The Vilar article points out Filelfo supported a refined version of Epicureanism (and see p. 48 in Robin's Filelfo in Milan) but that the Medici regime courted the masses with the base version. Its all rhetoric, but does provide additional context for the recycling of an old trope in Dante's Inferno.Ross Caldwell wrote: 02 Jul 2023, 18:39Marziano used the good sense of Epicureanism in his chapter on Venus. See pages 40-41 of our edition. Since this was directed at an audience of one, and we know Filippo Maria's nature, it was obviously to call him to refined and moderate pleasures rather than the caricature of Epicurean as hedonism or other vices like greed.
Re: the wives, he and Poggio were fighting on the same level on this score. Poggio was 50 when he married 18-year old Vaggia (whose name I can of course never forget), and had to write a book defending himself for the decision. Marriage was one thing - it meant becoming part of another family - while dispensing with a girlfriend of 20+ years in Rome with fourteen of his children, if Valla can be believed, was another.
I would also tend to say that Filelfo was right about the Medicean ethic. But it wasn't just Cosimo and his family, it was the Zeitgeist. The second half of the 15th century was like our own post-war 20th century, in terms of relaxation of the "virtues of our forefathers."
The main issue was Niccoli and other Medici supporters looked down on Dante's use of the volgare. From there Filelfo charged his opponents of not being Florentine patriots, and one see how "blindness" (especially with a lacking appreciation of Dante himself) could have have entered the war of worlds. But alas we need the oration.
The context of Filelfo and Dante from "Part II" of my main theory post, Literary source for the trumps: Dante’s Paradiso
viewtopic.php?t=1062
PART II. The Role of Francesco Filelfo
[deleting the irrelevant - for the present subject - astrological context here]
Filelfo cannot just be classified as a Milanese humanist, perhaps aware of the Marziano deck and playing a guiding hand in the CY and PMB decks, for he was in Florence before the Anghiari ur-tarot was produced and in fact played a leading role in the factionalism that culminated in Anghiari, thereafter fleeing to Siena, Bologna and then Milan.
Before this Florentine factionalism came to a head, Filelfo was invited to lecture at the Florentine studio as a partisan-neutral scholar in 1429 by Medici and Albizzi factions alike. Bruni was instrumental in bringing him there and they shared many ideals, including that of placing Prudence at the head of the virtues. Already in the year before in a letter to one who was a fellow student of his at Padua Filelfo emphasizes a hierarchy of virtues in the way one practices virtuous living; taken straight from Siena, Wisdom [sapientia] lording over the other virtues:
For like some queen or empress who is content in herself, after she has rid herself of all cares concerning nugatory and fleeting matters, Wisdom alone is the one who, so that she may direct herself toward the light of that one supreme and everlasting good and so that she may fix her gaze on it unguarded, places Prudence in charge over all the rest of the moral virtues, and she (as though she were their provider) assigns tasks to each individual virtue according to its own particular duties. (Eps. 9 Dec. 1428 fols. 7-7v, quoted in Robins, 1991: 48)
Bruni, however, was not the problem. Filelfo took sides against the Medici favorites of Niccolo Niccoli and Ambrogio Traversari with backing from the wealthy Palla Strozzi in adapting his teachings against the Medici faction. In addition to his university duties, Filelfo was allowed to lecture on Dante in Florence’s Duomo (while Brunelleschi’s dome was being completed), and used Dante to condemn Cosimo and his party via those lectures – something that lead to a Medici assassination attempt of Filelfo in Florence in May of 1433 (the assassin’s legal fees were paid for by Cosimo’s brother, Lorenzo). The attempt left Filelfo permanently scarred for life with a gash across his left cheek. Just months later on 29 September1433, the Albizzi faction orchestrated the exile of the prominent Medici: Cosimo was banished from Florence for ten years in Padua (moving from there quickly to Venice but would have seen the same famous art works there by his countryman, Giotto), his cousin Averred to Naples and his brother Lorenzo to Venice for five years (Curt S. Gutkind, Cosimo de’Medici, Pater Patriae, 1389–1464. 1938: 77–86).
