Giacomo Foscarini
Giacomo (Jacopo) Foscarini (1523–1603) was a Venetian nobleman from a prominent, but no longer very affluent, family
He was curious and adventurous, and he departed for Paris, in the entourage of the official Venetian ambassadors to the Kingdom of France, at the age of sixteen.
Later, Foscarini went to London, where he developed a flourishing business in trade between Venice and the British Isles, which brought him a solid fortune.
In the mid-1550s, he returned to Venice, leaving the London business to his brother. He married Elena Giustinian — from another important Venetian noble family — with whom he got seven children.
He had entered the Maggior Consiglio at the age of 21, thanks to the barbarela lottery, but his first political appointment was at age 44, in 1559.
In 1461, Foscarini served as Provveditor alla Sanità (Superintendent of Health), but then took another break from politics until 1564, for family reasons.
His career was stellar after 1564. He served in the Senate and in various roles overseeing trade and commerce. He was podestà (governor) of Verona in 1569–70, but was then called to serve in the war with the Ottoman Turks.
In 1572, Foscarini replaced the victor of Lepanto, Sebastian Venier, as Capitan General da Mar (top admiral), not for his military skills, which were few, but for his diplomatic experience.
During the visit of Henry III of France and Poland to Venice, in 1574, Foscarini was, thanks to his international experience, assigned the task of accompanying the King at all times.
Despite the recently signed peace treaty with the Ottoman Turks, Venice feared an attack on Candia (Crete), and Foscarini was appointed Provveditor generale (governor) of the island, with command over all forces there.
He was therefore away from Venice during the plague of 1575–1577 when Rocco Benedetti wrote his report.
After his return to Venice in 1578, he served as councillor for the Doge in the Signoria, and he became Procuratore di San Marco, an appointment for life, ranking second only to the Doge.
He held positions related to the restoration of the Palazzo Ducale after the fire in 1577, for the construction of the Rialto Bridge, and in the foundation of the public bank, the Banco Giro.
Foscarini remained a central figure in the republic until his death in 1603.
Source: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.
Mercuriale
Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–1606) was a physician and a professor of medicine at the university of Padua.
Born in Forlì, he soon went to Venice to study, and was in 1555 awarded a doctorate in philosophy and medicine from the Venetian College of Physicians, but part of his studies were in Padua.
Mercuriale returned to his native town after his studies, but remained in correspondence with many of the most prominent doctors and physicians of Padua.
After an official journey to Rome in 1562, he remained there under the protection of cardinal Alessandro Farnese, for whom he became personal physician.
Thanks to this connection, Mercuriale was appointed first chair of ordinary medicine at the University of Padua in 1569. Having published little before, he now published a series of works, which he must have written while in Rome.
His fame grew, and in 1573 Mercuriale treated and cured Emperor Maximilian II, who knighted him.
In 1575, the Republic of Venice extended his tenure for another six years, and raised his pay.
As Rocco Benedetti recounts, Mercuriale and Capodivacca were summoned to Venice in June 1576, where they insisted the disease circulating wasn’t the plague. They agreed to cure patients, but as the epidemic got worse, they left, having achieved nothing.
His career at the University of Padua wasn’t damage by the lack of success in Venice, and in 1581 his tenure was renewed again, with a substantial pay rise.
He left Padua in 1587 for Bologna, where he got a twelve-year appointment, and a very generous pay.
Only halfway through his tenure in Bologna, he left for Tuscany, and from 1592 he taught at the University of Pisa. He returned to his native Forlì in 1606, where he died later that same year.
He is recognised as one of the most important medical scholars of the 1500s.
Source: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.
Capodivacca
Girolamo Capodivacca (c.1523–1589) was born to a noble family in Padua, and started teaching almost as soon as he had finished his own studies.
In 1553, he was third chair in medicine at the University of Padua; in 1561 second chair. Then, in 1564, he moved from ‘extraordinary’ medicine to ‘ordinary’, where he taught for the next twenty-five years, part of this time in a difficult relationship with his colleague Mercuriale.
In 1576, Capodivacca and Mercuriale were summoned to Venice, as Rocco Benedetti writes, without earning much glory.
Capodivacca was highly esteemed for his treatment of venereal diseases, which earned him a small fortune. Widespread rumours that he had a secret cure for even the most severe cases of syphilis, didn’t hurt him.
He, too, was offered tenure at the University of Pisa by Francesco I, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, but declined the offer, despite the very generous pay and other benefits.
In 1589, he travelled to Mantua to treat the Duke of Mantua, and — just like predicted by an astrologer — died of a fever on his return.
Source: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.
Ravenna
Tommaso Giannotti Rangoni (1493–1577) was born in Ravenna to a well-off citizen family named Giannotti.
Little is known of his youth, but in 1510, he was studying philosophy and medicine in Bologna, and in 1513 he defended his dissertation successfully. He started teaching, probably astrology, at the university immediately after, in a position reserved for brilliant but poor scholars.
The earliest publications to his name are all astrological in nature.
Around 1516, Giannotti went to Rome as doctor for cardinal Domenico Grimani, whom he might have got to know in Bologna. When cardinal Grimani later returned to Venice, Giannotti followed, and got a teaching position at the University of Padua, in astrology and mathematics.
He left Padua suddenly, for a position as astrologer and physician to Guido Rangoni, an aristocrat from Modena, and general in the army of the Papal State.
Giannotti was one of the astrologers, who foresaw a giant flooding for 1524, due to a conjunction of several planets in the sign of Pisces. The flooding didn’t materialise, and Rangoni and Giannotti, who had sought refuge in the mountains, were sorely ridiculed in the carnival in Modena that year.
Despite the flood debacle, Giannotti remained in the service of Rangoni until 1532, and their relationship was so close, that Rangoni gave Gianotti permission to use his surname.
Sometimes before 1535, Giannotti Rangoni had settled in Venice, where he produced numerous booklets and pamphlets, mostly in matters of medicine, including syphilis, which was quite profitable.
He used his wealth to sponsor the arts, and he bought a palace in Padua for a college for poor students, especially from his native Ravenna.
In Venice, he sponsored the restoration of the church of San Zulian, on the condition that his funerary monument would ornate the façade. His bronze statue, created by Sansovino, still sits over the entrance.
Thanks to his charity, in 1562, he was appointed Cavaliere di San Marco, the highest honorific the Republic of Venice could offer non-nobles.
That same year, he also sponsored three paintings by Tintoretto for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, of which he was then guardian grando.
Giannotti Rangoni was therefore a well-known figure in Venice at the time, thanks to his scholarly status, wealth, charity, and self-promotion. Because of his city of origin, he was often just called il Ravenna, or as Benedetti styles him, The Most Excellent Ravenna.
He died on September 10th, 1577, after the epidemic was over, which is why Benedetti insisted that he was still alive. He is buried in the San Zulian church, as he had asked.
Source: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani.
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