Né vers 1600 en Italie, l'opéra encourait les foudres de Marcello dès 1720. L'ouverture des salles au public, les nécessités commerciales et le vedettariat l'avaient éloigné des idéaux qui présidèrent à sa naissance. L'opuscule de Benedetto Marcello aborde, sur le ton de la dérision et de la satire, tous les aspects de l'opéra, du livret à la musique, en passant par les chanteurs, les compositeurs, les directeurs de théâtre, la mise en scène, etc. Le texte méritait une nouvelle traduction française (...) (la dernière datait de la fin du dix-neuvième siècle), plus précise et plus complète, car le savant compositeur de l'Estro poetico-armonico y déploie une verve irrésistible, proche de celle dont se servira Carlo Goldoni dans l'imprésario de Smyrne. Cette satire représente l'étincelle qui allait embraser le flambeau de la réforme par le biais du comte Francesco Algarotti (1712-1764) poète et écrivain. Son Essai sur l'Opéra en musique contient en effet tous les points importants sur lesquels Calzabigi et Gluck allaient asseoir leur reconstruction : choix du livret, rôle de la poésie et de la musique, rôle des chanteurs, du compositeur, moyens et contrôle artistiques des productions. La traduction française qu'un fit Chastellux en 1773, nonobstant sa finesse et son élégance, fait pourtant figure de " belle infidèle ". Force nous était donc d'élaborer là encore une nouvelle traduction de ce texte fondateur. A côté de ces deux grands titres, nous avons réuni un dossier important d'écrits émanant des acteurs de la réforme : Métastase, Angiolini, Calzabigi, Gluck et Du Roullet. (shrink)

This paper examines the shift from Scholasticism to Renaissance humanism by focussing on the Italian humanist, Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542). The politico-religious climate of 15th-16th century Italy represents the arena in which Contarini developed his philosophy. His studies at the University of Padova where Padovan Aristotelianism dominated reflected the basis of his intellectual formation. The Platonic revival of Renaissance Italy also made its way into Contarini’s humanist philosophy.

The two treatises Modus concionandi and Istructio pro concionatoribus were written by Gasparo Contarini for the preachers of Belluno between 1538 and 1541. With these works, Contarini explores three aspects of the predication. First, he focuses on a rhetorical issue: the language of the predication must be adequate for an inexpert audience. Second, he suggests to censure the most complex theological issues from the field of the predication since the audience could not understand such technical concepts like predestination and (...) causal bounds. Third, he reveals that the aim of the predication is to help a civil ethic and to avoid social disorders – like those triggered by Augustinian preachers. In the texts Contarini also shows his debt to Pietro Pomponazzi, who in his Tractatus and Apologia provided both a civic paradigm and an accusation of the bad preachers. (shrink)

Quaestio, Volume 20, Issue, Page 530-534, January 2020.

Represented as the face of Venice, the houses of the Grand Canal were used during the Renaissance to support the portrayal of the Venetian Republic's unique structure of governance. Paolo Paruta's dialogue, Della perfettione della vita politica, a work of political theory on the Venetian Republic, is one such text used here to examine how in a changing context of modernization, architecture has been presented as a representation of state. Paruta's use of architecture as a representation of state was conceptually (...) different from those earlier writers such as Gasparo Contarini who presented the uniqueness of Venice's social qualities through its orderly governance and law. Fundamental to Paruta's incorporation of architecture to the conceptualization of Venice was Daniele Barbaro's interpretation of Vitruvius’ representation of the body-of-state, being reflected in the architectural makeup of the city. However, Vitruvius’ text, De architectura, described the monarch's body reflected in the architecture and urban strategies of the late Roman Republic. Paruta's use of the text and of Daniele Barbaro aimed to transfer these values to the Venetian Republic and its social formations. Subtly forging links between the radicalism of Doge Andrea Gritti's renovatio programmes and the power struggles of the young patricians, Paruta's aim for architecture was to support the preservation of Venetian values as distinct from those of Rome. Indications are that Paruta's message was understood. To examine the comprehensibility of Paruta's political propositions, his terms and arguments are analysed in the context of three different architectural composition types used in Venetian houses of the mid-sixteenth century. (shrink)

This essay deals with Girolamo Fracastoro’s ensouled cosmology. His Homocentrica sive de stellis (1538), an astronomy of concentric spheres, was discussed by the Padua School of Aristotelians. Since the polemics over the immortality of the human soul, which had famously opposed Pomponazzi to Nifo, psychological discussions—including those about heavenly spheres’ souls—raised heated controversies. Fracastoro discussed the foundations of his homocentric planetary theory in a dialogue titled Fracastorius, sive de anima (1555). In a 1531 exchange with Gasparo Contarini, Fracastoro discussed (...) celestial physics, including problems linked to mathematical analysis of physical causation. Contarini expressed his doubts over Fracastoro’s lack of consideration of Aristotelian viewpoints on heavenly souls and intelligences. Fracastoro offered an account of cosmic animation in his later dialogue “On the Soul,” taking a different path than his Paduan teachers. He picked up the Platonic idea of the “world soul,” freely connecting it with Aristotelian views about the ensouled cosmos of concentric spheres, resulting in an eclectic composition of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Averroistic elements. Fracastoro grounded his renewed mathematical astronomy on an understanding of the cosmos as a living whole. His animated homocentric cosmos represented a development of Aristotelian premises and a step beyond this legacy. (shrink)

Amor Dei, “love of God” raises three questions: How do we know God is love? How do we experience love of God? How free are we to love God? This book presents three kinds of love, worldly, spiritual, and divine to understand God’s love. The work begins with Augustine’s Confessions highlighting his Manichean and Neoplatonic periods before his conversion to Christianity. Augustine’s confrontation with Pelagius anticipates the unresolved disputes concerning God’s love and free will. In the sixteenth-century the Italian humanist, (...) Gasparo Contarini introduces the notion of “divine amplitude” to demonstrate how God’s goodness is manifested in the human agent. Pierre de Bérulle, Guillaume Gibieuf, and Nicolas Malebranche show connections with Contarini in the seventeenth-century controversies relating free will and divine love. In response to the free will dispute, the Scottish philosopher, William Chalmers, offers his solution. Cornelius Jansen relentlessly asserts his anti-Pelagian interpretation of Augustine stirring up more controversy. John Norris, Malebranche’s English disciple, exchanges his views with Mary Astell and Damaris Masham. In the tradition of Cambridge Platonism, Ralph Cudworth conveys a God who “sweetly governs.” The organization of sections represents the love of God in ascending-descending movements demonstrating that, “human love is inseparable from divine love.”. (shrink)