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Scipione Ammirato

Scipione Ammirato (Italian: [ʃiˈpjoːne ammiˈraːto]; 7 October 1531 – 11 January 1601) was an Italian author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He is regarded as an important figure in the history of political thought.

Scipione Ammirato
Portrait of Scipione Ammirato engraved by Francesco Allegrini after Giuseppe Zocchi (1763)
Born(1531-10-07)7 October 1531
Lecce, Kingdom of Naples
Died11 January 1601(1601-01-11) (aged 69)
Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany
Resting placeFlorence Cathedral
NationalityItalian
Occupation(s)Historian and philosopher
Notable workDiscorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito
Istorie Fiorentine
EraRenaissance philosophy
Region
Main interests
Politics and political philosophy, military theory, history

Ammirato's best-known work is the political treatise Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito (Discourses on Tacitus), published in 1594. The book soon became “an international classic” with numerous translations.[1] In his Discorsi Ammirato presents himself as an anti-Machiavellian from the start, leaving no stone unturned in his efforts to confute the main theses of Il Principe. Unlike Botero and Lipsius, Ammirato did not see Tacitism as a surrogate form of Machiavellianism. On the contrary, his Discorsi present the works of the Roman historian as an antidote to Il Principe, and this approach was to prove widely popular during the long Tacitus revival.[2]

Moreover, Ammirato's doctrine of reason of state defined such “reason” as violating neither natural nor divine law; it was the reason of the greater public good (such as public safety) and thus, in departing from the ordinary moral order in extraordinary circumstances, the modern prince did not come into conflict with Christianity.[3]

Biography

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Scipione Ammirato was born at Lecce in the Kingdom of Naples in 1531, of a noble family of Florentine origin. In 1547, he was sent to Naples to study law, but he soon turned to literature instead. He devoted himself to the study of classical literature, to satisfy his interest in the ancient world.[4] Ammirato attended literary clubs, striking up a friendship with the poet Berardino Rota, the historian Angelo di Costanzo and the polymath Bartolomeo Maranta.

In 1551 he received the minor orders from the Bishop of Lecce Braccio Martelli, who appointed him a canon of Lecce Cathedral. He afterwards travelled about Italy in quest of occupation; he resided some time at Rome, Padua and Venice, where he became secretary to Alessandro Contarini, a Venetian patrician, and became acquainted with Sperone Speroni, Vittoria Colonna, and Pietro Aretino.[5] He contributed the Argomenti dei canti to the edition of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso published in 1556 by Vincenzo Valgrisi, with the collaboration of Girolamo Ruscelli.[5] He was forced to hurriedly abandon the city on account of the discovery of his love affair with a member of the Contarini family. He took refuge in his native Lecce where in 1558 he founded the Accademia dei Trasformati.[5]

In his native country Ammirato was temporarily employed by several noblemen, and was sent by the Archbishop of Naples on a mission to Pope Pius V. It was a flourishing period in the history of papal Rome. Sixtus V was about to initiate “a program of urban development without parallel in any other European city.”[6] Intellectual life was lively and characterized by a “new humanism.”[7] There Ammirato associated with the humanist Giovanni Pietro Maffei, the philosopher Franciscus Patricius, and the Piedmontese political writer Giovanni Botero. He entered the patronage network of the reforming churchman Girolamo Seripando, to whom he dedicated the philosophical dialogue Il Dedalione o ver del poeta.[8]

He then went initially to Naples but was not supported by the Spanish who refused to appoint him official historian of the viceroyalty. In 1569 he fixed his residence at Florence, where the Grand Duke Cosimo I offered him a position as state historiographer at the respectable salary of 300 scudi a year, and Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici gave him the use of his own country house at La Petraia.[9] Ammirato became a member of the Florentine Accademia degli Alterati, under the pseudonym Il Trasformato (“The Transformed”).[10] In 1583, Bernardo Davanzati submitted to the academy the first book of his translation of the Annals, drawing Ammirato's attention to the works of Tacitus. In 1595 he was made canon of the Cathedral of Florence.[11] He died in Florence in 1601. At his death, he made his secretary, Cristoforo del Bianco, his heir on condition that del Bianco should adopt the name of Ammirato. Accordingly, he is known as Scipione Ammirato the younger. Several of Ammirato's works were edited after his death by del Bianco.

