A Detail from the Portrait of the ‘pole circle’: Thomas Starkey and Gasparo Contarini

The aim of this paper is to show the influence exercised by the Venetian patrician Gasparo Contarini on the maturation of the Tudor humanist Thomas Starkey’s political thought. The two men belonged to the same circle of intellectuals who gravitated around the Paduan residence of Reginald Pole in the 1520s and early 1530s. The oligarchical republicanism of Contarini’s "De magistratibus et republica Venetorum" finds a prominent place among the sources that contributed to the formulation of the proposal for constitutional reorganization contained in Starkey’s best-known text, "A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset", one of the major treatises of sixteenth-century English humanist political thought. The paper analyses in particular the importance of the Venetian political system celebrated by Contarini for those pages of Starkey’s work devoted to the measures required to remedy the crisis afflicting the Kingdom of England and to avoid the risk of a tyrannical degeneration of its government, through the establishment of a mixte state. But it also focuses on some points of convergence between the two authors concerning ecclesiological matters.