ORICELLARI, ORTI. – In the history of the Italian academies, all devoted to classical antiquity and Latin in the fifteenth century (notwithstanding the relative eclecticism of the Neapolitan academy), all characterized by vernacular classicism in the sixteenth century (especially beginning in 1540), and with a note of conventional nonconformity, the O. O. mark a point of exception or discrimination.
With the advent of the first Republic (1494), Bernardo Rucellai welcomed the Platonic Academy there, although 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 Cosimo Rucellai after the return of the Medici, who could hardly have objected to the flower of Florentine intelligence assembling there in freedom of judgment, balanced by the guests’ assured loyalty. But the experiment ended when Zanobi Buondelmonte, Luigi Alamanni, Jacopo da Diacceto, and others conspired against Cardinal Giulio, and ended up on the gallows or in exile. And the O. O. also came to an end. They lasted long enough, however, for it to be said that the new Italian culture began in them. By reading there I Discorsi sulla Prima Deca, and perhaps those on Arte della guerra, Machiavelli opened up a path in the study of history “not yet trodden by anyone” (historical politics); Giovanni Rucellai and Trissino, by debating there how tragedy might be rendered in the vernacular, initiated vernacular neoclassicism, and the former’s Rosmunda was performed there in 1515 in the presence of Leo X.
rentin à la cour de France au XVIᵉ siècle: L. Alamanni, sa vie et son oeuvre, Parigi 1903, see also: G. Toffanin, Machiavelli e il tacitismo, Padova 1921, cap. 1; id., Il Cinquecento, 4ᵃ ed., Milano 1950, passim. Giuseppe Toffanin