Francesco Patrizi Research Articles

Medicina y política en Francesco Patrizi: el cuerpo de <em>La Ciudad Feliz</em>

Besides some disagreements, La citta felice of Francesco Patrizi has usually been considered both as a work belonging to the utopian genre of sixteenth century or as a philosophical portrait of the real Venice. In this essay, I maintain, instead, that La citta felice was born in Patrizi’s mind from his attempt to support the Aristotelian political, aristocratic, order and to justify it according to the principles of the philosophical and Platonic medicine of Marsilio Ficino. Such an attempt led him to describe the polis as a human body, applying the Hippocratic-Galenic system to explain its internal functions and considering that the political order of the city arises from the civic body’s needs for maintaining the quantity and quality of natural, vital and animal spiritus.

“Not before either known or dreamt of”: The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the craft of wonder

The multiple readings of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili have led scholars to compare the text to one of the most enigmatic of sixteenth-century Italian gardens, Vicino Orsini’s Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo, with one author tracing the similarity to the Dalmatian philosopher Francesco Patrizi’s poetics of wonderment. Wonderment, however, was also an indispensable tool of monastic meditation practices that incorporated an art of memory. This essay argues that the similarity between the garden and the text is due to the fact that both reject the principle of Aristotelian mimesis and insist on wonderment either as the ultimate goal of the poet or as the monk’s indispensable tool for meditation

Plato’s Hermaphrodite and a Vindication of the Sense of Touch in the Sixteenth Century

AbstractThis essay considers readings of Plato’sSymposiumin sixteenth-centurytrattati d’amore(love treatises) — especially Francesco Patrizi’sL’amorosa filosofia— that offer an alternative to Marsilio Ficino’s pervasive interpretation as presented in hisDe amore. Against the backdrop of a larger debate concerning the role of the lower senses (touch, in particular) and the relationship between body and soul, these alternative readings of theSymposiumattempt to redeem the role of tactility in love matters. Whereas Ficino and his most influential followers — Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, and Baldassare Castiglione — center their exegesis on Diotima’s speech and privilege sight as the most noble sense, Patrizi’s reading — to a large extent preceded by those of Sperone Speroni, Agnolo Firenzuola, and Flaminio Nobili — focuses on Aristophanes’s myth and the figure of the hermaphrodite as the model for a different kind of human love that is both sensual and spiritual.

Francesco Patrizi e a crítica à concepção historiográfica do “burlesco” Luciano

The series of norms and considerations about the historiographic work established by Lucian in his How to Write History exercised a great influence on the genre of the ars historica in Renaissance. If Cicero’s De oratore is the main literary source for the recovery of the exemplum, Lucian’s work is often called into question in regard to issues related to the writing of the historical account, such as diction and style, brevity, syntax, as well as the qualities of a good historian. The crisis of this model of humanist historiography will be criticized by Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, in his “Della historia diece dialoghi”, published in 1560 in Venice. In the opening dialogues, Patrizi condemns the early humanists’ diligent affiliation to the auctoritates, in an endeavor to bring down the basis from which the whole preceding historiography was built. Thus, this article aims at: evincing the presence of Lucian’s work in humanist historiography; and 2) examining the sense of Patrizi’s criticism of the principles given by the “beffardo” Luciano.

Maravilha e conhecimento de Tasso a Vico

É um lugar comum associar o Barroco à meraviglia. Depois de contemplar o verso de Marino, è del poeta il fin la meraviglia, meu ensaio discutirá as concepções poéticas de Tasso, as quais unem o maravilhoso e a verossimilhança dentro do enquadramento da religião (ou seja, como uma representação do sobrenatural). A formulação de Tasso de que tudo que faz sentido é verdadeiro é discutida aqui em referência aos episódios amorosos de seu poema Jerusalem liberada. O ensaio abordará os escritos teóricos de Francesco Patrizi, que em seu Deca Ammirabil define o poeta como criador do maravilhoso, e também abordará o Cannocchiale Aristotelico de Emanuele Tesauro. O maravilhoso no século XVII também é uma característica dos escritos de Galileu, tanto como um traço da natureza das coisas, como uma manifestação da genialidade dos seres humanos na descoberta e invenção. A conclusão do ensaio enfoca a Scienza Nuova de Vico.

The Birth of Tragedy in the Cinquecento: Humanism and Literary History

Humanist literary historians treated Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ in a distinctive way: as a historical source. How had the Greek tragedy arisen, what was its relation to the comedy, and how was it performed? They approached Aristotle’s scanty and confusing words with a repertoire of methods: bold inference and exegesis, textual criticism, and above all comparison with Roman texts. These discussions were deeply relevant to the rise of the opera around 1600. Angelo Poliziano, Francesco Robortello, Piero Vettori, and Francesco Patrizi da Cherso are examined.

