Full Professor of History of Philosophy
My research has focused on a particular area of Renaissance
studies that has not been much explored, since it borders with
those areas traditionally considered as early modernity, and hence
as the place to turn to in studying the culture of early modernity.
This is not “another” Renaissance—different from the philological,
philosophical, literary, artistic, and political one (and much more
examined by Renaissance historiography)—but is rather an area where
the same humanism takes on a theoretical, epistemological, and
methodological dimension that has remained unexplored for a long
time. This lack could be due to the more prominent outcomes of the
artistic and literary Renaissance or to the confusion with the
primeval stage of a scientific, technical, and experiential
mentality that would be part of the culture of the two centuries
that followed.
In this line of research I have put together three previous
research interests, together with the tools acquired at the
different places of my formation: a) University of Bologna, where I
studied the encyclopaedic tradition in the modern age and the way
different disciplines were organized at scientific institutions
[L'Istituto delle scienze (1993); “L'‘Idea' dell'Istituto
delle scienze” (1995); “Le accademie letterarie di provincia tra
XVII e XVIII” (1995); “La nascita dell'Istituto delle Scienze”
(1998); “L'Institut des sciences de Bologne” (1999)]. This research
has been conducted in collaboration with the Science Museum of
Palazzo Poggi of the University of Bologna; b) University of
Florence (Ph.D.) and National Institute for Renaissance Studies:
Study of Renaissance Philology and Philosophy: “Cosmologia e teatro
del mondo: Il caso di Giulio Camillo” (1997); “La metà è più della
totalità: Enciclopedia e ‘medietas' del sapere…” (1999); “La
moltitudine di mezzi: Immagini e ossimori in Giordano Bruno”
(2004). This activity I am now carrying out by participating in the
National Committees for the celebrations of Bernardino Telesio and
Luigi Tansillo, instituted by MiBAC); c) Warburg Institute, London:
Here I studied the interrelations between the visual arts and
scientific-philosophical culture [“‘Pictura gravium ostenduntur
pondera rerum'” (1999); “The Image of the Tree of Knowledge in
the 16th Century” (1999); “‘L'Arte imita la Natura, anzi la
supera': Immagine e realtà nella cultura rinascimentale” (2004);
“La casa di Ulisse” (2007). This research I am now devoting to the
study of the iconology of Ulisse Aldrovandi.
In bringing out the theoretical, epistemological, and
methodological themes in the Renaissance I have come to reconsider
on a philosophical level the Neoplatonic mathematical theory [“‘Un
autre ordre du monde': science et mathématiques” (2004), “La
transmission du Commentaire d'Euclide…” (2009)] and to revaluate
the recovery of hermetic, Hebrew, and Neo-Pythagorean traditions,
within the frame of a spiritual reform of 16th-century thought
(“Frontiera o capitale? Per una geografia della cultura bolognese
nel Cinquecento” (2002); “‘Ipsum unum ut fingens…” (2004);
“Archemastria e architettura del sapere nel '500” (2005)]; I then
further studied the philosophical and logical-methodological values
within 16th-century anatomical Renaissance [“Zorzi, Vesalio e
Leonardo: la medietas del corpo” (2008); “La medietas du
corps à la Renaissance (2009)].
The outcome is a Renaissance thought that does not remain
confined to philosophy but can create intersections with different
fields of knowledge: from art theory to classical science, from
politics to ethics and religion. These are new or revived fields on
which the Renaissance confers philosophical value, and which we
accordingly have to investigate if we are to account for the way
the Renaissance has enriched the conceptual heritage of humanity.
The “explosion” of philosophy in other fields different from the
traditional ones has emerged as a characteristic aspect of humanist
thought. My research and teaching activity within the Ph.D.
programmes has focused in particular on the presence of philosophy
“outside philosophy.” I devoted my study first to the “polymathès”
aspect and then to the “encyclopaedic” aspect belonging to
Renaissance philosophy, that is, to the reformulation of the
relations among disciplines that characterizes this period
(rhetoric, mathematics, and architecture in particular) and to the
criteria of interpretation and control of reality developed by
humanists, scientists, philosophers, and reformers in the
15th and 16th centuries.
The volume Sapienza, prudenza eroica virtù (1999) is
mainly devoted to the philosophical interpretation of 16th-century
architecture and to the revival of the Vitruvian tradition.
