VERGIL, POLYDOR To VOSSIUS, GERARDUS JOANNES (Renaissance)

VERGIL, POLYDOR

(also Polidoro Virgilio, ca. 1470-1555). Italian humanist and historian. A native of Urbino and a priest, he entered papal service and accompanied Cardinal Adriano Castellesi to England when the cardinal became collector of Peter’s Pence in that country. By 1502 he had become the cardinal’s deputy, and in 1508 he became archdeacon of Wells. Vergil spent almost all the rest of his life in England, returning to Urbino only in 1553. His early writings included a collection of proverbs, Proverbiorum libellus (1498), which was a precursor of the more famous Adagia of Erasmus. The following year, he published De inventoribus rerum / On the Inventors of Things, a collection of essays on the persons he believed to have been the originators of human actions and inventions, ranging from religion and matrimony to more identifiable innovations like the art of printing. For Europe as a whole, this was his most famous publication.

Vergil’s scholarly reputation made him a welcome figure at the court of King Henry VII and his successor Henry VIII, and with royal encouragement he wrote a history of England, Anglica historia, which originally extended to the death of Henry VII in 1509 and was first published in 1534. As an Italian who had come as a papal functionary but who also held a valuable English benefice, Vergil quietly conformed to the religious changes associated with the early English Reformation, though he avoided any historical publication covering the reign of Henry VIII until he had returned to Italy in his old age; then he published an extension carrying the story down to 1538. Because Vergil had resided at the English court so long and had such close connections with prominent persons there, his history is an important source for the early Tudor period. His denial of the legendary history of King Arthur offended many later English writers even though in 1525 he published an edition of the history of Gildas, one of the few literary sources for the history of Britain in the centuries following the end of Roman rule. The later chroniclers Raphael Holin-shed and Edward Hall used his Anglica historia as a major source.


VERONESE, PAOLO

(Paolo Caliari, 1528-1588). Venetian painter, born at Verona into a family of stonecutters and trained there under Antonio Badile. He was influenced by the work of the mannerist painters Giulio Romano, who had worked in Verona, and Parmi-gianino. Veronese began his career in his home town but received commissions from patrons at Venice and in 1555 settled there. His specialty was decorative ceiling paintings, of which the earliest, produced in 1553 for the rooms of the Council of Ten in the doge’s palace, made his reputation, combining remarkable political allegory with a technical mastery of foreshortening and illusionism that made the figures seem lifelike when viewed from below. He continued with The Coronation of the Virgin (1555) as part of the sacristy ceiling in the church of San Sebastiano, following in 1556 with three pictures of the story of Esther on the nave ceiling of the same church. In 1557 Veronese was one of seven artists commissioned to produce competitively a number of roundels in the ceiling of the newly completed Library of St. Mark, and his representation of Music was awarded the prize by the distinguished judges, the painter Titian and the designer of the building, Jacopo Sansovino.

Even more famous was the series of ceiling decorations depicting feasts that he painted for the refectories of monasteries. The earliest of these was The Wedding at Cana (1562-1563) for the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, but the most notorious was his Last Supper for the Dominicans of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. After its completion, the artist was summoned before the Venetian Inquisition to explain why he had included representations of Germans (Lutherans, perhaps), Jews, dwarfs, and drunkards among the vast throng depicted in what at best was a very unconventional picture of the Last Supper. Since the inquisitors were not impressed by his plea for poetic license, he agreed to add an inscription identifying the work with an entirely different theme, which he now called Feast in the House of Levi. His later works included Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto (1574) and Apotheosis of Venice (1577), both executed for the ducal palace.

