Trissino, Gian Giorgio

TRISSINO, GIAN GIORGIO. - Man of letters, b. at Vicenza on 8 July 1478, d. at Rome on 8 Dec. 1550. Alternating his studies with the duties of a courtier, he spent his life among courts and literary circles: at Milan (where in 1506 he was studying Greek in the school of Demetrius Chalcondyles), at Ferrara, at Florence, at Venice, at Padua and lastly, in '45, on the little island of Murano, courted there by the learned men of Venice.

A precursor of literary Aristotelianism, T. sought to ennoble the vernacular with the forms of Greek poetry. At Rome, where Ciceronians and Virgilians held sway, he wrote in 1515 the Sofonisba, a pedestrian imitation of Greek tragedy, whose spirit he did not feel: historically important, in any case, for being the first example, in Europe, of a "regular" tragedy. With the same intent of a learned poet, he set about imitating the Iliad in a "regular" heroic poem, L'Italia liberata dai Goti, in monotonous and limp blank verse, which came out in 1547-48, after twenty years of labored work. In 1529 he had published the first three parts of the Poetica, of a strictly grammatical character; the 4th part, like the 5th and 6th, published posthumously in 1563, bear the mark of the Aristotelian questions then under debate. In the matter of language, T. dreamed, along with Dante, whose De vulgari eloquentia he was the first to publish in 1529, infaithfully translated, of an illustrious vernacular: he wanted to Hellenize the Italian language even with the introduction of new letters of the alphabet.

Giulio Natali