Francesco Robortello facts for kids

Francesco Robortello (1516–1567) was an important Italian scholar during the Renaissance. He was known as a humanist, which means he studied and taught about the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. People sometimes called him Canis grammaticus, which means "the grammatical dog," because he was very direct and demanding when discussing grammar and texts.

Francesco Robortello: A Renaissance Scholar

Born in Udine, Francesco Robortello was a busy teacher. He traveled to many universities in Italy, including Padua, Lucca, Pisa, Venice, and Bologna. He taught subjects like philosophy, how to speak and write well (rhetoric), and also Latin and Greek languages. He returned to Padua in 1560.

Robortello spent a lot of time editing and correcting old books from ancient times that had been lost and then found again. His careful way of fixing these texts helped create the modern study of Hermeneutics, which is about understanding and interpreting texts.

He wrote an important book explaining Aristotle's Poetics, which is a famous work about plays and poetry. Robortello's ideas influenced how people thought about comedy and theatre writing in Europe for many years, though not so much in England.

He also wrote about Horace's Ars Poetica, another ancient text about poetry. Robortello added his own ideas about different types of writing, like satire, epigrams, comedy, and elegies, which were not fully covered in Aristotle's book.

Robortello was not afraid to argue with other scholars, like Carolus Sigonius and Vincenzo Maggi. He would write essays correcting mistakes he found in their published works, even those by famous scholars like Erasmus. These essays were collected and published over time. Many experts in Italian language studies see Robortello as a very important starting point.

Francesco Robortello died in Padua. Some of his students became famous themselves, including Giacomo Zabarella, a philosopher, and Jan Kochanowski, a poet who brought Renaissance ideas to Polish literature.

Important Works by Robortello

Here are some of Francesco Robortello's main works:

• De historica facultate disputatio (1548; 1567): This was an early and important book about how history should be written.
• De rhetorica facultate (1548): A book about the art of speaking and writing effectively.
• In Aristotelis poeticam explicationes (Florence 1548, 2nd edition 1555): This book explained Aristotle's Poetics in a new way for humanists.
• Dionysi Longini rhetoris praestantissimi liber de grandi sive sublimiorationis genere ... cum adnotationibus (Basel 1554): In this work, he helped bring back the important literary ideas of Longinus from his book On the Sublime.
• Thesaurus criticus (1557, second edition 1604): A collection of his critical writings.
• De arte, sive ratione corrigendi antiquorum libros disputatio (Florence 1548; 2nd edition 1562): This "Lecture on the art and method of correcting the books of the old writers" was one of the first detailed discussions on how to properly fix and edit ancient texts.
• De artificio dicendi (1567): A textbook about the art of speaking.

Images for kids

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  A portrait of Francesco Robortello.

See also

In Spanish: Francesco Robortello para niños