Invisibile Come Dio: La Vita E L'opera Di Gabriele Biondo by Michele Lodone (review)

This is the first comprehensive study of the life and thought of the enigmatic figure Gabriele Biondo (ca. 1445–1511), the youngest of the famous humanist Flavio Biondo's five sons. It is enriched with a detailed survey of his surviving manuscripts and a transcription / critical edition of his three most importatnt treatises: the De meditatione et deceptionibus (1492); fragments from the Ricordo (1498) and its complete Latin translation the Commentarius (1503); and the De amore proprio (1502–06). This monograph is an expansion of Lodone's 2012 thesis on the latter treatise at the Scuola Normale Pisa under Franco Bacchelli who encouraged him to expand on earlier studies of Gabriele conducted by Augusto Campana (on Gabriele's humanism and his roots in the Romagna), Carlo Dionisotti (on his poetry and letters), and Delio Cantimori (on the religious context in which he worked). This volume admirably succeeds in this task. The scholarship is based on extensive archival research, careful reconstructions using documentary evidence, cautious judgments, and an empathy for his subject.

Information on Gabiele's early life is limited. He apparenly grew up in Rome where his father Flavio (1392–1463) held the posts of apostolic secretary and notary of the Camera. He was trained in the humanities. By 1468 he was a noted Roman poet, had apparently acquired a doctoral degree in both laws, and was made a count of the Lateran Palace. Unlike his brothers, Gabriele did not pursue a career in the Roman Curia, although he is isted in 1470 as an apostolic notary. Lodone suspects that in the late 1460s, Gabriele underwent a conversion experience influenced by the writngs of Pietro di Giovanni Olivi and Angelo Clareno. His father was a supporter of the Observant movement in the Franciscan Order and his sister Eugenia joined the Clarissa convent of Corpus Christi in Ferrara. While espousing the Franciscan emphasis on poverty, Gabriele was very critical of the friars who claimed to practice it. He never joined the Franciscans, but instead became a secular priest. When and where is not clear. Also a mystery is how and why he assumed by 1470 the post of prior of the pieve of San Stefano in Modigliana—was it a collegiate church whose prior was elected, did soneone with patronage rights over it nominate him, did Bishop Bartolomeo Gandolfi of Faenza appoint him, or did the Roman curia intervene? Gabriele had an maternal uncle Matteo Maldenti living in the area. Did he leave Rome where he saw false prophets and the anti-Christ and flee to this mountainous area based on the exhortation of Matt 24: 16? Once there he gathered around himself a group of disciples, a kind of confraternity (the Friends of Truth), whose members lived there, in Florence, and elsewhere, reaching to Bologna and Venice.

The spirituality he dispensed called for the annihilation of self, direct contact with God, a downplaying of the role a priest as mediator and of the rituals and sacraments as vehicles of grace. He propagated these views in his letters and treatises. His De mediatione et deceptionibus aimed at teaching beginners how to pray: realize one's unworthiness and complete dependence on divine grace, gaze affectionately on Christ crucified, resign one's self to God's will, abandon all forms of self-love, and receive the gift of divine light. The treasise De amore proprio was in the form of a letter to Sister Alessandra degli Ariosti of the Clarissa Corpus Christi convent in Bologna. It warned against self love that seeks earthly things, instead abandon oneself to God's will, be passive, and let God infuse His grace and act in us. The Ricordo, a collection of his teachings with a final section denouncing Savonarola as a false prophet, became the target of an Venetian inquisitorial process in Padua in 1501–02, with the imprisonment of his disciple Giovanni...