The Rejection of Learning in Mid-Cinquecento Italy

Abstract

In the years 1535-1555 a group of Italian authors rejected much of Italian Renaissance learning. Humanists in the Quattrocento had wished to educate man for the active life. During the sixteenth century humanist education became a broad pattern of learning stressing grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, history, and literature, based on both the Latin classics and vernacular models like Petrarch. Its purpose was the training of the young patrician to serve his family, city, or prince in the affairs of the world. But a group of critics mocked liberal studies, spurned the classical heritage, rejected authorities like Cicero and Pietro Bembo, ridiculed humanists, thought that history was widely misused, denied the utility of knowledge, and argued that man should withdraw into solitude. Nicolò Franco of Benevento (1515-1570), Lodovico Domenichi of Piacenza (1515-1564), Ortensio Lando of Milan (c. 1512-c. 1553), Giulio Landi of Piacenza (1500-1579), and Anton Francesco Doni of Florence (1513-1574) reached maturity in the fourth decade of the sixteenth century and expressed these critical themes in their many books published from 1533 to the early years of the 1550s.