FILELFO, FRANCESCO — Autograph letter to Ottaviano Ubaldini, by which F. sends the Consolatio ad Jacobum Marcellum patricum Venetum... de obitu Volcrt filii (1461) — Vatican Library, cod. Vat. lat. 1790, f. 11.
FILELFO, FRANCESCO: — Humanist, born on 25 July 1398 at Tolentino in the Marca d’Ancona, died at Florence on 31 July 1481. A pupil of Gasparino Barzizza at Padua, he completed his studies at Constantinople and married the niece of Manuele Crisolora. A lively polemicist, hostile to Cosimo dei Medici, a follower of the Visconti and subsequently of the Sforza, he ultimately entered the service of Lorenzo il Magnifico.
Translator and commentator on Aristotle (Rhetorica ad Alexandrum and Ethica Nicomachea), his predominant interest in problems of rhetoric and morality took a Peripatetic orientation, although he often attempted, in accordance with a widespread practice, to reconcile Aristotelianism and Platonism. His most important philosophical writings—namely, the still unpublished Commentationes Florentinae de exilio (ca. 1449), the Connivia Mediolanensis (1443), the De morali disciplina (begun in 1473 and interrupted at Book V by his death), and the Epistole (published at Venice in 1502)—reveal a concrete sense of the value of earthly goods and bodily pleasure, not separated from an awareness of the significance 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 actuality of a body that has life potentially,” made him opposed to every Stoicizing or Platonizing asceticism. Hence, precisely, his sympathy for Epicurus,
of whom, especially in certain letters, he sings the praises. But this never signifies anti-Christian polemic in a paganizing sense. Epicurus is seen as the thinker who, recognizing man’s earthly mission, proposed for him a model of an exceedingly pure life: one of calm, peace, and alipia (ἀλύπος = without pain), not in itself incompatible with Christian ideals. F. also wrote poems, epistles, satires (the accusations against Pio II are unjust), epigrams, odes, and translations; and, for the edification of the unlearned, a Vita di s. Giovanni Battista in terzine. He also conceived the idea of producing his masterpiece by modelling a Latin poem, Sphorius, in praise of Francesco Sforza, on the Iliad.