VERROCCHIO, ANDREA

(Andrea Cione, ca. 1435-1488). Florentine artist, primarily known as a sculptor. Born the son of a kiln worker and initially trained as a goldsmith, as early as 1463 he received a major commission for a monumental bronze sculpture, The Incredulity of St. Thomas. Another early work was a tomb for two members of the Medici family in San Lorenzo at Florence, Piero I and Giovanni de’Medici (1472). For a fountain at a Medici family villa he produced Putto with a Dolphin and a David that directly challenged the much-admired earlier treatment of the same figure by Donatello. Both of these works are thought to date from the 1460s or 1470s. His most widely known work, also in a sense a challenge to Donatello, is his Equestrian Monument of Bartolomeo Colleoni (ca. 1483-1488), a monumental bronze statue erected at Venice in honor of one of the city’s most successful mercenary generals. Verrocchio headed a large workshop which trained many younger artists, of whom the most famous was Leonardo da Vinci. In his own time he was also a famous and successful painter, though the attribution of his works is often disputed. Even his most important painting, The Baptism of Christ (ca. 1475-1485), is known to have been retouched (if not repainted) by Leonardo. Many of the Italian artists of the next generation show traces of his influence.

VESALIUS, ANDREAS

(1514-1564). Physician and anatomist. Born in Brussels, he was the son of an apothecary who served the Emperor V. After study at the University of Louvain, he began the study of medicine at Paris, where he found the traditional anatomy lectures useless. He then returned to Louvain, took a baccalaureate in medicine (1537), and moved on to the University of Padua, the premier medical faculty in Europe, where he received a medical doctorate later that same year. He was immediately appointed professor of surgery, with the duty of conducting anatomical dissections. His early Tabulae anatomicae sex / Six Anatomical Tables (1538), produced jointly with a pupil of the painter Titian, was based on the ancient Greek anatomist Galen, whose work relied on animal dissections. But Vesalius’ experience in dissections convinced him that Galen’s book, the standard textbook on anatomy, was full of errors, and he began criticizing Galen in his lectures.

Beginning in 1540 he worked on a new manual of anatomy, De hu-mani corporis fabrica / On the Structure of the Human Body (1543), for which he employed a skilled German painter and woodcut engraver, Jan Steven van Calcar (known in Italy as Giovanni Flammingo), whose illustrations reflect Vesalius’ new anatomical discoveries even more accurately than the book’s Latin text. Vesalius also produced a shorter text for use by students, his Epitome. This topic was quickly translated into German. A considerably revised Latin edition appeared in 1555. That same year, Vesalius joined the Spanish court, where he found the scientific climate less favorable than Padua had been. In 1564 before leaving on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he accepted reappointment to the faculty at Padua, but he died on the return trip later that same year. His De fabrica is generally regarded as the first significant step toward abandonment of the authority of Galen and the introduction of new material based on direct experimentation.

VIÈTE, FRANÇOIS

(1540-1603). French mathematician, important for the development of trigonometric tables and algebraic notation. The son of a lawyer and notary at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, he was educated in law at Poitiers, receiving a baccalaureate in 1560 but abandoning that profession in 1564 to become tutor to the daughter of an important noble family. He moved to Paris in 1570, and in 1573 King IX appointed him counsellor in the Parlement of Rennes, where he remained for six years. In 1580 Viète became a privy councillor and maître des requêtes in the Parlement of Paris. Having been banished from court through the influence of political enemies, he spent the years 1584-1585 in the provinces. After the accession of King Henry IV in 1589, he returned to court, deciphering coded messages captured during the war with Spain. In 1602, however, he was dismissed from royal service.

Viete’s first mathematical tract, Principes de cosmographie, began as one of his lectures as a tutor. Other works include Canon mathe-maticus seu Ad triangula (1579), In artem analyticam isagoge (1591), and De aequationum recognitione et emendatione (1615), edited and posthumously published by a Scottish friend. Viete’s mathematical innovations include being the first mathematician to use letters of the alphabet to represent known and unknown quantities, invention of the term "coefficient," and use of the cosine law for plane triangles. He also published the law of tangents. In 1592-1595 he engaged in a public dispute with the noted scholar Josephus Justus Scaliger, who erroneously claimed to have solved the problem of squaring the circle.

VILLANI, GIOVANNI, MATTEO, and FILIPPO

Florentine mercantile family, known principally for their description of Florence on the eve of the period when it became a major center of Renaissance humanism. Giovanni (ca. 1275-1348) travelled to Rome for the papal jubilee in 1300 and after seeing the ruinous ancient capital declared that Rome, the old metropolis, was sinking while his city, Florence, was rising. Confident of the great destiny lying before Florence, he undertook to write its history, beginning, in good medieval fashion, with the Tower of Babel and providing a largely uncritical account until he got to his own times, which he described with shrewd insight into the civic life he knew from personal experience. Giovanni served three terms as one of the priors and held several significant administrative jobs. He also endured a period of exile. As an experienced businessman who had travelled in France and Flanders in 1302-1308 and had worked as manager of the Peruzzi bank’s branch at Bruges, he had an interest in numbers that led him to include not only his famous estimate of the number of students in Florence but also much other statistical information on population, food consumption, cloth production, public works, and churches. Modern research has in general found these estimates remarkably accurate. Giovanni died in the Black Death of 1348. His brother Matteo continued the history of Florence down to 1363, when he also died of plague, and Matteo’s son Filippo added one book covering one additional year.

Giovanni’s description of the large number of boys and girls attending school in the city (between 8,000 and 10,000 in vernacular schools and 550 to 600 boys learning Latin grammar) is often cited, both as an indication of widespread literacy and as evidence of the more restricted availability of Latin education. Filippo Villani, who was one of the city’s early humanists and served as chancellor of the commune of Perugia and as lecturer on Dante in the Florentine Studio (1401-1404), is also known for his work Famous Citizens of the City of Florence, a collection of biographical sketches of local citizens, written in Latin.

VILLON, FRANÇOIS

(1431-ca. 1463). French poet, usually classed as a late medieval rather than a Renaissance author since his works lack the classicizing style associated with the French Renaissance. Yet his poetry was admired by leading figures of the Renaissance, including François Rabelais, who cites him in Pantagruel and makes him appear as a character in the Quart livre, and Clément Marot, who published the first collected edition of his works in 1533. Villon was born in Paris to a poor family and brought up by one of his relatives, a chaplain, whose surname he adopted. Thanks to this patron, he was able to study at the University of Paris (B.A., 1449; M.A., 1452). Villon seems to have led a disorderly and violent life, belonging to a gang of ruffians and in 1455 getting involved in a brawl that ended with his killing a priest, a crime for which he received a pardon from the king. Late the following year Villon participated in the theft of a large sum from the Collège de Navarre, and when the theft was discovered, he left Paris and remained in the provinces until 1461. In 1461 he was imprisoned for an unknown crime but was one of the prisoners pardoned in honor of the formal entry of King Louis XI into the city of Meung. In 1462 he was involved in another fatal conflict and was imprisoned though not identified as the murderer. He appealed his sentence to the Parlement, which commuted it to an exile of 10 years in 1463. A few days later, Villon disappeared from Paris, and there is no further record of him.

Villon’s poems are full of topical references and personal satires which even his Renaissance editor, Marot, could not fully understand. They refer to events in his life, and they also parody legal language and traditional ideas of courtly love, often in a scatological manner. His collected Lais circulated from 1456, and his Testament from 1462. Some of Villon’s poems are written in the argot of the Parisian criminal class.

VIRTU

Italian term, derived from the Latin virtus and frequently used in Renaissance discussions of human character. The term, like its Latin source, does not mean "virtue" in the conventional modern sense, though it does imply "goodness" in contrast to "vice." Above all, it denotes the qualities that made a man (the source-word of virtus is vir, the classical Latin word for a high-status man) admirable, such as intelligence, competence, and energy. Niccolo Machiavelli in particular employs it to describe the qualities needed in a successful ruler, but it was a common word, used by many authors and always having a complimentary connotation. When used with reference to things, it implies power or efficacy, such as the virtu of a medicine or a weapon.

