PATRIZI, FRANCESCO. - Political writer and humanist, b. 24 February 1413 in Siena, d. 1494 in Gaeta, the city of which he was elected bishop on 23 March 1461 by Pope Pius II. He lived in Siena until 1457, from where he was exiled for having taken part in a local conspiracy. He then went to Verona, and afterwards to Foligno, where he held the governorship of the public administration, soon abandoned following widespread protests and unproven accusations. A nimble and cultivated intellect, P. won the esteem of the scholars of his time (his friend and protector was his fellow citizen Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pius II) and he exercised himself in works of poetry, rhetoric and politics.
Wide circulation was enjoyed, between the late 15th and the 16th century, by P.'s De institutione reipublicae (9 books), begun in exile, finished between 1465 and 1471, dedicated to Sixtus IV, and by the De regno et regis institutione (9 books), presumably composed between 1481 and 1484, dedicated to Alfonso of Aragon, duke of Calabria. These are almost parallel treatises, which seem to have appeared to P.'s contemporaries (and may still appear) contradictory, inasmuch as the first exalts the excellence of the republican order and the second the superiority of the monarchical regime; but which substantially demonstrate only P.'s impartial scientific interest (who perhaps personally preferred the "mixed State") in political reality as such. With a dense and minute examination P. analyzes the individual virtues necessary, respectively, to the prince and to the citizen. Platonic and Aristotelian motifs flow into his work, and for the purposes of his political pedagogy he avails himself of the whole apparatus of historical-classical erudition peculiar to humanism. Abandoning every outmoded dispute concerning Church and Empire, P. turns to the positive examination of the aspects of the State: such, of course, as could be intellectually represented by a thinker of the Renaissance, by no means disposed (despite certain vague foreshadowings of Machiavellianism) to abandon the ethical requirement, to which he deems it necessary to anchor political reality. In the economic sphere, P. rejects Plato's egalitarian communism, preferring to assure the individual, whose dignity of labor he exalts, a small private property, and to the State the availability of an adequate landed patrimony. A writer, in short, neither vivid nor typical for strong originality, alien as he is to authentic philosophical interests, and yet notable for the commitment devoted to the systematization of a politics aspiring to objectify itself in science and in pedagogy. Indeed, it may be said that P. ("the great Patrizio," as he was called) is the only treatise writer of any bulk in the Italian 15th century; whence his fortune: numerous were the editions, abridgments and translations, in Latin, Italian, French, German, English and Spanish. And if Machiavelli (v.) was able to secure for himself an unmistakable place of his own in the history of political discussion, P. holds, in a certain sense, the line of that classical tradition which would survive even after Machiavelli.
Bibliography5 works
Rodolfo de Mattei