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Virgilio Malvezzi (1595–1654) was an Italian historian and essayist, soldier and diplomat, born in Bologna. He became court historian to Philip IV of Spain. He used the anagram-pseudonym Grivilio Vezzalmi.

Virgilio Malvezzi
Born8 September 1595 
Bologna 
Died11 August 1654  (aged 58)
Castel Guelfo di Bologna 
Resting placeSan Giacomo Maggiore 
NationalityItalian
Other namesGrivilio Vezzalmi
Alma mater
  • University of Bologna 
OccupationWriter, politician, historian 
MovementBaroque

Life


Virgilio Malvezzi was born in Bologna of noble parents in 1595. His father, Piriteo Malvezzi, was a senator and his mother an Orsini of Rome. After finishing his law degree at the local university in 1616 he followed his family to Siena, where his father had been appointed governor of the city for Grand Duke Cosimo II.

He fought in the Spanish Army in Flanders and under the command of the Governor of Milan Gómez Suárez de Figueroa in Piedmont.[1]

Olivares called him to Madrid, where he arrived in 1636, to serve as the official historian of the reign of Philip IV.[2][3] He became a member of both the Council of State and the Council of War. By the late 1630s Malvezzi's credentials as a scholar and historian were somewhat tarnished by the closeness of his relationship to Olivares; but his Romulus, published in his native Bologna in 1629, had won him an international reputation.[4] In 1640 he was one of the ambassadors sent by Philip to England, in an attempt to avert the marriage of Mary Stuart to William II of Orange.[5]

He became adviser to the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria from 1643. Malvezzi was a connoisseur of painting and a close friend of Guido Reni and Diego Velázquez.


Writing


In his youth Malvezzi wrote a commentary to Tacitus in the tradition of Justus Lipsius, soon establishing a reputation as a Christian neostoic and anti-Ciceronian humanist.[1][6][7]

Malvezzi used a sententious style, reminiscent of Tacitus and Seneca, which found many admirers even among the Spanish conceptists. His taste for the paradoxical and the epigrammatic, for abrupt transitions and contrived obscurity was praised as “elegantly laconic”[8][9] and was much admired by Olivares who made him the historian of his regime.[10] On the other hand, Malvezzi's literary style was criticized for its opacity by the translator Thomas Powell[11] and by John Milton, who unkindly remarked that Malvezzi “can cut Tacitus into slivers and steaks”.[12]

Malvezzi's anti-Ciceronianism could not be made more evident than by his defense of “obscurity” in Tacitus. He regarded Tacitus as the loftiest master of the “laconic style,” no less superior to the “asiatic than pure wine is to watered wine.” Its very obscurity imparts to the reader the same pleasure deriving from the metaphor inasmuch as it challenges him to integrate the apparent gaps in the sentence by intervening with his own wit.[13] Malvezzi's style has been lavishly praised in Gracián's Agudeza y arte de ingenio. In Gracián's eyes Malvezzi's peculiar genius was to have combined the critical style of a historian with the 'sententious' style of the philosopher (Agudeza, Discurso 62, 380–1).

His political thought was in the tradition of Machiavelli.[14] He composed a series of political biographies of famous princes from Roman and Jewish history probably reminiscent of Xenophon's Cyropaedia where it is easy to recognise Machiavelli's lasting influence: Romulo (1629), Tarquinio il Superbo (1632), and Davide perseguitato (1634). His Tarquin openly argues the case for dissimulation in politics.[15]

His biography of Olivares (Ritratto del Privata Politico Christiano) has been called hagiography. It argued that he was right to invoke the reason of state on behalf of the Spanish Empire.[16]


