Lodovico Dolce

Lodovico Dolce (1508/10–1568) was an Italian theorist of painting. He was a broadly-based Venetian humanist and prolific author, translator and editor; he is now remembered for his Dialogue on Painting.

The date of Dolce's birth, long accepted as 1508, has been more likely set in 1510. Dolce's youth was difficult. His father, a former steward to the public attorneys (castaldo delle procuratorie) for the Republic of Venice, died when the boy was only two. For his early studies, he depended on the support of two patrician families: that of the doge Leonardo Loredano (see Dolce's dedication of his Dialogue on Painting) and the Cornaro family, who financed his studies at Padua.

After he completed his studies, Dolce found work in Venice with the press of Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari. He was one of the most active intellectuals in 16th-century Venice. Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi claims that over the course of thirty-six years Dolce was responsible for 96 editions of his own original work, 202 editions of other writers, and at least 54 translations. As a popularizer, he worked to make information available to the non-specialist, those too busy to learn Greek and Latin.

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.

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, 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. From 1542, when he first went to work for the Giolito, until his death in 1568, he edited 184 texts out of just over 700 titles published by Giolito. These editions included works by Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Castiglione, Pietro Bembo, Lodovico Ariosto, Pietro Aretino, Angelo Poliziano, Jacopo Sannazzaro, and Bernardo Tasso. And he translated into Italian works of authors such as Homer, Euripides, Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, the playwright Seneca, and Virgil.

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