It has sometimes been suggested that Florentine chancellor Coluccio Salutati, like Hercules in the well-known Xenophon passage, is a figure in bivio – in this case, confronted with the diverging roads of ‘humanistic’ virtue and Christian morality. The present article aims to reconsider this characterisation through the study of Salutati’s De laboribus Herculis, a lengthy treatise on the allegorical interpretation of Seneca’s Hercules plays, especially in light of the seldom recognised presence of Saint Augustine. By identifying Augustine’s De civitate Dei as a primary source – based on references, marginal notes, and other intertextual elements –, one can subsequently see how Salutati’s conception of the theologia poetarum as a bridge between the pagan and the Christian world was fundamentally inspired by his reading of the City of God.
This article studies the oration read by Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459) at the funeral of the Leonardo Bruni, the chancellor of Florence, in the basilica of Santa Croce in March 1444. An analysis of the eulogy’s models and sources is followed by a study of the transmission of the text – which survives in 21 manuscripts and was published once before, in 1741, from a single witness – and its annotated critical edition.
The essay seeks to situate and interpret the BLONDI FLAVII FORLIVIENSIS ADDITIONES CORRECTIONESQVE ITALIAE ILLVSTRATAE of 1462 (much of it mirrored in Pius II Piccolomini’s Commentarii) – within the context of contemporary events and of the author’s Italia illustrata and entire life’s antiquarian work – as an un-mercenary encomium of Pius’ papacy, a history and celebration of the ‘founding’ of Pienza, and, in a minor key but insistently, as rationale and encouragement for a call to crusade.
This paper proposes a new taxonomy for glosses on printed books, focusing on the glosses located on the 16th-century printed copies of Fortunio’s Regole grammaticali and Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua. In analyzing those texts, three levels of classification will be taken into account: the function of the glosses; their location in the page; and their graphic style. For each of the twelve possible outcomes, resulting from the combination of these three levels, some examples from Regole and Prose will be provided.
This article examines a modification introduced by Levinius Apollonius in his translation of a passage of Historia del descubrimiento y conquista del Peru (1555) by Agustín de Zárate, which he included in his De peruviae regionis inventione (1566). It argues that the change responds to Apollonius’s adoption of the idea of love as developed by the Renaissance Neoplatonic tradition. The final section of this article focuses on the implications of the link between ingenio (wit) and love in the debates on the character of Amerindians in early colonial literature.
The Library of the Episcopal Seminary and the Diocesan Historical Archive of Lodi preserve rare copies of printed texts of the XVI and XVII centuries, relating to the liturgy of the diocese’s patron saint, San Bassiano. Among these a particular attention goes to the Officium praeclari confessoris atque pontificis Laudae divi Bassiani by Giovanni Giacomo Gabbiano: published in 1561 in Venice by Comin da Trino, the Officium is a humanistic elaboration of liturgical texts. The analysis of these kinds of printed texts, appeared before and after the break of the Trento Council, and the comparison with those handed down from the previous manuscript tradition, are very useful to the study of the local liturgical history.
The article investigates the presence of Oratorians in the European courts between the 16th and 17th centuries and focuses particularly on their relationship with the Roman court. Their entrance into the College of Cardinals and relationship with the Pontiff, as Bishop, temporal sovereign and Head of Christianity led the Fathers to reflect on the traits of these religious figures present in the courts. The Oratorian priests and cardinals, in their roles as confessors, directors of conscience, ambassadors and secretaries of the main congregations, were responsible for activating networks and mediation practices which influenced the policies of the Holy See.
The essay presents a research around the figure of the Milanese poet Francesco Ellio, who lived in Milan in the early seventeenth century and is so far known for being the author of idylls. In this paper Ellio, whose dense network of contacts and relationships in the Lombard city is gathered, is studied because he is the author of the first Italian translation of Cervantes’ Perciles, the last masterpiece of the Hispanic genius, published in 1617. The translation was edited in Venice for the printer Fontana in 1626, placing itself among the last traces of Ellio’s life, and will remain the only one in Italian until the nineteenth century.
