Francesco Pona

A Veronese medical doctor and member of many academies, Pona was a prolific writer, producing medical and scientific texts, historiography, literary translation, drama, lyric poetry, prose romances, and tales. A follower of Cesare Cremonini, a heterodox Aristotelian professor at Padua, Pona was a leading member of the influential Accademia degli Incogniti - a society of Venetian intellectuals famous for the libertine and anti-clerical tendencies of many of its members.[1] By the mid 1630s, Pona converted to a strict Catholicism and abjured his juvenile production.[1] He died in Verona on 2 October 1655.[1]

Pona is best known for the horrific and macabre stories of La lucerna (The Lamp, 1625). This is a dialogue between a young student, Eureta, and a soul imprisoned in his oil lamp. The soul tells the boy the story of its many reincarnations in various people, animals, and objects, emphasizing the pathological and cruel aspects of its experiences.[2] Despite its heterodoxy (in March 1626 La lucerna was included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by the Catholic Church),[3] the work was so popular that it was reprinted in five editions before the end of the decade.[4]

Ormondo (1635), with its five insert-stories, offers an interesting blend of romance and novella traditions.[5] Pona is also known for his translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1617) and John Barclay's Argenis (1629).[6] Later in his life, he wrote an emblem book, Cardiomorphoseos, sive ex corde desumpta emblemata sacra (1645), called by a leading scholar “a point of suture between Renaissance imprese and Baroque emblems”.[7]

Cardiomorphoseos sive ex corde desumpta emblemata sacra, Verona, 1645

• 1620 Sileno overo Delle Bellezze del Luogo dell'Ill.mo Sig. Co. Gio. Giacomo Giusti. Pubblicato, con l'occasione delle Nozze de gl'Ill.mi Sig.ri Il Sig. Conte Francesco Giusti e la Signora Antonia Lazise. Angelo Tamo in Verona 1620 con licenza de' Superiori. This work brings first-hand information on Giardino all'italiana of Giardino Giusti in Verona owned by the Counts Giusti, in fact, the apothecary and botanist Francesco Pona was also gardener Counts Giusti.[8]
• 1622 Il Paradiso de' Fiori overo Lo archetipo de' Giardini. Angelo Tamo in Verona 1622 con licenza de' Superiori. This manual gardening is important to know first hand how to create a Giardino all'italiana of Giardino Giusti in Verona with topiary choice and care of the plants, the garden owned by the Counts Giusti, in fact, pharmacist and botanist Francesco Pona was also gardener Counts Giusti.[9]
• 1625 - La Lucerna - a dialogue reporting the imagined discussions over four evenings between a speaker-narrator (a soul imprisoned in an oil lamp) and the student Eureta, allowing the author to tell a series of observations, stories, curious or memorable facts and the lives of modern, mythological or historical people, each of whom the author makes represent a specific behavioural trait or illustrate a particular moral teaching[10]
• Pona, Francesco (1633). La Messalina. Venice: Giacomo Sarzina.
• Il gran Contagio di Verona nel Milleseicento, e trenta. Descritto da Francesco Pona Filosofo Medico di Collegio. Verona: per Bartolommeo Merlo. 1631.[11]
• Pona, Francesco (1645). Cardiomorphoseos siue ex corde desumpta emblemata sacra. Verona.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Francesco Pona.

• «Francesco Pona Veronese». In : Le glorie de gli Incogniti: o vero, Gli huomini illustri dell'Accademia de' signori Incogniti di Venetia, In Venetia : appresso Francesco Valuasense stampator dell'Accademia, 1647, pp. 156–159 (on-line).
• Albani, Hélène (1989). "Un roman baroque oublié: l'«Ormondo» de Francesco Pona (1635) entre nouveauté et conformisme". Esperienze letterarie. XIV (4): 37–57.
• Maggi, Armando (2000). "Visual and verbal communication in Francesco Pona's Cardiomorphoseos". Word & Image. 16 (2): 212–224. doi:10.1080/02666286.2000.10435683.
• Gallinaro, Ilaria (2004). "Il "Cardiomorphoseos" di Francesco Pona". Lettere Italiane. 56 (4): 570–601. JSTOR 26266967.