All Scholars

Giovanni Guarino (Also Guarino Veronese) studied at Padua with his friend Niccolò Niccoli (1364-1437) under Giovanni da Ravenna (Giovanni Conversini, 1343-1408) He accompanied the Byzantine scholar and translator Manuel Chrysolaras (1350-1415) as one of the first Italian humanists to visit Constantinople where he both mastered his Greek and purchased manuscripts. After five years with Chrysolaras he returned to Venice bringing with him over 50 manuscripts of Greek authors in two cases, one of which was tragically lost at sea. Ultimately, he discovered an important manuscript of Pliny and one of Aulus Cornelius Celsus. He spent two years in Bologna, where he associated with the humanists Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) and Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444). From Bologna he moved to an eventual university appointment in Florence, which lasted only two years due to Guarino’s caustic review of Niccoli’s only literary publication, an extended essay on Latin orthography. He moved to Venice where he opened his own school and developed a reputation (much like his mentor Chrysolaras) as one of the country’s greatest teachers. He took his teaching models from Priscian and Alexander of Villedieu for Latin and his abridgement of Chrysolaras’s Erotemata (1484). He was in such demand that students came from as far away as England for his instruction. He maintained control of his school as rector, while also serving as professor in his native Verona. Among his celebrated students at Venice was the future humanist and teacher Vittorino de Feltre (1378-1446). Among his students in Verona was Bartolomeo Facio (1400-57). In 1429 the Marquis of Ferrara, Niccolo d’Este (1383-1441) hired him as tutor to his 23-year-old son Leonello (1407-50). Guarino accepted on the condition that poor students be admitted to his classes, a policy he had maintained at his school in Venice. He taught from his own text, the Regulae Grammaticales, the first Latin grammar of the Renaissance. When Leonello married in 1435 Guarino returned to his school in Verona and himself married a wealthy Veronese woman whose family endowed his school.  She bore him 13 children, the most notable of whom was the poet and dramatist Giovanni Battista Guarini (1538-1612). When Guarino served as interpreter for representatives of the Greek and Roman churches in the latter years of the Council of Florence in 1438-45.

      As a scholar, he edited Caesar, Cicero’s speeches, Pliny the Elder, Gellius and Servius. He wrote commentaries on Cicero’s Pro Sexto Roscio, Persius, Martial, Juvenal, and parts of Aristotle, but is best known for translations of Strabo and 15 of Plutarch’s Lives. He collected Latin manuscripts and discovered in Venice in 1419 124 letters of Pliny beyond the 100 previously known. Fortunately, he made copies before the original was lost. The Collectae are notes to his lectures by his students. He left behind many speeches and over 600 letters. Sandys notes that Guarino’s son Battista’s (1434-1513) description of his teaching, De Ordine Docendi  (1459), “is the earliest treatise in which the claim to be considered an educated gentleman is reserved for one who is familiar with Greek as well as Latin.” (51)