PATRIZI, FRANCESCO. – Political writer, humanist, b. 24 February 1413 in Siena, d. in 1494 at Gaeta, the city of which he was elected bishop on 23 March 1461 by Pope Pio II. He lived in Siena until 1457, when he was exiled for having participated in a local conspiracy. He then went to Verona, and subsequently to Foligno, where he assumed responsibility for the administration of public affairs, which he soon abandoned following widespread protests and unsubstantiated accusations. A keen and cultivated intellect, P. earned the esteem of the scholars of his time (his fellow citizen Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pio II, was his friend and protector) and devoted himself to works of poetry, rhetoric, and politics.
Between the late 1400s and the 1500s, P.’s De institutione reipublicae (9 books), begun in exile, completed between 1465 and 1471, and dedicated to Sisto IV, and his De regno et regis institutione (9 books), presumably composed between 1481 and 1484 and dedicated to Alfonso di Aragona, duke of Calabria, enjoyed wide circulation. These are almost parallel treatises, which seem to have appeared contradictory to P.’s contemporaries (and may still appear so), since the first exalts the excellence of the republican constitution, while the second affirms the superiority of monarchical rule; but in substance they demonstrate only P.’s impartial scholarly interest (although he perhaps personally preferred the “mixed state”) in political reality as such. In a dense and meticulous examination, P. analyzes the individual virtues required, respectively, of the prince and the citizen. Platonic and Aristotelian themes converge in his work, and for the purposes of his political pedagogy he makes use of the entire apparatus of historical and classical erudition characteristic of humanism. Abandoning every outdated dispute concerning Church and Empire, P. turns to a positive examination of the aspects of the State: naturally, of the State as it could be represented intellectually by a Renaissance thinker, entirely unwilling (despite certain vague anticipations of Machiavellianism) to abandon the ethical requirement to which he deemed it necessary to anchor political reality. In economic matters, P. rejects Plato’s egalitarian communism, preferring to secure for the individual—whose dignity in work he exalts—a small private property, and for the State the availability of an adequate landed patrimony. Ultimately, a writer neither lively nor distinctive in his strong originality, being foreign to genuine philosophical interests, yet nevertheless noteworthy for the effort devoted to organizing a political theory aspiring to become objective as science and pedagogy. Indeed, it may be said that P. (“the great Patrizi,” as he was called) is the only Italian treatise writer of any considerable scope in the 1400s; hence his success: there were numerous editions, abridgements, and translations into Latin, Italian, French, German, English, and Spanish. MACHIAVELLISMO (v.) was able to secure an unmistakable place of his own in the history of political discourse, P. in a certain sense represents the line of that classical tradition which would survive even after Machiavelli.