Abstracts 2019 – LIX – Rinascimento


Saggi e testimonianze
Ilaria Morresi, Nel cantiere di Leonardo Bruni. Sulla tradizione manoscritta dell’Epistolario: le redazioni in 8 e in 9 libri	3
Abstract. – Leonardo Bruni’s official Epistolary has come down to us in two different textual forms, consisting respectively of eight and nine books of letters, whose exact relation with each other has been long investigated by scholars. The purpose of this paper is to define the original structure of both textual forms, as well as their mutual connection, thereby trying to reconstruct the progressive stages of the Epistolary’s composition and authorial revision. This attempt is first carried out with reference to the contemporary mentions of this work, i.e., those immediately following its first circulation in 1440, and then through careful analysis of the remarkable features of its manuscript tradition. While the transmission of the nine-book recension appears to be essentially homogeneous, the eight book textual form proves to be somehow more problematic and is therefore more thoroughly investigated. In this regard, particular attention is paid to several inscriptions that identify a group of witnesses as descendent from Bruni’s originalis, as well as to the related transmission of ‘extravagant’ letters in witnesses of the eight-book Epistolary.
Stefano Caroti, Pietro Pomponazzi e i «perplexis ambagibus illius Suiseth involut»	63
Abstract. – Pietro Pomponazzi’s attitude towards the new languages of analysis (to use a well-known expression of John E. Murdoch) is no doubt negative, as already noted by several scholars. This paper focuses on Pomponazzi’s assessment of one of these new languages: the intension and remission of forms, discussed in the first chapter of Richard Swineshead’s Liber calculationum. The Aristotelian commitment to neatly distinguishing mathematics and physics is not the main objection to the doctrine of intension and remission, which cannot pretend to be considered a part of scientific knowledge, being limited to particular aspects such as the measure of qualitative change and motion.
Michele Ciliberto, La fenice e il furioso. Sul ciclo, Bruno, Santo Mazzarino	81
Abstract. – This essay aims to show the importance of Santo Mazzarino’s works in order to understand several crucial theoretical points of Renaissance philosophy – especially the concept of time. Distinguishing between the idea of Eternal Return as a cosmological doctrine and the idea of Eternal Return as intuition of the historical development, Mazzarino provided the necessary theoretical arsenal to understand that a cyclical concept does not exclude the promotion of human praxis, as Paolo Rossi pointed out in his works.
Alessandro Della Casa, Da monista a ‘liberale’: i Machiavelli di Isaiah Berlin	97
Abstract. – This article traces the evolution of Isaiah Berlin’s reading of Machiavellian thought from the 1950s to the 1970s, based on unpublished letters and archival materials and through comparing the editions of Berlin’s essay on Niccolò Machiavelli. Examination of the historical and intellectual context in which Berlin’s study took place allows us to highlight the influences and conditioning that led Berlin to switch from his early monistic interpretation of Machiavellian writings to a clearly pluralistic and even liberal one. Comparing Berlin’s interpretation of the Florentine secretary with those provided by Leo Strauss and Reinhold Niebuhr, the last part of the article explains the key role played by the reflections on Machiavelli in the development of Berlin’s realistic liberalism within the framework of the ideological conflict of the Cold War.
Testi e commenti
Laura Carotti, Cesare Rao e gli studi di ‘perspectiva’. Saggio per un’edizione del trattato IX dei Meteori	119
Abstract. – This paper provides the transcript of the ninth treatise of Cesare Rao’s Meteori, published in 1582, showing how the insertion of notions and concepts learnt by works about perspectiva allowed the Apulian philosopher to broaden his scientific investigation in the direction of an eclectic and multifaceted Aristotelianism.
Matteo Fadini, Volgarizzare il teatro della Riforma: la Comedia piacevole (Phasma) di Nicodemus Frischlin	171
Abstract. – The article examines the case of the Italian translation of the Phasma, a comedy written by Nicodemus Frischlin (performed in 1580 and published posthumously in 1590), as well as the political and theological context in which the play was born. The Italian version was printed in 1612 by Sebastian Müller in Augsburg providing a false location (Romanopoli), and was entitled Comedia piacevole della vera, antica, romana, catolica et apostolica chiesa. The new title as well as the addition of a false letter by Ferdinand I to Luther, which explains how Charles V’s brother would join the Reformation, enlighten the background of the translation. Hence, this can be regarded as an operation of religious proselytism achieved through literature. Furthermore, the article offers the complete edition of the Commedia with a brief comment.
Note e varietà
Raffaele Danna, Una scienza per la rinascita. Note su Paolo dell’Abaco e la matematica abacistica fiorentina	255
Abstract. – Florence, one of the capitals of the commercial revolution, was also the capital of the so-called tradition of abacus mathematics. The paper focuses on Paolo dell’Abaco, arguably the most prominent Florentine abacus master of the 14th century. Although not new to the literature, Paolo dell’Abaco’s works have not yet been published in their entirety, nor thoroughly studied. The analysis concentrates on Paolo’s main work, the unpublished Trattato di tutta l’arte dell’abacho, offering an overview of what is probably the earliest surviving manuscript preserving the text (BNCF, Fondo Nazionale II. IX. 57). This manuscript is a valuable source for outlining the distinctive features of practical mathematics in 14th century Florence, providing a significant case-study in the reception and vulgarization of Leonardo Fibonacci’s mathematical heritage.
