FRANCESCO PATRIZI OF CHERSO. — Scholar and philosopher, b. 25 Apr. 1529, d. in Rome in Feb. 1597. He studied in Venice, Ingolstadt and from 1547 in Padua. In Spain he was tutor to the Duke of Francavilla, viceroy of Catalonia. In 1577 he was called by Alfonso II d’Este to teach Platonic philosophy at Ferrara. In 1592, at the invitation of Clement VIII, his former schoolfellow, he moved to the University of Rome, where he remained until his death.
An eclectic spirit, with a short epic poem, *Eridano* (Ferrara 1558), in thirteen-syllable verses he extolled the Este family. As a philosopher he fought Aristotelianism to the point of invoking its condemnation from Gregory XIV. He refuted the distinction between history and poetry in the ten dialogues *Della historia* (Venice 1560): a notable work in the history of sixteenth-century historiographical theory; the concept of art as mimesis in the *Discussiones peripateticae* (part 1, Venice 1571; complete ed. in 4 vols., Basel 1581) — a rigorous philological critique and philosophy of Aristotelianism — and in the *Trattato della poetica* (Ferrara 1882), notable also 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 universi philosophia* (Ferrara 1591), a kind of Platonic-naturalistic synthesis that brings him close to Telesio, Campanella and Bruno, and in which P. elaborates a theory of light in a Neoplatonic vein.