Sometimes they come back. The autographs of illustrious men, especially in the nineteenth century, aroused the appetites of European collectors. By the law of supply and demand, some agile-fingered antique dealers stole the papers written by the geniuses of the Renaissance scattered in bulk in Italian archives and libraries. Then the autographs were put up for sale in luxurious auction catalogs, especially in France. And they disappeared from circulation.
Francesco Guicciardini to Niccolò Machiavelli
The original of Francesco Guicciardini’s letter to Niccolò Machiavelli written by Florence on 7 August 1525 has recently re-emerged. The autograph is preserved in the Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in the third volume of the collection of letters of Doctor Payen. He was the French physician and scholar, as well as distinguished montaignista, who discreetly bought the autograph at a Parisian auction on April 10, 1863. The letter was considered untraceable until today. The autograph allows us to fill in the gaps in the two known apographs, one at the Florence National and the other at the Vatican. Now we know with certainty that the central body of the letter concerns the estate of Finocchieto, visited by Niccolò on behalf of his friend Francesco a few days earlier. It so happens that twenty years ago I also found the Machiavellian letter of 3 August 1525 with the mocking “review” of Finocchieto as an allegory of bad government. This time, however, the collector was Italian.
It was Giberto Borromeo, who had jealously included the piece in his collection, in the splendid setting of his villa on Borromeo Island, in Lake Maggiore. The original was not included in the three volumes of the National Edition of Machiavelli’s Letters now out at Salerno Editrice, and of which I am one of the co-curators. The letter contains the famous phrase “ambuliamo in tenebris”, a phrase that pessimistically defines the human condition and in particular a moment of war and uncertainty. The text is published in my new book Francesco Guicciardini between autobiography and history (Ronzani Editore, 2022 ), an incisive and ruthless portrait of Guicciardini, archetype of the man of power, reconstructed thanks to unpublished documents, ciphered letters and the many voices of his contemporaries. and explosively, the Accusatoria, in which Guicciardini imagines being pilloried by a republican magistrate. This speech is usually treated by scholars as a mere rhetorical exercise, but it is possible to demonstrate that the charges are all true and incontrovertible.
He also formulates against Guicciardini the accusation of practicing a form of autobiography disguised as historiography, or an oblique self-justification of one’s work. A genealogy of “Italian” politics, still practiced today by looking at the “particular” rather than the general interest. Because even politicians sometimes return.