Emanuele Tesauro

Frontispice of the 1670 edition of Cannocchiale aristotelico by Emanuele Tesauro (1592-1675).

Emanuele Tesauro (1592–1675) was a rhetorician, dramatist, Marinist poet, and historian from Turin.

His Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico, originally published in 1654, is a work on tropes, literally the oxymoronic "Aristotelian telescope". Its main concern is the invention and wit of ingenious metaphors.^[1] It has been called "one of the most important statements of poetics in seventeenth-century Europe".^[2] Metaphor he calls the "Great Mother of All Witticisms". In Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before, these themes are self-consciously taken up, through the character Padre Emanuele and his metaphor-machine.^[3]

Partial bibliography

• Ermenegildo, Edippo, Ippolito (1621)
• L’Idea delle perfette imprese (1622)
• Il Giudicio (1625)
• Panegirici, published by Bartolomeo Zavatta, Turin, (1659).
• Il cannocchiale aristotelico, o' sia, idea dell'arguta et ingeniosa elocutione, che serve a tutta l'Arte Oratoria, Lapidaria, et Simbolica., Venice, Presso Paolo Baglioni, 1664.
• Inscriptiones (1670)
• La Filosofia morale derivata dall'alto Fonte del Grande Ariostotele Stagirita, published by Presso Nicolo Pezzana, Venice (1679).
• Campeggiamenti overo Istorie del Piemonte, published by Giacomo Monti, Bologna, 1674.
• Dell’arte delle lettere missive published by Giovanni Recaldini, Bologna (1678).
• Del Regno D'Italia sotto i barbari., published by Presso Giovanni Giacomo Hertz, in Venice (1680).

Notes

1. George Alexander Kennedy, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (1989), p. 448.
2. Jon R. Snyder,Mare Magnum: the arts in the early modern age, p. 162, in John A. Marino, editor, Early modern Italy (2002).
3. Cristina Farronato, Eco's Chaosmos: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernity (2003), p. 26.