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  • Mazzotta and the Theology of the Renaissance
  • Maria C. Pastore Passaro (bio)

The question of theology figures in most of Giuseppe Mazzotta’s thinking. It is a concern he keeps in mind and which he makes the real subject matter of poetry. A book such as Dante, Poet of the Desert announces even in the title its theological substance. Ever since Mazzotta’s work, readers of Dante know that ‘desert’ is the figure of poetry and of exile, the ‘metaphoric space’ of the quest between idolatry and prophecy.

I would like to add that Mazzotta treats Dante’s theology in a manner different from other scholars both in the United States and Italy. For Mazzotta, theology is not, as it is for Charles Singleton or John Hollander, a point of reference, a term used to give coherence to Dante’s poetry. Nor is Mazzotta’s theology ‘Augustinian’ as it is for John Freccero—the theology of the self that seeks faith and conversion—or Thomistic as for Giuseppe Vandelli and Étienne Gilson. I will let Dante scholars define Mazzotta’s Dantesque theology. It encompasses many facets. To me it seems to be a theology at once both Franciscan and Dominican, Augustinian and Thomistic. I want to turn, instead, to some essays he has written on the Renaissance over a number of years in order to grasp his theological thinking.

The fact that Mazzotta deploys an original theological focus on the Renaissance is in itself important. He has written essays such as “Science and Theology: Galileo and Bellarmine” and “‘Le Lagrime della Beata Vergine’ di Torquato Tasso”, and he has promoted and written the foreword to the Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola. To [End Page S173] understand Mazzotta’s radical and strong sense of theology, I think we should look at the historiography of the Renaissance.

Ever since the nineteenth century, the study of the Renaissance has been put forth as a basically secular phenomenon. The Renaissance was seen as a secular turn from the theological Middle Ages. Figures such as Francesco De Sanctis and Jacob Burckhardt—the two major voices of the nineteenth century—set the stage for this esthetic and civil, or secular, understanding of the Renaissance. Their views flow into those of Giovanni Gentile and Hans Blumenberg in the twentieth century. Thus, the Renaissance began to be studied as the harbinger of modernity. The originality of Giuseppe Mazzotta’s work on the Renaissance has rethought the paradigm instituted by his predecessors. He has proposed a ‘Viconian’ interpretation of the Renaissance. According to Mazzotta, Vico’s Scienza nuova seeks to bring life to the Renaissance that he experiences as shattered and dead. Secondly, Mazzotta has begun by expanding the temporal boundaries of the Renaissance. In many traditional readings, the Renaissance roughly begins with Bruni in 1400 and ends around 1527, and it concerns Florence’s temporal and spatial boundaries. Mazzotta widens the Renaissance. It begins with Petrarch, it includes Florence, Rome, Naples, and ends with Vico in 1740s Naples. Third, the model Mazzotta proposes is one where art, music, philosophy, politics and history come together. He believes that what we call Baroque does not mean the exhaustion of the Renaissance. It brings together different periods such as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with the addition of science. But the novelty of Mazzotta’s reading consists in his acknowledgment of theology and religious thought as the perspective that is always challenged by politics, science and rhetoric. Yet in turn it introduces new and radical ideas and challenges the sciences. He calls it a “new encyclopedism” (NMW 40) and it is new also because he has started it.

A text by Mazzotta in which a theological reading emerges is the short piece on Torquato Tasso’s Le lagrime della Beata Vergine, a work written in 1593, after the critical failure of the Gerusalemme conquistata. Mazzotta reconstructs the circumstances of Tasso’s writing of the poem. In beautiful Italian prose, he points out how Tasso saw in the house of Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini a painting of the Virgin in tears because of the death of her son. Mazzotta reads the twenty-five octaves that make up the poem, beginning with the...

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