Pietro Summonte Explained

Pietro Summonte^[1] (1463 - 1526) was an Italian Renaissance humanist of Naples, a member of the learned circle of friends in the Ciceronian manner^[2] that constituted Pontano's Accademia Pontaniana.^[3] Summonte's care in preserving his correspondence on artistic matters with the Venetian Marcantonio Michiel resulted in a precious archive mined by art historians.^[4] His major poem was the Canzone intitulata Aragonia. To him, Jacopo Sannazaro and Benedetto Cariteo addressed verses in Latin and the vernacular, and Sannazaro entrusted his Arcadia, which had circulated in manuscript since about 1485, but of which corrupt pirated editions appeared at Venice (1502) for a carefully corrected printing by Sigismondo Mayr (1504),^[5] in which Brian Richardson has detected revisions that brought the language closer to Boccaccio and Petrarch, so that it lost many of its southern dialect forms.^[6] Summonte, who took on the guidance of the Accademia Pontaniana after Pontano's death (1503), edited for publication Pontano's two books of Hendecasyllables, to which he applied the subtitle Baiae.

Notes and References

1. The family drew its name from Summonte (Submonte, because of its location at the foot of Mount Partenio), near Avellino.
2. Cicero's Laelius de Amicitia one of the first works of Cicero to be published in Naples was "doubtless very influential among the Neapolitan humanist circle", suggests Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi, noting Ciceronian passages in Pontano's Latin dialogue Aegidius: Furstenberg-Levi, "The Fifteenth Century Accademia Pontaniana: an Analysis of its Institutional Elements", History of Universities, 21.1 (2006:42, 57)
3. The Accademia Pontaniana of Naples was revived under the impetus of Benedetto Croce in 1892, and continues to publish its Atti annually: (official website).
4. His letter to Michiel of 20 March 1524, reporting on the state of art in Naples, and works there by Netherlandish painters, was published by Fausto Niccolini, in L'arte napoletana del Rinascimento (Naples) 1925:161-63. It is translated in Carol M. Richardson, Kim Woods and Michael W. Franklin, Renaissance Art Reconsidered: An Anthology of Primary Sources (2007:193-96).
5. http://net.lib.byu.edu/aldine/37Sannazaro.html (Brigham Young University) Renaissance texts: Sannazaro
6. Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470-1600 (1994:59); L. Monti Sabia, "Pietro Summonte e l'Editio princeps delle opere del Pontano", "L'Umanesimo Umbro, Perugia 1978:451-473.