VISCONTI

Italian ruling family who established themselves in the late 13th century as signori ("lords") of Milan, which they made the center of a powerful principality that by 1400 aspired to control all of central and northern Italy and perhaps even aimed at securing a royal title. The family’s control of Milan grew out of the violent factional struggles between Ghibellines and Guelfs in the 13th century for control of the city’s government. Authoritarian rule was first created by the rival Guelf family of Della Torre, but in 1277 they were overthrown by a Ghibelline conspiracy led by the local archbishop, Ottone Visconti. Since Ottone, ruling as a bishop, could not pass his lordship on to his descendants, he arranged for his nephew Matteo Visconti to be elected capitano del popolo, leader of the city’s armed forces, first for a 10-year term and then for life. Though the Visconti were temporarily displaced by their Della Torre rivals in the early 14th century, the interruption was brief, and the family ruled Milan and a growing set of subject cities and rural districts until it became extinct in 1447 and was shortly afterward replaced by the Sforza dynasty. In the middle of the 14th century, the principality was ruled jointly by three Visconti brothers, with Milan and the old Lombard capital at Pavia being the two principal centers of power.

The greatest figure of the dynasty was Giangaleazzo Visconti (1351-1402), who succeeded his father in 1378 and in 1385 deposed his last surviving uncle, the brutal and violent Bernabò. Having united the whole principality in his own hands, Giangaleazzo consolidated his power, capitalized on the wealth and commercial importance of Milan, and established an effective and largely beneficent internal administration. But he also was ambitious to expand his territories and through shrewd manipulation of inter-city rivalries and the use of military force made himself a growing threat to the independence not only of other small states in Lombardy but also of the wealthy and powerful republics of Venice and Florence. Significantly, as he annexed conquered regions, he did not incorporate them into the territory subject to the city of Milan but ruled them in his own person, thus reducing his dependence on the political voice of the Milanese people. He brought this political development to its peak in 1395 when he purchased the title duke of Milan from the Holy Roman Emperor Wenceslas, thus acquiring a hereditary title under which he could solidify personal control of the whole state.

Giangaleazzo’s military expansion eventually united the Venetians and Florentines against him. His enemies (especially Florentine humanists) depicted him as an unprincipled tyrant while representing themselves as defenders of republican institutions and Italian liberty. Giangaleazzo’s military power and diplomatic skill posed a serious threat to both of the great republics, and the Florentines in particular seriously feared that they would be conquered and incorporated into his territories, a fear increased by his success in taking over Pisa, Siena, Perugia, and Bologna (1398-1402).

His unexpected death of plague in 1402 seemed the salvation of Florentine independence. It was, however, a disaster for Milan and the large state that he had built, which rapidly collapsed and never entirely recovered under his successors. At the time of Giangaleazzo’s death, both of his sons were minors. The states that had come to fear Visconti power, particularly the Venetians, quickly seized territory that Gian-galeazzo had added to his principality; in the case of the Venetians, their move to seize the easternmost provinces of the duchy marks the beginning of their direct involvement in mainland politics. Several of the subjugated cities threw off Milanese rule. The elder of Giangaleazzo’s sons, Giovanni Maria (1402-1412), was mentally deranged and proved to be so dangerous that he was assassinated. The younger son, Filippo Maria (1412-1447), was a far better ruler and managed to stabilize the duchy and restore control over the western part of his father’s territories, though the Venetians kept control of the lands they had seized in the east. Filippo Maria came to be a danger to both the Venetians and the Florentines. His territories and power never equalled his father’s, but he was a successful duke except for his failure to produce a legitimate heir.

At his death in 1447, Filippo Maria left only his illegitimate daughter Bianca Maria, whom he had married to his ablest mercenary general, Francesco Sforza. The Milanese succession crisis produced another round of wars as the citizens of Milan tried to re-establish their republican form of government while at the same time defending their independence and their territories from ambitious neighbors, especially the Venetians. Eventually they had to turn to Francesco Sforza to beat off the foreign invaders, but after doing so, he seized control of the city and declared himself and his wife duke and duchess of Milan. The success of this seizure of power inaugurated a long period when the duchy of Milan was ruled by this new Sforza dynasty.

VITRY, PHILIPPE DE

(1291-1361). French composer and poet, also bishop of Meaux. His contemporary Petrarch knew and admired his French poetry, but he is best known as one of the leading figures of the new musical style known to contemporaries as ars nova. He wrote four treatises on the ars nova style. His surviving compositions include a number of motets.

