11 Facts About Giovanni Pontano

Giovanni Pontano, later known as Giovanni Gioviano, was a humanist and poet from Cerreto di Spoleto, in central Italy.

Giovanni Pontano was the leading figure of the Accademia Pontaniana after the death of Antonio Beccadelli in 1471, and the academy took his name.

Giovanni Pontano's mother escaped with the boy to Perugia, and it was here that Pontano received his first instruction in languages and literature.

Giovanni Pontano here began a close friendship with the distinguished scholar, Antonio Beccadelli, through whose influence he gained admission to the royal chancery of Alphonso the Magnanimous.

Giovanni Pontano was almost immediately made the companion and trusted friend of its sovereign, loaded with honours, lodged in a fine house, enrolled among the nobles of the realm, enriched, and placed at the very height of social importance.

Giovanni Pontano was passionately attached to his wife and children; and, while his friend Beccadelli signed the licentious verses of Hermaphroditus, his own Muse celebrated in liberal but loyal strains the pleasures of conjugal affection, the charm of infancy and the sorrows of a husband and a father in the loss of those he loved.

Not long after the death of his first wife Giovanni Pontano took in second marriage a beautiful girl of Ferrara, who is only known to us under the name of Stella.

Giovanni Pontano had already lost his only son by the first marriage; therefore his declining years were solitary.

Giovanni Pontano died in 1503 at Naples, where a remarkable group of terracotta figures, life-sized and painted, still adorns his tomb in the church of Monte Oliveto.

Giovanni Pontano is there represented together with his patron Alfonso and his friend Jacopo Sannazaro in adoration before the dead Christ.

Giovanni Pontano was distinguished for energy of Latin style, for vigorous intellectual powers, and for the faculty, rare among his contemporaries, of expressing the facts of modern life, the actualities of personal emotion, in language sufficiently classical yet always characteristic of the man.