Dire l'« art » à Florence sous Cosme I de Médicis: une Poétique d'Aristote au service du Prince

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the circulation of Aristotle's Poetics in the social and political contexts of sixteenth century Florence. It starts by analyzing why the methods traditionally used by historians of ideas, which have been dominant in the study of Aristotle's Poetics since the work of Bernard Weinberg, are insufficient. These lines of inquiry fall short because 1) they fail to take into account the links between the scholars who produced these commentaries and the secular powers these scholars served, 2) they neglect to situate the production of these discourses within the various understandings of “art” that were dominant in the early modern period. The second part of the article develops a case study centered on three books published between 1548 and 1550 under the patronage of Cosimo I de Medici: Francesco Robortello's Latin commentary of Aristotle's Poetics, Bernardo Segni's translation of the text into the Tuscan dialect and Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the most famous artists […]. The study underlines that these books all aimed at defining the “arts” of representation as founding elements of the form of pacification the Medici claimed to bring to the civil strives of republican Florence. It also investigates the role attributed to Aristotle's rhetorical, moral and political works within this specific configuration, and highlights how these necessities weighed on the interpretations of Aristotle's Poetics, stressing in particular that the understanding of Aristotle's concept of catharsis as referring to a “purgation of the passions” appears to have been formalized for the first time in Florence around 1550. But, while this reading circulated swiftly around Europe, becoming extremely common during the early modern period, it may not be have been the dominant reading in Florence itself, as a complex manuscript, circulated among members of the academy of the Alterati between 1573 and 1617, and commenting on Pier Vettori's reading of the Poetics, tends to suggest.