Petrarch’s Famous Men in the Early Renaissance: The Illuminated Copies of Felice Feliciano’s Edition. Lilian Armstrong. Warburg Studies and Texts 5. London: Warburg Institute, 2016. xii + 248 pp. £45.
and posits a correlation between the sensorimotor physicality of writing in calligraphers like Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi (whose handwriting manual Operina was published in 1522) with that of reading as theorized by educators like John Amos Comenius (1592–1670). In “Wholesome or Pestilential? Giovanni Battista Doni (1594– 1647) and the Dispute on Roman Air,” Sara Miglietti situates the Florentine polymath’s De Restituenda Salubritate Agri Romani (On restoring healthiness to the Roman countryside, ca. 1630) within the ecological debates of his time, and contrasts his antiquarian work to contemporary scientific treatises on the subject. Grace Allen’s “Addressing the Reader: Lodovico Dolce’s Somma della filosofia d’Aristotele and the Audience for Vernacular Philosophy in Sixteenth-Century Italy” describes the authorial strategies employed by the famed Venetian poligrafo in promoting his compendium of Aristotelian thought for a lay readership. The volume concludes with two book reviews: Louis Bayman, The Operatic and the Everyday in Postwar Italian Film Melodrama (Elda Buonanno Foley), and Gino Tellini, Alle origini della modernità letteraria (Paola Quadrini). Despite the misleadingly simplistic title of this volume, the essays it contains employ a robustly flexible notion of dialogue in discussing a wide range of important artists and thinkers. The reader will welcome its rich panorama of the literature and the arts in the Italian Renaissance and Baroque.