Bratislav Lučin, Književni krug Split – Marulianum, Split
Although it is probably one of the most often mentioned episodes from the rich and still not completely investigated life of the polytropos Croatian humanist Franciscus Tranquillus Andronicus, his unsuccessful attempt to meet Erasmus of Rotterdam has not yet received a full analytical approach. This paper proposes to give an account of all the available sources on Tranquillus – Erasmus relation. The work will be based mainly on a detailed analysis of the famous letter which the renowned humanist addressed to the young man from Trogir and on the role of the character named Parthenius in Erasmus' Convivium poeticum (with a review of arguments which allow the identification of this personage with Tranquillus). Other available information, even though some of it might seem meager or purely contextual, will also be taken into account: the correspondence of Petrus Mosellanus and Erasmus, Tranquillus' connections with Jacobus Piso, Willibald Pirckheimer, Joachim Vadianus, Juan Luis Vives and others, his efforts to gain a reputation in the res publica litterarum as well as in diplomatic missions, his ambition to obtain a chair of rhetoric at the Leipzig University and at the Collegium Trilingue in Louvain, etc. Some additional light on the relation of the two humanists may be shed by studying Erasmus' correspondence of that period and by what is known about his personal problems in the wake of the controversies over the Collegium Trilingue. The paper will also try to examine the general similarities and differences between the two humanists, who in the memory of the posterity remain paradoxically connected by the very fact of a missed possibility of contact and intellectual exchange.