Major works

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Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito

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Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, to whom the Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito were dedicated

Ammirato invoked Tacitus to refute Machiavelli's secular republicanism and composed his Discorsi as a counter to Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy.[12] Although Machiavelli is never mentioned by name in the Discorsi of Ammirato, his works are discussed in many passages.[13] Machiavelli is always referred to vaguely (“altri,” “l'autor presupposto,” etc.), even when an exact citation of his work is provided in the margin.[14] Ammirato blames Machiavelli for having subjugated the Christian religion to the demands of the State. Rather than adjust religion to fit themselves, he writes, men, and especially princes, must adjust laws to fit religion, «since in the nature of men in the fields and the caverns, before cities were built, there was a belief in God sooner than there were civil gatherings, on behalf of which laws were made; because it would not otherwise be necessary to say that religion should accommodate to civil life, than who might say that seasons of the year should change to fit individuals rather than the other way round.» [15]

Ammirato defines the reason of state as:

an act contrary to ordinary reason committed for the public good, that is to say, on behalf of a higher and more universal reason.

— Discorsi del signor Scipione Ammirato sopra Cornelio Tacito, Florence, Giunti, p. 231

The reason of state should always have the good of the public as its aim and have to be compatible with religion. Ammirato accepted the derogation from the dictates of natural and positive law only when the preservation of the state was at stake, but rejected as a sign of tyranny any infringement of laws on the grounds of desire for glory or private interest. Ammirato made it clear, however, that though reason of state might authorize a ruler to set aside positive law, it did not permit him to act in violation of divine law.[16]

The work is notable for its "Tacitean" style, concise to the point of obscurity. Ammirato intermixes modern examples with ancient ones, to make it clear, as he says in one of his Discorsi, that the truth of things is not changed by the difference of times.[17]

Ammirato's Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito went through four Italian editions before 1599 and two more at the beginning of the next century. They were translated into Latin for the benefit of German readers in 1609 and 1618 and appeared in French translations twice in 1618 and in 1628, 1633, and 1642.[18] In 1612 French royal geographer and humanist Antoine de Laval recapitulated Ammirato's arguments in his Dessein des problèmes politiques.[19] Abraham Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaye considered Ammirato's commentary "unquestionably one of the best that we have upon Tacitus".[20] Ammirato was widely read in England. Thomas Hobbes was surely acquainted with his work,[21] and Thomas Gordon's commentaries on Tacitus owed much to the work of Malvezzi, Ammirato and Alamos de Barrientos.[22]

Istorie Fiorentine

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The Istorie Fiorentine, were published in two parts. Books I-XX (from the foundation of the city up to 1434, when Rinaldo degli Albizzi was exiled and Cosimo de' Medici invited to return) were printed in Florence in 1600; Books XXI-XXXV (up to 1574, the year in which Ammirato's patron Cosimo I died) were published posthumously in 1641 by Scipione Ammirato the younger, and dedicated to the Grand Duke Ferdinando II. In 1647 Scipione Ammirato the younger published a second and improved edition of the first part, with additions, in 2 vols. fol. The Istorie may not be a great imaginative work, but it is securely based on original archive sources, many of which had been previously inaccessible.[4] It is widely considered “a far more complete and comprehensive history of Florence than any which existed in his own day”, and was greatly praised by Tiraboschi.[23] Ammirato, was highly critical of Machiavelli's Florentine Histories and accused the Florentine secretary of having «altered names, twisted facts, confounded cases, increased, added, subtracted, diminished and did anything that suited his fancy without checking, without lawful restraint and what is more, he seems to have done so occasionally on purpose.»[24]

Works

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Political and historical works

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  • Ammirato, Scipione (1594). Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito. Florence: per Filippo Giunti.
  • Ammirato, Scipione (1598). Orazioni a diversi Principi intorno a' Preparamenti che s'avrebbero a fare contro la Potenza del Turco. Florence: per Filippo Giunti.
  • Istorie fiorentine. Vol. 1. Florence: Filippo Giunti. 1600. Retrieved 30 May 2019.
  • Istorie fiorentine. Vol. 2. Florence: nella stamperia nuoua d'Amador Massi, e Lorenzo Landi. Con licenza de' superiori. 1641. Retrieved 30 May 2019.
  • Ammirato, Scipione (1637). I Vescovi di Fiesole di Volterra e d'Arezzo, con l'Aggiunta di Scipione Ammirato il Giovane. Florence: Amadore Massi. These are biographical notices of the bishops of those three sees.

Genealogical works

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Scipione Ammirato, Delle famiglie nobili napoletane, Volume 1, 1580
  • Delle Famiglie Nobili Napoletane, a genealogical work in two parts, folio, the first of which was published in 1580, and the second in 1651, after the author's death.
  • Delle Famiglie nobili Fiorentine, completed and published in 1615 by Scipione Ammirato the younger, in fol.
  • Albero e Storia dei Guidi coll'Aggiunte di Scipione Ammirato il Giovane, fol. 1640, and again, with additions, in 1650. The Guidi were a prominent aristocratic family that played an important role in the history medieval Florence;
  • Discorsi delle Famiglie Paladina e Antoglietta, 1595. Ammirato was a careful and accurate genealogist, and his works on these subjects are based on thorough historical research. He examined fifty thousand archival documents for his work on the Neapolitan families, and six thousand for those of Florence.

