Ortensio Lando or Landi was an Italian author of satires and translations. He is also sometimes known by a Latin pseudonym of Hortensius Tranquillus.
Ortensio Lando was born in Milan, and around the year 1523, he entered an Augustinian monastery, receiving the name of Jeremiah. He led a peripatetic life, living in Venice, Padua, Genoa, Siena, Ferrara, Lyon and Naples. He may or may not have completed a degree in medicine at Bologna. He is said to have acquired the name Tranquillus at his induction to the Accademia degli Elevati in Ferrara. Biographical details of Lando are not well ascertained.
He is the author of Paradossi, a series of 20 short essays arguing for an anti-dogmatic (contrarian) propositions using both rudimentary sophistry and some erudition based on classic mythologies, biblical topics, or historical events. Among the twenty chapters are, for example, propositions asserting that ugliness is better than being beautiful; poverty is better than wealth; ignorance is better than wisdom; being a bastard is preferable to being legitimate; or that it is better if the wife is sterile versus being fertile. The works of Lando, while influential, were not universally praised by later reviewers.
Lando is described by Sotheby and Wilkinson as filled with singular and curious Paradoxes, but several of them so licentious and blasphemous that even the French translator Charles Estienne, was compelled to omit them in the version he published in 1553.[1] Jacob Burkhardt in assessing Landi's descriptions of his contemporary Italy[2] states the man: is so fond of playing hide-and-seek with his own name, and fast-and-loose with historical facts, that even when he seems to be most in earnest, he must be accepted with caution and only after close examination.
Peer of Pietro Aretino and Doni, friend to Etienne Dolet (later incinerated for heresy), he is said to have left the Augustinian order and became an apostate. All of his books landed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Roman Catholic church, and “I paradossi” in particular was widely banned and copies of it were confiscated.[3]
In the first print of Paradossi, Landi's name does appear as the author, but we find at the end of the book the phrase: "Suisnetroh tabedul" (which in reverse reads "ludebat Hortensius" or "Hortensius has played". Another note from Paolo Mascranico, that the author is "M. O. L. M. detto per Sopra Nome il Traq," (Mr Ortensio Landi Milanese named il Tranquillo). In another text it is said: SVISNETROH SVDNAL, ROTUA TSE, 'Hortensius Landus author est.'
Among his published works are: