lodovico dolce

 

  • “[10] Works Dolce worked in most of the literary genres available at the time, including epic and lyric poetry, chivalric romance, comedy, tragedy, the prose dialogue, treatises
    (where he discussed women,[11] ill-married men, memory, the Italian language, gems, painting, and colors), encyclopedic summaries (of Aristotle’s philosophy and world history), and historical works on major figures of the 16th century and
    earlier writers, such as Cicero, Ovid, Dante, and Boccaccio.

  • [15] “In fact, scholars have demonstrated that Dolce’s treatise was written long before Vasari’s [1850 Lives] went to press”.

  • [19] It is uncertain how well he knew Titian at the time he wrote his life, which was the first published biography of the artist.

  • [14] Writings on art[edit] L’Aretino (1557), Dolce’s main work on art, has been said to have been a riposte to Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, whose first edition of 1550 did
    not even include Titian, which Vasari rectified in the second edition of 1568.

  • Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi claims that over the course of thirty-six years Dolce was responsible for 96 editions of his own original work, 202 editions of other writers, and
    at least 54 translations.

  • [24] Dolce’s book continued to be admired as a treatise on art theory through to the 18th century, but more recently it is his biographical information that has been valued.

  • [19] According to Anthony Blunt, the work was probably written in close collaboration with Aretino, who died a year before publication.

  • [21] Mark Roskill sees a different picture of the book’s prehistory, with Dolce being a member of Aretino’s “outer circle” for some years around 1537–42, before a slackening
    of relations; over this period Dolce became familiar with Aretino’s strong but unsystematic thinking on art.

  • He was a broadly based Venetian humanist and prolific author, translator, and editor; he is now mostly remembered for his Dialogue on Painting or L’Aretino (1557),[1] and
    for his involvement in artistic controversies of the day.

  • [32] As his authorities, he cites Aristotle, the Persian philosopher Avicenna, Averroes, and the Libri mineralium of Albert the Great among others, but, according to Ronnie
    H. Terpening, he appears to have simply translated Camillo Leonardo’s Speculum lapidum (1502) without crediting the earlier author.

  • [37] He also translated various Latin authors, sometimes very loosely, other times, such as for Seneca’s ten tragedies, with fidelity to the original.

  • For those who had no knowledge of Greek or Latin, he compiled a work in, joining Homer’s epic to Virgil’s, a work published posthumously in 1570.

  • [38] Ronnie H. Terpening concludes his book on Dolce by noting that Truly, then as now, taking into account all his imperfections and those of the age, this is a worthy career
    for any man or woman of letters.

  • In turn, the added material on Titian in Vasari’s 2nd edition of 1568 shows evidence of using L’Aretino (and also evidence of ignoring it), as well as the researches of the
    Florentine ambassador.

  • Aretino’s advances to Michelangelo had been rebuffed, and there is harsh criticism of his Last Judgment, repeating those already made by others, but usually couching objections
    in terms of decorum for such an important location as the Sistine Chapel, rather than morality as such—understandably, given Aretino’s own notorious record in his life and works.

  • After the publication of Vasari’s Lives in 1550, the Venetian intellectual establishment felt the need for a Venetian counterblast, for which Dolce was probably chosen “by
    someone higher up in the hierarchy of Venetian humanists”, and also supplied with some material.

  • [17] Beginning with a discussion of the principles of art, the dialogue moves on to a paragone or comparison between Raphael and Michelangelo, and to discuss a number of other
    contemporary painters, and then ends with a biography and appreciation of Titian.

  • [18] A clear hierarchy emerges from the book: of all the artists of his own century, Titian is the greatest, followed by the varied and harmonious Raphael, then the flawed
    Michelangelo.

  • For the latter poem, he published a work explaining the more difficult aspects, the Espositioni (1542), and an analysis of the poem’s figurative language, the Modi affigurati
    (1554).

  • [4] For his early studies, he depended on the support of two patrician families: that of the doge Leonardo Loredano (see Dolce’s dedication of his Dialogue on Painting) and
    the Cornaro family, who financed his studies at Padua.

  • [30] Editions of Other Writers[edit] Among the authors edited by Dolce (for which see “Works” above), he focused most significantly on Ariosto.

  • [30] Histories[edit] Two of his histories—the Life of Charles V (1561) and the Life of Ferdinand I (1566)—were very successful in the sixteenth century.

 

