FIRENZUOLA, AGNOLO
Frontispiece of *Ragionamenti*, Florence 1548 – Copy preserved in the Vatican Library.
S (1939), pp. 151-85; id., *Humanismus in Concilio Florenzino*, in *Acta Academiae Velchradensis*, 15 (1929), pp. 193-211; E. Gandil, *Bessarion Nicaeensis in Concilio Florenzino*, in *Orientalia Christiana Periodica*, 6 (1940), pp. 417-66; G. Hofmann, *Köpfen und Acht-tier auf dem Konzil von Florenz*, ibid., 8 (1942), pp. 5-39; id., *Das Konzil von Florenz in Rom*, ibid., 15 (1949), 71-84.
GIORGIO HOFMANN
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FIRENZUOLA, AGNOLO. – Man of letters, born at Florence in 1493, died at Prato on 27 June 1543. Friend of Aretino, then Vallombrosan monk and procurator of his Order at the papal court, in 1526 he was dispensed from his religious vows while retaining ecclesiastical benefices. From 1543 he lived in Florence and Prato, afflicted by syphilis and, in his final years, by poverty. He founded the Accademia dell’Addiaccio, a forerunner of the Arcadia.
He wrote lyric poetry, two comedies, the unfinished *Ragionamenti d’amore*, *Delle bellezze delle donne*, *Della perfetta bellezza d’una donna*, and *La prima veste degli amanti* (a reworking of the *Panciattana* through Giovanni da Capua’s *Directorium humanae vitae* and the Spanish vernacularization *Esemplario contra los angulos y peligros del mundo*). He also translated, with subjective transfiguration, Apuleius’s *The Golden Ass*, and opposed Trissino’s typographic innovations in *Discacciamento delle nuove lettere intimamente aggiunte nella lingua toscana*, a discourse appreciated by Clement VII.
In his free life and writings he failed to rise above an elementary sensuality that led him to seek and fix upon woman only an eclectic outward perfection, and that guided his imaginative elaboration, as a rule, toward the instinctive animal world. Moral problems, when pursued at all, dissolve in his witty and often licentious storytelling, even though beneath F.’s sensuality there is discernible that weary sadness which, for the better-endowed spirits, is the gateway to transcendence through suffering.