Loschi, Antonio

(ca. 1368-1441)

   Italian humanist, a native of Vicenza, educated in law at Padua but best known for his career as chancellor to the duke of Milan, Giangaleazzo Visconti, during a period of war between Milan and Florence. He wrote a political tract attacking the Florentines' claim that the war involved a struggle between republican liberty and monarchical tyranny. This Invectiva in Florentinos, probably written about 1397-1398 and directed against the Florentine propaganda diffused in the official letters of the Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati, praised monarchy as a better guarantor of peace and social order than republican government. It argued that unification of northern Italy under the rule of the Visconti dukes would shelter the peninsula from military intervention by foreign powers.

   Loschi also argued that the Florentines' eagerness to gain political control over neighboring cities gave the lie to the city's pretense of being the defender of Italian liberty. In response, a number of Florentine humanists, including Salutati himself in his Invectiva contra Antonium Luschum (1403), defended the record of their city in upholding political freedom. Yet Loschi was by no means a personal enemy of Salutati. He had been one of the young humanists who clustered around Salutati during the years when Salutati made Florence the center of the new humanist culture. In 1406, after the death of Giangaleazzo, Loschi moved to Rome and became a curial official.