Gian Giorgio Trissino, born of a patrician family in Vicenza, had been exiled from Venice for political reasons, and traveled to Germany and Lombardy.

He has the advantages of a good humanistic training, having studied Greek under Demetrius Chalcondylas at Milan and philosophy under Niccolò Leoniceno at Ferrara.

His culture had recommended him to the humanist Pope Leo X, who in 1515 had sent him to Germany as his nuncio; later on Pope Clement VII has showed him special favor, and employed him as ambassador.

In spite of the banishment from Vicenza pronounced upon him in 1509 because his family had favored the plans of Maximilian, he is held in high esteem throughout Italy.

Wherever he makes his home, it is a center for gatherings of scholars, littérateurs, and the most cultured men of the time.

His family life is far from happy, apparently through little fault of his own.

Trissino occupies a prominent place in the history of modern European literature because of his tragedy Sophonisba, written in about 1515 and published in 1524.

Based on the life of the Carthaginian lady Sophonisba and inspired by ancient tragedies, it is perhaps the first tragedy in early modern times to show deference to the classic rules.

It will serve as an example for European tragedies throughout the sixteenth century.

It will be translated into French by Mellin de Saint-Gelais, and performed with great acclaim in 1556 at the Château de Blois.

Giangiorgio Trissino bases his 1529 treatise on poetics, Sei divisioni della poetica (“The Six Kinds of Poetry”), on that of Aristotle.

In La poetica, he used Italian poetry to exemplify his theory.

In 1532, the Emperor Charles V made Trissino a count palatine.

He is held in high esteem throughout Italy, despite the banishment from Vicenza pronounced upon him in 1509 because his family had favored the plans of Maximilian.

Wherever he makes his home, it is a center for gatherings of scholars, littérateurs, and the most cultured men of the time.

His family life is far from happy, apparently through little fault of his own.

Michelangelo, seventy-five in 1550, returns to his first love, sculpture, executing his most intimate statue, the Pietá, or Deposition, that he intends to have placed on his own tomb.

This marble, unfinished and partially mutilated by Michelangelo in a fit of depression, reveals the omnipresent power of death.

In the aged and resigned features of the morning figure of Joseph of Arimathea (or, possibly, Nicodemus) supporting the dead Christ, can be seen a self-portrait.

Italian architect Giacomo da Vignola, upon being appointed papal architect to Pope Julius III in 1550, settles in Rome.

He begins work on the church of Sant’Andrea in Via Flaminia, whose oval-based plan represents a radical break with the Renaissance classical tradition (and anticipates one of the most widely used forms in baroque architecture).

Italian poet and humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino attempts to revive the Italian tradition of heroic poetry in his L'Italia liberata dai Goti (“Italy Liberated from the Goths”), written in 1547-48) in eleven-syllable rhymeless lines.

He bases his verse comedy, I simillimi, published in 1548, on the Roman playwright Plautus' “Menaechmi.”

Best remembered for his tragedy “Sonofisba,” Trissino dies at seventy-two on December 8.