SADOLETO, Giacomo. — Cardinal, born in Modena to Giovanni and Francesca Machiavelli on 12 July 1477; he studied Latin and Greek in Ferrara under Niccolò Leoncino. In 1503 he was in Rome at the court of Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, who secured for him a canonry at S. Lorenzo in Damaso. By virtue of his culture and gentle character, he was a friend of Bembo, the Greek scholar, Giove, and Filippo Beroaldo the Younger.
In 1513 Leo X appointed him his secretary alongside Bembo, and on 24 April 1517 made him Bishop of Carpentras. He left Rome only during the pontificate of Adrian VI, but resumed his office as secretary under Clement VII. In 1527, shortly before the Sack of Rome, he retired to his bishopric, from which Paul III recalled him in October 1536 to take part in the planned reform of the Church. On 22 December he was created cardinal together with Carafa, Rodolfo Pio di Carpi, Polo, and Aleandro, and took part with them in the commission that drafted the celebrated *consilium* of reform and was charged with preparing the Council of Trent. In 1538 he accompanied Paul III on his travels and returned to Carpentras. Recalled to Rome in 1542, he was sent as legate to France to negotiate peace between the king and Charles V; he was back in Rome in 1545, from which he never moved again, and died there on 18 October 1547.
His literary activity was manifold: he was admired for his little poems (the most notable being that on the Laocoön) and his Latin orations, and was one of the most convinced Ciceronians of his age, as may be seen from his copious correspondence (*Epistolarum libri XVI*, 7 vols., Rome 1559–67; besides other letters published subsequently). In 1533 he published in Venice the work *De liberis recte instituendis*, which places him among the foremost pedagogues of his time. Within a harmonious framework of humanistic family education, he directs the study of the technical and liberal arts toward moral formation, achieved through the virtues of self-mastery and the golden mean, and toward directing all intellectual faculties toward philosophy, the sole guide to the discovery of human dignity and man’s likeness to God, and thus to happiness. The *De laudibus philosophiae* (Lyons 1538) was composed with the same humanistic intent. Sadoleto was also a notable theologian. He wrote an exposition of Psalm 50 (Rome 1525) and another of Psalm 93 (Lyons 1530); then, in connection with the controversies of the time, a *Commentarius in Pauli epistolam ad Romanos* (ibid. 1535), in which, following the directions of Erasmus, he inclined toward a kind of semi-Pelagianism on the question of grace; for this he was reproved by Badia, Master of the Sacred Palace. He wrote an apology and revised his work in a new edition of 1536. A short work, *De peccato originali*, was published by Ritter only in 1912.
