A poet and a magistrate, the last male descendent of the prestigious Baffo family in Venice. He became member of the Maggior Consiglio at the age of twenty, and started working for the Quarantia. He married against his family’s wishes the harpsichordist Cecilia Sagredo, seventeen years younger than him. The wedding was celebrated outside the church, with witnesses of dubious reputation, and the couple never generated a male heir, de facto ending the century old Baffo dynasty. He was very close to the illuminist movement, and as a consequence his poetic work was characterized by marked licentious, epicurean elements. He loved declaiming his erotic poems with his friends and continued to compose until his death, but he always refused to publish them. He died at the age of seventy-four and was buried in the Church of San Maurizio, near the Palazzo Bellavite where he lived. His poems were published posthumous in Britain, and were re-discovered by Guillaume Apollinaire.
Copyright © Alastair Fontana 2013Corneille de Lyon: Portrait of a Man, 1536