The article aims to reconstruct the vast panorama of all literary and erudite sources used by Rosini in the composition of La monaca di Monza, outlining the declination he gave to the historical novel genre, responding to the primary purpose of educating the reader about the glories of the national literary past of the 16th and 17th centuries. By putting the pages of the novel into dialogue with his critical writings, we will outline his views on the relations between Tasso and the city of Florence, the literary academies of the grand-ducal capital (Fiorentina and Alterati) and the baroque poetry. From the analysis of the selected passages, we see a clear idea of literature based on classicism and respect for tradition. It’s a game of mirrors between past and present which also allows us to highlight the position occupied by Rosini within the cultural panorama of the 19th century, inserting him in the linguistic and literary debates of his contemporaries animated by the reborn Crusca and by the work of Monti.
This article assesses the extension and characteristics of d’Annunzio’s knowledge of the Renaissance in a corpus of eight texts. It discusses the distribution of the renaissance presences in each work, their geographical distribution, the variety of cited individuals and the evolution of the arts represented. and argues that d’Annunzio’s fashions the Renaissance and its vitalist spirit as the cornerstone of Italian identity in a period in which the Renaissance was generally stigmatized. The findings pave the way for further investigation of d’Annunzio’s influence on the reception of the Renaissance in the twentieth century.
L. Tomasin, Europa romanza. Sette storie linguistiche (P. Cherubini), p. 827 – T. Foffano, Il cardinale Branda Castiglioni legato pontificio e mecenate della cultura, a cura di A. Contess i – M. Ferrari (C.M. Monti), p. 829 – I paratesti nelle edizioni a stampa dei classici greci e latini (XV-XVIII sec.), a cura di G. Abbamonte – M. Laureys – L. Miletti (S. Brusa), p. 831 – C. Revest, Romam veni. Humanisme et apauté à la fin du Grand Schisme (P. Cherubini), p. 833 – L. Gualdo Rosa, La carriera di Giovanni Aurispa al servizio della curia. Da Eugenio IV a Callisto III, con un ricordo di Germano Gualdo di C. Bianca (C.M. Monti), p. 837 – M. Lodone, Invisibile come Dio. La vita e l’opera di Gabriele Biondo (D. Zardin), p. 839 – G. Mazzanti, Un imperatore musulmano. Il Liber de sceleribus et infelicitate perfidi turchi ac de spurcitia et feditate gentis et secte sue (1467/1468) di Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo (J. Schnapp), p. 845 – F. Gatti, Un ciceroniano nella Controriforma. Giovanni Pelliccioli e i classici greci e latini (S Stucchi), p. 847 – Francesco Bracciolini. Gli ‘ozi’ e la corte, introduzione di M.C. Cabani, a cura di F. Contini – A. Lazzarini (F. Chiesa), p. 849 – C. Carminati, Tradizione, imitazione, modernità. Tasso e Marino visti dal Seicento (S. Apollonio), p. 851 – M. Verga, Alla morte del Re. Sovranità e leggi di successione nell’Europa dei secoli XVII e XVIII (G. Sodano), p. 854 – Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Carteggi con Bianconi .... Bottazzoni, a cura di A. Colombo (A. Brambilla), p. 856 – K. Fennelly, An archaeology of lunacy. Managing madness in early Nineteenth Century asylums (A. Tanturri), p. 857 – Simonde de Sismondi, Il carattere degli Italiani, a cura di R. Bizzocchi (R. Minuti), p. 859 – M. Broers – A.A. Caiani (eds.), S. Bann – G. Johnson – M. Price (sub-eds.), A history of the European Restorations, Volume One, Governments, States and Monarchy; M. Broers – A.A. Caiani – S. Bann (eds.), A history of the European Restorations, Volume Two, Culture, Society and Religion (R. Benzoni), p. 862
Le giovanni donne sempre più lontane, i giovani in solitaria ricerca, il dovere degli adulti di mettersi in ascolto: Paola Bignardi racconta il libro-inchiesta "Dio, dove sei?".