Portraits of Learned Men
By Paolo Giovio
Translated by Kenneth Gouwens
Harvard University Press 2023

New in Harvard’s I Tatti Renaissance Library is this fascinating volume of 16th century historian Paolo Giovio’s Portraits of Learned Men, edited and translated by University of Connecticut history professor Kenneth Gouwens. Giovio intended these dozens of short writer-profiles for a very specific destination: a building on Lake Como where they’d accompany the best portraits of the men that Giovio could find. The building would be open to the public, who could stroll from portrait to portrait and read the profiles in much the way museum-goers do today – which explains the piquant brevity Giovio usually employs. 

He’s brief, and as Gouwens notes, he’s often oddly bruising. “The Latin word elogium has no satisfactory English equivalent,” he writes. “Few of the biographical sketches in Portraits of Learned Men are eulogies; many verge on character assassination.” This element runs throughout the book, sometimes overt but often deliciously veiled. “Who wouldn’t be amazed that the natural endowments of this man, Machiavelli, were so powerful that with no Latin, or at best a mediocre knowledge of it, he could develop full-fledged competence as a writer?” he writes of the famous author of The Prince, for instance, adding with pointed condescension that “we should look with kindness upon his Tuscan wit …”

Likewise the historian Polydore Vergil: we’re told that he wrote his English History “so as to curry favor with the English nation, listing the names of minor dukes as if to pander most of all to those who were greedy for glory.” But it isn’t only Polydore Vergil who gets a little mud on him in his own profile; “Because he had previously published proverbs on charming themes,” Giovio writes, “which were then taken up and expanded with great erudition by Erasmus, he obtained financial support from the Henry who was then king.” (For what it’s worth, Erasmus denied that little insinuation of plagiarism). 

There aren’t many such nuances in Portraits of Learned Men, but Gouwens captures them all with economic skill. “Giovio sought,” he writes, “to impart an appreciation for each man as a flesh-and-blood human being whose foibles were integral to making him who he was, and who, each in his own distinct way, contributed to making the Republic of Letters what it was.” The man’s little museum was failing even before Giovio’s death in 1552 and was demolished by his heirs and creditors. But this book lives on, and now, thanks to I Tatti, it’s got a new definitive edition in English.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.