VITTORINO DA FELTRE

(Vittorino Ramboldoni, 1378-1446). Italian humanist, scholar, and educator, the son of a notary of Feltre. About 1390 he entered the University of Padua, where he studied dialectic, rhetoric, and philosophy and also canon law, but his deepest interest was in the studia humanitatis—that is, in humanism. His teacher at Padua, Giovanni Conversino da Ravenna, had been a pupil of Petrarch. Next Vittorino studied rhetoric with Gasparino Barz-izza, an early leader in the effort to introduce humanistic reforms into the curriculum of schools and universities. In 1410 Vittorino completed his doctorate in arts. Since he was poor, he had to earn a living by teaching introductory Latin language and mathematics. In 1415 he moved to Venice, where he studied Greek under Guarino da Verona and George of Trebizond, once again supporting himself by teaching Latin to schoolboys. Vittorino returned to Padua in 1419 and became a successful teacher there. Like other masters, he took students as boarders in his own home, and he reduced his fees for those who (like himself in earlier years) were poor. In 1422 the university appointed him Barzizza’s successor in the chair of rhetoric, an appointment that committed him to a secular career; previously, he had considered entering a monastery. As a university professor, however, he found that the prevailing teaching style conflicted with his own preferred methods and also that his students could not be given the careful moral supervision that he had provided for his private pupils. In 1423 he resigned his professorship and settled in Venice to found his own Latin grammar school.

That same year, however, Vittorino received an invitation from Gi-anfrancesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, to organize a school at the Mantuan court for the children of the ruler and prominent courtiers. The opportunity to educate and shape the character of a future ruler was attractive to him, and after making sure that he would be allowed to conduct the school according to his own preference, he moved to Mantua. This school at Mantua, which he called La Casa Giocosa / The Pleasant House, was one of the earliest and most influential Italian schools specfically organized to teach the humanities. The students included members of the ruling family, sons of local nobles, and promising students from poor families to whom he could offer free education and connections with the rich and powerful that would promote the students’ future careers. These scholarship students made up about half of the enrollment; there were about 70 students in all, including a few girls.

Vittorino insisted that it must be a boarding school, even for the children of the ruler, since he wanted to impart strict moral and religious training and to insulate his adolescent students from the moral corruption and cynicism of court life. The program of study focused on the humanistic subjects of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy and involved study of both Latin and Greek. It also included mathematics, music, philosophy, and religion. Since he was educating boys who would be future rulers and high officials — and hence also soldiers—Vittorino included physical training and military exercises. Religious instruction and regular participation in religious services and sacraments were an important part of the school’s atmosphere.

The ultimate goal of the educational program was to prepare pupils to be useful members (and leaders) of society. The school soon developed a reputation extending far beyond Mantua, so that prominent families throughout Italy strove to get their sons admitted to study with Vittorino. A number of men who became leaders of the next generation of humanists studied there, including Niccolò Perotti and Lorenzo Valla. This school, together with the contemporary court school conducted at Ferrara by Guarino da Verona, established a model for the humanistic grammar school that became the ideal of Renaissance education throughout Italy and later throughout Europe.

VIVES, JUAN LUIS

(1492-1540). Spanish humanist, born into a family of conversos. He was educated in his native city of Valencia and then at the University of Paris (1509-1512), where he disliked the traditional scholastic curriculum and eventually left without taking a degree. He settled in Bruges, which became his principal home for the rest of his life. In 1517 he became tutor to Guillaume de Croy, the aristocratic cardinal and archbishop-elect of Toledo, and accompanied his 19-year-old pupil to the University of Louvain. Vives was permitted to lecture at Louvain despite his lack of a formal university degree. He had attracted the favorable attention of the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples at Paris and of the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who settled in Louvain in 1517, about the same time that Vives arrived there. Both Erasmus and his friend Thomas More admired Vives’ command of Latin. His treatise criticizing scholastic education, In pseudodialecticos, also attracted Erasmus and More to him. In 1522 he received an offer of the chair of rhetoric at the University of Alcalá in his native Spain, in succession to the great Spanish humanist Elio Antonio de Nebrija. Almost simultaneously, however, he learned that the Spanish Inquisition had arrested his father on charges of relapsing into Jewish religious practices. The father was executed in 1524, and though the humanist’s mother had died in 1509, she, too, was accused of apostasizing into Judaism, was tried in 1528, and her body was exhumed and burned. Prudently, Vives de-clined the offer from Alcalá and never again returned to his native country.

