PATRIZI, FRANCESCO DA CHERSO

PATRIZI, FRANCESCO da CHERSO. – Man of letters and philosopher, b. 25 April 1520, d. in Rome in February 1597. He studied in Venice, Ingolstadt, and, from 1547, Padua. In Spain he was tutor to the duke of Francavilla, viceroy of Catalonia. In 1577 Alfonso II d’Este called him to teach Platonic philosophy at Ferrara. In 1592, at the invitation of Clemente VIII, his former fellow student, he moved to the University of Rome, where he remained until his death.

An eclectic spirit, he celebrated the Este family in an epic poem, the Eridano (Ferrara 1558), in thirteen-syllable verse. As a philosopher, he fought Aristotelianism, even going so far as to call upon Gregorio XIV to condemn II. He refuted the distinction between history and poetry in the ten dialogues Della historia (Venice 1560), a noteworthy work in the history of sixteenth-century historiographical theories; he treated the concept of art as mimesis in the Discussiones peripateticae (part 1, Venice 1571; complete ed. in 4 vols., Basel 1581)—a closely argued philological and philosophical critique of Aristotelianism—and in the Trattato della poetica (Ferrara 1882), also noteworthy for a polemical appendix against Tasso. He also wrote on the sciences, military matters, and politics (La città felice, in Utopisti del '500 scelti e annotati da C. Curcio, Rome 1944). But his principal work is the Nova de universis philosophia (Ferrara 1591), a kind of Platonic-naturalistic synthesis that brings him close to Telesio, Campanella, and Bruno, and in which P. develops a theory of light in the Neoplatonic tradition.