ORICELLARI, ORTI. — In the history of Italian academies, all marked by love of classical antiquity and Latin in the 15th century (despite the relative eclecticism of the Neapolitan one), all marked by vulgar classicism in the 16th century (especially from 1540 onward) and with a touch of conventional bohemianism, the O. O. represent a point of exception or distinction.
At the advent of the first Republic (1494), Bernardo Rucellai welcomed the Platonic Academy there, though it had nothing to do with II. Even without the name of an academy, gatherings of learned men began to take place through the efforts of Cosimino Rucellai after the return of the Medici, which the latter could not but approve, as it allowed the flower of Florentine intelligence to convene in freedom of judgment, balanced by the sure loyalty of the guests. But the experiment ended when Zanobi Buondelmonte, Luigi Alamanni, Jacopo da Diaceto, and others conspired against Cardinal Giulio and ended up on the gallows or in exile. And so ended the O. O. as well. Yet they lasted long enough to be credited with having initiated the new Italian culture. By reading there the Discourses on the First Decade, and perhaps those on the Art of War, Machiavelli opened a path in the study of history not yet trodden by anyone (political history); Giovanni Rucellai and Trissino, with their discussions on how to render tragedy in the vernacular, initiated vulgar neo-classicism there, and the former’s Rosmunda was performed there in 1515 in the presence of Leo X.