Emanuele Tesauro

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

His "Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico" is a work on tropes, literally the oxymoronic "Aristotelian telescope". Its main concern is the invention and wit of ingenious metaphors. [George Alexander Kennedy, "The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism" (1989), p. 448.] It has been called "one of the most important statements of poetics ins seventeenth-century Europe". [Jon R. Snyder,"Mare Magnum: the arts in the early modern age", p. 162, in John A. Marino, editor, "Early modern Italy" (2002).] 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. [Cristina Farronato, "Eco's Chaosmos: From the Middle Ages to Postmodernity" (2003), p. 26.]

Partial bibliography

* "Ermenegildo, Edippo, Ippolito" (1621)
* "L’Idea delle perfette imprese" (1622)
* "Il Giudicio" (1625)
* "Panegirici sacri" (1633)
* "Il cannochiale aristotelico" (1654)
* "Inscriptiones" (1670)
* "Filosofia morale" (1670)
* "I Campeggiamenti" (1674)
* "L’arte delle lettere missive (1674)"

Notes