a poet of feeling, whatever the subject of his song (the young wife; 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 Ferrarese Stella, the persistent and vulgar passion of his final years). In two documents especially, Renaissance Latin redeems itself from the charge of being bookish and academic: in the poetry of P. and in the prose of Erasmus. When this romantic feeling for classicism moves him, his hand becomes as light as that of the neo-humanists of Romanticism would be; and then he spontaneously inserts into his descriptions of nature mythological fantasies precisely suited to nineteenth-century taste. In the collection Lyra and in the hexameter poem Lepidina, one does not object to the fanciful coves of the Neapolitan coast, and Mergellina, Posillipo, and Amalfi, returning populated by dryads and oreads. Truly academic, however, is the senile 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. 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 interest one even more than his verse. Within them lies 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 Ferdinando with Giovanni d'Angiò.