English translations


His Discourses upon Cornelius Tacitus, translated by Sir Richard Baker and first published in 1642, were dedicated by the publisher Richard Whitaker to William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Saye and Sele. Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth translated both Romulo and Il Tarquinio Superbo and had them published together in one volume in 1637, whereas the two Italian source texts had come out separately in 1629 and 1632. The 1648 edition of Monmouth's translation of Romulus was prefaced by verses from Robert Stapylton, Thomas Carew, John Suckling, and William Davenant. Two of Malvezzi's letters were translated and published in 1651 as Stoa triumphans by Thomas Powell, a close friend of the poet Henry Vaughan.[17] The pourtract of the politicke Christian-Favourite, a translation of Il Ritratto del Privato Politico Christiano, was published anonymously in London in 1647. Malvezzi's Chief Events in the Monarchy of Spain in the Year 1639 and Considerations upon the lives of Alcibiades and Coriolanus were translated by Robert Gentilis and published respectively in 1647 and 1650 by Moseley. John Nichols claimed that Thomas Gordon's commentaries on Tacitus were derivative from the work of Virgilio Malvezzi, Scipione Ammirato and Baltasar Alamos de Barrientos.[18]


Works


He wrote in Italian and Spanish, and was early translated into Latin, Spanish, German and English, with a Dutch edition of 1679.


Notes


  1. Tuck, Richard (1993). Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651. Cambridge University Press. p. 74. ISBN 9780521438858.
  2. Elliott 1991, p. 168.
  3. Elliott, J. H. (1999). "Power and Propaganda in Spain of Philip IV". Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages. University of Pennsylvania Press: 166.
  4. The year of the three ambassadors, in H. Lloyd-Jones et al., eds., History and imagination: essays in honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper (London, 1981), 171.
  5. Mendle, Michael (2003). Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public's 'Privado'. Cambridge University Press. pp. 12–13. ISBN 9780521521314.
  6. McCrea, Adriana (1997). Constant Minds: Political virtue and the Lipsian paradigm in England, 1584-1650. University of Toronto Press. p. 9. ISBN 9780802006660.
  7. Olivares, who would eventually become Malvezzi's patron, was also a Lipsian. See Elliott 1991, pp. 29–30.
  8. Kennedy, George Alexander (1989). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. III. p. 357.
  9. Snyder, Jon R. (2002). "Mare Magnum: the arts in the early modern age". Early Modern Italy, 1550-1796. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 162.
  10. Elliott 1991, p. 30.
  11. «His style is right Laconick, strict and succinct: so farre that his brevity doth sometimes cloud his sense, and makes each period a Riddle to some capacities; so that I am bold (now and then) to enlarge the roome to let in more light; for his own words doe scarce bring us home to his meaning.» Quoted in: Davis, Paul (2008). Translation and the Poet's Life. The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646-1726. Oxford University Press. p. 46. ISBN 9780199297832.
  12. John Milton, Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England [1641], in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, Volume 1: 1624–1642, edited by Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 573.
  13. Aldo D. Scaglione (1972). The Classical Theory of Composition: From Its Origins to the Present: a Historical Survey. University of North Carolina Press. p. 188.
  14. Scott, Mary Augusta (1969). Elizabethan Translations from the Italian. B. Franklin. p. 420.
  15. Zatti, Sergio (2006). The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso. Translated by Dennis Looney; Sally Hill. Toronto: Toronto University Press. p. 206.
  16. Stradling, R. A. (1994). Spain's Struggle for Europe, 1598-1668. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 130. ISBN 9781852850890.
  17. Stoa triumphans: or, Two sober paradoxes viz. 1. The praise of banishment. 2. The dispraise of honors. Argued in two letters by the noble and learned Marquesse, Virgilio Malvezzi. Now translated out of the Italian, with some annotations annexed (London, 1651). Powell also translated Malvezzi's 'portrait' of the Count-Duke Olivares, Ritratto di un privato politico christiano (1635); both the translation and Malvezzi's portrait of statesmanship were praised by Vaughan in Olor Iscanus (1651). Powell's translation of Malvezzi's Ritratto di un privato politico christiano was never actually published; Vaughan apparently read it in manuscript.
  18. The Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812), 1:710.

Further reading




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