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spoke languidly because of the infirmity of his soul and said,
Oh, my soul, I know that you have to go and I know where
you will go; it will be over soon. Moreover, many times he
offered me his book On the Mortality of the Soul (De mortalitate
animae), and he wanted to make me give it to his students,
but I neglected to look at it, and once he asked if I had read
it, and I told him yes, even though I had not read it. . . .
Likewise the said Signor Rocco once told me that one
finds in the Holy Scriptures many contradictions and things
that do not coincide with the proper time period, and things
that cannot be so, in particular the Ark of Noah, which
could not be capable of carrying so many animals. . . .
Also Signor Rocco asked us how much time since we had
been used carnally, either naturally or against nature, and we
told him all about it; and he added, You have done well be-
cause that instrument was made by nature because we have
our tastes and delights. 22
What interested the inquisitors, however, was less Rocco s
sodomies than his heresies, especially his rejection of the im-
mortality of the soul after the fashion of Cremonini.
For all their free-spirited ideas, the Incogniti were hardly
revolutionaries. No matter how much they rebelled against
the dogmas of the Church, they failed to imagine an alterna-
tive society or to embrace an ideology of progress, as would
the Enlightenment thinkers whom the Incogniti anticipated
in other respects. In fact, they remained, as Giorgio Spini put
it, fixed in a fundamentally conservative attitude, insensible
82
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Pietro della Vecchia s painting Socrates and His Two Pupils, also known as
Know Thyself, was one of a series of oil paintings Vecchia produced show-
ing an elderly teacher paying what may be seen as erotic attention to his
young students. Antonio Rocco s book advocating pedophilia influenced
della Vecchia. Prado Museum, Madrid.
the li berti nes
to the sources for social renewal in their own time. Spini
traced the attitude of the Venetian libertines to the influence
of Cremonini, who had oriented them toward a backward-
looking philosophical and historical method and who seems
to have imparted to a chosen few intimates the rudiments of
his crypto-libertinism.23 Thus, in politics they uncritically
promulgated the conservative, traditional myth about the vir-
tues of the Venetian republic.
Loredan himself depicted the academies as a microcosm
of that republic. In his Academic Novelties, he presented a dis-
course on that thing which is most prejudicial to the sur-
vival of the academies. He defines the academy as none
other than a union of the Virtuous to cheat time, and to in-
vestigate Virtue and happiness. Quoting Plato, Loredan de-
fines the republic in the same way, as a union of citizens for
the purpose of pursuing happiness. The first obligation of
academicians is to flee error, and of the citizen to avoid
blame. The function of the academy is to teach, and the in-
terests of the academy and the republic are virtually identical.
He then examines those things prejudicial to both republics
and academies. His list is a peculiar amalgam of republican
theory with a certain Incognito twist. The prejudicial condi-
tions he catalogs include: when rewards and punishments are
determined by emotions rather than justice, when merit is
not rewarded, when citizens are unequal, and when those
who govern are ignorant. This is standard republican theory.
But he slips in between numbers three and five the position
rhetorical theory designated as the least conspicuous on his
85
The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance
list the statement Old age is a grave detriment to the in-
terests of the Republic. 24 Is this an example of the Incogni-
ti s questioning the gerontocracy of savi who governed them,
without bringing the republican system itself into question?25
The Incogniti supported the most ardent of the free spir-
its, Ferrante Pallavicino, and provided an appreciative audi-
ence for him. The books he wrote during his most produc-
tive period, between 1635 and 1640, were so popular that
booksellers and printers bought them from him at a pre-
mium. During the same half decade, he worked on publish-
ing projects with the Incogniti and another prominent acad-
emy, the Unisoni. He also published accounts of his travels
to Genoa and to Germany as the chaplain to the duke of
Amalfi. After the German trip he returned to Venice in the
summer of 1541 with his face disfigured by a skin disease and
a new book ready for publication. Il Corriero svaligiato, which
might be translated as The Post-Boy Robbed of His Bag,
became, according to his contemporary biographer and col-
league in the Incogniti, Girolamo Brusoni, the sole cause of
all his misfortunes. 26 In the novella four courtiers read and
comment on letters that their prince has ordered stolen from
a courier. The letters included some political ones written by
the Spanish governor of Milan. The conceit of the novella al-
lowed Pallavicino to express multiple points of view and to
offer a small encyclopedia of contemporary ideologies criti-
cal of the Grandi, described as ravenous wolves and greedy
harpies; the court of Urban VIII Barberini, the barber who
cut the beard of Christ ; the Jesuits who attempted to mo-
86
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
This frontispiece engraving is typical of the Venetian tradition of female per-
sonifications of the Republic of Venice, presiding over the sea empire symbol-
ized by the ship on the left and the land empire depicted as a tower on a hill.
From Giovanni Francesco Loredan, Discorsi academici de Signori incogniti (Venice,
1635).
the li berti nes
nopolize all education and intellectual life; the Inquisition,
which ruined the business of publishers through prosecution
of those who sold prohibited books; and most of all of the
Spanish, who dominated Italy politically and militarily. The
only powers to escape condemnation in the letters were the
valiant republics, Genoa, Lucca, and especially Venice, which
had managed to maintain political independence.27
The reaction against Il Corriero svaligiato was immediate.
The apostolic nuncio to Venice, Francesco Vitelli, demanded
Pallavicino s arrest; Pallavicino spent six months in Venetian
prisons but was never brought to trial.28 In March 1642 the
supporters of the Holy See in the Senate proposed legisla-
tion to banish Pallavicino and prohibit the sale of Il Corriero.
The proposal came to a vote four times and failed to pass,
for each time more senators abstained than voted for the
provision. With the support of Loredan and the Incogniti,
Pallavicino mustered strong backing from many members of
the upper levels of the Venetian patriciate, even if most were
unwilling to commit themselves to a no vote.29 Neverthe-
less, after his release from prison he lived insecurely in Ven-
ice, tenaciously persecuted by Vitelli and the nephew of the
pope, Francesco Barberini. Twice Pallavicino was forced to
leave his monastery and take refuge with Loredan, and during
the summer of 1642 he escaped Venice, traveling home to
Parma, to Friuli, and back to Parma, only to return to Venice
in August to see a woman.
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