Francesco Patrizi’s two books on space: geometry, mathematics, and dialectic beyond Aristotelian science

Francesco Patrizi was a competent Greek scholar, a mathematician, and a Neoplatonic thinker, well known for his sharp critique of Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. In this article I shall present, in the first part, the importance of the concept of a three-dimensional space which is regarded as a body, as opposed to the Aristotelian two-dimensional space or interval, in Patrizi’s discussion of physical space. This point, I shall argue, is an essential part of Patrizi’s overall critique of Aristotelian science, in which Epicurean, Stoic, and mainly Neoplatonic elements were brought together, in what seems like an original theory of space and a radical revision of Aristotelian physics. Moreover, I shall try to show Patrizi’s dialectical method of definition, his geometrical argumentation, and trace some of the ideas and terms used by him back to Proclus’ Commentary on Euclid. This text of Proclus, as will be shown in the second part of the article, was also important for Patrizi’s discussion of mathematical space, where Patrizi deals with the status of mathematics and redefines some mathematical concepts such as the point and the line according to his new theory of space.

Locus est spatium On Gerald Odonis' Quaestio de loco

Abstract This article examines Gerald Odonis' view on the nature of place as found in his commentary on the Sentences (Sent. II, d. 2, qq. 3-5) and in an anonymous question (Utrum locus sit ultima superficies corporis ambientis immobile primum) extant in manuscript Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, 4229. Both texts defend a thoroughly un-Aristotelian conception of place as three-dimensional space. Odonis not only deviates from Aristotle's definition of place as the inner surface of a surrounding body, but also from the positions of his contemporaries, including fellow Franciscans. Despite some remarkable doctrinal similarities between Odonis' view and that of Renaissance innovators like Francesco Patrizi and Bernardino Telesio, it seems unlikely that Gerald played a role in the rise of new conceptions of place in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. An edition of the anonymous Quaestio de loco is given in an appendix.

Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (review)

and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By Claude V. Palisca, ed. by Thomas J. Mathiesen. (Studies in the History of Theory and Literature.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. [x, 302 p. ISBN 0-252-03156-3. $35.] Illustrations, bibliographical references, index. The intellectual legacy of a musicologist begins with writing a dissertation, an exercise that demands both a demonstration of familiarity with the broad structure of a research area and, often, detailed technical forays into identifying and solving problems posed by that structure. When scholars also become teachers, as Claude Palisca was for five years at the University of Illinois and thirty-three years at Yale University, they also develop the art of presenting complex arguments, reorganizing knowledge, and then communicating that reorganization persuasively in the classroom as well as in print. Palisca's broadest contribution to the teaching of music history were his multiple re-editions of Donald Grout's History of Western Music, his particular home within that history was music in the Renaissance and baroque eras and its inescapable connections to the music of the ancient Greeks and Romans, even though ancient music itself was unknowable. From his first scholarly article in 1954 to his last in 2000 (which appeared in 2003), Palisca worked from original letters, treatises in manuscript and in print, and music scores, sorting out to what extent the moderns knew the ancients, what they understood and misunderstood of them, and how Italian writers in particular not only codified but also, more interestingly, influenced musical composition and performance in their time. Sometimes Palisca's research explained networks between sources; he published masterfully annotated translations of several treatises; at other times, he studied critics looking at specific dissonances and accidentals within music scores. His books Humanism in Italian Renaissance Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) opened windows to specific writers and treatises. They made it clear that by theory Palisca meant far more than rules of musical compositions or descriptions of musical systems. He was investigating how thinking about music-whether it was about scores or tuning or creating operafit into learned inquiry in a fervently learned era. When Clarendon Press issued updated versions of nineteen of his essays dating from 1956 to 1986 as Studies in the History of Italian and Theory (Oxford, 1994), it seemed that, like Johann Sebastian Bach, Palisca in retirement was also surveying his own work for its own collective structure. The posthumously edited book under review here, and Ideas, provides the keys and intellectual contexts to Palisca's numerous studies, as well as a kind of narrative organization to his oeuvre. The language and presentation are clear and largely non-technical, as if accompanying a Anthology of Humanist Musical Theory. Anyone tackling Palisca's articles today or his interests would do well to begin with this, his last book, first drafted in 1997 and revised by him up to late 2000. The chapter titles signal not only the broad themes Palisca intended by ideas but also the importance of each discussion. In the third chapter on Sense over Reason: The Anti-Theoretical Tradition, for example, Palisca describes how modern Italians disagreed with, set aside, and advanced new arguments against establishment theorists like hoary Boethius or the numerology of Gioseffo Zarlino. In Theories of Monody and Dramatic Music (chap. 7), he rewrites a story that every music student has read in one edition or another of the Norton History of Western Music; but here Palisca integrates the views of classical scholar Girolamo Mei on the different modes used for actors and choruses in ancient Greek drama, of humanist Francesco Patrizi on Greek poetic forms, and the arguments of lutenist-theorist Vincenzo Galilei and singer-composer Giulio Caccini on solo singing. …

Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric (review)

224 Reviews Rebhorn, Wayne A., ed. and trans., Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2000; paper; pp. viii, 332; R R P £14.95; ISBN 0801482062. The Renaissance has long been known as 'the age of rhetoric', but this collec of writings on the subject demonstrates w h y rhetoric was such an important, and yet unsettling force within Renaissance culture. Stressing the intention that the texts should speak for themselves, Wayne R e b h o m utilises excerpts, supplementing these with explanatory notes where necessary, in order to include the broadest selection of writers possible. Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric features 25 writers, spanning the period from Petrarch in the mid-fourteenth century to Rene Bary in the mid-seventeenth century. The texts range from expositions of rhetorical devices to extravagant attacks and ardent defences of rhetoric's power. Each selection is prefaced by helpful biographical details, a brief overview of the writer's work, and a short introduction to the selected text/s. Footnotes explain obscurities and trace sources where necessary, while the inclusion of a biographical glossary and a bibliography of works on rhetoric increase the userfriendliness of the volume. Rebhom has modernised the spelling of English texts, and his preference for idiomatic English has ensured that even the more obscure translations remain accessible. There is nothing monolithic about the texts included in this volume: they rehearse the disputes of classical antiquity, but illuminate the relevance of such arguments to Renaissance culture and thought. In an intelligent introduction, Rebhom outlines the disparity between writers w h o assert the inherent nobility of the art of rhetoric, and those who provide grave warnings about its capacity for disrupting social order and threatening peace. Somewhere between these poles, Francis Bacon and Peter Ramus appear to justify rhetoric while, at the same time, reveal their hostility towards an art of words. Rebhom conjectures that eloquence is easily dismissed in this way as 'mere rhetoric' (p. 10), due to its association with subjective rather than absolute truths. This tenuous relationship between truth and rhetoric is taken up by opponents, including Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and John Jewel, w h o deride rhetoric as the art of lying, declaring it to be an instrument of social dismption and the symptom of afracturedstate. In response, proponents, including George of Trebizond, laud rhetoric as the great equaliser, an indicator of man's worth, and the means of acquiring and maintaining social order. In a reversal of Mirandola's criticism, Rene Bary ventures so far as to assert eloquence's capacity for impeding man's corruption of truth (p. 286). Reviews 225 Rebhom has chosen and edited his texts carefully in order to highlight the scope of Renaissance debate about the usefulness and role of rhetoric in society. Excerpts from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's On Rhetoric and Francesco Patrizi's Ten Dialogues on Rhetoric convey a concern that the art, perfected by legal practitioners, could subordinate the unbiased discovery of truth to the lawyer's desire to 'win'. B y way of contrast to such attacks, writers including Nicholas Caussin and Philip Melanchthon defend the power of rhetoric as a thing of beauty, a 'heavenly seed' capable of inspiring 'people's spirits' to feelings ofdivinity (p. 275). The rhetorician is thus variously imagined. For some writers, he is Pygmalion-like in his obsessive artifice and, for others, he embodies the civilising force of Orpheus' song. It is perhaps in the positioning of rhetoric as a specifically political tool, however, that these Renaissance writers distinguish themselves from the classical writers they are so heavily indebted to. While the writers of classical antiquity considered rhetoric's role within a republic, Renaissance writers responded to their o w n political model. Absolute sovereignty centralised the power of rhetoric in the Prince, and battled against the reality that an eloquent subject might threaten sovereignty by employing rhetoric to attack his Prince. More generally, this monarchic model was considered susceptible to corruption, providing skilledflattererswith a deceitful means of acquiring favour and status at court. The debate surrounding rhetoric as a political tool is, for R e b h o m 'one ofthe most striking debates' to emerge from...

