doubt rests upon the whole of this story. Apostolo Zeno affirms
that in the middle of the last century three of the missing books
turned up among family papers in the possession of Count Giov.
Batt. Giovio, who wrote a panegyric on his ancestor. It is therefore
not improbable that Giovio possessed his history intact, but preferred
to withhold from publication those portions which might
have involved him in difficulties with living persons of importance.
The omissions were afterwards made good by Curtio Marinello in
the Italian edition, published at Venice in 1581. But whether
Marinello was the author of these additions is not known.
After Clement’s death Giovio found himself out of favour with the next pope, Paul III. The failure of his career is usually ascribed to the irregularity of the life he led in the literary society of Rome. We may also remember that Paul had special causes for animosity against the Medici, whose servant Giovio had been. Despairing of a cardinal’s hat, Giovio retired to his villa on the lake of Como, where he spent the wealth he had acquired from donations and benefices in adorning his villa with curiosities, antiquities and pictures, including a very important collection of portraits of famous soldiers and men of letters, now almost entirely dispersed. He died upon a visit to Florence in 1552.
Giovio’s principal work was the History of His Own Times, from the invasion of Charles VIII. to the year 1547. It was divided into two parts, containing altogether forty-five books. Of these, books v.–xi. of part i. were said by him to have been lost in the sack of Rome, while books xix.–xxiv. of part ii., which should have embraced the period from the death of Leo to the sack, were never written. Giovio supplied the want of the latter six books by his lives of Leo, Adrian, Alphonso I. of Ferrara, and several other personages of importance. But he alleged that the history of that period was too painful to be written in full. His first published work, printed in 1524 at Rome, was a treatise De piscibus romanis. After his retirement to Como he produced a valuable series of biographies, entitled Elogia virorum illustrium. They commemorate men distinguished for letters and arms, selected from all periods, and are said to have been written in illustration of portraits collected by him for the museum of his villa at Como. Besides these books, we may mention a biographical history of the Visconti, lords of Milan; an essay on mottoes and badges; a dissertation on the state of Turkey; a large collection of familiar epistles; together with descriptions of Britain, Muscovy, the Lake of Como and Giovio’s own villa. The titles of these miscellanies will be found in the bibliographical note appended to this article.
Giovio preferred Latin in the composition of his more important works. Though contemporary with Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Varchi, he adhered to humanistic usages, and cared more for the Latinity than for the matter of his histories. His style is fluent and sonorous rather than pointed or grave. Partly owing to the rhetorical defects inherent in this choice of Latin, when Italian had gained the day, but more to his own untrustworthy and shallow character, Giovio takes a lower rank as historian than the bulk and prestige of his writings would seem to warrant. He professed himself a flatterer and a lampooner, writing fulsome eulogies on the princes who paid him well, while he ignored or criticized those who proved less generous. The old story that he said he kept a golden and an iron pen, to use according as people paid him, condenses the truth in epigram. His private morals were of a dubious character, and as a writer he had the faults of the elder humanists, in combination with that literary cynicism which reached its height in Aretino; and therefore his histories and biographical essays are not to be used as authorities, without corroboration. Yet Giovio’s works, taken in their entirety and with proper reservation, have real value. To the student of Italy they yield a lively picture of the manners and the feeling of the times in which he lived, and in which he played no obscure part. They abound in vivid sketches, telling anecdotes, fugitive comments, which unite a certain charm of autobiographical romance with the worldly wisdom of an experienced courtier. A flavour of personality makes them not unpleasant reading. While we learn to despise and mistrust the man in Giovio, we appreciate the author. It would not be too far-fetched to describe him as a sort of 16th-century Horace Walpole.
