Barbaro the Younger, Ermolao

Abstract

Ermolao Barbaro is an emblematic example of the complex relationship, often obliterated by the ideological simplifications in which the vulgarization of Renaissance culture and thought has been founded, between the prescientific conceptions potentially elaborated in the medieval and scholastic philosophical speculations and the cult of the classical heritage passionately practiced in the courts since Petrarch, a fierce adversary of the barbaric language of the academic studia and a passionate advocate of the Humaniores Litterae. His family background and the geographical poles between which he moved (Padua and Florence) and his intellectual and speculative interests offer a good testimony of this: starting with a solid philosophical and juridical formation that enabled him to play a certain role as a diplomat, political functionary, and university lecturer, he dedicated a conspicuous part of his scholar production to classical philology, thus giving a well-recognized contribution on the establishment of the text Pliny’s the Elder Natural History, one of the main disputed intellectual questions that has shaped the erudite and scientific European debate from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.