ZAMAGNA, BERNARDO. – Humanist, born of a noble family on 9 November 1735 at Ragusa, in Dalmatia, and died there on 20 May 1820.
Educated at the College founded in 1658 by the Ragusan Jesuit Marino Gondola and directed by the Jesuits of the Roman province, Z. entered the Society of Jesus in Rome on 29 November 1753. Under the guidance of his fellow citizen Fr. Raimondo Cunich, he made rapid progress in Latin and Greek, soon further advanced by teaching the two languages at the Collegio Romano, in Livorno, and at the Tolomei College in Siena.
On 15 August 1772 he took solemn vows; on 21 July 1773, when the Society was suppressed by Clement XIV, he became a priest of the secular clergy. During the four lustrums he spent in religious life, Z. had already acquired a reputation as “a most Latin pen,” as his contemporaries put it, earned by the little poems Echo, Navis aëria, and Elegiarum monobiblos in praise of the Mother of God, composed while he was a student and published in Komarek’s elegant type, the first in 1764 and the other two in 1768. The theologian Filippo Bonamici, approving their publication, praised their verborum nitorem, sententiarum oumen, numerique variam et aptam compositionem et christianam pietatem. Echo and Navis aëria (“The Aerodyne”) were subjects suggested to Z. by the great advances in the physical sciences during the eighteenth century; by undertaking to celebrate them in poems of exquisite Latinity, he augmented the ranks of his fellow religious poets, Ambrogi, Noceti, and Mazzolari.
In the years following the suppression of the Order (1773), he confirmed his renown: in 1777 he translated the Odyssey into Latin verse; in 1785, the works of Hesiod, a version judged too free by some critics of his time. These were followed by the Idylls of Theocritus, Moschus, and Bion of Phlossa, rendered in Virgilian hexameters. Z.’s intellectual fecundity was not exhausted by translating the poets of Hellas: to form a proper idea of it, one must bear in mind the great abundance of poems, elegies, epistles in the manner of Horace, epigrams, and funeral orations, such as those on the deaths of Empress Maria Theresa and Fr. Boscovich; an immense body of literary work in the field of Greek and Latin classicism, which makes Z. one of the most distinguished poets in the language of Latium to have flourished in Italy after the Renaissance.
Pietro Tacchi Venturi