DONI, ANTON FRANCESCO. – Polymath, born in Florence in 1513, died at Monselice in September 1574. He was a Servite friar and later a secular priest (in Florence he opened a printing house in 1546 with the aid of Cosimo I, but without success), a petitioner for favors from princes and men of letters in various cities of central and 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 brought no dignity to the ecclesiastical habit (before their hostility, he wrote to Aretino: “if I were not a priest, it would suit me to be virtuous”); outwardly lively, he harbored within a dark humor, sharpened by hardship and dulled by cheerful and often earthy storytelling. He loved Dante, Petrarch, every form of art, the beautiful book; he despised pedantry and narrow-mindedness, eager to surpass his own age and curious about the most varied problems—social, religious, aesthetic, and scientific; he even concerned himself with palmistry and telepathy, with insights into the fields of phrenology and psychiatry. In Zucca (1551–52; 2nd ed. 1565), a miscellany of anecdotes, letters, proverbs, and rough sketches, he included, among other things, a theory of surplus value (“the rich man says: ‘I pay all my servants,’ ‘what do you pay them with, your own labor?’, ‘no, sir, with the labor of others,’ etc.,” p. 123 of the 2nd ed.); in I mondi (1552–53) he outlined an idyllic organization of humanity with socialist anticipations (in 1548 he had printed More’s Utopia translated by Ortensio Lando); in Libreria prima and seconda (1550–51) he compiled the oldest repertory of printed books and manuscripts, though also including fanciful information. He attempted comedy (La stufaiolo), epic poetry (La guerra di Cipro), treatises (La moral filosofia; Dialoghi della musica, with musical specimens of the period; and del Disegno), and lyric poetry. His finest work consists of I marmi (1553), a witty record of conversations on various subjects, which D. imagines as having been 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 as a glimpse into this singular personality, who, in rare reflective pages, was able to express a fundamental compassion for human suffering, melancholy at the imbalance between ideal and reality, and a sense of death, and who “beneath his histrionic appearances concealed a moral vein which, because of his indiscipline as a man and a man of letters, was dissipated” (A. Momigliano).
migliano, La maschera del D., in Corriere della sera, 3 Sept. 1932; Utopisti e riformatori sociali del tempo, edited by C. Curcio, Bologna 1941 (v. indice); E. Savino, Le cicolate letterarie dei « Marmi » del D., Lecce 1941. Enzo Navarra