Virgilio Malvezzi

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

Life

The son of the governor of Siena, Periteo Malvezzi, he was born to the aristocratic family of Malvezzi from Bologna.

He fought for the Spanish forces in Flanders.[1]

Olivares called him to Madrid, where he arrived in 1636, to become the official chronicler to Philip IV.[2][3] 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.[4]

He became adviser to the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria from 1643.

Writing

Initially he wrote on Tacitus, in the tradition of Justus Lipsius, but as a Christian neo-stoic, and anti-Ciceronian.[1][5] Olivares, who became Malvezzi's patron, was also a Lipsian.[6] His style imitated Tacitus, too, in its dour compression, and was criticized for its opacity by the translator Thomas Powell; another view is that his prose was "elegantly laconic".[7][8] John Milton referred to "Malvezzi, that can cut Tacitus into slivers and steaks".[9]

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.[10] 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.[11] His Tarquin argues the case for dissimulation in politics.[12]

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.[13]

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.[14] The pourtract of the politicke Christian-Favourite, a translation of Il Ritratto del Privato Politico Christiano, was published anonymously in London in 1647.

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. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651 (1993), p. 74.
  2. J. H. Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares (1984), p. 168.
  3. J. H. Elliott, Power and Propaganda in Spain of Philip IV, p. 166, in Sean Wilentz, Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages (1999).
  4. Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public's 'Privado' (2003), pp. 12-13.
  5. Adriana McCrea, Constant Minds: Political virtue and the Lipsian paradigm in England, 1584-1650 (1997), p. 9, citing Davide perseguitato.
  6. Elliott, p. 29-30.
  7. George Alexander Kennedy, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism vol. III (1989), p. 357.
  8. Jon R. Snyder, Mare Magnum: the arts in the early modern age, p. 162, in John A. Marino, editor, Early modern Italy (2002).
  9. John Milton, Of Reformation in England, Book II, online text.
  10. 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.
  11. Mary Augusta Scott, Elizabethan Translations from the Italian (1969), p. 420.
  12. Sergio Zatti, The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso (2006 translation by Dennis Looney, Sally Hill), p. 206.
  13. R. A. Stradling, Spain's Struggle for Europe, 1598-1668 (1994), p. 130.
  14. 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 christianissimo (1635); both the translation and Malvezzi's portrait of statesmanship were praised by Vaughan in Olor Iscanus (1651).

Further reading
  • Rodolfo Brändli (1964), Virgilio Malvezzi, politico e moralista
  • Virgilio Malvezzi, Opere, a cura di Edoardo Ripari, Persiani, Bologna, 2013
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