Summary
Seventeenth-century theorists in Europe canonised wit. Croce unearthed a body of theorising which formalised the cult of the witty conceit. He mustered some six treatises in Italian and one in Spanish to witness the critical principles of the time. The titles of these works indicate their scope and appeared as follows:
M. Pellegrini, Delle Acutezze, che Altrementi Spiriti, Vivezze, e Concetti, Volgarmente si Appellano, Genoa, 1639; and I Fonti dell'Ingegno Ridotti ad Arte, Bologna, 1650.
P. F. Minozzi, Gli Sfogamenti d'Ingegno, Venice, 1641.
B. Gracián, Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio en que se Explican Todos los Modos y Diferencias de Conceptos, Madrid, 1642 and (much augmented) Huesca, 1648.
Sforza Pallavicino, Del Bene, Rome, 1644; and Trattato dello Stile e del Dialogo, Rome, 1662.
E. Tesauro, Il Canocchiale Aristotelico, Turin, 1670 and, with two sections added, Bologna, 1675.
Only Gracián's and Tesauro's treatises seem to have made any mark. Tesauro's Il Canocchiale was republished in the augmented version in Venice, 1682, and in a Latin translation of that version in Cologne, 1714. Gracián's Agudeza ran to three editions in its first seven years, and fifteen editions in all down to 1773. A modern edition was published in Madrid in 1942 and reprinted in 1957.
Mario Praz found that the treatises of Gracián, Tesauro and Sforza Pallivicino simply bear out the thinking of the times, which brings the entire universe ‘under a mode of wit’.
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- Metaphysical Wit , pp. 46 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992