In 1523 he visited England and accepted an offer from Cardinal Thomas Wolsey to teach Greek at Oxford. In 1524 he returned to Bruges and married the daughter of a Spanish converso family settled there. His wife remained in Bruges when he returned to England, where he had formed friendships with influential persons such as Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher, and the royal physician Thomas Linacre. In 1527-1528 he served as tutor to Princess Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and his Spanish queen, Catherine of Aragon. His support for Queen Catherine during Henry’s effort to secure a divorce cost him the king’s favor, and for a time in 1528 he was held under house arrest but was eventally permitted to return to Bruges. Late in 1528 he briefly returned to England as adviser to Queen Catherine, but since she refused to follow his advice on how to conduct her opposition to the divorce, he returned to the Netherlands, living mostly at Bruges.

At the urging of Erasmus, Vives edited St. Augustine’s City of God, accompanied by his own commentary (1522). He dedicated this work to Henry VIII but it did not interest the king. His De institutione feminae Christianae / On the Education of a Christian Woman (1524) was dedicated to Queen Catherine, who was more receptive, and he also gained the queen’s interest with his De ratione studii puerilis / On the Method of Educating Children (1536), a guide to education written for Princess Mary. Later he wrote a work De officio mariti / On a Husband’s Duties (1529), dedicated to the Spanish duke of Gandia. Vives wrote several textbooks that were widely used in schools, including Introductio ad sapientiam /Introduction to Learning and a collection of dialogues designed to assist in the study of Latin (1538). Vives also made a major contribution to contemporary social theory with his De subventione pauperum / On Poor-Relief (1525), which addressed the much-debated issue of the relief of poverty, and he published two political tracts on resistance to the Turks and on issues of war and peace among Christians.

VOSSIUS, GERARDUS JOANNES

(1577-1649). Dutch humanist, a major representative of the late flowering of Renaissance culture in the independent Netherlands. In his lifetime he was recognized as a great scholar, and his publications summed up much of what Renaissance humanistic scholarship had achieved. His widespread correspondence extended his influence throughout Europe. Born at Heidelberg, where his father, a prominent Dutch Calvinist, had taken refuge during the war for independence, Vossius received his education at the Latin school in Dordrecht and in 1595 entered the University of Leiden, where he received the M.A. degree. He became rector of the Latin school at Dordrecht (1600-1615) and then regent of a college for ministers at Leiden. Although he preserved neutrality in the conflict between the Arminians and the strict Calvinists, he was dismissed after the latter faction gained political control of the republic. In 1622 he became professor of eloquence and history at Leiden and in 1632 became the first rector and professor of history and politics in the Athenaeum Illustre at Amsterdam.

Several of Vossius’ publications dealt with church history, including Historia Pelagianismi / History of Pelagianism (1618) and Dis-sertationes tres de tribus symbolis / Three Disquisitions on the Three Creeds (1642). In secular history he wrote Ars historica / The Art of History (1625), De historicis Graecis / The Greek Historians (1623), and De historicis Latinis / The Latin Historians (1627). His works as a rhetorician and grammarian included Institutiones oratoriae / Introduction to Oratory (1606), Poeticarum institutionum libri tres / Three Books of Lessons on Poetics (1647), Aristarchus, sive de arte grammatica libri septem (1635, a work on Latin grammar), De vitiis sermonis / On Errors in Language (1645), and Etymologicon linguae Latinae / Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language (1662). He also published a work on classical mythology, Theologia gentilis (1641), a work on the structure of the arts and sciences, De artium et scientiarum natura ac constitutione (posthumous, 1695), and a number of highly successful textbooks.

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