# Ragionamenti di mons. Galeazzo Florimonte, vescovo di Sessa, sopra l’Ethica d’Aristotile, al signor Alfonso Cambi Importuni, gentilhuomo fiorentino **Autore:** Florimonte Galeazzo **Dati editoriali:** Venice, Domenico Nicolini da Sabbio, 1567 **Codice archivio:** 195 **Prezzo:** 1800.00 USD **Stato commerciale:** Disponibile **Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/florimonte-ragionamenti-ethica-1567 --- ## Descrizione accademica e analisi 4to (206x147 mm). [4], 177, [1] leaves. Signatures: *4 A–Xx4 Yy2. The fourth preliminary leaf is a blank. Woodcut initials and the printer’s device of winged Victory holding a wreath and a palm, with the motto Nisi qui legitime certaverit, on the title and on the verso of the final leaf. Contemporary limp vellum with remnants of ties, spine and lower edge lettered in ink. Short split in the spine, staining and a few small wormholes in the vellum. Light dampstaining to the upper outer corners of the preliminary and final leaves, a small marginal wormhole in the first gathering and slight abrasion to the upper outer corner of the title. The margins preserve early manuscript annotations in Latin and Italian on some fifty pages. First complete edition of Florimonte’s dialogues on the first four books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, with an early reader’s notes in Italian and Latin. Galeazzo Florimonte, Bishop of Sessa and the friend who encouraged Giovanni Della Casa to write the Galateo, had seen at court how little time princes gave to moral philosophy. His own teacher, Agostino Nifo of Sessa, had discussed Aristotle with Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno. In his dedication to Alfonso Cambi Importuni, dated at Sessa on 12 August 1563 (fols. *2r–*3v), Florimonte recalls hearing these conversations and receiving Cardinal Gasparo Contarini’s encouragement to set them down in Italian. He compares the moral instruction of the ancients to the woad with which a dyer prepares cloth to receive scarlet. The dedication also recounts the author’s dismay at finding two unfinished books already in print. The Venetian edition of 1554, issued by Plinio Pietrasanta under Girolamo Ruscelli’s editorship, credited Nifo with the discourses and Florimonte with collecting them. That edition and Seth Viotti’s Parma printing of 1562 contained only what Florimonte intended as Books I and IV. This third, posthumous edition prints Books II and III for the first time and restores the fourth to its place. The revision reaches into the dialogue itself. In 1554 the narrator describes a party debating courage and temperance after dinner in a garden. Here, at fol. 125r, the prince raises the question himself. Nifo’s answer draws a distinction a ruler had reason to ponder. The ancient republics gave their highest honours to courage because it served them best. Whether it was the greater virtue was another question. The words Col privilegio on the title-page also point to a figure whose name is absent from the imprint. On 17 January 1567 the Venetian Senate granted Dionigi Atanagi a twenty-year printing privilege for Florimonte’s Ragionamenti. The grant records Atanagi’s part in bringing the revised text to press after the author’s death. Domenico Nicolini printed the volume. The interesting annotations are written in an elegant and neat contemporary hand in light brown ink. At fols. 8v–9r, alongside the proposition that human action aims at a good, the reader writes phrases from the Latin translation of Aristotle by Giovanni Argiropulo (John Argyropoulos), including atque actus itidem et electio and bene veteres bonum ipsum id esse dixerunt. The comparison continues at fol. 9v. Where Florimonte explains how people agree on the name of happiness yet differ over what it consists in, the reader enters Nomine igitur omnes fere de ipso consentiunt and De felicitate autem beside the relevant clauses. The same sequence can be followed in the Paris printing of Argiropulo’s translation (Simon de Colines, 1522, fols. 12v–13r). The wording identifies the Latin version. Which edition the reader consulted remains open. Elsewhere the reader works wholly in Italian. A note at fol. 16r reduces a long exchange to the proposition that happiness consists in a human being’s characteristic activity. At fols. 50v–51r the questions La virtù che cosa sia, Potentia che cosa sia and Habito che cosa sia index Aristotle’s distinction between passions, faculties and settled dispositions (Nicomachean Ethics II.5, 1105b19–1106a13). These notes show how an early reader studied Florimonte, moving between the Italian argument and its Latin counterpart and drawing out definitions for later use. The title bears the early ownership inscription “C. Morozzo”. A note on the rear pastedown, recorded as “fù del ducca / di Sora”, reports earlier ownership by a Duke of Sora without naming him. The annotator remains unidentified. A nineteenth-century manuscript label with a price and shelfmark is recorded on the front pastedown. Galeazzo Florimonte was born in Sessa Aurunca (near Caserta), where between 1500 and 1506 he had as a teacher Agostino Nifo. Around 1514 he entered the service of Alfonso d’Avalos Marquis of Vasto, with whom he briefly visited Paris for the first time. During a second visit in 1520 as physician of M.A. Colonna, Florimonte was able to spend more time at the court of Francis I and to meet people who had a lasting impact on his religious views, like Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the German theologian Al-bert Pigge. Back from France, in the years 1527-28 Florimonte worked in Verona as a tutor in the Serego house and met bishop G.M. Giberti and all the humanists who gathered around his figure: M.A. Flaminio, F. Berni, F. Della Torre, and Lodovico da Canossa. Florimonte left Verona in 1536, living between Sessa and Rome. In 1540 he was appointed as guardian of S. Casa di Loreto and in 1541, through the intercession of G. Contarini, as spiritual councilor of the governor of Milan, Alfonso d’Avalos. In 1542 he was elected bishop of Aquino. At the end of 1545 he moved to Trent, where he stand out as one of the most active representatives of the group of reformers. Shortly before the council was suspended in 1549, he was called to Rome by the Pope. He remained there until 1552 and it was during that sojourn that Florimonte encountered G. Della Casa and suggested him to write the famous Galateo. In 1552 Florimonte finally obtained the long-sought post of bishop of Sessa and immediately settled in his new bishopric. When the works of Council of Trent opened again in 1562, Florimonte was summoned, but now old and suffering from various illnesses, he obtained a dispensation. His friend L. Beccadelli kept him informed from Trent and communicated Florimonte’s opinions and advices to the other prelates. Floriomente died in Sessa in 1565 (F. Pignatti, Florimonte, Galeazzo, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, XLVIII, 1997, s.v.). --- ## Bibliografia di riferimento Adams, F-638; Edit16, CNCE19274; USTC, 830045; D.A. Lines, Aristotle’s Ethics in the Italian Renaissance, Leiden, 2002, Appendix C, no. 37, pp. 487-488; L. Bianchi, “Uses of Latin Sources in Renaissance Vernacularizations of Aristotle: The Cases of Galeazzo Florimonte, Francesco Venier and Francesco Pona”, pp. 31-55, and E. Refini, “Aristotelian Commentaries and the Dialogue Form in Cinquecento Italy”, pp. 93-107, in Vernacular Aristotelianism in Italy from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century, London, 2016; E. Squassina, Privilegi librari ed edizioni privilegiate nella Repubblica di Venezia (1566–1603), Milan, 2024, pp. 41, 74-75. --- *Documento generato automaticamente dall'Archivio Govi Rare Books per finalità di ricerca e catalogazione.*