VANINI, GIULIO CESARE (occasionally LUCILIO). — A confused and restless figure, an Aristotelian philosophaster, born at Taurisano in Lecce in 1585, died at Toulouse on 9 February 1619.
He graduated in law at Naples on 6 June 1606, when he had perhaps already entered the Carmelite Order under the name of Fra’ Gabriele. Later, after 1608, he went to study at Padua in the company of his fellow religious Bonaventura (in the world Gian Battista) Ginocchi. From Padua, it seems, the two friars went across the Alps and wandered through Protestant countries, until, having arrived in France, the superior general of the Order, Enrico Silvio, forced them to leave. Having gone to Venice in 1612, they obtained from the English ambassador letters of recommendation to the leaders of the Anglican Church and, on 28 June of that year, in London, repudiated Catholicism. Suspected by the Anglicans because of the reputation for libertinism that accompanied them, and soon reduced to dire straits, they requested and obtained permission to return to the Catholic Church; but while Ginocchi returned to Italy, V. France, where a fierce struggle against libertines and atheists had begun. In June–July 1615 he obtained permission from the ecclesiastical authorities to print in Lyons the Amphitheatrum Aeternae Providentiae divino-magicum christiano-physicum, necnon astrologo-catholicum, adversus veteres philosophos, atheos, epicureos, peripateticos et stoicos, and the following year in Paris the dialogues De admirandis Naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis. Revisions to the manuscript of the latter work and its printing by a non-Catholic publisher aroused strong suspicions regarding the true purpose pursued by V. in these writings; therefore, in order to avoid worse consequences, he prudently decided to leave Paris and settle in Toulouse under the false name of Pompeo Usciglio. Intemperate language in disputes with the leading theologians of Toulouse induced the city’s Parlement to have him arrested (August 1618). Tried as a blasphemer and atheist, he was sentenced to have his tongue cut out and to be burned at the stake. The following year the Amphitheatrum and the De arcanis were disavowed and prohibited, because they were «attiesimi tanto periculosores assertores quanto occultiores et libertatis abominandae vindices» (16 July 1620, cf. E. Nemer [V. BIBLICA.], pp. 186–98).
(courtesy of Mons. A. P. Frutes)
VAN GOGH, VINCENT – Head of a Boy (1888) – Amsterdam, Rijks Museum.
scientific and philosophical renewal, he limits himself to repeating the old motifs of Aristotelianism in the process of dissolution, reaping, without literary scruples and without parsimony, from the works of Pomponazzi, Cardano, Scaliger, and others.