Scenario

Argumentation theory has a wide range of applications, from legal debate to discourse on social media, history of science to rhetorical analysis of literary texts.

For the development of CONTRO, we wanted to engage with real-world texts that are complex, historically situated, and interpretively rich. Our aim was to ensure that the ontology could extract information that was both meaningful and faithful to its sources. To this end, we chose as our reference scenario a major literary controversy from the Italian Renaissance: the dispute between the Modenese critic Lodovico Castelvetro and the Marchigiano poet Annibal Caro. What began as a disagreement over poetic style quickly escalated into an ideological confrontation over the epistemic role of poetry, with lasting personal repercussions for those involved.

Sparks of controversy

The central decades of the 16th century were pivotal for the questione della lingua, the debate over which form of Italian should serve as the literary standard. This discourse unfolded through an interplay of literary practice and theory, with Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (1549) marking a turning point. Bembo advocated for Petrarch and Boccaccio as respective models for poetry and prose.

In 1553, Annibal Caro composed a Canzone dei Gigli d’oro in Petrarchist style, commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese to commemorate his family’s alliance with the Valois of France. Despite its modest literary quality, the poem received clamor of praise among Roman intellectuals. Perplexed by this acclaim, the Modenese jurist Aurelio Bellincini sent the text to his friend Lodovico Castelvetro for evaluation. Castelvetro, long engaged in a commentary on Petrarch’s Canzoniere, dismissed the poem with a succint, seventeen-point note criticizing its inapt vocabulary and feeble metaphors.

Although Castelvetro had expressed a desire for his views to remain private—how sincerely is unclear—the note nonetheless circulated at the Roman court and in other Italian cities, threatening to discredit Caro: his position as secretary to the Farnese, secured by his literary reputation despite his modest origins, depended entirely on his patrons’ favor.

Caro promptly began to prepare a defensive strategy, mobilizing influential supporters to direct harsh criticism at Castelvetro. In 1554, the Canzone appeared in print as an appendix to a collection of letters by illustrious men edited by Lodovico Dolce, accompanied by a commentary attributed to Caro and almost certainly his own work, though he always refuted its authorship. Castevetro, caught off guard by the scale of the backlash, circulated a second text titled Dichiarazione d’alcune cose dell’antiscritto Parere in an attempt to clarify his position.

The Apologia

It took three years of reflection for Caro to complete his definitive self-defense, the Apologia, issued anonymously in 1558. During this time, we imagine him—despite professed indifference and within the narrow margins left by his official duties—engaged in the careful orchestration of his polemical and literary campaign, seeking the advice of his circle and especially his friend Benedetto Varchi. “I feel like the man who tried to build a house in the town square but couldn’t finish it because of the sheer number of architects,” he wrote to Varchi, explaining his decision to go to print despite conflicting advice: some urging caution, others warning that softening the polemical tone would spoil the effect.

By the time of publication, the Farnese had shifted to the imperial side and the encomiastic themes of the Canzone seemed inevitably dated. Nevertheless, the Apologia stands as a masterpiece of spite, blending deforming irony, pointed argumentation, rhetorical crescendos, and menacing overtones. It draws on the burlesco style Caro had cultivated in his early Florentine poetry, in the manner of Francesco Berni, before turning to more “serious” literary forms.

The work mocks Castelvetro starting with its very structure: a sequence of contributions attributed to a ludicrous cast of fictitious Roman academics, all introduced by Mastro Pasquino—the academy’s janitor, who proclaims himself Castelvetro’s accomplice in slander. Each voice takes on a distinct stylistic function: Predella delivers a point-by-point rebuttal of Castelvetro’s critique; Buratto unleashes a caustic invective; and Ser Fedocco recounts an allegorical dream in which the adversary is represented as a barn owl, a caricature of the owl Castelvetro had adopted as his emblem, dwelling in a glass castle, a pun on his name, clear on the outside but foul within. The castle had appeared up in the air, disrupting the peace of Parnassus, and is demolished by order of Apollo. From the rubble, the owl is dragged in mock triumph, crowned with nettle, tried before a dwarfish embodiment of the very words Castelvetro had condemned in the Canzone, and ultimately subjected to a grotesque crucifixion.

Although the Apologia deploys a range of rhetorical strategies, Predella’s contribution merits closer attention for the substance of its literary arguments. Caro reaffirms his Petrarchist allegiance, even as he slips its constraints: poetic rules and models must yield to the creative freedom of the poet and to the evolution of a living language, against the treatment of poetry as a dead language or a mathematical calculus.

The Ragione

Castelvetro was evidently champing at the bit for the Apologia’s appearance—so much so that, according to Varchi’s Ercolano, he offered to cover the cost of publication himself—and produced his rebuttal in a mere forty-five days. With the Ragione, Castelvetro seizes the opportunity to display the full extent of his erudition: it is a treatise on language and poetic style that, while responding point-by-point to the Apologia, stands as an autonomous work.