Susanne Beiweis – Lauri Ockenström, Memory, Mercury and Magic in Marsilio Ficino’s De vita	271
Abstract. – The Renaissance period reflected a keen interest in developing tools for mnemotechnics and for improving mental capacity. In many innovations, for example in Camillo’s theatre, memory was closely connected to the theory of correspondences and the concept of occult properties applied in learned magic. One of the basic sources of the latter tradition was Marsilio Ficino’s De vita libri tres, a vast compilation of astrological medicine and magic. In De vita, Ficino does not discuss mnemotechnics as such, but his eclectic compendium offers various medical recipes and magical instruments for improving one’s memory. In this article we argue that prompted by his personal motives, in De vita Ficino created a fresh and innovative concept of memory, which occasionally connected memory to Mercury instead of Saturn and differed from certain traditional views. By moulding the earlier traditions he constructed a unique concept of mercurial memory that was, in accordance with his old habits, an amalgam of ancient mythology, astrology, Neoplatonism (both Greek and Latin) and medieval image magic, which was closely linked both to Ficino’s theories of memory and imagination, and to his practical applications for improving one’s memory.
Lorenza Tromboni, La discesa di Carlo VIII in Italia: l’impatto culturale di un evento politico tra XV e XVI secolo	297
Abstract. – In 1494 the French King Charles VIII came to Italy to claim back the reign of Naples. This military campaign had a strong cultural impact in France and in Italy; a remarkable number of works were composed before, during and after the French invasion. This article explores the intellectual production linked to the Italian campaign of Charles VIII with the aim of identifying trends and patterns in the evolution of political thought between the 15th and 16th century. The sources analyzed in this study have been selected according to a specific methodology of research: the dimension of the geographical itinerary is crucial, as well as the need to document the literary production in different languages – Latin, the vernacular languages (French, Italian), and Turkish. The different perspectives of the authors are stressed in order to highlight the seeds of a modern political awareness.
Rita Ramberti, Riprese del tema dell’anima in Pietro Pomponazzi dopo il De immortalitate animae: dal De fato al De nutritione et augmentatione	335
Abstract. – Once the controversy raised by the publication of De immortalitate animae (1516) came to an end, Pietro Pomponazzi devoted himself to further pondering the relationship between universal determination and human individuality, begun in De immortalitate and defensive works. At the same time, with the reduction of phenomena to the order of physical-astral causes operated in De incantationibus, in De fato (1520) he undertook theological research on the various aspects of Aristotelian-Stoic and Christian providentialism. De nutritione et augmentatione (1521) is instead aimed at investigating the physical and biological processes in which quantitative motions occur in the sublunary world. Resumption and variations of themes and metaphors from the De immortalitate to the last treatises demonstrate the continuity of a theoretical tension oriented in multiple directions (physical, theological and biological), to define the principium individuationis and the role of men in a universe governed by necessity.
Luca Burzelli, Aspetti della tradizione aristotelica nel De immortalitate animae: Gasparo Contarini lettore di Avicenna	365
Abstract. – The treatise De immortalitate animae by Gasparo Contarini has often been described as a summary of Thomistic arguments with which the Venetian philosopher attempted to challenge his master, Pietro Pomponazzi, in order to defend the immortality of the soul. The aim of this article is to analyze more closely the structure of the treatise, its main arguments and the most relevant authorities used by Contarini – both openly and silently. In this context, it is important to reconsider the role of Aquinas in his argumentation and to underline the profound influence of Avicenna’s De anima. Indeed, the Persian philosopher provided Contarini with several fundamental concepts for the defense of immortality, namely substantial form and perfection, which only appear capable of confronting Pomponazzi’s questions on the role of phantasy
Jacopo Gesiot, Notizia di un plagio romanzo: Joanot Martorell nel Duello regolato di Fausto da Longiano	391
Abstract. – This article highlights for the first time the precise reuse of Joanot Martorell’s Tirant lo Blanc in the Duello regolato a le leggi dell’honore (1551) by Sebastiano Fausto da Longiano. The author, who had already been active as a translator from Spanish, includes passages of the Catalan novel in his treatise, converting them into models of «cartelli di querela» as a camouflage. As scholars have demonstrated, recourse to plagiarized material was a very common procedure in the sixteenth century, but in this case it also responds to the need for ideal examples of conduct from the aristocratic collective imagination; indeed, fictional paragons of chivalry validate the patrician ethic better than juridical discourses, especially when they are believed to have happened in the historical past rather than in literature.
Giorgio Caravale, Francesco Pucci e Thomas Bodley. Un’intima amicizia intellettuale tra Londra e Oxford (1573-1576)	403
Abstract. – Thomas Bodley and Francesco Pucci: the former was an internationally known diplomat and patron, the founder of one of the oldest libraries in the western world, while the latter was a Florentine merchant, a religious polemicist, a theologian and philosopher branded a heretic by Catholics and Protestants alike. In the light of three previously unpublished letters held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, presented here for the first time in the original Latin version, this article reconstructs their intellectual friendship in early 1570s England and their relationship with the main figures of English academic culture of the time.
Giuseppe Bruno-Chomin, Utopian Redemption and the Plurality of Worlds: Tommaso Campanella and Cyrano de Bergerac	427
Abstract. – The seventeenth-century ‘nuova scienza’ challenged Christian theology and many traditional modes of thinking. Theories such as the plurality of worlds and pre-Adamism became highly controversial and intellectually pervasive topics. Philosophers in both Italy and France textually engaged with intellectual developments, and utopian narratives emerged aimed at understanding human existence, and its presumed centrality, vis-à-vis other life forms in a potentially limitless universe. This essay considers Tommaso Campanella’s La città del Sole, his Apologia pro Galileo and Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde ou les États et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil and their treatment of cosmic pluralism, pre-Adamism, and utopian notions of redemption.
Variazioni
Jonathan Salina, Umanesimo, retorica e «civil conversazione» nel pensiero di Ernesto Grassi	449
Archivio
Inaugurazione della Scuola post-dottorale ‘Eugenio Garin’	467
Indice dei manoscritti	475
Indice dei nomi	479