Anton Francesco Doni

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File:Portret van schrijver Anton Francesco Doni Penningen van Anton Francesco Doni (serietitel) Medaglie del Doni (serietitel), RP-P-2003-55.jpg
Anton Francesco Doni, engraving by Enea Vico, 1550

Anton Francesco Doni (16 May 1513 – September 1574) was an Italian scholar, publisher, writer and translator.

Biography

Anton Francesco was born in Florence, the son of Bernardo di Antonio Doni, a scissors maker. He was not related to the very wealthy Agnolo Doni, who in his early years was a patron of Michelangelo and Raphael. Doni was a native of the San Lorenzo quartiere.[1] In 1542, he went to Piacenza, where he attended the faculty of jurisprudence for some time, joined the Accademia Ortolana under the name of Semenza and began his literary activity: in fact a volume of his Letters came out in Piacenza in 1543. In 1544 he went to Venice, where he stayed for a short time before traveling to Rome and again to Florence (where he opened a printing press and became first secretary of the Accademia degli Umidi). In 1547, he went to Venice again, where he joined the Accademia Pellegrina[2] and devoted himself permanently to the profession of scholarship.

He published in 1552 I mondi (Worlds), a novel inspired by Thomas More's Utopia (1516), which Doni himself had published in Venice in 1548 in a translation from Latin by Ortensio Lando. Doni's I mondi is considered one of the precursor Renaissance utopian works of Italian fantasy literature.

Gifted with a polemical nature, he entered into violent diatribes against Domenichi and Aretino, previously his close friends. In the lagoon city he wrote most of his works. In 1555, he went to Pesaro in the hope of obtaining employment with Duke Guidobaldo II della Rovere. The employment faded because of Aretino's quarrels to which Doni responded with an infamous libel in which among other things he predicted Aretino's death within the year, a prophecy that came true. In 1564, he again abandoned Venice and, after brief stays in Ancona and Ferrara, retired with a son to Monselice, where he resided until his death.

His main work remains La libraria del Doni fiorentino, published in 1550, which was the first attempt to make a bibliography in Italy. The work was not the result of systematic work: as the author himself admitted, it did not pretend to collect everything it could, but simply to be useful to those who had to research a hitherto unobtainable document. Moreover, compared to Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516) and Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), his illustrious predecessors in the history of Bibliography, Doni titled it Libraria, including works written in the vernacular in the list.

Doni's literary output includes a wealth of occasional works, each of which served a practical purpose. Although he was a music lover and instrumentalist, and possibly also a composer, he no longer pursued any deeper scholarly interest after completing his main writings. Of great music-historical value as a source text is the Dialogo della musica; it contains numerous comments on Italian music in the 16th century, instrumental playing — especially the practice of playing the viola and organ — and the musical life of his time. The Dialogo della musica was modeled on Giovanni Boccaccio's collection of novellas The Decameron: the company gathers to sing four- and eight-part madrigals. On the first evening, works by Claudio Veggio, Vincenzo Ruffo, Giovanni Battista Riccio, Jacques Arcadelt and Girolamo Parabosco, among others, will be sung; on the second evening, compositions by Perissone Cambio, Jacquet de Berchem, Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Jakob Buus and other representatives of the art of madrigal will be performed. The swinging and farcical narration is only in the treble part, while the other parts contain only the musical text. La Libraria and La seconda Libraria (1550/51) give an accurate description of the available Italian books and manuscripts on music. They also provide information about academia, as well as a historical outline of each academy that existed in his time. In addition, he left an autobiography and numerous journalistic works.

Doni took little or only negative note of the judgment of his contemporaries. His pamphlets written against numerous public figures caused even the Nobel Prize winner Giosuè Carducci to consider him a "disgrace to our [Italian] literature" ("vergogna delle nostre lettere"). Carl Friedrich Flögel's Geschichte der komischen Litteratur (1785) emphasized the satirical and mannerist elements of his work.[3]