Literary works

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  • Il Rota ovvero delle Imprese, 1562; a treatise upon the heraldic devices, in the form of a dialogue between prominent Neapolitan intellectuals. It is named in honour of one its interlocutors, Berardino Rota, a distinguished humanist and poet and a close friend of Ammirato's.[25]
  • Rime spirituali sopra i Salmi, Venice, 1634.
  • Opuscoli, a collection of his minor works, in 3 vols, 1637–1642. They contain orations addressed to several princes and popes, biographies of King Ladislaus and his sister Joanna II of Naples, and of several distinguished members of house of Medici; treatises, short poems, and dialogues. Most important among them is the dialogue Dedalione, published in the third volume of the Opuscoli (1642), in which the seer Tiresias answers the objections raised by Daedalion against poetry, basing his argument on certain passages in Plato.[26]

Ammirato left several manuscript works, among others a continuation of the Monte Cassino Chronicle, and his own autobiography, which is kept in the library of Santa Maria la Nuova of Florence.

See also

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References

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Notes

  1. ^ Tuck 1993, p. 69.
  2. ^ Jürgen Von Stackelberg, Tacitus in der Romania: Studien zur literarischen Rezeption des Tacitus in Italian und Frankreich 120–128.
  3. ^ “Ragion di Stato altro non essere che contravvenzione di legge ordinaria, per rispetto di pubblico beneficio, ovvero per rispetto di maggiore e più universale ragione.” See Rodolfo De Mattei, “Scipione Ammirato,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 3 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1961) 1-4; De Mattei, Il pensiero politico di Scipione Ammirato, con discorsi inediti (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1963) 121-151 (the above citation appears on 124).
  4. ^ a b Campbell 2003.
  5. ^ a b c Rossi 2002.
  6. ^ Torgil Magnuson, Rome in the Age of Bernini, vol. I: From the Election of Sixtus V to the Death of Urban VIII (Stockholm and Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1982), 16.
  7. ^ Alphonse Dupront, “D'un humanisme chrétien en Italie à la fin du XVIe siècle,” (1935) in Dupront, Genèses des temps modernes: Rome, les réformes et le nouveau monde: Textes réunis et présentés par Dominique Julia et Philippe Boutry (Paris, 2001), cited in Romain Descendre, L'état du monde: Giovanni Botero entre raison d'État et géopolitique (Geneva, 2009), 35.
  8. ^ Jedin, Hubert (1947). Papal Legate at the Council of Trent, Cardinal Seripando. B. Herder Book Company. p. 69.
  9. ^ Cochrane 2013, p. 107.
  10. ^ Cochrane 2013, p. 117.
  11. ^   One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Ammirato, Scipione". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 860.
  12. ^ William Caferro, ed. (2017). The Routledge History of the Renaissance. Routledge. ISBN 9781351849456.
  13. ^ De Mattei 1961.
  14. ^ Donaldson, Peter S. (1992). Machiavelli and Mystery of State. Cambridge University Press. p. 120.
  15. ^ Discorsi del Signor Scipione Ammirato sopra Cornelio Tacito, Filippo Giunta, Florence 1594, Book V, Discorso 5; see also Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes.
  16. ^ Discorsi sopra C. Tacito, Firenze, 1594, bk. 12. c. 1. pp. 231-240. Ammirato explicitly subordinated ragion di stato to ragion divina or religion, but he had little conception of natural law and allowed a ruler a great deal of latitude in departing from ordinary law for the benefit of the common good. He condoned the rape of the Sabine women as well as the assassination of the Duke of Guise by Henry III in 1589.
  17. ^ Amelot de la Houssaye, Abraham Nicolas (1690). "Critique de divers auteurs modernes qui ont traduit ou commenté les œuvres de Tacite". Tacite Avec des Notes Politiques et Historiques. Paris: La Veuve d'Edme Martin: III. Son style est nerveux et concis, comme celui de Tacite, ce qui fait quelquefois qu'il en est obscur: et peut-être a-t-il affecté ce défaut, pour ressembler mieux à son auteur. Il entremêle assez souvent les exemples modernes avec les anciens afin, dit-il dans un de ses discours, que chacun voye que la vérité des choses n'est pas altérée par la diversité des temps.
  18. ^ Cochrane 2013, p. 125.
  19. ^ Tuck 1993, p. 89.
  20. ^ Amelot de la Houssaye, Abraham Nicolas (1690). "Critique de divers auteurs modernes qui ont traduit ou commenté les œuvres de Tacite". Tacite Avec des Notes Politiques et Historiques. Paris: La Veuve d'Edme Martin: III. En un mot, son Commentaire est assurément un des meilleurs que nous ayons sur Tacite
  21. ^ Mastnak, Tomaz (2012). Hobbes's Behemoth: Religion and Democracy. Andrews UK Limited. ISBN 978-1845403751. In the Chatsworth library catalogue which he [Hobbes] drew up in the late 1620s (making some further additions in the early 1630s), we find, for example, Ammiratus in Tacitu[m] (Scipione Ammirato, Dissertationes politicae, sive discursus in C. Tacitum (Helenopolis, 1609), the Latin version of his Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito (Florence, 1594).
  22. ^ Nichols, John (1812). The Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 1. London. p. 710.
  23. ^ Trollope, Thomas Adolphus (1856). The Girlhood of Catherine De' Medici. London: Chapman & Hall. p. 312.
  24. ^ Ammirato's Istorie fiorentine, ed., F. Ranalli (Florence, 1846), cited in Eric W. Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, pp. 269-70.
  25. ^ Dorigen Sophie Caldwell (2004). The Sixteenth-century Italian Impresa in Theory and Practice. AMS Press, 2004. p. 43. ISBN 9780404637170.
  26. ^ See esp. Republic book 3, Stephanus number 398a-b, as well as 2.377b-c and 3.392a-b.

