ANTONIO TEBALDEO. — Humanist, born in Ferrara in 1456 to a family of distant French origin, the Tebaldi (a surname which he Latinized as T. or Tibaldeo), died in Rome in 1537.
In Ferrara he studied Latin letters under Luca Ripa and was soon considered the leader of the local poetic school. He served as secretary to Lucrezia Borgia, Cardinal Ippolito, and tutor to Isabella d’Este Gonzaga. In 1496 he moved to Mantua, but in 1513 he was forced to leave that court after offending a gentlewoman of the duchess with satirical sonnets directed against Equicola. The favor of Leo X induced him to settle in Rome, where he counted many friends among the poets and humanists gathered around Angelo Colocci. By at least 1521 he had taken holy orders, and from 1525 to 1527 he was enriched as resident of Brentonico in Trentino and rector of the church of S. Pietro. Returning to Rome, he was among the victims of the “sack” (1527), which reduced him to 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. Raphael portrayed him twice: around 1511 in one of the poets of the “Parnassus” (Vatican, Stanza della Segnatura) and in 1516 in a panel highly praised by Bembo, now lost. Tebaldeo’s Italian poems, reprinted several times in volume form, are dismissed by Croce as prosaic banality, while his Latin verses, of better inspiration, remain largely unpublished in manuscript collections. Among these stands out the famous couplet for Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon, attributed to him only recently on the authority of certain manuscripts.