Tappe della fortuna del Guicciardini tra Cinque e Seicento

This essay encompasses a range of time of about six decades, from 1582 to 1648: the publishing dates of Girolamo Muzio’s «Battaglie per diffesa dell’italica lingua» and Giano Nicio Eritreo’s (Giovan Vittorio Rossi) «Pinacotheca tertia» — both works appeared posthumously.
Within these two dates we find the works of many authors, such as Giusto Lipsio, Antonio Possevino S. J., Scipione Ammirato, Francesco Bocchi, Jacopo Gaddi, Giambattista Marino, Giovan Battista Lauri, Girolamo Ghilini, Giovanni Imperiali, Sebastiano Maccio, Agostino Mascardi, Gabriel Naudé and again Eritreo (but also, through “external” considerations, Giovan Battista Leoni, Alessandro Tassoni, Traiano Boccalini and Anton Giulio Brignole Sale): all of their works can be ascribed to the two main literary genres that in the Cinquecento and Seicento operate as both mirrors, «specula», and vantage-point for the investigation of Guicciardini’s influence. Namely, the two genres are the biographical collection («de viris illustribus») and the historiographical treatise («de historia conscribenda»): both genres derive, through the Classical and Classicistic Tradition, from that same Petrarchean root of humanistic erudition that in the Eighteenth century will give life to one of the most prominent assessments of Guicciardini’s «Fortleben»: the «Storia d’Italia» edited among others by Apostolo Zeno.
However, one should not think of Guicciardini’s appreciation as of a smooth, linear process: accordingly, this essay stresses the multiplicity and nuances of historiographical approaches to Guicciardini’s oeuvre. Single authors and their judgements on Guicciardini will therefore be examined not as isolated voices of endorsement or critique, but rather as the interwoven elements of a comprehensive literary and historical web, where continuity counts as much as difference.