Paolo Giovio: the historian and the crisis of sixteenth-century Italy

Abstract

Best-known for his sweeping narrative Histories of Hiw Own Times and for his portrait museum on the Lake Como, the Italian bishop and historian Paolo Giovio (1486-1552) had contact with many of the protagonists of the great events he described - the wars of France, Germany and Spain and the sack of Rome. He used the information he gleaned from his contacts to carry on an extensive correspondence that became a kind of proto-journalism. With his interests in history, literature, geography, exploration, medicine and the arts, this man reflects almost the entire spectrum of High Renaissance civilization. In this biography, Zimmermann examines the historian as a figure formed by 15th-century humanism who was caught in the changing temper of the Counter Reformation. The book reveals a conscientious, independent-minded historian and an astute commentator on the entire Mediterranean world, the first to integrate the contemporary history of the Muslim nations with that of the Europe. The book also stresses the important contributions Giovio made to the ethos of the Renaissance through his biographies and portrait museum, both tributes to the emerging sense of individual human personality.