Education

Cesarotti was born in Padua into a family of ancient noble origins but which had long since entered the middle class. He studied in the Seminary of his home town.

Career

Soon after completing his studies, he obtained the chair of Rhetoric (late 1740s-early 1750s). At the end of the 1760s he gained the professorship of Greek and Hebrew. In 1797, still in the Seminary of Padua, he was appointed professor of Rhetoric and Literature.

In November 1760 he left Padua to move to Venice as a tutor to the Grimani family. Here he came into contact with the most prominent personalities in the cultural world such as Angelo Emo, the brothers Gasparo and Carlo Gozzi, Carlo Goldoni and Angelo Querini. In this environment he matured the experience that would give him European fame, namely the translation into Italian of the Poems of Ossian published recently by James Macpherson. His translation was written over a decade, with an incomplete first edition in 1763 and then the definitive and complete one, in 1772. During the next two decades, in France and Italy where the translation was very famous, many imitations and imitators of the “Ossianic style” appeared. From a darker English poetic vein, Cesarotti translated Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

In the next forty years Cesarotti published numerous translations from French, such as plays by Voltaire (La morte di Cesare, Maometto, Seramide), and from ancient languages, such as the full works of Demosthenes and two translations of Homer’s Iliad (a literal one and one adapted to modern taste). Alongside his translating activities, he was also a theorist and a critic and published several essays addressing literature, language and translation, such as Course of Greek Literature, On the Origin and Progress of the Poetic Art (1762), On the Sources of the Pleasure derived from Tragedy (1762), On the Philosophy of Taste (1784). His Essay on the Philosophy of Language (1785 and republished in 1800) is one of the most remarkable works in the field of linguistics written in Italy during the age of Enlightenment.