578 margaret l. king
to fulfill.17 Barbaro’s is the first voice, among the patrician humanists, of a
cultural shift that would be effectuated around the turn of the century.
From the 1490s, humanism became one pursuit among many in a
diversified, pluralistic intellectual culture which still featured many patri-
cians but also an increasingly large number of commoner and migrant
intellectuals.
all the humanists named thus far were patricians, most from the inner
circle of the Venetian ruling elite. commoner humanists also contributed
to the city’s humanist culture: many of foreign origin and some of the ele-
vated class of the cittadini originari. But they, too, were assimilated to the
political goals of the aristocracy, either through ties of friendship (the phy-
sicians Giovanni caldiera, Giovanni Marcanova, and alessandro Benedetti)
or patronage (the foreigners Filippo da rimini, Pietro Perleone, niccolò
Sagundino, Marc’antonio Sabellico, and Giorgio Valla, among others).18
For the most part, the commoner humanists wrote works supportive of
the ideology of the patrician intellectuals who were their patrons, and
of the Venetian state that in many cases employed them. characteristic
of these are the works of citizen physician Giovanni caldiera, based on
aristotle’s Ethics, proposing an ideal of the solitary, the domestic, and the
17 Branca, “ermolao Barbaro and late Quattrocento Venetian humanism”; Vittore
Branca, “ermolao Barbaro e l’umanesimo veneziano,” in Branca, ed., Umanesimo europeo
e umanesimo veneziano, pp. 193–212; “l’umanesimo veneziano alla fine del Quattrocento:
ermolao Barbaro e il suo circolo,” in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 3 (1980): Dal primo
Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento, part 1, 123–75; and relevant essays reprinted in Branca,
La sapienza civile; also Branca’s editions of ermolao Barbaro’s the Epistolae, orationes et
carmina, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence, 1943), and his De coelibatu, De officio legati, ed.
Vittore Branca (Florence, 1969). See also King, Venetian Humanism, pp. 322–23 and passim;
King, “caldiera and the Barbaros”; and Pio Paschini, Tre illustri prelati del Rinascimento:
Ermolao Barbaro, Adriano Castellesi, Giovanni Grimani (rome, 1957), pp. 9–42; and for
Barbaro’s De officio legati, see douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism
and Professions in Renaissance Italy (chicago, 2002), pp. 101–20.
18 For these figures generally, excluding Benedetti, see King, Venetian Humanism, Tables
6 and 7 at 291 and 298–99 respectively, and individual profiles of each: caldiera at pp.
344–45; Marcanova at pp. 392–93; Filippo at pp. 406–07; Perleone at pp. 415–17; Sagundino
at pp. 427–29; Sabellico at pp. 425–27; and Valla at pp. 439–40. For caldiera, see also King,
“caldiera and the Barbaros”; and King, “Personal, domestic, and republican Values in the
Moral Philosophy of Giovanni caldiera,” Renaissance Quarterly 28.4 (1975), 535–74, repr.
in King, Humanism, Venice, and Women: Essays on the Italian Renaissance, facsimile repr.
no. 4 (aldershot/Burlington Vt., 2005). For Marcanova, see also elizabetta Barile, Paula c.
clarke, and Giorgia nordio, Cittadini veneziani del Quattrocento: i due Giovanni Marcanova,
il mercante e l’umanista (Venice, 2006). For physician and historian alessandro Benedetti,
see Giovanna Ferrari, L’esperienza del passato: Alessandro Benedetti filologo e medico
umanista (Florence, 1996). For Filippo, see also King, “a Study in Venetian humanism
at Mid-Quattrocento”; and for Valla, see Gianna Gardenal, Patrizia landucci ruffo, and
cesare Vasoli, Giorgio Valla tra scienza e sapienza, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence, 1981).