Works Cited

[‘1. Published in Italian and English translation on facing pages in Roskill (see References).
2. ^ Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere: Lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1988).
3. ^
“Lodovico was born in Venice either in 1508 or more likely in 1510….” Terpening, Ronnie H., Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters, p. 8.
4. ^ Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University
of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 9.
5. ^ Emmanuel Antonio Cicogna, Memoria intorno la vita e gli scritti di Messer Lodovico Dolce letterato veneziano del secolo XVI in Memorie dell’I. R. Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere e arti, 11 (1863–64).
6. ^
Terpening, p. 9.
7. ^ Cicogna, p. 93, cited in Terpening, p. 9.
8. ^ Bareggi, p. 58.
9. ^ Jump up to:a b c Terpening, p. 13.
10. ^ Terpening, p. 24; Roskill, p. 6.
11. ^ Dialogo della institution delle donne. Venice: Giolito de Ferrari,
1547. [1]
12. ^ Nancy Dersofi, Review of Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters, in Italica, vol. 75, no. 3 (1998), p. 461.
13. ^ Terpening, pp. 266–269.
14. ^ Terpening, pp. 262–266.
15. ^ Roskill, p. 29, writes, “Titian had
not been omitted in Vasari’s 1550 edition. But the formal setup of the work had dictated that, since this artist was still alive, no more should be said about him than that, as a creato of Giorgione’s, ‘non solo lo paragonò, ma lo ha superato grandemente.'”
16. ^
Giulio Dalvit and Elizabeth Peyton, Titian’s Man in a Red Hat, The Frick Collection, 2022, citing Barbara Agosti, Giorgio Vasari: Luoghi e tempi delle Vite, Milan, 2013, pp. 97, 103n.418.
17. ^ Hale, pp. 50–51.
18. ^ Roskill, p. 8.
19. ^ Jump
up to:a b Blunt, pp. 82–84.
20. ^ Roskill, p. 37.
21. ^ Blunt, pp. 123–125.
22. ^ Roskill, pp. 37–40, 39 quoted.
23. ^ Roskill, p. 40.
24. ^ Hale, pp. 641–642; Roskill, pp. 29–30, 45–46, 64–65.
25. ^ Roskill, pp. 65–68.
26. ^ Roskill,
pp. 83-199.
27. ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). “Gascoigne, George” . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 11 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 493–494.
28. ^ This production is regarded as the first performance of a ‘Greek’ drama on the English
stage. See Hall, Edith (1999), “Greek Tragedy and the British Stage, 1566–1997”, Cahiers du Gita 12, pp. 112–33.
29. ^ Terpening, p. 126.
30. ^ Jump up to:a b Terpening, p. 258.
31. ^ Terpening, p. 132.
32. ^ Terpening, pp. 151–156.
33. ^
Terpening, p. 150.
34. ^ Terpening, p. 25.
35. ^ Terpening, p. 30.
36. ^ Memoria intorno la vita e gli scritti di Messer Lodovico Dolce (1863).
37. ^ Terpening, p. 262.
38. ^ Terpening, p. 93.
2. Blunt, Anthony, Artistic Theory in Italy,
1450–1600, 1940 (refs. to 1985 ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198810504
3. Dolce, Lodovico, Tieste, edited by Stefano Giazzon, Torino, RES Edizioni, 2010 (ISBN 978-88-85323-58-2)
4. Giazzon, Stefano, Il Thyeste (1543) di Lodovico Dolce,
in AA. VV., La letteratura italiana a congresso. Bilanci e prospettive del decennale (1996–2006), Lecce, Pensa Multimedia, II, pp. 325–333
5. Giazzon, Stefano, La Giocasta di Lodovico Dolce: note su una riscrittura euripidea, «Chroniques Italiennes»,
20, 2011, pp. 47 (ISSN 1634-0272)
6. Giazzon, Stefano, Venezia in coturno. Lodovico Dolce tragediografo (1543–1557), Roma, Aracne, 2011 (ISBN 978-88-548-4464-3)
7. Giazzon, Stefano, Dante nel regno di Melpomene: appunti sulla presenza dantesca
nelle tragedie di Lodovico Dolce, «Filologia e Critica», 1, (2011), pp. 125–138 (ISSN 0391-2493)
8. Giazzon, Stefano, La dictio tragica di Lodovico Dolce fra Classicismo e Manierismo, «Rivista di Letteratura Teatrale», 4 (2011), pp. 29–59 (ISSN
1973-7602)
9. Giazzon, Stefano, La Hecuba di Lodovico Dolce: appunti per una analisi stilistica, «Lettere Italiane», LXIII, 4 (2011), pp. 586–603
10. Giazzon, Stefano, Il Manierismo a teatro: l’Ifigenia di Lodovico Dolce, «Forum Italicum», 1
(2012), pp. 53–81 (ISSN 0014-5858)
11. Giazzon, Stefano, Petrarca in coturno: sul riuso di Rerum vulgarium fragmenta e Triumphi nelle prime tragedie di Lodovico Dolce, «Italianistica. Rivista di letteratura italiana», XLIII, 1 (2014), pp. 31–45
(ISSN 0391-3368)
12. Giazzon, Stefano, La maschera dell’ambiguità. Sull’ Ifigenia di Lodovico Dolce, «Per Leggere», XXVI, 1 (2014), pp. 63–90 (ISSN 1593-4861)
13. Giazzon, Stefano, Il Sacripante di Lodovico Dolce: un poema manierista, «Esperienze
Letterarie», XL, 4 (2015), pp. 29–61 (ISSN 2036-5012)
14. Hale, Sheila, Titian: His Life, 2012, Harper Press, ISBN 978-0-00717582-6
15. Montorfani, Pietro, «Giocasta», un volgarizzamento euripideo di Lodovico Dolce, in «Aevum», 80 (2006), pp.
717–739.
16. Roskill, Mark W., Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York: Published for the College Art Association of America by New York University Press, 1968; reprinted with emendations by University of Toronto Press,
2000) ISBN 0-8020-8333-1
17. Terpening, Ronnie H., Lodovico Dolce, Renaissance Man of Letters, University of Toronto Press, 1997 (review) ISBN 0-8020-4159-0
Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/55229469@N07/14646282112/’]