Castelvetro opens the Ragione by outlining an ideal poetic language, against which Caro’s Canzone dei Gigli is assessed for both “word faults” and “feeling faults.” The confrontation revives the ancient debate between anomalists and analogists: Caro advocated for a poetic language close to speech, while Castelvetro, accused in the Apologia of reducing the Italian vernacular to a rarefied lexicon drawn from Petrarch and Boccaccio, counters with a more rigorous conception of imitation.

Drawing on Quintilian, he maintains that imitation is first ethical, then linguistic: no single author suffices as a model, and word usage must be validated by its survival in later authors. For Castelvetro, the authority of literary tradition defines the limits of poetic license. Innovation in vocabulary must be sparing, motivated by poetic quality, and intelligible to the audience. He dissects Caro’s lexical choices on philological and historical-linguistic grounds: Latinisms, trivial etymologies, attestation in works of little value, or the availability of better alternatives all constitute faults. Etymology, alongside grammar and rhetoric, becomes a tool for deeper critical inquiry, underpinned by the belief in the systematic nature of language.

His treatment of metaphor follows Aristotelian principles: metaphors must serve knowledge, a criterion Caro fails to meet. He also criticizes the Canzone for blurring the line between metaphor and allegory, lacking the formal discipline to prevent one figure from collapsing into the other.

Finally, responding to Caro’s charge of malice, Castelvetro reaffirms the critic’s right and duty to evaluate public works, framing critique as a necessary condition of poetic discourse.

Legacy

By the mid-1550s, the controversy had shifted from the literary to the political level, with mounting personal consequences for Castelvetro. In 1555, he was accused of orchestrating the murder of Alberigo Longo, a poet aligned with Caro and one of the authors behind the circulating parodic verses against Castelvetro, though he consistently denied involvement. At the same time, his pseudonymous translation of a work by Melanchthon drew the Inquisition’s suspicion of Reformed sympathies. Caro, both in the Apologia and through his network of influence in Rome, played an active role in amplifying those charges.

Castelvetro’s heresy trial became the object of a jurisdictional dispute between the Duchy of Ferrara and the Papacy, but he was ultimately excommunicated in absentia. In 1560, he traveled to Rome to appeal the decision, but fled to Chiavenna, then part of the Swiss Confederacy, once it became clear the outcome would not change. There, he began work on a Correzione of Varchi’s Ercolano, who by 1561 had taken the place of Caro in the controversy. Death prevented him from completing it, but the work was published posthumously in Basel in 1572 by his brother, Giovanni Maria Castelvetro.

The controversy left a lasting legacy, periodically reemerging as a touchstone for cultural tensions—between Classicism and Baroque, Enlightenment and Romanticism. As late as the 18th century, Ludovico Antonio Muratori and Giusto Fontanini reignited the debate, aligning with Castelvetro and Caro, respectively.

At stake was not merely a question of poetic taste, but a deeper redefinition of intellectual identity that the confrontation helped crystallize. For Castelvetro, Petrarchism was adherence to the thing through the word: terse, truthful, and grounded in the study, excavation, and contemplation of the classics. Caro, by contrast, embraced a Petrarchism that revived Petrarch’s imagery but not his linguistic or textual discipline: a source of artifice and allegory, and, in essence, pre-Baroque. Each came to embody a new model of intellectual: Caro, the court poet empowered by his profession; Castelvetro, the niche specialist legitimized by erudition—both ultimately removed from the humanist ideal of the intellectual as philosopher shaping discourse through ideas and values.

Castelvetro knew how to reason, and by reasoning he would crush whatever stood before him. But Caro knew how to write, and by writing he could, through the enchantment of style, replace the real image with a caricatured and grotesque puppet of his opponent and set it up in the public square for ridicule.

Carlo Dionisotti, Annibal Caro e il Rinascimento, p. 35 (translation is ours)

A small sample of the texts, both original and translated, can be read in Examples. The text of the Apologia is available in the last edition of Caro’s works ¹. For a general framing of the controversy, refer to the editor’s introduction ²; for a reconstruction of the historical and political events behind it consult ³; for recent contributions to its interpretation, see ⁴, ⁵. Castelvetro’s Ragione was the subject of a scholarly edition in an unpublished doctoral dissertation, with further context provided in an article by the editor ⁶. Both works have been digitized and are accessible online ⁷, ⁸.

Modelling relevance

The Caro–Castelvetro controversy exemplifies the type of argumentative complexity this project seeks to model: a layered structure in which not only two interpretations confront each other over the same field claim, but also constrasting rhetorical strategies and diverging goals. The debate proceeds through appeals to authority, reductio ad absurdum, irony, ad personam and composite arguments, implicit premises, concessions, and distinctions—rationales that are difficult to extract without analytical decomposition. It requires clarification of the dialectical architecture underlying rhetorical and literary discourse: identifying the loci of disagreement, tracing the movement of claims across voices and genres, and exposing the justificatory principles at play, including those grounded in ipse dixit rather than formal inference. As such, the scenario functions not only as a historical case study but also as a stress test for the ontology’s capacity to capture perspectival conflict and the rhetorical reconfiguration of meaning.