DONI, ANTON FRANCESCO. — Polymath, born in 1513 in Florence, died in 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 help of Cosimo I, but without success), a seeker of favors from princes and literati in various cities of central and northern Italy, and finally a solitary madman in an abandoned tower.
Contentious, he furiously attacked Domenichi and Aretino, whom he called a "bestial Antichrist" (Il terremoto, 1556); intolerant of discipline, he brought no honor to the ecclesiastical habit (he wrote to Aretino, before their hostility: "if I were not a priest, it would suit me to be virtuous"); outwardly lively, he harbored a dark humor within, sharpened by hardship and stifled by his cheerful and often coarse storytelling. He loved Dante, Petrarch, all forms of art, and beautiful books; he despised pedantry and narrow-mindedness, eager to surpass his time and curious about the most varied social, religious, aesthetic, and scientific problems; he even dabbled in chiromancy and telepathy, with insights into phrenology and psychiatry. In La Zucca (1551–52; 2nd ed. 1565), a miscellany of anecdotes, letters, and proverbs, he sketches, among other things, a theory of surplus value ("the rich man says: 'I pay all my servants,' 'what do you pay for with your labor?' 'No, sir, with others' labor,'" 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 Thomas More’s Utopia, translated by Ortensio Lando); in the Libraria prima and seconda (1550–51) he compiled the earliest repertory of printed and manuscript books, though including fantastical data as well. He tried his hand at comedy (Lo studio), poetry (La guerra di Cipro), treatises (La moral filosofia; Dialoghi della musica, with musical essays of the time; Del Disegno), and lyric poetry. His best work is I marmi (1553), a witty record of conversations on various topics, which D. imagines held by his fellow citizens seated on the marble steps of Santa Maria del Fiore, and an unconscious fresco of contemporary Florentine life. Notable are his Lettere (1543), a window into this singular figure, who, in rare thoughtful pages, expressed a fundamental pity for human suffering, melancholy for the imbalance between ideal and reality, and a sense of death, and "under eccentric appearances concealed a moral vein that, because of his undisciplined nature as both man and writer, remained scattered" (A. Momigliano).