GELLI, GIOVAN BATTISTA. - Man of letters, b. in Florence on 12 Aug. 1498, d. there on 24 July 1563.
A frequenter of the Orti Oricellari, consul of the Accademia Fiorentina for the decade 1553-63, he published as an expositor of the Dantean poem, wrote comedies (La sporta, 1543; L'errore, 1556, modeled on the Adulatoria), historical essays (Trattatello sulle origini di Firenze; Vite di artisti fiorentini) and linguistic ones (Dialogo sopra la difficoltà d'ordinare la lingua, 1551, in which he maintains, together with Varchi, the Florentine character of the Italian vernacular), poems, lectures on Dante and on Petrarch, two philosophical treatises informed by Aristotelianism (Capricci del bottaio, 1548; La Circe, 1549).
His humanistic conception of human dignity arrives at its divine origin and determines an apostolate of culture as a beginning and stimulus to virtue. In the Capricci he discourses on the transience of earthly goods, on death, on the immortality of the soul, on the necessity of abandonment to the will of God. Despite the explicit censures of the «reform», the work was, for certain expressions, placed on the Index donec corrigatur in 1562; it was in May of the same year that G. contested his submission (Pastor, VII, p. 284). In the Circe is portrayed the antagonism between reason (Ulysses) and the senses (his eleven companions who, reduced to brutes, are reluctant to resume their former shape). The arguments of those former men condense, in tragic synthesis, the negative aspects of human life, to which is opposed, through the mouth of the eleventh interlocutor, the celebration of man «the great miracle of nature», the only one endowed with reason and free will and capable of transforming himself «from earthly into a celestial animal» if «he will consider philosophizing the beauty of the heavens and the marvelous order of nature» and, «disdaining all the impediments of the body, will attend to contemplating divine things». Gelli's narration develops in a fairy-tale tone, illuminated by discursive limpidity and, beneath the apparent primitiveness, conceals a mature substance of thought that welcomes, in amiable synthesis, the suggestions of the Renaissance and the conquests of Christian civilization.
Bibliography5 works
Enzo Navarra