Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina

Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina (20 January 1664 – 6 January 1718) was an Italian man of letters and jurist. He was born at

In Naples, meanwhile, he had earned the favor of Cardinal Antonio Pignatelli (the future pope Innocent XII), who in 1689 requested that he come to Rome as one of his agents. To the slightly stifling climate of the Roman capital in those years, Gravina brought a breath of the lively debates in which he had participated in Naples. In 1690 he was among the founders of Rome's Academy of Arcadia.^[1] In Rome, which had now become his base, he composed between 1692 and 1696 numerous writings that were literary in nature or characterized either by historical scholarship or by moral or aesthetic criticism, and that were for the most part united in the various Opuscula, dedicated to Innocent XII (1696). He also received several public appointments, including in 1699 the chairmanship of the faculty of Civil Law at La Sapienza University, during the reorganization and reinvigoration of the university, which had been rather inactive until that point. In 1703 he transferred to the chair of Canon Law. From Innocent XII Gravina received the offer of various ecclesiastical honors, but declined them from a disinclination to enter the clerical profession.^[3]

His openness to the currents of European thought brought on more than a few disputes with more conservative groups in the

The years 1714-16 he spent in Calabria resting and attending to the inheritance bequeathed him by Caloprese. In his final years Gravina continued to publish on legal and literary subjects and even wrote tragedies, which were in their time much appreciated. He also reestablished contacts in the Neapolitan circle, traveling frequently to the capital of the Kingdom of Naples and publishing various works there. He died in 1718 in Rome. Comforting him at his death in 1718 was one of his dearest friends and followers, Pietro Metastasio. Gravina was survived by his mother, to whom he left his property in Calabria. His Roman possessions were left to Metastasio. Among the famous pupils of Gravina were Lorenzo Gori and Orazio Filippo Bianchi.

Works

Gravina was the author of a number of works of great erudition, the principal being his Origines juris civilis, completed in 3 vols (1713) and his De Romano imperio (1712).^[2] The work of Gravina that is best remembered is his discourse on poetry, first published in 1708: Della Ragion Poetica libri due, in which he defines poetry as an intuitive and imaginative form of knowledge with the power to inspire civic renewal. Gravina seeks to pioneer poetics as a science deduced from rational first principles and conceives poetry itself as a rudimentary and imperfect form of cognition through which philosophical truth is transmitted by means of image and emotion. In this and in his preference for the primitive (Homer and Dante) over the refined (Virgil and Torquato Tasso), he points distantly towards Vico's The New Science (1725).

See also

• Lodovico Sergardi
• Manuel Martí

References

Bibliography

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Gravina, Giovanni Vincenzo". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 383–384.
• Gravina, Gian Vincenzo (1973). Scritti critici e teorici. Scrittori d'Italia 255. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Retrieved 29 June 2015.
• Gravina, Gianvincenzo (2005). R. Gaetano (ed.). Della Ragion poetica. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino.
• San Mauro, Carla (2006). Gianvincenzo Gravina giurista e politico. Con un'appendice di scritti inediti. Milan: FrancoAngeli.