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Renaissance Anthropologies and the Conception of Man Caroline Stark RENAISSANCE ANTHROPOLOGIES AND THE CONCEPTION OF MAN Caroline Stark Two sixteenth-century developments are credited with drastically altering the conception of man and his place in the universe, thus marking a fun- damental shift to modernity: the Protestant Reformation and subsequent Counter-Reformation, and the emergence of the New Science. This new conception of man, either as an impotent, sinful creature in need of divine grace or as a creative, active force for improving his own condition and society, would not have been possible without the earlier debate over the condition of man among Renaissance humanists.1 A number of notable humanists, including Petrarch, Facio, Manetti, and Pico della Mirandola,2 responded to the misery of man tradition, as exemplified by Pope Inno- cent III’s treatise on the misery of the human condition,3 by celebrating 1 Giovanni Gentile, Giordano Bruno e il Pensiero del Rinascimento (Florence: Le Let- tere, 1991); Eugenio Garin, “La ‘Dignitas Hominis’ e la Letteratura Patristica,” La Rinascita 1 (1938): 102–46; Giovanni Di Napoli, “ ‘Contemptus Mundi’ e ‘Dignitas Hominis’ nel Rinasci- mento,” Rivista di Filosofia Neoscolastica 48 (1956): 9–41; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man, and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Charles Trinkaus, “The Renaissance Idea of the Dignity of Man,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner, 1973), 136–47; Craven, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Sym- bol of His Age: Modern Interpretations of a Renaissance Philosopher (Geneva: Droz, 1981): 21–45; Charles Trinkaus, “Themes for a Renaissance Anthropology,” in The Scope of Renais- sance Humanism, ed. Charles Trinkaus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 364–403, especially 372–96; Oliver Glaap, Untersuchungen zu Giannozzo Manetti, De dig- nitate et excellentia hominis: ein Renaissance-Humanist und sein Menschenbild (Stuttgart: B.G. ­Teubner, 1994); M. V. Dougherty, “Three Precursors to Pico della Mirandola’s Roman Disputation and the Question of Human Nature in the Oratio,” in Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, ed. M. V. Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 114–51. 2 Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), De remediis utriusque fortunae (1360); Bartolomeo Facio (ca. 1405–1457), De excellentia ac praestantia hominis (ca. 1447); Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459), De dignitate et excellentia hominis (ca. 1453); Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Oratio (written in 1486 but published posthumously). Since the focus of this discussion will be on humanist works prior to Pico’s Oratio, comments regarding Pico’s ideas about the conception of man will be reserved until the end. 3 Pope Innocent III (Cardinal Deacon Lotario da Signa) (ca. 1160–1216), De miseria humane conditionis (ca. 1195). Donald Howard argues that Innocent’s treatise marks the height of the “misery of man” genre that was particularly characteristic of the asceticism of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. See Donald Howard, “The Contempt of the World: A Study in the Ideology of Latin Christendom, with Emphasis on Fourteenth Century English Literature,” PhD Dissertation (University of Florida, 1954); idem, The Three Temptations: Medieval Man in Search of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); and 174 caroline stark the dignity of man and asserting his divine potential. The humanist response drew not only from the patristic exegetic tradition of the “cre- ative” man in Genesis but also from classical writers.4 The rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417 of Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Manilius’s Astronomica,5 with their powerful assertions of man’s capacity to develop the technical and political arts and to master his environment, further fueled the debate.6 I would like to examine the Renaissance reception of Lucretius’s and Manilius’s anthropologies, that is, stories of the birth and development of man, in the works of two fifteenth-century humanist poets, Lorenzo Bonincontri (1410–ca. 1491) and Giovanni Pontano (1429– 1503). After analyzing Bonincontri’s and Pontano’s anthropologies in light of this debate over the nature of man, I will trace how certain ideas that emerge from Renaissance anthropologies adumbrate later developments. Howard’s introduction to Innocent III, On the Misery of the Human Condition. De Miseria Humane Conditionis, trans. Margaret Mary Dietz, ed. Donald Roy Howard (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969); and the introduction to idem, De Miseria Condicionis Humane, ed. Robert E. Lewis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978). The Latin text of De miseria is taken from Michele Maccarrone, ed., Lotharii Cardinalis (Innocentii III) De miseria humane conditionis (Padua: Antenore, 1955). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 4 Two passages of great importance were Genesis 1:26: that man was made in God’s image (“creative” man, thus, is seen as made in the image of God the creator) and 1:28: that man has dominion over the animals. See Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (London: Constable, 1970); and idem, “Themes for a Renaissance Anthropology,” 364–403. 5 Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) rediscovered both of these texts during the Council of Constance (1414–18). For the textual history of Manilius and Lucretius, see Michael Reeve, “Manilius,” in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 235–38; and Anna Maranini, Filologia Fantastica: Manilio e i suoi Astronomica (Bologna: Il mulino, 1994); and Cosmo Gordon, A Bibliography of Lucretius (London: Hart-Davis, 1962); Wolfgang Fleischmann, “Lucretius,” in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller, F. Edward Cranz, and Virginia Brown (Washing- ton: Catholic University of America Press, 1971); and Michael Reeve, “The Italian Tradition of Lucretius,” Italia medioevale e umanistica 23 (1980): 27–48; idem, “The Italian Tradition of Lucretius Revisited,” Aevum 79 (2005): 115–64; idem, “Lucretius from the 1460s to the 17th Century: Seven Questions of Attribution,” Aevum 80 (2006): 165–84; idem, “Lucretius in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: Transmission and Scholarship,” in The Cam- bridge Companion to Lucretius, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip R. Hardie (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 2007), 205–13. 6 Cf. Eugenio Garin, “La ‘Dignitas Hominis’ e la Letteratura Patristica,” 105. For the impact of classical anthropologies and of the reconciliation of those conceptions of man with Christian conceptions of man, see Charles Trinkaus, “The Renaissance Idea of the Dignity of Man”; idem, “Themes for a Renaissance Anthropology,” 364–403; Ann Blair and Anthony Grafton, “Reassessing Humanism and Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53:4 (1992): 535–40, 538; Susanna Gambino Longo, Savoir de la Nature et Poésie des Choses: Lucrèce et Epicure à la Renaissance Italienne (Paris: Champion, 2004), 262. .
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