L'huomo Di Lettere - Italian

Italian

In 1645 the appearance of Bartoli's first book initiated an international literary sensation. The work quickly inserted itself in the regional literary debates of the time, with an unauthorized Florentine edition (1645) dedicated to Salvator Rosa soon challenged by a Bolognese edition (1646) dedicated to Virgilio Malvezzi. Over the following three decades and beyond there were another thirty printings at a dozen different Italian presses, especially Venetian, of which half a dozen "per Giunti, e Baba" with a signature frontispiece title illustration.(Here right)

Bartoli's literary "how to" book spread its influence well beyond the geographical and literary confines of Italy. During the process of her conversion to Roman Catholicism at the hands of the Jesuits in 1651 Christina, Queen of Sweden specifically requested a copy of this celebrated work be sent to her in Stockholm. It seems to have fulfilled the Baroque dream of an energetic rhetorical eloquence to which the age aspired. Through its gallery of exemplary stylizations and picturesque moral encouragements it defends and emends not only the aspiring letterato, but also an updated classicism open to modernity, but diffident of excess. The book's international proliferation made it a vehicle of the cultural ascendancy of the Jesuits as modern classicists during the Baroque. Years later, Bartoli provided a revision for the collected edition. After Bartoli's death the editions and translations continued to appear, particularly in the Ottocento.

In Bartoli's lifetime and beyond his work was also translated extensively, by men of letters of other nationalities, Jesuits and non-Jesuits.