Bibliography

  • Angelis, Domenico de (1706). Della vita di Scipione Ammirato patrizio leccese. Lecce: Stamperia Vescovile.
  • Scarabelli, Luciano (1853). Di Scipione Ammirato e delle sue opere, introduzione alle Istorie fiorentine. Torino: Pomba. pp. 7–42.
  • Congedo, Umberto (1904). La vita e le opere di Scipione Ammirato (notizie e ricerche). Trani: Vecchi.
  • Persico, Tommaso (1912). Gli scrittori politici napoletani dal '400 al '700. Naples: Hoepli. pp. 190–224.
  • Toffanin, Giuseppe (1921). Machiavelli e il Tacitismo. Padova: Angelo Draghi. pp. 156 ff.
  • Alberti, Alberto (1930). "Politica e ragion di Stato nell'opera di Scipione Ammirato". Atti della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. 66: 598–626.
  • Monti, Gennaro Maria (1944). "Un avversario cinquecentesco dell'unità d'Italia: Scipione Ammirato". Studi in onore di Nicolò Rodolico. Florence: 263–273.
  • De Mattei, Rodolfo, Varia fortuna di Scipione Ammirato; Opere a stampa di Scipione Ammirato; Codici di Scipione Ammirato, in "Studi salentini", 8 (1960), pp. 352–407.
  • De Mattei, Rodolfo (1961). "AMMIRATO, Scipione". Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 3: Ammirato–Arcoleo (in Italian). Rome: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. ISBN 978-8-81200032-6.
  • De Mattei, Rodolfo (1961). "Scipione Ammirato " Il Vecchio " e Scipione Ammirato " Il Giovane "". Archivio Storico Italiano. 119 (1). Florence: 63–76. JSTOR 26250428.
  • Schellhase, Kenneth C. (1976). Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 142–5.
  • Tuck, Richard (1993). Philosophy and Government 1572–1651. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521438853.
  • Mellor, Ronald J., ed. (1995). Tacitus: the classical heritage. New York; London: Garland Publishing.
  • Maggi, Armando (1997). "L'impresa come narrazione nel "Rota" di Scipione Ammirato". Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana. 26 (1): 75–83. JSTOR 23933994.
  • Brand, Peter; Pertile, Lino, eds. (1999). The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 200. ISBN 9780521666220.
  • Bondanella, Peter; Conway Bondanella, Julia; Shiffman, Jody Robin, eds. (2001). "Ammirato, Scipione". Cassell Dictionary Italian Literature. A & C Black. p. 11. ISBN 9780304704644.
  • Vasoli, Cesare (2007). "Unità e disunione dell'Italia? Uno storiografo della Controriforma. Scipione Ammirato e la sua replica al Machiavelli". Le sentiment national dans l'Europe méridionale aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Madrid: 189–203. doi:10.4000/books.cvz.11148. ISBN 978-8495555939.
  • Snyder, Jon R. (2012). Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe. University of California Press. pp. 129–132. ISBN 9780520274631.
  • Cochrane, Eric (2013). Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800: A History of Florence and the Florentines in the Age of the Grand Dukes. University of Chicago Press. p. 125. ISBN 9780226115955.
  • The Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. 1842. Public Domain  This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
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