Filelfo, Francesco

FILELFO, FRANCESCO - Autograph letter to Ottaviano Ubaldini, with which F. sends the Consolatio ad Jacobum Marcellum patricum Venetum... de obitu Volcrt filii (1461) - Vatican Library, cod. Vat. ist. 1790, f. 11.

Vincenzo Monachino

FILELFO, FRANCESCO: - Humanist b. July 25, 1398 at Tolentino in the Marca d'Ancona, d. at Florence on July 31, 1481. A pupil in Padua of Gasparino Barzizza, he completed his studies at Constantinople and married the niece of Manuel Chrysoloras. A lively polemicist, hostile to Cosimo de' Medici, a follower of the Visconti and later of the Sforza, he ended up in the service of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

A translator and commentator of Aristotle (Rhetorica ad Alexandrum and Ethica Nicomachea), his prevailing interest in problems of rhetoric and morals took a Peripatetic direction, even though he not infrequently attempted, according to a widespread custom, a reconciliation between Aristotelianism and Platonism. His most important philosophical writings, namely the still unpublished Commentationes Florentinae de exilio (c. 1449), the Connivia Mediolanensis (1443), the De morali disciplina (begun in 1473 and cut off at book V by his death), and the Epistole (ed. at Venice in 1502), reveal a concrete sense of the value of earthly goods and of bodily pleasure, not divorced from an awareness of the meaning of Christian values. The Aristotelian concept that man is not spirit alone but a concrete synthesis of body and soul, a synolon, a living individual in whom the soul is "the perfect act of a body that has life potentially," made him averse to every Stoicizing or Platonizing asceticism. Hence precisely his sympathy for Epicurus, of whom, especially in certain letters, he weaves the praise. But always without this signifying an anti-Christian polemic in a paganizing sense. Epicurus is seen as the thinker who, recognizing man's earthly mission, proposed to him a most pure model of life, that of calm, of peace, of alipia (ἀλύπος = without pain), not in itself in conflict with Christian ideals. F. also wrote: poems, epistles, satires (unjust the accusations against Pius II), epigrams, odes, translations, and, for the edification of the unlearned, a Life of St. John the Baptist in terzine, and he thought of deriving his masterpiece by modeling on the Iliad a Latin poem, Sphorius, in praise of Francesco Sforza.

Eugenio Garin