VALERIANO BOLZANI, Giampietro (Pierius Valerianus). - Humanist, b. at Belluno in 1477, there he remained there until 1509, except for the period of his studies at Padua.
In the shadow of the Medici he lived in Rome and Florence. After the murder of Alessandro de' Medici in 1537 he returned to Belluno. He died at Padua in 1558. He shared in the extreme ideas and enthusiasms of humanism, those that characterized the Rome of Leo X. He always used Latin. Convinced that the vernacular did not derive from it, but was an inferior language, coeval with it, he was slow to admit that it had by then taken its place, or was destined to take it as its successor. From this humanistic piety of his, which was also consecrated by the priesthood, radiated his Italian and Catholic sentiment. In the hymn to St. John the Evangelist the invocation to the Saint on behalf of the Latin fatherland is moving. He wrote a short poem Leucippus, five books of love elegies, Poëmata (Basel 1538), Amorum libri quinque et alia poëmata (Venice 1549). The epistle Studiorum conditio represents the most notable pre-Aristotelian poetics after that of Vida. Characteristic for a melancholy accentuation of his is the little work Contarenus, sive de literatorum infelicitate (Venice 1620), which is in fact a brief literary history in which men of letters are seen in the perspective of unhappiness. And yet, despite this participation of his in the enthusiasms of the humanists, what inspired him most deeply and best commends him to posterity is a sentiment that distinguishes him from them. Ancient ruins had been loved by Petrarch and by the whole 14th century; but with a love that one would be tempted to call romantic and pre-Piranesian. The taste for scientifically studying them, collecting them, cataloguing them, from which the modern museums would come, now dawns with Bembo and with Pierio. This is the merit of the Antiquitates Bellunenses, which V.B. compiled by studying the relics of his native land. Even richer in a sensibility, at that time still embryonic among scholars, are the Hieroglyphica, sive de sacris Aegyptiorum aliorumque gentium literis commentarii, 58 books, where, though without first-hand research, there is gathered whatever antiquity has handed down concerning those old symbols. They were soon translated and reprinted several times, they pleased the following century, which, greatly loving erudition for erudition's sake, but skeptically, and as a pastime, believed it recognized a precursor in the author of the Hieroglyphica. At the origin of these, however, is the old humanistic enthusiasm: and it can still be perceived.
Bibliography5 works
Giuseppe Toffanin