Works

  • Lettere d'Antonfrancesco Doni (1544)
  • Dialogo della musica (1544)
  • Lettere del Doni libro primo (1546)
  • Lettere del Doni. Libro secondo (1547)
  • Prose antiche di Dante, Petrarca et Boccaccio e di molti altri nobili ingegni (1547)
  • L'epistole di Seneca. Ridotte nella lingua toscana, per il Doni (1548)
  • Disegno, partito in più ragionamenti, ne’ quali si tratta della pittura, della scoltura, de’ colori, de’ getti, de’ modegli (1549)
  • Epistole di Seneca tradotte in lingua Toscana (1549)[4]
  • La Fortuna di Cesare, tratta dagli autori latini (1550)
  • La Libraria (1550–1551)[5]
  • La Zucca (1551–1552)[6]
  • Tre libri di lettere del Doni. E i termini della lingua toscana (1552)[7]
  • La moral filosophia del Doni, tratta da gli antichi scrittori; allo illustriss. Signor don Ferrante Caracciolo dedeicata (1552)[8]
  • I Marmi del Doni (1552)[9]
  • Pistolotti amorosi con alcune lettere d’amore di diversi autori (1552)[10]
  • Mondi celesti, terrestri, et infernali, de gli Academici pellegrini (1552–1553)[11]
  • Le Rime del Burchiello commentate dal Doni (1553)[12]
  • Terremoto del Doni, Fiorentino, e la rovina di un gran colosso bestiale antichristo della nostra età, Pietro Aretino (1554–1556)[13]
  • Il Canceliere, libro della memoria, dove si tratta per paragone della prudenza degli antichi con la sapienza de’ moderni (1562)
  • Dichiarazione d’Anton.-Fr. Doni sopra il capo tre dell’Apocalisse, contro agli eretici, con modi non mai più intesi da uomo vivente (1562)[14]
  • Pitture del Doni, nelle quali si mostra di nuova inventione amore, fortuna, tempo, castità, religione, sdegno, riforma, morte, sonno e sogno (1564)
  • Le ville del Doni (1566)
  • La filosofia morale, del Doni, tratta da molti degni scrittori antichi prudenti. Scritta per amaestramento uniuersale de gouerni, & reggimento particolare de gli huomini; con modi dotti, & piaceuoli nouelle, motti, argutie, & sententie (1567)

