Francis Robortello

Francesco Robortello (Latin: Franciscus Robortellus; 1516–1567) was a Renaissance humanist, nicknamed Canis grammaticus ("the grammatical dog") for his confrontational and demanding manner.

Robortello, who was born in Udine, was an editor of rediscovered works of Antiquity, who taught philosophy and rhetoric, as well as ethics (following Aristotle), and Latin and Greek, roving from Padua through universities at Lucca, Pisa, Venice, Padua, and Bologna before finally returning to Padua in 1560.

Robortello's scientific approach to textual emendations laid the groundwork for modern Hermeneutics. His commentary on Aristotle's Poetics formed the basis for Renaissance and 17th century theories of comedy, influential in writing for the theatre everywhere save in England. At the same time he was the conservative Aristotelian philosopher who urged woman to submit her will to that of her husband on the basis of her moral weakness, in his libro politicos: Aristotelis disputatio (Venice, 1552, p. 175, quoted Comensoli 1989).

He followed his In librum Aristotelis de arte poetica explicationes (1548), in which he emended the Latin version of Alessandro de’ Pazzi (published 1536) with a paraphrase of Horace's Ars poetica and with explications of genres missing in the surviving text of Aristotle: De Satyra, De Epigrammate, De Comoedia, De Salibus, De Elegia.

In the fields of philology and history he sustained controversies in print with Carolus Sigonius and Vincenzo Maggi in the form of essay-like orations, correcting the editions published in Venice by Aldus Manutius, and even philological missteps of Erasmus. These brief essays were collected and published at intervals. A convention of surveys of Italian linguistics (Gensini 1993) is to start with Robortello.

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