Vitruvius's construction technique is assumed as an organon
alternative to Aristotelian analytical philosophy, and as single
and general logic that can be extended to the different domains of
theoretical and applied knowledge. An encyclopaedic science closely
linked to mathematics (and, in particular, to Neoplatonic
mathematics), which can conjugate within itself speculative science
and the téchnai excluded by late Scholastic episteme
and can identify a scientific horizon that sets up a particular
(planning and constructive-composite) relation with the traditions
representing the extreme projections of the “civil” and “reformer”
attitude of Renaissance philosophy. The concept of ut
architectura philosophia and the concept of mediomondo
(identifying Renaissance “encyclopaedism,” that is, the function
developed by knowledge in its generality and in its interweaving of
different disciplines) understood as a mediation between the
intelligible and the sensible world has aroused particular
interest–especially in France–for the 1999 monograph (a French
edition by Vrin is forthcoming). Some research groups have been
formed to study these issues, and this has given way to a close
collaboration with the Universities of Paris X and Paris IV and
CNRS (CHPM and then UPR 76); I would highlight the équipes THETA
(Théories et Histoire de l´Esthétique, du Technique et des Arts)
and the international research group GDRI Traité d'art de la
Renaissance aux Lumières led by the Centre Pépin of the CNRS and
comprising Paris I Sorbonne, University of Bologna, Paris VIII
SILBA, Ecole Nationale des Chartes, the Russian Academy of
Sciences, and the Department of Romance Languages of the University
of Chicago. Also devoted to the concept of ut architectura
philosophia are the contributions “Architetti del sapere: Il
caso di Daniele Barbaro” (1998-1999); “The “Architecture” of
Encyclopedias…” (2003); “Ordre et mouvement dans l'architectonique
de Daniele Barbaro…” (paper presented in Metz, 2002); the essays on
Leon Battista Alberti and Giordano Bruno [“L'architettura come
‘umbra d'un sogno'" (2007); “Bruno, l'architettura e 'il terzo nome
del gatto'” (2005); etc.); and the series of lectures held in
Paris (Paris X and Académie de Beaux Arts). The resonance of this
research has led to the foundation of the series Pansophia
with the publishing house Olschki (the series now in its tenth
volume). The series was inaugurated by an international conference
I have personally organized entitled “Le origini della modernità: I
linguaggi del sapere” (1998). Starting from this research,
encyclopaedic tradition - and more precisely, the analysis
of the logical, philosophical, and epistemological conceptions
within Renaissance encyclopaedism - has been characterized by its
considering “encyclopaedic models” as tools for elaborating
and re-utilizing re-discovered traditions and as forms and
places for constructing a precise concept of tradition, as
well as for laying a modern scientific culture and mentality. From
here comes my choice to compare encyclopaedic formulas drawn
from different genres (books, libraries, curricula of
university colleges, programmes of publishing enterprises, and
symbolic and allegorical images related to the organization of
knowledge). A part of this line of research I have taken up the
study of the reform of classical rhetoric and the ars
memoriae within the framework of as a reform of the new
15th-century philosophy (“Ad Antonio Bernardi Illustrissimo
Filosofo”, 2008; “Memoria e ramismo”, 2009, etc.), and I
have also undertaken a ten-year study on the sources and cultural
and political values of the so-called “Ramist reform” of logic.
This study has led to the monograph Metodo ed enciclopedia nel
Cinquecento francese: Il pensiero di Pietro Ramo all'origine
dell'enciclopedismo moderno (2008) and to critical edition of
the encyclopaedia of Christophe de Savigny (2009), considered as
the first example of modern encyclopaedism (for this work, too, a
French edition is fothcoming).
And so continues my research devoted to the techniques,
operators, and symbolic languages – elaborated in original forms by
Renaissance philologists, philosophers, mathematicians, and artists
following a particular revision of ancient culture – and
interpreted by them as vehicles of knowledge polimathès. The
monograph Simboli e Questioni (2003) is about this question,
as are several contributions on the symbolicae quaestiones
of the humanist Achille Bocchi: in these works I study the mutual
influence of mathematics, painting, and Greek and Hebrew grammar in
the elaboration of a universal language. This research on the
concept of the symbolic has led to the international
conference “Institution et pensée symbolique à la Renaissance”
(Paris and Bologna, 2003) and to the book La filosofia simbolica
nella prima età moderna (2007). From this research, too, the
recovery of the Euclidean, Archimedean, Neoplatonic, and
Neo-Pythagorean traditions in the Renaissance foundation of
languages and gnoseological instruments has emerged. The link
between ancient mathematics and (modern) logic have attracted to
these works the attention of mathematicians and historians of
mathematics (University of Pisa; Project Maurolico; Paris Centre
Koyré; London Birkbek College, Cambridge University) engaged in the
study of the relations between Renaissance mathematics and linear
perspective. The discovery of imaginary numbers, within the frame
of a thought interested in understanding and reforming the world
(this is one of the topics investigated in the 2003 monograph
within the context of “symbolic philology”), has drawn the
attention of mathematicians and physicists from the universities of
Oxford and Singapore interested in the origins of complex numbers,
essential elements of Quantum Computation. The award of ISA Topic
2009 and the funding for organizing a series of lectures and an
international conference testify to the originality of this
research programme. The scientific research has involved the Ph.D.
programme in philosophy at the University of Bologna and has played
a very important role in activating the Ph.D. programme titled
“History of Ideas: Philosophy and Science” with SUM (Italian
Institute for the Humanities).
