Metamorfosi e conoscenza: I dialoghi e le commedia di Giovan Battista Gelli (review)

This book explores the works and philosophy of an intriguing figure of the Italian Renaissance, Giovan Battista Gelli (1498–1563). To underline the importance of Gelli, Cassiani, at the outset of her study, cites the authority of Luigi Pirandello, who places Gelli alongside Machiavelli and Bruno. It has been difficult to fit Gelli into the canon of Italian literary history precisely because of the tendency in his work to ignore categorizable models and paradigms of classification. Cassiani reminds us that Benedetto Croce, who exercised great influence in the first half of the twentieth century, excluded works that were digressive, fragmentary, and unfinished in nature. The point is that Gelli's works are characterized by a non-finito quality: that is, they are presented as documents that are in the course of being written but never completed, much like the some of the works of a later figure such as Pier Paolo Pasolini (La Divina Mimesis, Petrolio, for example). In addition, Gelli ignored the sort of rules of composition that were codified during the Renaissance.

However, although Gelli was capriccioso and irregolare, as he produced a body of work that defied classification, his textual production offers us, in Cassiani's mind, a philosophy of things in which the high and the low —from a social and intellectual point of view —are not detached from each other. To be sure, these two levels are in a constant dialogue, the background being a transformation that is taking place in sixteenth-century Italy. The movement stems from the idea that literature represents the realization of the need for new forms of communication, given that reality can no longer be represented in a univocal manner. Gelli, Cassiani reminds us, believes that literature should not be concerned solely with evasion and that philosophy is not the sole domain of the philosophers. Thus, the function of literature is to investigate reality and itself as well.

The book consists of three chapters, each one dealing with a different work by Gelli. The opening chapter ("Metamorfosi di anima e corpo: I capriccio") is sub-divided into four sections ("Capricciosi pensieri," "Unione e separazione," "Sogno e pensiero fantastico," and "Filosofia e teologia"). The second chapter is entitled "Metamorfosi della natura: La circe," and contains five sections ("Geroglifici e prisca sapientia," "La favola del piacere e del dolore," "Querelle des femmes e paradosso," "La scala della virtu'" and "Voci degli animali eparole dell'uomo"). The final chapter, "Mutazioni e travestimenti," consists of four sections ("Il dialogo nella commedia," "Imitazione e riscrittura," "Mutazione linguistica e corruzione religiosa," and "Inganno e travestimento").

A shortcoming of this book is that the reader is challenged by the author as the objectives of the chapter are not articulated, thus leaving the reader in a position to have to deduce or infer what Cassiani is setting out to prove or disprove. This is complicated by the absence of conclusions in the three chapters. Therefore, while it is not immediately clear what the specific objectives of the book are, aside from the general claims that are offered in the "Premessa," it is also true that Cassiani offers a wealth of information. The end result is sustained commentaries on Gelli's I capricci, La Circe, La Sporta, and Lo errore, which reveal the emergence of an alternative form of thinking and writing. An important particular that emerges from Cassiani's analysis of I capricci, for example, is Gelli's program of making knowledge available to a much wider public, including those who do not possess the sort of intellectual background that would traditionally be deemed necessary. Moreover, with philological skill, Cassiani identifies sources —Neoplatonism, Aristotle, and others —that inform the epistemological texture of the dialogue's content.

Along with the masterful reconstruction of sources, Cassiani illustrates how Gelli is able to manipulate the textual authorities transmitted from the past so as to create, as in the case of...