Girolamo Preti

Born in Bologna in 1582, he was destined for a legal career, but broke off his studies to devote himself to literature. He became a member of the Bolognese Accademia dei Gelati, founded in 1588 by Melchiorre Zoppio, and became friends with the poet Cesare Rinaldi.[2] In 1609, he was made member of the Accademia degli Umoristi.[2] He became friends with Girolamo Aleandro, Antonio Bruni, Alessandro Tassoni and other members of the Academy.[2] In 1611 Preti was charged by cardinal Federico Borromeo to purchase volumes for the newly founded Biblioteca Ambrosiana.[3] Later he put himself at the service of Cardinal Carlo Emanuele Pio di Savoia and then of Alessandro Ludovisi (the future Pope Gregory XV).[1] Preti was one of the few concettisti to find favour in the Rome of Pope Urban VIII; he served as secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and was accompanying him on a Spanish embassy when he died suddenly in the spring of 1626.[2]

Preti was a very successful poet. His poems, which were first printed in Venice in 1614, were reprinted eight times during the first half of the 17th century (Venice 1624 and 1656; Bologna 1618, 1620, 1631 and 1644; Milan 1619; Rome 1625; Macerata 1646). His idyll La Salmace was translated into French, Spanish, English and Latin.[4] In 1647 a translation into English of Oronta di Cipro was made by Thomas Stanley as Oronta, the Cyprian Virgin.[5] It was published in several editions through 1651. He is best known for his idylls, a genre which he established with the mythological Salmace of 1609, inspired by a story in the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and then extended to more straightforwardly amorous subjects.[4] His lyric Poesie (1614) is characterized by a cautious yet original adaptation of the models offered by Giambattista Marino, whom he knew from the early 1600s, when Marino was a frequent visitor to Bologna.[1] He makes moderate use of complex metaphors and acutezze, inclining to a gently sensuous style, which captures physical detail (his description of the nymph Salmacis bathing is exemplary), while avoiding the more intense and disturbing erotic charge to be found in Marino.[4] His ideas were similarly conservative: in his brief treatise Intorno all’onestà della poesia (1618) he reasserts the Renaissance Neoplatonist view of the moral functions of love poetry.[2] Like many other of Marino’s friends, he was perplexed by L’Adone.[2]

• Slawinski, M. (2002). "Preti, Girolamo". The Oxford Companion to Italian Literature. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-818332-7. Retrieved 8 June 2023.
• Ferro, Roberta (2012). "Girolamo Preti a Roma: le lettere a Federico Borromeo (1611-1612)". Aevum. 86 (3): 1031–1070. JSTOR 23414273.
• Arnaudo, Marco (2012). "Il doppio e lo specchio nella "Salmace" di Girolamo Preti". Italica. 92 (2): 484–495. JSTOR 43895978.
• Ferro, Roberta (2016). "PRETI, Girolamo". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 85: Ponzone–Quercia (in Italian). Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. ISBN 978-8-81200032-6.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Girolamo Preti.

• «Girolamo Preti Bolognese». In : Le glorie de gli Incogniti: o vero, Gli huomini illustri dell'Accademia de' signori Incogniti di Venetia, In Venetia : appresso Francesco Valuasense stampator dell'Accademia, 1647, pp. 276–279 (on-line).