La tradición clásica en el Perú virreinalLa formación de la cultura virreinal. Vol. 1: La etapa inicial

La tradición clásica en el Perú virreinalLa formación de la cultura virreinal. Vol. 1: La etapa inicial

New developments in Bruno studies: A critique of Frances Yates

Abstract When the name of Giordano Bruno is mentioned today in Renaissance studies, particularly in the English-speaking world, it is still usually qualified by a specific appellation: ‘Giordano Bruno, the Hermetic magus’, followed by a reference to Frances Yate's widely admired monograph on Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition. For Bruno as Hermetic magus was a Yatesian ‘discovery’, correctly heralded as a dramatic innovation with respect to the preceding critical tradition. The interpretation is clearly an interesting one for a philosopher of the same generation as known Hermetic enthusiasts such as Francesco Patrizi or Tommaso Campanella.

A note on Francesco Patrizi's use of Cleomedes

A note on Francesco Patrizi's use of Cleomedes

Francesco Patrizi da Cherso's concept of space and its later influence

Summary This study considers the contribution of Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–1597) to the development of the concepts of void space and an infinite universe. Patrizi plays a greater role in the development of these concepts than any other single figure in the sixteenth century, and yet his work has been almost totally overlooked. I have outlined his views on space in terms of two major aspects of his philosophical attitude: on the one hand, he was a devoted Platonist and sought always to establish Platonism, albeit his own version of it, as the only currect philosophy; and on the other hand, he was more determinedly anti-Aristotelian than any other philosopher at that time. Patrizi's concept of space has its beginnings in Platonic notions, but is extended and refined in the light of a vigorous critique of Aristotle's position. Finally, I consider the influence of Patrizi's ideas in the seventeenth century, when various thinkers are seeking to overthrow the Aristotelian concept of place and the equiv...

Some renaissance critiques of Aristotle's theory of time

Summary This paper offers a preliminary enquiry into a largely neglected topic: the concept of time in the post-medieval, pre-Newtonian era. Although Aristotle's theory of time was predominant in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it was, in this period, subjected to the most serious attack since that by the ancient Neoplatonists. In particular, in the work of Bernadino Telesio, Giordano Bruno and Francesco Patrizi we have concerted attempts to reconsider Aristotle's definition of time. Although the approach of each is different, all three endeavour to dissociate time from movement and to conceive it as part of an independent duration. They were probably inspired by Neoplatonism, and they offer important antecedents to Newton's theory of absolute time.

Members of Francesco Patrizi's Family Appearing in His Letters and Epigrams

It is hard to believe that Francesco Patrizi of Siena (1413-94) stopped writing letters when, after he was ejected from his governorship of Foligno (1461-64), he reluctantly, one imagines, took up residence in his diocese of Gaeta. His letters, after he left Foligno, do not seem to have been preserved, so that, as I have pointed out in a previous article, his Epigrams are the most fertile and practically the only source for his activities in the last thirty years of his life.His Letters, all from the Foligno period, deal overwhelmingly with his duties as Papal Governor, which he seems to have fulfilled most faithfully, but there are enough private letters mingled with them to throw light on the lives of his own family and those of some friends. The present article will be limited to his family.

A Notice of the Epigrammata of Francesco Patrizi, Bishop of Gaeta

The coming to light of a manuscript of the unpublished Epigrammata of Franciscus Patricius (Francesco Patrizi) of Siena (1413-1494) provides insights into the practical blank which was the history of this humanist from his settling in his diocese of Gaeta in 1465 until his death. For his life up to that point D. Bassi in an article, which is still fundamental, painstakingly gathered the facts. For the years 1461-1464, when Patrizi was governor of Foligno, his own Epistolae are a valuable and interesting source but only a few have ever been printed. Felice Battaglia recapitulated the known facts and added some documentation but, like Bassi, had little to say about the period 1465-1494.

Experimental Evidence for and against a Void: The Sixteenth-Century Arguments

ONE OF THE CHIEF identifiable characteristics of the period which we call the Renaissance is that philosophical thought gradually but steadily rejected Aristotle as the dominant authority. The Stagirite's teachings regarding logic, metaphysics, and psychology were all seriously and fundamentally questioned during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the course of the sixteenth century there emerged a strong critical tendency which directed its attention more toward Aristotle's natural philosophy. Among the thinkers of this century who criticized Aristotle from one or another viewpoint concerning his doctrines of natural philosophy were Gianfrancesco Pico, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Petrus Ramus, Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi, Giambattista Benedetti, Giordano Bruno, and the young Galileo Galilei. In all of these writers we find a deep-seated antipathy to the Peripatetic world view. Included in nearly all sixteenth-century critiques of Aristotle is some discussion of whether a void or empty space exists or could exist in without supernatural intervention. Since the Aristotelian dictum nature abhors a vacuum turned out to be one of his most questionable pronouncements and one which seems to have been experimentally refuted in the seventeenth century, it may be fruitful to once more consider the background of these important experiments.1 In my opinion we can distinguish at least four different ways in which the