Exil und Heimatferne in der Literatur des Humanismus von Petrarca bis zum Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts
Soderini, Rodolfo Peruzzi, and Niccolò Della Luna.11
The dialogue treats of exile in a slightly detached fashion, since Rinaldo degli Albizzi and the two Strozzis have not yet left their native Florence. But in this work by a disgruntled adversary, the political vicissitudes of Cosimo de’ Medici hardly inspire any laudatory references to the great men of antiquity. If history is written by the victors, then satire is written by the losers.
Bibliography
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Brown, Alison: The Humanist Portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici, Pater patriae. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24, 1961, 186–221. Reprinted in Brown 1992, 3–52.
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Exiled from the Cradle of Humanism
Francesco Filelfo’s Commentationes Florentinae de Exilio
Jeroen De Keyser (KU Leuven)
“Ainsi, la première chose que la peste
apporta à nos concitoyens fut l’exil. Et le
narrateur est persuadé qu’il peut écrire ici,
au nom de tous, ce que lui-même a éprouvé
alors, puisqu’il l’a éprouvé en même temps
que beaucoup de nos concitoyens.”
(Albert Camus, La peste)
The Italian humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481),1 who during a seven-year stay in Constantinople achieved a high degree of proficiency in Greek and who in 1427 returned to Italy with numerous Greek manuscripts in his luggage,2 came to Florence shortly after his return from the East. Initially sponsored as a teacher at the Florentine Studio by, among others, Palla Strozzi, Leonardo Bruni and Cosimo de’ Medici. Soon he clashed with the humanists supported by Cosimo, especially Niccolò Niccoli, Carlo Marsuppini and Poggio Bracciolini. By October 1433, when Cosimo was exiled to the Veneto, Filelfo appeared secure, having sided with the triumphant aristocratic party. But on Cosimo’s recall less than a year later, in September 1434, a regime change took place, and Filelfo found himself exiled from the city along with the aristocrats.
In the early 1440’s, when already firmly established at the court of Filippo Maria Visconti in Milan, Francesco Filelfo composed his Commentationes Florentinae de exilio.3 This unfinished consolatory dialogue in three books focuses on the fate of the Florentine oligarchs, especially Palla Strozzi, his son Onofrio, and Rinaldo degli Albizzi, who were forced into exile at the return to power of Cosimo de’ Medici. Interlacing their arguments with long philosophical digressions, the participants discuss the unhappy condition of exile and poverty, while trying to define what precisely makes for virtuous behaviour.
The Commentationes were originally planned to take up ten books, but Filelfo apparently abandoned the work after writing only three: the first on the inconveniences of exile in general (De incommodis exilii); the second on infamy (De infamia); and the third on poverty (De paupertate). From a marginal note in one of the few manuscripts transmitting the Commentationes, we know the original lay-out of the entire work: the other seven books were supposed to be addressing slavery, contempt, untimely old age, illness, prison, death and misery.
Ordo decem librorum: Liber primus summatim De incommodis exilii, Liber II De infamia, Liber III De paupertate, Liber IIII De servitute, Liber V De contemptu, Liber VI De intempestiva senectute, Liber VII De aegrotatione, Liber VIII De carcere, Liber VIIII De morte, Liber X De miseria (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, ms. II.II.70, f. 4v).4
It is unclear why the remaining books were left unwritten, since even the existing three were composed at a time when the hopes of the expatriated aristocrats for a reestablishment of themselves in Florence were already unlikely to be realised – but quite a few of Filelfo’s other major writings fell short of their projected length as well.5
Filelfo includes in his text numerous long selections and shorter quotes from various Greek authors, among others Euripides, Sextus Empiricus,6 the pseudepigraphic Cynic Epistles,7 Plutarch and Aristotle, producing perhaps the most accomplished and creative use of Greek texts in the first half of the Quattrocento. The dialogues move from discussions of the contemporary political scene in Florence to anecdotes containing witty observations about famous men, to literary passages translated from ancient Greek sources, and to rather technical philosophical discussions, such as the analysis of the summum bonum or ultimate good in Book 2, which turns out to rely heavily on a discussion of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by the medieval philosopher Albert the Great. There are also brief comical interludes, the purpose of which is to poke fun at the rival humanist and Cosimo supporter Poggio Bracciolini, who is consistently depicted as a greedy nitwit, glutton and drunk.8
In the first book of the Commentationes Filelfo quotes widely from a range of literary works, both classical and Christian, in order to disprove that exile is an unhappy condition in which to live. The discussion then skips to an analysis of pleasure and its role in human happiness, and to the notion of world citizenship, of worldly life as a state of exile from a homeland that is only truly to be found beyond earthly experience.9
The figure of Rinaldo degli Albizzi dominates the discussion in book two, with an extensive passage consisting in Ridolfo Peruzzi’s rendering of Rinaldo’s speech before Pope Eugenius IV on the eve of the Medici coup, trying to convince the pope to take the aristocrats’ side. The second part of the book is designed to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of ‘praise’ as an outcome of virtuous behaviour. One should pursue right or virtuous action for its own sake, and even though allegations of infamy may come from their fellow citizens, the aristocrats must avoid concerning themselves with how they appear to others; they must instead continue to behave as virtuously as possible.
In book 3, the accent is on the ethical dimensions of poverty and wealth. Filelfo’s interlocutors are looking for an understanding of wealth that is both socially acceptable and philosophically tenable. The guiding light for this dialogue is Leonardo Bruni, who had supported Filelfo’s career when the latter arrived to teach in Florence in the late 1420s. Bruni expounds on