Emanuele Tesauro 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. It has been called "one of the most important statements of poetics in seventeenth-century Europe". 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.
Life
Emmanule Tesauro was born in Turin on January 28, 1592, the son of a wealthy noble family. At the age of twenty he entered the Jesuit order. After earning his first degree, from 1618 to 1621 he worked as a professor of rhetoric in Cremona and Milan, where he was also much admired as a preacher. During this time Tesauro wrote his first literary works: his epigrams, published posthumously, as well as his first play, the Hermengildus. In Naples he began his theological studies. In 1623 he moved to Milan to complete his studies; there he published the Idea delle perfette imprese and the Giudicio. Due to political contrasts, Tesauro left the Jesuits in 1634, although he remained a secular priest. As an educator of the children of the Duke of Savoy, Tesauro spent some time in the Flanders. In 1642 he returned to Turin, where he became preceptor of the princes of Carignano. In 1653 he resumed his preaching activity. In 1666 he was commissioned by the municipality of Turin to write a history of the city. In 1670 he initiated a first complete edition of his works in Turin; his Latin plays were translated into Italian. Tesauro died in Turin in 1685. Tesauro was a very prolific author: he wrote tragedies, sacred poems, historical works, including Del Regno D'Italia sotto i barbari, and philosophical works, such as La Filosofia morale, very widespread and appreciated.
Il cannocchiale aristotelico
While having as a model the work of Aristotle, Tesauro tries for the first time to update the classical rhetoric to the new style of Baroque literature. Right from the title, Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico, Tesauro's work aims to revolutionize rhetoric and poetry in a way similar to what Galileo did in astronomy. The central element of the new poetry is, accordig to Tesauro, the metaphor, defined by the author as "madre di tutte le argutezze" , whose main aim is to generate "wonder in the reader", as well as to penetrate the variety of creation. The influence of Emmanuale Tesauro, Baltasar Gracián and Jakob Masen on European mannerism and the rise of the "argutia" movement is well documented in the studies by Miguel Battlori, K.-P. Lange, Wilfried Barner and Barbara Bauer.
