50 Ways Italian Genius Shaped the World
By Peter D’Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish
In Sprezzatura, Peter D’Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish give
a chapter to each of 50 Italian geniuses, who indeed helped shape the world.
“Sprezzatura,” they say, means “the art of effortless mastery.” They
tell about saints, scientists, artists, musicians, politicians, and poets.
St. Francis, of course, is a major figure. He started the
tradition of the crèche, tamed a wolf, and preached to a sultan
whose city was being attacked by Crusaders. What’s fun about this
book is that the information is more than the ordinary biographical data.
St. Benedict, the father of western monasticism, preserved the
Roman heritage. His monks collected, copied, illustrated, summarized,
and wrote commentaries on the ancient classics, enabling them to survive
the Dark Ages.
St. Thomas Aquinas attempted to reconcile the newly discovered
writings of Aristotle with the scriptures. Although he had many critics
and opponents, his work remains the philosophy of the Catholic Church and
includes the beautiful hymn “Pange lingua,” which is “practically a microcosm
of his Summa Theologica.”
One of my favorites is the mathematician Fibonacci, who appears
in the story of Frederick II, the father of ornithology, of all things.
Leonardo Fibonacci discovered the sequence named after him, a series of
numbers in which each successive number is equal to the sum of the two
preceding numbers. He also was instrumental in introducing Arabic
numerals into Europe.
Other scientists include Galileo, Marconi, Fermi, and the pioneers
of modern anatomy: Eustachio, Fallopio, Malpighi, Morgagni, and others.
Galileo began to question Aristotle’s statements, deciding that he could
learn the workings of nature by using his own trained observational faculties.
Marconi had to fight skepticism in his struggle to improve maritime communication,
but when some of the doomed Titanic’s survivors had a medal struck for
Marconi, he felt rewarded and justified. It is amusing to read that
almost every country has its own hero as the inventor of radio!
Having never heard of all these pioneers of modern anatomy, I
was amused to learn that the Eustachian tube is named after a man, and
the Fallopian tube after another man. Enrico Fermi was familiar to
me because at Los Alamos he was often referred to as one of the founders
of the Atomic Age,
Probably artists are the geniuses most discussed. Florence
receives deserved attention for Michelangelo, who was a poet as well as
the sculptor we know; Ghiberti, who created the glorious bronze doors of
the Baptistery; and Leonardo da Vinci, who worked also in Milan.
Palladio, the brilliant architect, whose name lives in so many buildings
imitating his Venetian style, took his famous name from a poem by his benefactor.
The authors say that Machiavelli brought the dawn of political
science. It was Venice that invented diplomacy because they
had interests in so many countries and wanted reports from everywhere from
ambassadors.
In the chapter “A New World,” Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, and
Verrazano receive merited praise. We can be glad that our country
took Vespucci’s first name, Amerigo, rather than his last!
Musicians figure prominently, with opera born in Jacopo Peri’s
Euridice, which was pretty dull. Opera needed Monteverdi to bring
life to it as the “father of modern music.”
Dante has a discussion, of course, and Petrarch, the creator
of the modern lyric. Boccacio is credited with development of western
literary realism. I’d always thought of him principally as a great
comic writer.
So many geniuses! Too many to list, Montessori, Donatello,
the Medici family, Garibaldi, Rossellini, and Ferrari. An enjoyable,
if immodest, book.
Barbara DuBois
August 31, 2005