This highly confrontational period, focusing on the role that Filelfo’s use of Dante played, is well covered in Simon Gilson’s Dante and Renaissance Florence, (2005: 103f.). Providing an apt commentary and quoting Filelfo’s own incendiary lecture notes, Gilson remarks:
[Filelfo:]‘Now is the time, worthy citizens, now is the time for us, in defending the homeland, to join together not only our wealth but our very selves, until death if need be.’ “The enemy, of course, is within and Filelfo’s attack is directed at the family whom the ruling oligarchy views as threatening to assume power to the detriment of the city’s freedom and its best political traditions. Dante has, in short, become a Republican rally-cry in a manipulation of his name which is, on Filelfo’s part, an especially a cynical one. An outsider, professional rhetorician, and astringent controversialist, who is clientistically linked to the anti-Medici faction, he seizes on the opportunity to make use of Dante as a politically-charged symbol at a time of tumultuous factional rivalry (103)
To get a sense of how incendiary Filelfo’s words were, actually calling for factional violence, one can turn to a 1432 oration by a student follower, holding up Dante as the model for revolt against the Medici:
O liberator of your most ample republic…you alone incurred the infinite persecutions of men for the defense of the patria. You bore the cruel envies of many scoundrels for the defense of the patria.. Finally you were sent into exile for the defense of the patria.. And I will say something even more worthy of recollection – that Dante, finding himself in exile, always praised his patria, always exulted it, and always defended it. So you see then, most prudent citizens [prudentissimi cittadini], how many dangers Dante bore for the defense of the patria. Now what should you do, Florentine citizens? (Deborah Parker, Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance, 1993: 54)
The Medici orchestrated their own return the next year in 1434, and had the Albizzi exiled and forcing Filelfo out as well by 1435, condemned with the appropriate sentence - as the mouthpiece of the Albizzi - of having his tongue cut out if he should return. Filelfo would move on to a similar position in Siena, a bitter enemy of Florence (and whom, ironically, Dante despised as a good Florentine).
The “anti-Dante” position (favouring Latin over the volgare) that was led by Niccoli ceased with Niccoli’s death. It is notable therefore that Bruni’s biography of Dante comes out in 1436, following Filelfo’s expulsion of the year before.
Indeed, it may be possible that a further motivation for the [Bruni’s] Vita is one that the Medici were themselves keen to endorse – the desire to promote Florence externally, at a time when the first attempts were being made for the city to be the venue of the Council of the Church. In this light, the Vita can be viewed as a potent example of how the evocative force of Dante’s name and its value for maximizing the ‘gloria della citta’ help to [p. 124] overturn ideologized cultural preferences that had previously militated against him. (Gilson, 2005:, 123-124).
Bruni was not alone in the Dante revival in the period after the Medici return in 1434. Matteo Palmieri's Vita civile, from the same time period right after Filelfo’s exile (released c. 1435-1440), is a work that focuses on the role that the Virtues play in guiding the active life, but ends with an attempt at emulating Cicero's "Somnium Scipionis", with Charlemagne appearing in the role of Scipio the elder and Dante in that of Scipio the younger (a near death experience on the battlefield of Campaldino with a glimpse of the afterlife). But it is Bruni’s use of Dante that is most pointedly direct in regard to Filelfo’s earlier use of Dante.
Ianziti has fully explored the implications of Bruni’s role in the rehabilitation of Dante in Florence, both for himself and for Filelfo, particularly in light of Bruni’s previously wholly positive view of Dante: “The question is especially urgent because in the Lives Bruni appears to have made several significant changes to the account of Dante’s exile contained in the History, despite his claim to be merely transferring detail from that earlier version to his biography” (Gary Ianziti, “From Praise to Prose: Leonardo Bruni's Lives of the Poets”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Vol. 10, 2005: 127-148, 135). Instead of focusing on Dante’s positive civic role model as a good soldier in the Florentine victory over Siena at Campaldino, he finds a major character flaw expressed during Dante’s exile:
The most notable change concerns the description of Dante’s behavior during the descent into Italy of the Emperor Henry VII in 1313. In the History Bruni notes Dante’s Epistle VI, written a diatribe against Florence at the moment when Henry seemed on the verge of bringing his wayward Florentine subjects to heel. Bruni describes the harsh tone of this letter not to ‘frivolity or malignity’ on Dante’s part, but to historical circumstance, which deluded the exiles into gloating over an imminent victory that subsequently failed to materialize. Things stand very differently in the Life, where Bruni reports Dante’s outburst with unmitigated disapproval: ‘Dante could not maintain his resolve to wait for favor, but rose up in proud spirit and began to speak ill of those who were ruling the land, calling them villainous and evil and menacing them with their due punishment through the power of the emperor.’ (ibid, 141-142)
[Continuing in this vein]
Exile thus looms as the central theme of the Lives. Nor is the fact of the work’s composition in 1436 without significance. Recent studies have suggested how traumatic the events of the early 1430s were for Bruni [Field’s study]. As Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, he could hardly have avoided involvement in the struggles taking place between the ruling Albizzi oligarchy and the Medici faction that opposed it. Where Bruni stood in relation to these power struggles is still debated. No doubt the situation required him to call upon his own [i[prudentia[/i] in dealing with the contending parties. As is well-known of course, the struggle led in 1433 to the exile of Cosimo de’ Medici and his leading supporters. One year later, however, Cosimo and his followers returned, and it was now the leaders of the oligarchy – many of whom were old and close friends of Bruni – who were banished, as it turned out, for good. As a result, Bruni lost a number of his closest friends, including Palla di Nofri Strozzi and later, the promising young humanist and Bruni devotee Francesco Filelfo (143)…. No doubt the ultimate lesson of 1434 was one Bruni had long been careful to practice: the lesson of [i[prudentia[/i], in this case of avoiding too obvious an attachment to one of the other of the Florentine factions. Such attachment had been the downfall of the young hothead Filelfo. One hundred and thirty-odd years earlier, it had ruined Dante. Bruni was not about to fall into the same trap. (143-144)
It is not speculative at all to flatly state that Filelfo’s brandishing of Dante as some club over the heads of the Medici has been turned against him, and the cherished virtue shared between Filelfo and Bruni, prudence, has been held up to the former as a mirror to show that he has failed to practice it.
