Lodovico Dolce

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.

[9] Following a productive life as a scholar and author, Dolce died in January, 1568, and was buried in the church of San Luca in Venice, "although in which pavement tomb is unknown.

"[10] 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.

[13] And he translated into Italian works of authors such as Homer, Euripides, Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, the playwright Seneca, and Virgil.

[16] It takes the form of a dialogue in three parts between Pietro Aretino, representing the Venetian point of view, and the Florentine humanist Giovanni Francesco Fabrini.

[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.

[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.

[26] As a dramatist he wrote numerous tragedies: Giocasta (1549, derived probably from Euripides' The Phoenician Women via the Latin translation of R. Winter),[27] Thieste, Medea, Didone, Ifigenia, Hecuba and Marianna.

[31] His Treatise on Gems (Trattato delle gemme, 1565) falls into the lapidary tradition, with Dolce discussing not only the physical qualities of jewels but the power infused in them by the stars.

[33] In addition to translating Cicero's De Oratore (1547), Dolce authored several treatises on language, among them the Osservationi nella volgar lingua (1550).

He edited three of Ariosto's comedies, La Lena (c. 1530), Il Negromante (c. 1530), and I Suppositi (1551); the poet's Rime (1557), and the Orlando furioso (1535).

[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.