PONTANUS, JOVIANUS (1426-1503), Italian humanist and poet, was born in 1426 at Cerreto, in the duchy of Spoleto, and educated, after the death of his father in a civil disturbance, at Perugia. At the age of 22 he went to Naples, where he re mained for the rest of his life. He became a friend of the famous scholar Beccadolli, and was introduced by him to Alphonso the Magnanimous, who made him tutor to his sons. Thereafter he was political adviser, mi:itary secretary and chancellor to the Aragonese dynasty. He illustrates very clearly the importance of men of letters in Italy. He arrived in Naples a penniless scholar, and became almost immediately' one of the most im portant men in the kingdom. He founded an academy for the meetings of scholars in Naples, which lasted long after his death. In 1461 he married Adriana Sassone, who bore him one son and three daughters and died in 1491. Soon after this he married a girl from Ferrara, only known to us as Stella. He was passionately fond of wife and children, and much of his verse, especially Eridanus, written after his second marriage, tells of his love for them. He outlived Stella also, and died in 1503 at Naples, where
a group of life-size terra-cotta figures is still to be seen on his tomb at Monte Oliveto church. Pontanus had a good Latin style and the faculty, rare among his contemporaries, of expressing the facts of modern life, the actualities of personal emotion, in lan guage sufficiently classical yet always characteristic of the man. His ambitious Urania embodies the astronomy of the day.
His most original compositions in verse, however, are elegiac and hendecasyllabic pieces on personal topics—the De conjugali amore, Eridanus, Tumuli, Naeniae, Baiae, etc.—in which erotic freedom is condoned by a passionate sincerity.
Pontanus' prose and poems were printed by the Aldi at Venice. For his life see Ardito, Giovanni Pontano e i suoi tempi (Naples, 1871) ; for his place in the history of literature, Symonds, Renaissance in Italy (1875, etc.).