Patrizi, Francesco

Patrizi, Francesco 

Born 1529, in Cherso; died February 1597, in Rome. Italian humanist and philosopher. Representative of Neoplatonism during the Renaissance.

Patrizi served in the Venetian Navy and studied in Padua. He taught philosophy at the University of Ferrara beginning in 1578 and at the University of Rome beginning in 1592. In his chief work, the New Philosophy of the World (1591), Patrizi developed a theory of the world as an infinity in the process of formation and as a hierarchically ordered, animated organic whole. The source of the bond and “kinship” of all things was the light that radiated from the divine all-embracing unity, permeating the entire world.

In his Poetics (1582), Patrizi, who disagreed with Aristotle’s idea of poetry as imitation, developed a concept of the artist as creator. He characterized the state of creation as possession by “divine madness,” or inspiration. Other works by Patrizi included treatises on rhetoric and historiography, and anti-Aristotelian polemics.

WORKS

L’amorosa filosofia. Florence, 1963.
Della poetica, vols. 1–2. Florence, 1969.

REFERENCES

Golenishchev-Kutuzov, I. N. Ital’ianskoe Vozrozhdenie i slavianskie literatury XV-XVI vv. Moscow, 1963.
Arcari, P. M. Il pensiero politico di F. Patrizio da Cherso. Rome, 1935.
Crespi, L. A. La vita e le opere di F. Patricio. Milan, 1941.
Saitta, A. Il pensiero italiano nell’umanesimo e nel rinascimento, vol. 2. Bologna, 1950. Pages 521–67.
Kristeller, P. O. Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Stanford, Calif., 1964.

N. V. KOTRELEV