Giason Denores

Giason Denores, also written Giasone De Nores (about 1530 to 1590), was an Italian philosopher of the Renaissance, born around 1530 in Nicosia on the island of Cyprus into one of its most powerful families. He studied letters and the sciences at the University of Padua under the humanist Trifone Gabriel and came under the influence of Sperone Speroni. After the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in 1570 he found refuge in Venice, and in 1577 he pleaded the cause of the Cypriot refugees before the Doge. He was then offered the chair of moral philosophy at Padua, and in the remaining thirteen years of his life he wrote eleven of his fourteen works, among them criticism of pastoral tragicomedy that drew him into a bitter polemic with Giovanni Battista Guarini.