Robortello, who was born in
Udine, was an editor of rediscovered works of
Antiquity, who taught philosophy and rhetoric, as well as ethics (following
Aristotle), and Latin and Greek, roving from Padua through universities at
Lucca,
Pisa,
Venice,
Padua, and
Bologna before finally returning to Padua in 1560. Robortello's scientific approach to
textual emendations laid the groundwork for modern
Hermeneutics. His commentary on Aristotle's
Poetics formed the basis for Renaissance and 17th-century theories of
comedy, influential in writing for the
theatre everywhere save in England. At the same time he was the conservative Aristotelian philosopher who urged a woman to submit her will to that of her husband on the basis of her moral weakness, in his
libro politicos: Aristotelis disputatio (Venice, 1552, p. 175, quoted Comensoli 1989). He followed his
In librum Aristotelis de arte poetica explicationes (1548), in which he emended the Latin version of Alessandro de’ Pazzi (published 1536), with a paraphrase of
Horace's
Ars Poetica and with explications of
genres missing in the surviving text of Aristotle:
De Satyra,
De Epigrammate,
De Comoedia,
De Salibus,
De Elegia. In the fields of
philology and history, he sustained controversies in print with
Carolus Sigonius and
Vincenzo Maggi in the form of
essay-like
orations, correcting the editions published in Venice by
Aldus Manutius, and even philological missteps of
Erasmus. These brief essays were collected and published at intervals. Robortello died at Padua, where, in the 1550s, one of his pupils was
Giacomo Zabarella. Another pupil was
Jan Kochanowski, a poet who wrote both in Polish and Latin and introduced the ideas, forms and spirit of the Renaissance into Polish literature. ==Main works==