VARCHI, BENEDETTO

(1503-1565)

Florentinehumanist. He studied law at the Universty ofPisaandAristotelianphilosophy atPadua, but because of his inherited wealth was free to devote much time to mas-teringGreekand Provençal. His support of the uprising againstMedicirule ofFlorencein 1527 forced him into exile, but in 1543 Duke Cosimo de'Medici permitted him to return to the city, where he became a member of the ducal court, joined the FlorentineAcademy, and lec-tured onDanteandPetrarch.In 1547 Cosimo asked Varchi to write a history of Florence, and hisStoria Fiorentina, based on careful use of documents and frank in its criticism of some of the Medici, is now re-garded as his principal work, but it was not published until 1721. His contemporaries admired him for his vast memory, his rich lingistic knowledge, and his poems in both Latin and Tuscan. He wrote a com-edy,La suocera/The Mother-in-Law, orations, works of literary criti-cism, and a grammar of the Provençal language. Varchi's treatiseEr-colanowas a contribution to contemporary debates on language and supports the humanists' contention that usage is more important than authority and reason in determining good practice in any language. He defended the use of the contemporary Florentine form of Tuscan against critics who attacked usages not found in the great 14th-century writers. On the other hand, as a great admirer of the "Three Crowns" (Dante, Pe-trarch, andBoccaccio), he also argued that a good stylist must be fa-miliar with the language as used by the best writers of the past.