Bernardo Davanzati

Bernardo Davanzati (Italian pronunciation: [berˈnardo da.vanˈt͡sa.ti]; 31 August 1529 – 29 March 1606) was an Italian agronomist, economist and translator. Davanzati was a major translator of Tacitus. He also attempted the concision of Tacitus in his own Italian prose, taking a motto Strictius Arctius reflecting his ambition.[1][2]

Bernardo Davanzati
Bernardo Davanzati, portrait by Cristofano Allori
Born(1529-08-31)31 August 1529
Florence, Republic of Florence
Died29 March 1606(1606-03-29) (aged 76)
Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany
Resting placeSanta Trinita
Occupations
  • Poet
  • Intellectual
  • Civil Servant
Known forItalian translation of Tacitus
Spouse
Francesca Federighi
​
(m. 1572)​
Children4
Parent(s)Antonfrancesco Davanzati and Bernardo Davanzati (née Ginori)
Writing career
LanguageItalian
Genre
Literary movementRenaissance

Biography

Bernardo Davanzati was bom in Florence on August 8, 1529. He was the scion of a patrician Florentine family. By devoting himself to trade, first in Lyon and later at home, he made a large fortune which permitted him to dedicate much of his industrious life to historical research and literature. He was a founding member of the Accademia della Crusca and a leading member of the Florentine Academy, of which he was elected Consul in 1575. Bernardo wrote with lively elegance and rare conciseness on many different subjects.

In order to refute the charge of prolixity advanced against the Italians by the French scholar Henri Estienne, he undertook a translation of Tacitus' writings in which he succeeded in being more concise than the Latin original.[3] He published his translation with the text opposite to it, and proved, page for page, that the Italian version, without omitting a word of the text, was often shorter, but nerer longer, than the original. Davanzati's translation is widely considered a classic of Italian literature.[4] The Academicians Della Crusca have sanctioned the high merit of this work, by rejecting every other translation of Tacitus, and by quoting very often that of Davaneati in their Vocabolario.[5]

He wrote on economics as a metallist.[6] His works included Notizie dei cambi (1582) and Lezione delle monete (1588).[7] Davanzati's Discourse upon Coins was translated by John Toland (London: Awnsham and John Churchil, 1696) from the original 1588 edition.

Diagram illustrating the working of exchange rates from Davanzati's ''Notizie dei cambi

In 1582 Davanzati completed his translation of the preface to the Hero's Pneumatica, which under the title Della natura del voto he dedicated to the architect and painter Bernardo Buontalenti. The manuscript is Firenze, Biblioteca nazionale, Banco rari 223.[8] The translation was printed in the nineteenth century in C. Gargiolli and Ferdinando Martini (eds.) , Della natura del voto di Erone Alessandrino volgarizzamento inedito di Bernardo Davanzati (Florence, 1862).

His Scisma d'Inghilterra [The Anglican Schism], an account of contemporary English history first published in Rome in 1602. It was a concise version of a work of Girolamo Pollini, on the English Reformation, which itself was dependent on a Latin work of 1585 written by Nicholas Sander and Edward Rishton. John Milton used its imprimaturs (from the 1638 edition) as an illustration on his Areopagitica.[9][10][11]

Davanzati was a close friend of Filippo Sassetti. Writing Davanzati in 1585, Sassetti noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (e.g. deva/dio 'God', sarpa/serpe 'snake', sapta/sette 'seven', ashta/otto 'eight', nava/nove 'nine').[12] This observation is today credited to have foreshadowed the later discovery of the Indo-European language family.

Notes
  1. John Humphreys Whitfield; John Robert Woodhouse (1980). Short History of Italian Literature. Manchester University Press. p. 125. ISBN 978-0-7190-0782-8. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
  2. Arnaldo Momigliano (1990). The Classical Foundations of Modern History. University of California Press. p. 123. ISBN 978-0-520-07870-3. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
  3. Zaccaria 1987.
  4. Cochrane, Eric (2013). Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800. A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes. University of Chicago Press. p. 120. ISBN 9780226115955.
  5. Montucci, Antonio, ed. (1818). Italian extracts; with familiar phrases and dialogues, intended as a suppl. to Galignani's Grammar and exercises (2 ed.). Boosey. p. 289.
  6. Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1954). History Of Economic Analysis. Allen & Unwin. p. 278. ISBN 978-0-415-10888-1. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
  7. Roncaglia, Alessandro (2005). The Wealth of Ideas: A History of Economic Thought. Cambridge University Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-521-84337-9. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
  8. See P.O. Kristeller, Iter Italicum (Leiden-London, 1963f.), vol. I, 176.
  9. Michael Wyatt (1 December 2005). The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge University Press. p. 72. ISBN 978-0-521-84896-1. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
  10. Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton Blackwell (2003), p. 573 note 28.
  11. Alan Rudrum; Joseph Black; Holly Faith Nelson (11 August 2000). The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose. Broadview Press. p. 566. ISBN 978-1-55111-053-0. Retrieved 3 January 2013.
  12. Nunziatella Alessandrini, "Images of India through the eyes of Filippo Sassetti, a Florentine Humanist merchant in the 16th century", Mary N. Harris, ed., Sights and Insights: Interactive images of Europe and the wider world

Works cited
  • Perini, Leandro (1976). "Un patrizio fiorentino e il suo mondo: Bernardo Davanzati". Studi Storici (in Italian). 17 (2): 161–170. JSTOR 20564426.


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