Francesco Barbaro e dintorni

Through his own substantial and constant cultural and political commitment, the Venetian patrician Francesco Barbaro (1390-1454), a pupil of Giovanni Conversini, Gasparino Barzizza and Guarino Guarini, was a promoter of the then new Humanist movement and a protector of his city’s civic heritage. Like his contemporary Florentine literati friends, he proposed the Rome of the republican era as a model, with whose protagonists he personally identified, reintroducing their civic and moral values as well as their patriotism. His works provide an example of «civic humanism» conceived in austere terms, but capable of going beyond shallow local rivalries in order to open up to a supranational dimension of culture, implicit in the concept of the «res publica litteraria », which would enjoy special favour in the centuries to come