GELLI, GIOVAN BATTISTA. — Man of letters, born in Florence on 12 August 1498, died there on 24 July 1563.
A frequenter of the Orti Oricellari and consul of the Florentine Academy, during the decade 1553–63 he published an exposition of Dante’s poem; he wrote comedies (La spetta, 1543; L’errore, 1556, modelled on the Adulatoria), historical essays (Trattatello sulle origini di Firenze; Vite di artisti fiorentini) and linguistic works (Dialogo sopra la difficoltà d’ordinare la lingua, 1551, in which, together with Varehi, he maintains the Florentine character of the Italian vernacular), poems, lectures on Dante and Petrarch, and two short philosophical treatises informed by Aristotelianism (Capricci del bottino, 1548; La Circe, 1549).
His humanistic conception of human dignity leads back to its divine origin and gives rise to an apostolate of culture as the beginning and stimulus of virtue. In the Capricci he discusses the transience of earthly goods, death, the immortality of the soul, and the necessity of surrendering oneself to the will of God. Despite its explicit censures of the “reform,” the work was, because of certain expressions, placed on the Index donec corrigatur in 1562; in May of the same year G. contested his submission (Pastor, VII, p. 284). In La Circe the antagonism between reason (Ulysses) and the senses (his eleven companions, who, having been reduced to beasts, resist resuming their former shape) is portrayed. The arguments of these former men condense, in tragic synthesis, the negative aspects of human life, opposed by the eleventh interlocutor’s celebration of man, “the great miracle of nature,” the only creature endowed with reason and free will and capable of changing “from earthly into heavenly animal” if he “will, by philosophizing, consider the beauty of the heavens and the wondrous order of nature” and, “despising all the impediments of the body, will devote himself to contemplating divine things.” Gelli’s narrative unfolds in a fairy-tale tone, illuminated by discursive clarity and, beneath its apparent primitiveness, conceals a mature substance of thought that embraces, in an amiable synthesis, Renaissance influences and the achievements of Christian civilization.