Emanuele Tesauro

Emanuele Tesauro
Emanuele Tesauro
	Frontispice of the 1670 edition of il Cannocchiale aristotelico
Born	January 28, 1592; Turin
Died	February 26, 1675 (aged 83); Turin
Occupation	Rhetorician, dramatist, poet, historian, literary critic
Nationality	Italian
Genre	Poetry, historiography, literary theory
Literary movement	Baroque
Notable works	Il cannocchiale aristotelico

Emanuele Tesauro (1592–1675) was a rhetorician, dramatist, Marinist poet, and historian from Turin.

His Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico, originally published in 1654, is a work on tropes, literally the oxymoronic "Aristotelian telescope". Its main concern is the invention and wit of ingenious metaphors.[1] It has been called "one of the most important statements of poetics in seventeenth-century Europe".[2] Metaphor he calls the "Great Mother of All Witticisms". In Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before, these themes are self-consciously taken up, through the character Padre Emanuele and his metaphor-machine.[3]

Life

Emmanule Tesauro was born in Turin on January 28, 1592, the son of a wealthy noble family. At the age of twenty he entered the Jesuit order. After earning his first degree, from 1618 to 1621 he worked as a professor of rhetoric in Cremona and Milan, where he was also much admired as a preacher.

During this time Tesauro wrote his first literary works: his epigrams, published posthumously, as well as his first play, the Hermengildus. In Naples he began his theological studies.

In 1623 he moved to Milan to complete his studies; there he published the Idea delle perfette imprese and the Giudicio. Due to political contrasts, Tesauro left the Jesuits in 1634, although he remained a secular priest. As an educator of the children of the Duke of Savoy, Tesauro spent some time in the Flanders. In 1642 he returned to Turin, where he became preceptor of the princes of Carignano. In 1653 he resumed his preaching activity. In 1666 he was commissioned by the municipality of Turin to write a history of the city. In 1670 he initiated a first complete edition of his works in Turin; his Latin plays were translated into Italian.

Tesauro died in Turin in 1685.

Tesauro was a very prolific author: he wrote tragedies, sacred poems, historical works, including Del Regno D'Italia sotto i barbari (1663-64), and philosophical works, such as La Filosofia morale (1670), very widespread and appreciated.

Il cannocchiale aristotelico

While having as a model the work of Aristotle, Tesauro tries for the first time to update the classical rhetoric to the new style of Baroque literature.

Right from the title, Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope), Tesauro's work aims to revolutionize rhetoric and poetry in a way similar to what Galileo did in astronomy.

The central element of the new poetry is, according to Tesauro, the metaphor, defined by the author as "madre di tutte le argutezze" [mother of all wit],[4] whose main aim is to generate "wonder in the reader", as well as to penetrate the variety of creation.

The influence of Emmanuale Tesauro, Baltasar Gracián and Jakob Masen on European mannerism and the rise of the "argutia" movement is well documented in the studies by Miguel Battlori, K.-P. Lange, Wilfried Barner and Barbara Bauer.[5]

Partial bibliography

Ermenegildo, Edippo, Ippolito (1621)
L’Idea delle perfette imprese (1622)
Il Giudicio (1625)
Panegirici, published by Bartolomeo Zavatta, Turin, (1659).
Il cannocchiale aristotelico, o' sia, idea dell'arguta et ingeniosa elocutione, che serve a tutta l'Arte Oratoria, Lapidaria, et Simbolica., Venice, Presso Paolo Baglioni, 1664.
Inscriptiones (1670)
La Filosofia morale derivata dall'alto Fonte del Grande Ariostotele Stagirita, 1st ed. published by Bartolomeo Zapata, Turin (1670).
Campeggiamenti overo Istorie del Piemonte, published by Giacomo Monti, Bologna, 1674.
Dell’arte delle lettere missive published by Giovanni Recaldini, Bologna (1678).
Del Regno D'Italia sotto i barbari, published by Presso Giovanni Giacomo Hertz, in Venice (1680).

Notes

George Alexander Kennedy, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (1989), p. 448.
Jon R. Snyder, Mare Magnum: the arts in the early modern age, p. 162, in John A. Marino, editor, Early modern Italy (2002).
Cristina Farronato, Eco's Chaosmos: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernity (2003), p. 26.
From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale, Nancy L. Canepa, Wayne State University Press, 1999, p. 217
See Wilfried Barner, Barockrhetorik. Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen (Tubingen, 1970); Miguel Batllori, Gracián y el Barocco (Rome, 1958); Barbara Bauer, Jesuitische 'ars rhetorica' im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Frankfurt, 1986); K.-P. Lange, Theoretiker des literarischen Manierismus. Tesauros und Pellegrinis Lehre von der "Acutezza" oder von der Macht der Sprache (Munich, 1968).

External links

Emanuele Tesauro entry (in Italian) in the Enciclopedia italiana, 1937
Literature by and about Emanuele Tesauro in the German National Library catalogue

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[1] George Alexander Kennedy, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (1989), p. 448.

[2] Jon R. Snyder, Mare Magnum: the arts in the early modern age, p. 162, in John A. Marino, editor, Early modern Italy (2002).

[3] Cristina Farronato, Eco's Chaosmos: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernity (2003), p. 26.

[4] From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile's Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale, Nancy L. Canepa, Wayne State University Press, 1999, p. 217

[5] See Wilfried Barner, Barockrhetorik. Untersuchungen zu ihren geschichtlichen Grundlagen (Tubingen, 1970); Miguel Batllori, Gracián y el Barocco (Rome, 1958); Barbara Bauer, Jesuitische 'ars rhetorica' im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Frankfurt, 1986); K.-P. Lange, Theoretiker des literarischen Manierismus. Tesauros und Pellegrinis Lehre von der "Acutezza" oder von der Macht der Sprache (Munich, 1968).