Castelvetro, Lodovico (1505-1571)

Italian scholar and critic. One of the leading linguists of his day, he wrote on the evolution of Italian, and commentaries on Dante and Petrarch. He also translated Aristotle's Poetics and published an influential commentary on it in 1570.

He was born in Modena. His grasp of the historical evolution of Italian is demonstrated in his Giunta fatta al ragionamento di Messer Pietro Bembo (1563) and in his commentaries on Petrarch's Rime/Poems and on the first part of Dante's Inferno. From 1560 he spent some years in exile after the Inquisition had condemned him for doctrinal irregularities, and he died at Chiavenna, north of Lake Como.