Pietro Lauro (1510–1568) was one of the most well-known Italian polymaths of the 16th century. His work includes translations from Latin, Ancient Greek, and Spanish, covering texts by classical, foreign, and Protestant authors. Lauro demonstrated skill in handling texts on diverse topics, such as philosophy, architecture, medicine, gardening, agronomy, biological sciences, history, theology, and astronomy. He also ventured into writing a chivalric romance in the style of Spanish works, the , his magnum opus in this regard.
An adherent of the Protestant Reformation, although his translations were criticized by his contemporaries for being overly literal, crude, and impartial, Lauro is credited with completing the translation into the vernacular of numerous classical, scientific, and epistolary texts. His works achieved significant circulation, not only among the Venetian literati of his time but throughout Italy, to the extent that some of his translations are still reprinted in new editions today.
Biography
Youth Little is known about Lauro’s life, and few biographical details are certain. It is presumed that he was born around 1510, possibly from a family of humble origins. The only reference to his youth is a testimony by Lodovico Castelvetro, his contemporary and fellow Modenese, later recorded in writing by Girolamo Tiraboschi:
This testimony, however, is contradicted by other sources; Tiraboschi himself doubts some of its suggestions, such as the possibility that Lauro became a friar. He likely received a fragmented and not particularly advanced education; it is believed he may have pursued university studies at Bologna or Padua, although his name does not appear in the Acta graduum of either institution. Considering his scientific dissemination work in the medical field, it is thought he may have attended university courses in medicine, but this is not supported by reliable sources. It is almost certain, however, that like many future scholars born in the 1510s of the 16th century, such as Lodovico Dolce, Anton Francesco Doni, Girolamo Ruscelli, and Niccolò Franco, Lauro came into contact with the works of Erasmus of Rotterdam, including Adagia, De conscribendis epistolis, and De duplici copia verborum ac rerum.
First Venetian period (1539–1546)
Employment
Like other Italian scholars, Lauro was drawn to the job opportunities offered by the Venetian printing industry, settling in the lagoon city perhaps in the early 1540s. However, his first work, printed in the same city, is dated 1539: the Petri Lauri Mutinensis Preludium ad copiam dicendi, ubi et obiter muliebre ingenium mobile et uarium, porut [sic] copia dicendi potuit, exprimitur, of which a single copy survives today, included in a miscellaneous volume, preserved at the Vatican Library. In style and structure, it is an educational text, possibly compiled during teaching activities; this may explain Castelvetro’s statement:
But here too, Tiraboschi says:
Lauro was likely not merely a grammarian limited to teaching the basics of Latin to children or youths but a true professor (also of Ancient Greek) who taught students engaged in more advanced studies. Alongside this teaching activity, he undertook other remunerative tasks to support his large family (known from his letters), such as writing on commission or working as a copyist (a handwritten copy by him of the Comentari delle cose turchesche is held at the Civic Museum Correr). In Venice, Lauro is also recorded as a schoolteacher in documents from 1561, an employment further evidenced by a letter addressed to him by Lucrezia Gonzaga di Gazzuolo in 1552. Beyond this information, it is nearly impossible to reconstruct Lauro’s biography before 1542 with certainty. From his letters, it is known that he lived in near poverty throughout his life, despite the help and financial support from acquaintances and friends, often foreign, in addition to the income generated by his works.
It was his activity as a vernacular translator of classical texts that made him most famous: between 1542 and 1568, there were prolific entrepreneurial initiatives to print Latin or Greek texts in the Italian vernacular. Primarily, this activity was undertaken by Venetian printers such as Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari, who, in 1542, four years after inheriting his father’s business, surrounded himself with numerous scholars employed in assembling, editing, and vernacularizing classical and European texts. The category of polygraphs, of which Lauro became a part, consisting of writers and translators who dealt with varied and sometimes significantly different topics for dissemination purposes, experienced its most intense phase during this period.