Bibliography.—The sources of Giovio’s biography are: his own works; Tiraboschi’s History of Italian Literature; Litta’s Genealogy of Illustrious Italian Families; and Giov. Batt. Giovio’s Uomini illustri della diocesi Comasca, Modena (1784). Cicogna, in his Delle inscrizioni Veneziane raccolta (Venice, 1830), gives a list of Giovio’s works, from which the following notices are extracted: 1. Works in Latin: (1) Pauli Jovii historiarum sui temporis, ab anno 1494 ad an. 1547 (Florence 1550–1552), the same translated into Italian by L. Domenichi, and first published at Florence (1551), afterwards at Venice; (2) Leonis X., Hadriani VI., Pompeii Columnae Card., vitae (Florence, 1548), translated by Domenichi (Florence, 1549); (3) Vitae XII. vicecomitum Mediolani principum (Paris, 1549), translated by Domenichi (Venice, 1549); (4) Vita Sfortiae clariss. ducis (Rome, 1549), translated by Domenichi (Florence, 1549); (5) Vita Fr. Ferd. Davali (Florence, 1549), translated by Domenichi (ibid. 1551); (6) Vita magni Consalvi (ibid. 1549), translated by Domenichi (ibid. 1550); (7) Alfonsi Atestensi, &c. (ibid. 1550), Italian translation by Giov. Batt. Gelli (Florence, 1553); (8) Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (ibid. 1551), translated by Domenichi (ibid. 1554); (9) Elogia clarorum virorum, &c. (Venice, 1546) (these are biographies of men of letters), translated by Hippolito Orio of Ferrara (Florence, 1552); (10) Libellus de legatione Basilii Magni principis Moscoviae (Rome, 1525); (11) Descriptio Larii Lacus (Venice, 1559); (12) Descriptio Britanniae, &c. (Venice, 1548); (13) De piscibus romanis (Rome, 1524); (14) Descriptiones quotquot extant regionum atque locorum (Basel, 1571). 2. Works in Italian: (1) Dialogo delle imprese militari et amorose (Rome, 1555); (2) Commentarî delle cose dei Turchi (Venice, 1541); (3) Lettere volgari (Venice, 1560). Some minor works and numerous reprints of those cited have been omitted from this list; and it should also be mentioned that some of the lives with additional matter, are included in the Vitae illustrium virorum (Basel, 1576). (J. A. S.)
The best and most complete edition of Giovio’s works is that of Basel (1678). For his life see Giuseppe Sanesi, “Alcuni osservazioni e notizie intorno a tre storici minori del cinquecento—Giovio; Nerli, Segni” (in Archivio Storico Italiano, 5th series, vol. xxiii.); Eug. Müntz, Sul museo di ritratti composto da Paolo Giovio (ibid., vol. xix.).
JOWETT, BENJAMIN (1817–1893), English scholar and theologian, master of Balliol College, Oxford, was born in Camberwell on the 15th of April 1817. His father was one of a Yorkshire family who, for three generations, had been supporters of the Evangelical movement in the Church of England. His mother was a Langhorne, in some way related to the poet and translator of Plutarch. At twelve the boy was placed on the foundation of St Paul’s School (then in St Paul’s Churchyard), and in his nineteenth year he obtained an open scholarship at Balliol. In 1838 he gained a fellowship, and graduated with first-class honours in 1839. Brought up amongst pious Evangelicals, he came to Oxford at the height of the Tractarian movement, and through the friendship of W. G. Ward was drawn for a time in the direction of High Anglicanism; but a stronger and more lasting influence was that of the Arnold school, represented by A. P. Stanley. Jowett was thus led to concentrate his attention on theology, and in the summers of 1845 and 1846, spent in Germany with Stanley, he became an eager student of German criticism and speculation. Amongst the writings of that period he was most impressed by those of F. C. Baur. But he never ceased to exercise an independent judgment, and his work on St Paul, which appeared in 1855, was the result of much original reflection and inquiry. He was appointed to the Greek professorship in the autumn of that year. He had been a tutor of Balliol and a clergyman since 1842, and had devoted himself to the work of tuition with unexampled zeal. His pupils became his friends for life. He discerned their capabilities, studied their characters, and sought to remedy their defects by frank and searching criticism. Like another Socrates, he taught them to know themselves, repressing vanity, encouraging the despondent, and attaching all alike by his unobtrusive sympathy. This work gradually made a strong impression, and those who cared for Oxford began to speak of him as “the great tutor.” As early as 1839 Stanley had joined with Tait, the future archbishop, in advocating certain university reforms. From 1846 onwards Jowett threw himself into this movement, which in 1848 became general amongst the younger and more thoughtful fellows, until it took effect in the commission of 1850 and the act of 1854. Another educational reform, the opening of the Indian civil service to competition, took place at the same time, and Jowett was one of the commission. He had two brothers who served and died in India, and he never ceased to take a deep and practical interest in Indian affairs. A great disappointment, his repulse for the mastership of Balliol, also in 1854, appears to have roused him into the completion of his book on The Epistles of St Paul. This work, described by one of his friends as “a miracle of boldness,” is full of originality and suggestiveness, but its publication
