DONI, ANTON FRANCESCO. - Polymath, b. in 1513 in Florence, d. at Monselice in Sept. 1574. He was a Servite friar and later a secular priest (in Florence he opened a printing house in 1546 with the help of Cosimo I, but without success), a seeker of favors from princes and men of letters in various cities of central-northern Italy, and finally a solitary madman in an abandoned tower.
Quarrelsome, he furiously attacked Domenichi and Aretino, the "bestial antichrist" (Il terremoto, 1556); impatient of discipline, he conferred no decorum on the ecclesiastical habit (he wrote to Aretino, before the hostility: "if I were not a priest, it would become me well to be virtuous"); cheerful in appearance, he harbored inwardly a black humor, sharpened by hardship and dulled by gay and often coarse storytelling. He loved Dante, Petrarch, every form of art, the beautiful book; he scorned pedantry and mental narrowness, eager to surpass his time and curious about the most varied problems: social, religious, aesthetic, scientific; he occupied himself even with chiromancy and telepathy, with intuitions in the field of phrenology and psychiatry. In the Zucca (1551-52; 2nd ed. 1565), a miscellany of anecdotes, letters, proverbs, he sketches, among other things, a theory of surplus value ("the rich man says: 'I pay all my servants,' 'with what do you pay them?', 'with your labor?', 'no, sir, with the labor of others,' etc.", p. 123 of the 2nd ed.); in I mondi (1552-53) he outlines an idyllic arrangement of humanity with socialist anticipations (in 1548 he had printed More's Utopia translated by Ortensio Lando); in the Libreria prima and seconda (1550-51) he compiles the oldest repertory of printed books and manuscripts, but including fantastic data as well. He attempted comedy (La stufaiolo), the poem (La guerra di Cipro), the treatise (La moral filosofia; Dialoghi della musica, with musical essays of the time; del Disegno); and lyric poetry. The best work consists of I marmi (1553), a witty record of conversations on various subjects, which D. imagines held by his fellow citizens seated on the marble steps of S. Maria del Fiore and an unconscious fresco of contemporary Florentine life. The Lettere (1543) are interesting, a clue to this singular type, who, in rare thoughtful pages, knew how to express a fundamental pity for human suffering, the melancholy for the imbalance between ideal and real, the sense of death, and "under histrionic appearances hid a moral vein that, because of his undisciplined nature as man and man of letters, was dispersed" (A. Momigliano).
Bibliography7 works
Enzo Navarra