TEBALDEO, ANTONIO. — Humanist, born at Ferrara in 1456 to a family of distant French origin, the Tebaldi (a surname which he Latinized as T. or Tibaldeo), died at Rome in 1537.
At Ferrara he studied Latin literature with Luca Ripa and was soon regarded as the leader of the local young poetic school. He was secretary to Lucrezia Borgia and Cardinal Ippolito, and tutor to Isabella d'Este Gonzaga. In 1496 he had moved to Mantua, but in 1513 he was obliged to leave that court, having offended a gentlewoman of the duchess with several satirical sonnets directed against Equicola. The favor of Leo X induced him to settle in Rome, where he had numerous friends among the poets and humanists gathered around Angelo Colocci. He had taken Holy Orders at least as early as 1521, and from 1525 to 1527 was resident archpriest of Brentonico, in Trentino, and rector of the church of S. Pietro. Upon returning to Rome, he was one of the victims of the “sack” (1527), which reduced him to a state of extreme poverty. He is buried in the church of S. Maria in Via Lata, his parish church. The inscription placed there in 1776 recalls among his acquaintances Sannazaro, Ariosto, Giraldi, Bembo, Giovio, and Castiglione. Raffaello portrayed him twice: around 1511 as one of the poets in the “Parnassus” (Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura), and in 1516 in a highly praised panel, now lost, which Bembo commended. T.’s Italian poems, reprinted several times in book form, are condemned by Croce as prosaic banalities, whereas his Latin poems, of finer inspiration, still remain largely unpublished in manuscript collections. Among these, the famous couplet for Raffaello’s tomb in the Pantheon holds pride of place; it has recently been attributed to him on the authority of certain codices.
Deoclecio Redig de Campos