First translations Although the publishing program of printing houses was subject to the approval of their owners, they allowed considerable freedom for the proposals and advice of their collaborators. Lauro thus began his career as a translator in 1542, proposing and completing the first vernacular translation of the Oneirocritica by Artemidorus of Daldis for Giolito, titled Dell'interpretatione de sogni, dedicated to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza y Pacheco, the Spanish ambassador in Venice. Even today, some Italian editions of this text use this version, based on the 1547 reprint. This was soon followed by the De' notevoli et utilissimi ammaestramenti dell'agricoltura, a translation of the Geoponica, a Byzantine work then attributed to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, now to Cassianus Bassus, an author who lived between the 6th and 7th centuries. After these initial works, which, as confirmed by examinations of the prefaces, were the result of his personal initiative in selecting texts, Lauro caught the attention of other printers, such as , with whom he began collaborating concurrently. Tramezzino entrusted him with the translation of the Chronica by the German astronomer Johann Carion. These historical-annalistic texts were highly successful at the time, and Lauro, again for Tramezzino, translated another the following year, the Catalogo de gli anni et Principi de la creatione de l'huomo sin a 1540 dal nascere di Christo by Valerius Anshelm.
Between 1543 and 1545, Lauro established himself in various fields of specialized literature, translating works from Latin and Greek across diverse genres. Notably, he published a vernacular translation of the historical collection Della guerra troiana: this was the Italian edition of the successful pseudo-ancient anthology Auctores vetustissimi, published in 1498 by the Dominican Annius of Viterbo; in 1550, it was reissued, revised as I cinque libri de le antichità de Beroso sacerdote caldeo. He also translated other works by Greek historians, such as the De i fatti del Magno Alessandro re di Macedonia, a vernacularization of the Anabasis of Alexander by Arrian, followed by Flavius Josephus’s De l'antichità giudaiche (Antiquities of the Jews) and the Historia d'Egesippo by Saint Jerome; he then worked on agricultural texts, such as Le herbe, fiori, stirpi, che si piantano ne gli horti by Charles Estienne, and a medical text from the Corpus Hippocraticum, Opere utilissime in medicina di Polibio illustre medico. In 1546, he translated the De re aedificatoria by Leon Battista Alberti, titled I dieci libri de l'architettura. Although Lauro’s was the first vernacular translation of Alberti’s work and enjoyed some popularity, the translation that gained more recognition at the time was the subsequent one by Cosimo Bartoli, published in Florence in 1550, which completely overshadowed Lauro’s in later editions. This was due to several factors: not only was the Italian rendering of the text better and less literal, but the Tuscan edition was also better curated, featuring a good number of illustrations (absent in the Venetian version). Nonetheless, Lauro’s translation remains historically significant as the first vernacular version of the first "modern" book on architecture. Additionally, the edition, given the small size of the volume, almost considered "pocket-sized," was designed to appeal to a broader (less affluent and educated) audience than the Latin version.
In addition to classical languages, during the first part of his career, Lauro also translated from Spanish. The most significant of these were works of pure entertainment, such as the Historia del valorosissimo cavallier della Croce and De l'ufficio del marito, come si debba portare verso la moglie by Juan Luis Vives, dedicated to Eleanor of Toledo. Of notable historical importance during this period are the vernacular translations of two works later placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum: the only complete Italian translation of 1543 of the De inventoribus rerum by the humanist from Urbino, Polydore Vergil, (banned in 1557), published as De l'origine e de gl'inventori de le leggi, costumi, scientie, arti, et di tutto quello che a l'humano uso conviensi, and the first vernacular translation of the Colloquies by Erasmus of Rotterdam, printed at the workshop of the French Vincenzo Valgrisi in 1545 and reprinted four years later with revised text. The Italian translation of this work, which likely inspired for the composition of his poem Il sogno dil Caravia, attracted the interest of many scholars, including Benedetto Croce. In the reprint, Lauro’s dedication is addressed to Renée of France, wife of Ercole II d'Este, likely at the request of the duchess herself, to align with a highly fashionable author in Europe at the time and better integrate into the intellectual élite of Ferrara.
Second Venetian period (1550–1568) No further information about Lauro is available, possibly due to his absence from Venice, until 1550, when he published the aforementioned Beroso sacerdote caldeo. This was a vernacular translation of the 1498 text by Annius of Viterbo, Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium, in which Annius claimed to have rediscovered lost texts attributable to Berossus. The rediscovered texts were later revealed to be forgeries, likely created ad hoc by Annius himself: it was common practice for many authors to attribute their works to the Babylonian astrologer to lend them prestige. Lauro’s translation achieved widespread success, much like the original text, so much so that the following year it was followed by an incomplete translation of the Moralia by Plutarch, titled Le piacevoli et ingeniose questioni di Plutarcho. Finally, in 1552, Tramezzino published the first book of De le lettere di m. Pietro Lauro modonese, which saw a second reprint in 1553; in 1560, a second book was published, without indication of the printer but attributable to the workshop of Comin da Trino.
Spanish, theology, and chivalric books