Filelfo’s response? He too turns his pen to the theme of exile by placing his primary patron, Palla Strozzi, exiled in Padua (with the Albizzi exiled across northern Italy), in one of the earliest Platonic dialogues in the Renaissance, appropriately entitled On Exile. But the setting is back in Florence at the time of the Medici exile, and we find that even Bruni is imagined as one of the speakers….speaking ill of none other than Cosimo Medici with his own humanists (Poggio Bracciolini):
Leonardo [Bruni]: An object of wonder indeed, Poggio, as you say seeing that he is a vulgar, lowborn, miserable thief who has entrenched himself using the city’s lowest and filthiest manure – a vile and shameful sort of trade - ; who has enrolled on his side all the destitute and the beggars; who has held worthy of his intimate society whomever he knows to have mastered the arts of sprinkling poison and brandishing a dagger; and who has drawn to himself all worthless criminals, not so much by gifts as by boundless hope and his promises of base wickedness. This inexperienced and lazy band of impoverished and forsaken weaklings is easily stirred up by Cosimo de’ Medici, a man practiced in evil ways through all sorts of tainted activity….” (Filelfo,On Exile, Book 3.60-63, tr. W. Scott Blanchard, 2013: 355)
And so on, ad nauseam. One can only imagine Bruni’s response to these words placed in his mouth, still chancellor of Florence and beholden to Cosimo as the real power broker. But this came right after Anghiari had already sealed Strozzi, Albizzi, et al.’s fate. Just before that, when there was still hope of a final victory over Cosimo that flickered out at Anghiari, Filelfo was writing directly about and to Cosimo, in such poetic works as his Satyrae:
Satire 4.1 examines the contrasting figures of Palla [Strozzi] and Cosimo from an imagined point in time when Cosimo, after a brief incarceration in Florence, had just left the city to spend his eleven months in exile in Venice and Padua. Beginning as a poem addressed to Cosimo--who is addressed as "Mundus," punning by way of Latin on the Greek term kosmos--the satire takes up the Stoic theme of the wise man who rules himself and his passions, in contrast to the foolish man whose impulses are unconstrained. Despite Cosimo's use of money to win friends and influence people, the poem notes that during his time of greatest need Cosimo's friends have deserted him. Filelfo makes many of the same points in a taunting letter to Cosimo composed in 1440 on the eve of the battle of Anghiari [this is the letter I suggested get published with the oration], a letter that mocks Cosimo's "egalitarianism," that is, his demagoguery in seeking the "people's" support, even as he refuses to allow himself to be constrained by the same laws that bind the citizens of Florence. (W. Scott Blanchard, “Patrician Sages and the Humanist Cynic: Francesco Filelfo and the Ethics of World Citizenship”, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4, 2007: 1107-1169, 1141)
Given the fact that Dante was at the heart of Filelfo’s attack on the Medici party and the first known production of trionfi cards immediately follows upon Anghiari, a deck whose trumps themes are arguably the same as those 14 images painted for Bianca Visconti in Ferrara some three months after Giusti’s deck was completed for Malatesta, as well as the Milanese CY deck some ten months after Giusti’s deck, I will argue that the Dantean schema was common to all as evidenced in the surviving CY Deck’s trumps, albeit based on the Florentine “Anghiari ur-tarot”. In fact, one is almost forced to muse that it was not just Bruni’s Vita di Dante that has taken Filelfo’s weapon and used it against that humanist, even now resident in Milan and working as the mouthpiece for Visconti and the rebel Albizzi faction, but the Giusti/Anghiari deck has achieved the same objective in a pictorial format. If his old friend Bruni was behind the Anghiari deck, that must have specifically stung – but considering Bruni’s own allegiance might have been suspect at the time by the Medici (see Arthur Field, "Leonardi Bruni, Florentine traitor? Bruni, the Medici, and an Aretine conspiracy of 1437", Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 1109-50) he had no option but to do their bidding. The CY, assuming it follows the same trumps as the Anghiari, did not necessarily need a humanist behind its creation but certainly Filelfo was available for any Visconti tweaking and would have understood the “Anghiari ur-tarot” all too well. He had been in Milan since 1439 and may have been looking for such a project to involve himself in order to make his mark there.
Phaeded