| Saggi e testimonianze | |
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Laura Zabeo, La biblioteca perduta del cardinal Antonio Cerdà. Esempi di committenza ecclesiastica romana alla metà del Quattrocento |
3 |
| Abstract. – This investigation – developed from the PhD thesis I libri dei papi umanisti. La miniatura a Roma nel primo Rinascimento, Firenze 2017 – explores a case study of an ecclesiastical library belonging to one of the most important cardinals and intellectuals of the mid-15th century, the Spanish theologian Antonio de la Cerda (1390-1459). Through the reconstruction of his patronage of illuminated manuscripts, in particular a luxurious series in three volumes of Nicholas of Lira’s Postilla super Biblia, in Vetus et Novum Testamentum, it is possible to study the particular phenomenon of Roman book production. This refined library collection not only testifies to the affirmation of the new Renaissance book model, but it also reflects the vibrant and international artistic environment of the city of the popes, which attracted illuminators and scribes from many Italian regions and from all over Europe. | |
| Nicolò Magnani, Giorgio Valla e gli albori della poetica neoaristotelica | 31 |
| Abstract. – The essay explores the beginnings of Aristotelian theory about the art of poetry in early Renaissance Italy and beyond, focusing especially on the role of Giorgio Valla’s work – his Latin translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (1498) and the book De poetica, from his special encyclopedic treatise De expetendis et fugiendis rebus (1501). The study helps shed light on the actual importance of this latter work by identifying the presence of a genuinely Aristotelian idea of poetry, establishing it as a landmark in the reception of the Poetics in the Renaissance. In addition, the essay undertakes an initial survey of De poetica’s numerous classical sources – especially Greek grammarians and metricists – which greatly support the Aristotelian framework of the treatise. This investigation highlights the importance of classical knowledge in the development of Renaissance theories on the art of poetry. | |
| Vojtěch Hladký, Francesco Patrizi on Hermes Trismegistus and Orpheus: The Use of Hermetica and Orphica in the Nova de universis philosophia | 59 |
| Abstract. – This study presents a comprehensive account of Patrizi’s use of ancient Hermetic and Orphic texts in his most substantial philosophical work, Nova de universis philosophia, complementing this author’s article devoted to the presence of Chaldean (Magian) Oracles in this treatise. As in the previous article, the study aims to survey all passages where quotations from the Hermetica and Orphica appear in the Nova de universis philosophia and to place them within the broader argument of the book. The study also offers a broader comparison of various aspects of all these texts, which according to Patrizi constitute primordial ancient wisdom. In its final part, the author discusses Patrizi’s understanding of the particular literary genres of these texts, whose degree of authority depends on whether they are based on inspired and metaphysical poetry (the Chaldean Oracles and partly the Orphica) or a proto-philosophical dialogue (the Hermetica). | |
| Michele Ciliberto, Henry Cobham, Giordano Bruno e la religione. Variazioni su un tema |
99 |
| Abstract. – This essay aims to examine the concept of religion in Giordano Bruno’s work. Starting from the negative judgement about Bruno’s religion expressed in a letter by Henry Cobham, English ambassador in Paris, to Francis Walsingham, the author analyzes Bruno’s founding of a new concept of religio, focusing especially on Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (London 1584) and on the preface of Articuli adversus mathematicos (Prague 1588). The argumentation is also based upon an accurate discussion of the processual documents. | |
| Testi e commenti | |
| Claudia Bassani, «Copia d’una pistola mandata a uno amico sanato d’una gravissima infirmità»: per l’attribuzione a Piero Bonaccorsi di una lettera anonima nelle miscellanee di prose fiorentine | 141 |
