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, and under the guidance of his fellow citizen Father Raimondo Cunich made rapid progress in Latin and Greek, soon increased by his teaching the two languages at the Collegio Romano, at Livorno and at the Tolomei in Siena.
On 15 August 1772 he took his solemn vows; on 21 July 1773, after Clement XIV had suppressed the Society, he became a priest of the secular clergy. In the four lustra he lived in religion, Z. already enjoyed a reputation "for a most Latin pen", as his contemporaries put it, earned for him by his short poems: the Echo, the Navis aëria, the Elegiarum monobiblos in praise of the Mother of God, composed while he was a student and published with the elegant types of Komarek, the first in 1764, the other two in 1768. The theologian Filippo Bonamici, approving their printing, praised their verborum nitorem, sententiarum oumen, numerique variam et aptam compositionem et christianam pietatem. The Echo and the Navis aëria ("The Airship") were subjects suggested to Z. by the great advances of the physical sciences in the eighteenth century, and he, undertaking to celebrate them in poems of exquisite Latinity, swelled the ranks of the versifiers among his confreres: the Ambrogi, the Noceti, the 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. There followed the Idylls of Theocritus, of Moschus and of Bion of Phlossa, rendered into Virgilian hexameters. The fecundity of Z.'s genius was not exhausted in translating the poets of Hellas: to form a just idea of it one must bear in mind the great quantity of poems, elegies, epistles in the manner of Horace, epigrams, funeral orations, such as those on the death of the Empress Maria Theresa and of Father Boscovich; a huge accumulation of literary work in the field of Greek and Latin classicism, which makes Z. one of the most distinguished versifiers in the language of Latium to flourish in Italy after the Renaissance.
Bibliography6 works
Pietro Tacchi Venturi