GELLI, GIOVAN BATTISTA. — Scholar, b. in Florence on 12 August 1498, d. there on 24 July 1563.
A frequent visitor to the Orti Oricellari, consul of the Accademia Fiorentina for the decade 1553–63, he published expositions of Dante’s poem, wrote comedies (La sporta, 1543; L’errore, 1556, modeled on the Aulularia), historical essays (Trattatello sulle origini di Firenze; Pile di artisti fiorentini) and linguistic treatises (Dialogo sopra la difficoltà d’ordinare la lingua, 1551, in which, with Varchi, he upholds Florentine Tuscan as the standard of Italian), poetry, lectures on Dante and Petrarch, and two philosophical treatises informed by Aristotelianism (Capricci del bottino, 1548; La Circe, 1549).
His humanistic conception of human dignity culminates in the divine origin of that dignity and in a doctrine of cultural apostolate as the path and stimulus to virtue. In the Capricci he discusses the transience of earthly goods, death, the immortality of the soul, and the necessity of abandoning oneself to the will of God. Despite explicit censures of the “Reformation,” the work was, for certain expressions, placed on the Index donec corrigatur in 1562; on 6 May of the same year Gelli submitted to this censure (Pastor, VII, p. 284).
In La Circe he portrays the antagonism between reason (Ulysses) and the senses (his eleven companions, reduced to beasts, reluctant to resume their former shape). The arguments of these former men condense, in tragic synthesis, the negative aspects of human life, to which the celebration of man—“the great miracle of nature,” the only being endowed with reason and free will and capable of transforming “from earthly to celestial”—is opposed through the mouth of the eleventh interlocutor. This transformation occurs when man, “contemplating through philosophy the beauty of the heavens and the wondrous order of nature” and “scorning all impediments of the body,” devotes himself to the contemplation of divine things.
Gelli’s narrative style unfolds in a fairy-tale tone, illuminated by limpid discourse, and beneath its apparent simplicity conceals a mature substance of thought that, in a pleasing synthesis, embraces Renaissance inspirations and the achievements of Christian civilization.