| Abstract. – The article proposes the attribution to the Florentine notary Piero Bonaccorsi (1410-1477) of Copia d’una pistola mandata a uno amico sanato d’una gravissima infirmità (Copy of an epistle sent to a friend cured of a serious illness), a letter preserved in anonymous form in sixteen Florentine manuscripts of the 15th century, which collected together rhetorical-civil texts. Starting from the discovery of the untraceable private codex Kraus lot 491, in which the notary’s name appears at the end of the epistle, the essay examines the sources (mainly biblical and patristic) mentioned in the letter. Most of them coincide in fact with texts transcribed, quoted or certainly known by Piero Bonaccorsi. A stylistic comparison is then carried out between the anonymous epistle and Bonaccorsi’s other writings. Finally, the essay presents the recensio of the manuscripts transmitting the letter, to which two new acquisitions are added, and provides the first complete edition of the text, based on the codex Kraus. |
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| Ovanes Akopyan – Anastasia Malkova, Medicine, Astrology, and Self-Censorship: Translating Marsilio Ficino in Muscovy (ca. 1580-1620) | 165 |
| Abstract. – This essay traces the history and intellectual context of a unique source: the late 16th-century Russian translation of several chapters of the De vita libri tres by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Through a meticulous reconstruction of the trajectory of Ficino’s text toward Moscow and the subsequent translation commission, this article sheds light on a particular features of the reception of foreign learning in the 16th- and early 17th-century Muscovite state. The essay also provides an annotated edition of the Russian fragments of Ficino’s renowned treatise. | |
| Note e varietà | |
| Raphael Ebgi, I filosofi della ‘voluptas’. Riflessioni sul pensiero del primo Marsilio Ficino | 203 |
| Abstract. – This paper aims to show how Ficino’s earlier works reflect his curiosity about authors and doctrines that had been deemed on the verge of heresy throughout the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Our study of these texts will show how Ficino ended up setting forth a highly original theory, according to which several ancient theological and philosophical traditions would share, at their core, a peculiar ‘philosophy of pleasure (voluptas)’, which holds the pleasure of the mind as superior to contemplation in the pursuit of the highest form of happiness (beatitudo). This hedonistic doctrine would have been embraced by a chain of authors, beginning with Hermes Trismegistus, continuing with Plato, Democritus, and Pyrrhus, and culminating with Epicurus. This perspective, according to Ficino himself, was later on accepted as well by Origen of Alexandria, Avicenna, and Al-Ghazali. | |
| Leonardo Francalanci, Letture (neo)platoniche del Triumphus Mortis nel Comento laurenziano | 223 |
| Abstract. – This article investigates the influence of Petrarch’s Triumphs, and of Tr. Mortis in particular, on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Comento. Lorenzo’s interpretation of the poem set forth in the first part of his prosimetrum, clearly influenced by Ficino’s teachings on (neo)platonic Love, shows that during the last quarter of the 15th century the author of the Canzoniere was not only regarded as a model of style, but as the author of the Triumphs, was also admired for his sententiae and considered a worthy auctoritas alongside other philosophers in vernacular such as Dante and Cavalcanti. | |
| Luca Burzelli, Una causaliltà auto-limitata. Note su libero arbitrio e predestinazione secondo Gasparo Contarini | 257 |
| Abstract. – This article considers the issues of free will, predestination and justification, as explored by Gasparo Contarini in his private and public letters of the 1530s. Contarini had been developing a theory of the causal bounds since his youth at the university. Later, from 1530 he mingled these philosophical issues with religious problems. This double approach, which combines the authority of Aristotle with the texts of St. Paul, characterizes three famous letters which immediately circulated as public pamphlets, i.e., De libero arbitrio, De praedestinatione and De justificatione. Finally, the article considers Contarini’s position during the Colloquy of Regensburg (1541), where the cardinal proposed a compromise theory of justification, which was closely connected with the aforesaid letters: indeed, he pointed at a middle way between Scylla and Charybdis, i.e., between Augustine and Pelagius, for which the salvation of the soul requires both divine grace and personal active participation. | |
| Alessandra Preda, Rabelais e la chimera: la biblioteca di Saint-Victor ‘au plus haut sens’ | 277 |
