PATRIZI, FRANCESCO. - Political writer and humanist, born on 24 February 1413 in Siena, died in 1494 at Gaeta, where he was elected bishop on 23 March 1461 by Pope Pius II. He lived in Siena until 1457, from which he was exiled for participating in a local conspiracy. He then went to Verona, then to Foligno, where he held the government of the public administration, soon abandoned due to widespread protests and unproven accusations. With an agile and cultivated intellect, Patrizzi earned the esteem of contemporary scholars (among his friends and patrons was his fellow citizen Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pius II) and devoted himself to works of poetry, rhetoric, and politics.
Among Patrizzi’s works, the *De institutione reipublicae* (9 books), begun in exile and completed between 1455 and 1471, dedicated to Sixtus IV, and the *De regno et regis institutione* (9 books), presumably composed between 1481 and 1484 and dedicated to Alfonso of Aragon, Duke of Calabria, enjoyed wide circulation between the late 15th and 16th centuries. These treatises, which appear almost parallel, seemed contradictory to Patrizzi’s contemporaries (and may still appear so), as the first extols the excellence of republican government while the second emphasizes the superiority of monarchy. Yet they essentially demonstrate only Patrizzi’s impartial scientific interest (which may have personally favored a "mixed state") in political reality as such. Through dense and meticulous analysis, he examines the individual virtues necessary, respectively, for the prince and the citizen. Platonic and Aristotelian motifs converge in his work, and he draws on the entire apparatus of classical-historical erudition typical of humanism for his political pedagogy. Abandoning outdated disputes over Church and Empire, Patrizzi turns to the positive examination of the state’s aspects, as they could be intellectually conceived by a Renaissance thinker, who was by no means inclined (despite some vague premonitions of Machiavellianism) to abandon the ethical requirement to which he deemed it necessary to link political reality.
In economic matters, Patrizzi rejects Plato’s egalitarian communism, preferring to secure for the individual—whose dignity of labor he extols—a small private property, while ensuring the state has an adequate landed patrimony. Ultimately, he was not a vivid or particularly original writer, lacking genuine philosophical interests, yet he remains notable for his commitment to systematizing politics, aspiring to objectify it as a science and pedagogy. Indeed, one might say that Patrizzi ("the great Patricius," as he was called) is the only substantial political treatise writer of 15th-century Italy; hence his success: numerous editions, abridgments, and translations into Latin, Italian, French, German, English, and Spanish. MACHIAVELLISMO (v.) secured an unmistakable place in the history of political thought, Patrizzi, in a sense, upholds the tradition of classical thought that would endure even after Machiavelli.