Paolo Giovio, [Dialogue on the Illustrious Men and Women of Our Times]

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Paolo Giovio

Dialogo sugli uomini e le donne illustri del nostro tempo
[Dialogue on the Illustrious Men and Women of Our Times]

Edited by Franco Minonzio

2 volumes

Torino, Nino Aragno, 2011

Portrait of Vittoria Colonna, Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Giovio Series
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[N.B. On Paolo Giovio, see also in this log: Paolo Giovio, Portraits of Illustrious Men, Edited by Franco Minonzio, Translation from Latin by Andrea Guasparri and Franco Minonzio. Preface by Michele Mari. Notes to the images by Luca Bianco, Turin, Einaudi, 2006; Barbara Agosti, Paolo Giovio. A Lombard Historian in XVI Century Artistic Culture, Leo S. Olschki, 2008]

[1] Tome I includes: Introduction, critical text and translation; Tome II contains Notes, appendix and index.

Portrait of Giuliano de' Medici, Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Giovio Series
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[2] Text of the strip (Volume I):

"After having departed in July 1527 from Rome, which was suffering the Sack of the imperial armies since two months, Paolo Giovio repaired to Ischia, where he was greeted by Vittoria Colonna and his circle. He had just left behind him the terrible images of a violated and humiliated Rome, had still in his eyes the imprisonment of Clement VII, with whom he shared the hardships of the siege of Castel Sant'Angelo, and would soon learn that Gian Matteo Giberti, one of the closest friends, had become a hostage of the occupants too. He had lost his properties, but not his writings, at least not the Historiae (Histories), although he elsewhere stated otherwise. He knew that a far worse fate had occurred to many. And when Ms Colonna invited him to write, in order to impede that the memory of that painful and distressing defeat would not go lost, Giovio drafted in 1528, and almost certainly ended in 1529 - in a first draft – the Dialogus de viris et foeminis aetate nostra florentibus (Dialogue on the illustrious men and women in our times) in three books, dedicated to Giberti and set in Ischia, towards the end of the previous year, the atrocious 1527. In the fiction of the dialogue, partly modelled on certain biographical data, Paolo Giovio met Alfonso d'Avalos, Marquis of Vasto and Pescara, general of the army of Charles V, and a little later Giovanni Antonio Muscettola, Senator of Naples in Ischia. With them he had a joint reflection over the period of three days, which started from the consciousness of the severity of the fracture marked by the Sack and involved crucial aspects of the Italian crisis (the reasons for the military weakness of the Italian states in Book I, the reasons the decline of literary research in Book II; the fragility of the social framework of the local powers, which was summed up in the evanescent nature of female beauty and ethics, both in Book III). He thereby composed an alarmed fresco of the military and civilian, aristocracy and intellectual classes of the Italian peninsula.

Portrait of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Firenze, Uffizi Gallery, Giovio Series
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A puzzled sense of destiny - Fato prudentia minor - was the motto chosen by Giovio, with an eloquent reversal of a verse of Virgil (Georg. I, 416) - that caused him to fix a situation of uncertainty and ambiguity in his writing, also thanks to a calculated game of anachronism, where alternative outcomes were still open. At the same time, he was conscious that, after 1527, the autonomy of the Italian courts was contrasted and subject to political and military strategies, which were now being decided elsewhere. This awareness makes of these pages – of a rare intelligence – a document essential to the perception of historical change in Italy during the XVI Century. Paolo Giovio, in the magnetic and sharp Latin that earned him the admiration of his contemporaries, registered the failure of humanities and their categories, which had not held the impact of history: events had in fact proven to be much less rational, much less exemplary than he had believed. "The sack of Rome - wrote Frances Yates - through the work of the armies of the new Charlemagne was the terrible response of history to the dreams of the Italian humanists." And with the weakening of the ability of the humanistic culture to "grasp" the reality, Giovio could brilliantly sense its inevitably progressive marginalization within the Italian society which had survived the season of the "wars of Italy". This dialogue, as Carlo Dionisotti observed, "written by a man of a different temper and mind that the various Giraldi and Valeriano, remains a key document of the history of Italian literature of the sixteenth century." 

Portrait of Federico Zuccari, Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Giovio Series
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[3] Text of the strip (Volume II):

"Founded on a new collation of the three manuscripts of the sixteenth century, owned by the Società Storica Comense [Como Society for History] (Aliati Fund, 28.1, partly autograph of Giovio, and Aliati Fund, 28.2, with autograph variants by Giovio) and the Biblioteca Comunale [Public Library] of Como (1.6.16, with autograph variants by Giovio), the present critical edition offers the text of the Dialogue in a completely revamped form compared to the editio princeps (1984), which still offered the dialogue in integral form for the first time (including Book II, already edited by Girolamo Tiraboschi on the basis on a copy transmitted to him by Giovan Battista Giovio). This edition amends errors, including those of reading but not only those. It also proposes unpublished conjectures based on new interpretations of difficult passages; moreover, in front of codes which were heavily marked by additions, substitutions and deletions, by a thick inlay of mostly autograph variants, both marginal and interlinear, it offers a new critical apparatus, based on criteria that aim at a full readability. If the critical text is new, also the translation is unedited (so far only short fragments of the Dialogus had been published in a modern language). Last but not least, the comment is unprecedented, since no precursor analysed the text, with the exception of relatively short passages which were anthologized. The introduction (of whose magnitude the author respectfully apologizes) aspires to provide some access keys, which are considered absolutely necessary, for an historical understanding of the Dialogue."

Portrait of Cristoforo Colombo, Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Giovio Series
Fonte: Wikimedia Commons

[4] Franco Minonzio has also edited the critical edition of Giovio’s Elogia, published in the series 'Millenni' by Einaudi Publishers in 2006.

Portrait of Caterina de' Medici, Florence, Uffizi Gallery, Giovio Series
Source: Wikimedia Commons

[5] The Book II of the Dialogue was published by Tiraboschi in his Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature), with the title Fragmentum trium dialogorum. Paola Barocchi proposed some fragments in her Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento (Writings on art in the sixteenth century). Sonia Maffei not only took the same fragments and republished them (albeit separately) in 1999; but, with the benefit of the Latin edition published in full in the meantime by Ernesto Travi, she chose excerpts from Books I and III, as examples of literature on ekphrasis (Napoli e le ville reali - Naples and royal villas, Gli scogli delle Regine - The rocks of the Queens, Lamento sull'Italia - Lamentation on Italy).

However, for a framing of the Dialogue as part of the art criticism by Paolo Giovio, see Barbara Agosti, Paolo Giovio. Uno storico lombardo nella cultura artistica del Cinquecento (Paolo Giovio. A Lombard Historian in 1500 Artistic Culture ) and particularly pp. 42-48. With a warning: Barbara Agosti was not appreciative of the positions taken by Minonzio in the Elogia and here repeated in the Introduction by Minonzio, exactly with a reference to Ms Agosti (pp. CLI-CLXI); but she is certainly the one who unveiled some aspects of Giovio’s art history writings, which we think were wrongly underrated.