| Abstract. – The essay comments on Saint Victor’s library, described by Rabelais via an improbable catalogue, in Chapter VII of Pantagruel. The analysis of the repertoyre’s titles – which Rabelais restores in macaronic language – shows the perfect ‘deconstruction’ of privileged expressions of scholastic institutions, while highlighting the creativity of a critical procedure also aimed at renewal. Nothing is removed, but changes form; Rabelais’s repertoyre is not just an anti-library, against scholastic culture, but also a library ‘au plus haut sens’. The essay highlights a sort of permeable library aimed at representing the transition to modernity that 16th century humanism experienced, critically. The surplus of titles guarantees the polysemy of the res literaria that the library intends to preserve; at the same time, it shows its most problematic character, as a locus called to contain, even if not in a linear way, an abnormal cultural heritage. The ideal library – multilingual, polysemic, and inclusive – is, perhaps, a chimera. |
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| Marco Matteoli, Una quintuplice sfera: sulla ‘seconda’ lezione oxoniense di Giordano Bruno | 297 |
| Abstract. – In this paper we first attempt to reconstruct the discussion about Bruno’s second lecture at Oxford University in the summer of 1583. Next, we propose the reading of a passage of Insomnium (Paris 1586), in which a ‘vision’ of the astronomical system is outlined, similar to what Bruno himself would describe a few years later in Articuli adversus mathematicos (1588) and then in De immenso (1591), and which has never been read by the critics in an astronomical sense. Starting from this brief account, we try to show how shortly after the publication of the Italian dialogues, Bruno already had in mind an idea of the ‘solar system’ based on the centrality of the Sun and only four surrounding ‘orbits’. Although much time has passed since the Oxonian lectures, it is worth noting that the Insomnium system (more explicitly) and those proposed in the following texts presuppose a system formed by five ‘spheres’, just like the title Bruno himself gave to that lecture. | |
| Variazioni | |
| Gianluca Montinaro, Il Ragionamento sulla pestilenza dell’anno 1576 di Ludovico Agostini | 347 |
| Abstract. – This essay proposes, for the very first time, the edition of the Ragionamento sulla pestilenza dell’anno 1576 by Ludovico Agostini (Pesaro, 1536-Gradara, 1612). The work, written on the occasion of the plague that devastated Northern Italy in 1576, is structured as a letter addressed to a personified Italy. The writer does not narrate the tragedy of the plague; instead, Agostini is interested in showing how this invincible disease is the preferred means with which God acts in History. According to Agostini it was punishment for the many sins committed by Italy against God and the true faith. But it is also a way of atonement. In Ragionamento sulla pestilenza dell’anno 1576, using many examples taken from the Bible and from classical works, Agostini («driven by profound religiosity and sincere love of your country», as wrote Luigi Firpo) admonishes Italy and encourages it to purify itself and embrace faith with a sincere heart. | |
| Miriam Benfatto, Sulla storia degli effetti del Sefer ḥizzuq emunah (fine XVI sec.) di Yiṣḥaq ben Avraham Troqi: la trasformazione degli argomenti polemici nelle biblioteche dei filosofi (XVII-XVIII sec.) | 365 |
| Abstract. – This paper examines an important source of anti-Christian ideas and the circulation of Jewish polemics against Christianity. The main object is the Sefer ḥizzuq emunah (The Strengthening of Faith) (late 16th century), written by the Karaite scholar Yisḥ ̣aq ben Avraham Troqi (ca. 1533-1594), and its circulation during the 17th and 18th centuries. The manuscript copies (17th and 18th centuries) and the first printed edition (late 17th century) attracted the attention of philosophers and may have played a role in their critique of Christian religion, especially in the context of the so-called radical Enlightenment. | |
| Archivio | |
| Simonetta Bassi, Giordano Bruno a Oxford di Ludovico Limentani | 391 |
| Ludovico Limentani, Giordano Bruno a Oxford | 396 |
| Offset | |
| Incipit: nuovi libri nuove idee | 427 |
| Incipit: New Books New Ideas | 431 |
| Indice dei manoscritti | 437 |
| Indice dei nomi | 441 |
Rivista dell'Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento – Firenze