Notes

  1. ↑ In a letter dated January 3, 1549, sent from Florence to B. Volpe (who said he was a descendant of the poet Salvino, a companion of Dante), Doni wrote an ironic, mostly fanciful genealogy of his own family, in which he claimed to descend from a Ghibelline lineage, having two popes (Dono I and Dono II) as relatives, being exiled from Florence due to the hostility of the Medici's and then live in Pistoia, Hungary and Naples; that he took the habit of the Servants of Mary and served as a master of doctrine at the Convent of the Annunziata; that he left the Servites and the city of Florence around 1540, became a priest, and began to wander around various cities in northern Italy (Genoa, Alessandria, Pavia, Milan).
  2. ↑ Which counted among its members Ercole Bentivoglio, Jacopo Nardi, Francesco Sansovino, Ludovico Dolce, Enea Vico, Bernardino Daniello, and other distinguished scholars.
  3. ↑ Flögel, Carl Friedrich (1785). Geschichte der komischen Litteratur, 2. Liegnitz/Leipzig: Verlag David Siegert, p. 184.
  4. ↑ Apostolo Zeno played the bad trick of discovering and revealing to the public, in his notes on Fontanini's Bibliotheca card. imperialis Catalogus, that this translation, with a few slight changes, is the same one that Sebastiano Manilio had published in Venice in 1494. Such a shameless plagiarism allows us to believe that it is not the only one that its author has allowed himself.
  5. ↑ The work of our author which could be most useful would be his Libraria, divided into two parts, if he had given (as he announced it was his intention), an exact knowledge of printed books and manuscripts. It is entitled: La libraria del Doni, Fiorentino, nella quale sono scritti tutti gli autori volgari, con cento discorsi sopra quelli, etc. (1550); and La seconda Libraria del Doni (1551). But, says Tiraboschi with reason, either he only indicates things, or he extends himself in uselessness; sometimes he praises, sometimes he blames, without one being able, most of the time, to distinguish, if he speaks seriously or if he is joking; however this small library, as imperfect as it is, has had several editions. Apostolo Zeno has made some curious observations on this subject in his notes on Fontanini's work Bibliotheca card. imperialis Catalogus which are worth consulting. It was considered, in addition to being the first bibliography text, the first attempt at Italian literary history. Ugo Foscolo, however, criticized it for the author's capriciousness.
  6. ↑ In Italy, the dried and empty bark of the fruit of the calabash or gourd, zucca, is used to preserve salt, seeds of different species, etc. Doni gave this title to a collection of anecdotes, proverbs and good words that do not always have the salt that this allusion promises. He divided them into 3 parts which he did not want to call, he says in his prologue, Motti, Argutie, Sentenze, being neither an Aristotle for the sentences, nor a Dante for the fine repartees, nor a gallant bel esprit for the good words; but he entitled them simply: Cicalamenti, Baie, Chiacchere, gossip, nonsense. Each anecdote cicalamento, baia or chiacchera, is followed by a moral or pleasant reflection and a proverb. This collection was followed by a second of the same kind, under the title of Foglie de la Zucca; the leaves are worth neither more nor less than the fruit. They are dicerie or historiettes, each of which is followed by a dream and a fable; at least that is how it is in the first part of the leaves; in the second, it is first the fable, then the dream, and then the historiette; the third is entitled: dream, fable and historiette; but all is confused there according to the whim of the author. The leaves were followed by the flowers Fiori della Zucca, these flowers are grilli, fantasies, Passerotti, nonsense, and farfalloni, divided into three quite distinct parts; each grillo is regularly followed by a history, and an allegory; each passerotto, it is of a speech and a solution; and each farfallone, of a text and a gloss. Finally Doni, to exhaust this allegory, still made appear the ripe fruits, frutti maturi della Zucca; these are in general very-grave, and composed of wise answers, maxims and sentences that the author lends to the various members of the Accademia Pellegrina of which he was himself a member. These four parts which form the Zucca, are gathered in a single volume, very well printed, and decorated with engravings in wood, among which one distinguishes the portrait of the author, who had, like almost all the most buffoonish writers of this time, like Berni and Aretino, a serious figure and with large features.
  7. ↑ He had given a first, less extensive edition in 1545. The subjects on which he writes are some of pure jest, others more serious, which he tries to treat cheerfully. The third book of the last edition is preceded by a kind of grammar, I Termini della lingua toscana, which he attributes to another academician, but which passes for being his own. The liberties he takes in several of his letters on matters of religion caused this book to be put on the Index, which had no other effect than to make copies more rare and expensive.
  8. ↑ The Moral Philosophy is the unabridged Italian translation of the Panchatantra, an Indian collection of novellas consisting of short prose narratives interspersed with verse stanzas of ethical or didactic content with illustrative apologies or animal fables. Doni's Moral Philosophy is derived from John of Capua's Directorium humanae vitae.
  9. ↑ In Florence they call I Marmi a square paved with large pieces of marble, which is in front of the cathedral and where one often walks in the evening. This work, divided into four parts, is composed of interviews that the author supposes to have been held in this square between people of different states, on subjects of morals, literature, etc. The coldness which reigns in these interviews attracted to him the following epigram: "Marmoris inscribis, Doni, bene nomine librum, par est frigus enim marmoris atque libri." It is a work of bizarre dialogues. Doni pretends to have been turned into a bird, free to fly and listen to the conversations of those who gather, to chat, on the "marbles," the marble steps of Florence Cathedral. Like so many of Doni's works, this one is a satirical zibaldone. In the dialogue Carafulla and Ghetto Pazzi of Ragionamento primo, Doni has the buffoon Carafulla hypothesize the heliocentric theory just nine years after the publication of Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and eighty years before the publication of Galileo Galilei's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
  10. ↑ This is a collection of love letters, most of them written by Doni himself. Included in one of these Pistolotti are the Stanze villanesche dello Sparpagliola alla Silvana sua innamorata, which had been published separately in 1550 in Bologna, and were reprinted independently by Giuseppe Baccini in 1887. In this work Doni explicitly declares his annoyance with the amorous sappiness of the Petrarchists, who were very numerous in the 16th century.
  11. ↑ Another work of bizarre dialogues, in which, however, Doni expounds the utopia of an anarchist-communist society ordered according to Thomas More's Utopia and with reminiscences of the Platonic Republic. The first Italian translation of More's Utopia, by Ortensio Lando, moreover, had been published in 1548 by Anton Francesco Doni himself. The author reprinted and recast several times this work, composed of visions, dialogues, moral fictions mixed, as usual, with oddities and trivialities. The Worlds were translated into French by Gabriel Chappuys; in the 2nd edition, given in 1580, the translator added to all the other Worlds that of the horned ones, and in the 3rd, 1583, to the other hells, that of the ungrateful ones.
  12. ↑ This commentary, on an unintelligible poet who was so by design, is no less extravagant than the text it claims to explain.
  13. ↑ This is one of the literary amenities that Doni and Aretino threw at each other after they had fallen out. The Terremoto was to be followed by several other galanteries of the same kind, which are announced behind the frontispiece, such as the Rovina; il Baleno; il Tuono, la Saetta; la Vita, la Morte, l'Esequie and la Sepoltura. But the death of Aretino, which occurred shortly afterwards, probably stopped Doni in continuing such a project.
  14. ↑ A booklet on the Apocalypse, in which the Doni, who appears in his letters so unorthodox that they were put in the rank of prohibited books, nevertheless wanted to mingle in the ranks of those who were then fighting the heretics.

References

  • Bartoletti, Maria A. (1973). Dizionario Critico della Letteratura Italiana. Turin: Éd. UTET.
  • Bonora, Ettore (1966). Storia della Letteratura Italiana. Milan: Éd. Garzanti.
  • Candela, Giuseppe (1993). Manierismo e Condizioni della Scrittura in Anton Francesco Doni. New York/San Francisco/Bern: Lang.
  • Comi, Anna (1998). Vom Glanz und Elend des Menschen. Untersuchungen zum Weltbild von Anton Francesco Doni. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
  • Einstein, Alfred (1934). "The Dialogo della Musica of Messer Francesco Doni 1544," Music and Letters, pp. 244–53.
  • Einstein, Alfred (1971). The Italian Madrigal, 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  • Marsili-Libelli, Cecilia Ricottini (1960). Anton Francesco Doni. Scrittore e stampatore. Fiorenze: Sansoni.
  • Romei, Giovanna (1992). "Doni, Anton Francesco." In: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Vol. 41. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
  • Thompson, Wendy (2007). "AFD's Medaglie," Print Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, pp. 223–72.
  • Thompson, Wendy (2009). "An unknown portrait series by Battista Franco," Print Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, pp. 3–18.

External links

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