I. Sperone Speroni, the protagonist, is made to repeat his contention that language study is not the gateway to philosophy and his epigram: “things make men wise; words make them seem so.” Tomitano apparently takes him to mean that philosophy feeds style, not style philosophy; for Tomitano goes on to exhibit Petrarch as full of philosophy and perfect in style. Dante is less careful, but Petrarch is a treasury for all writers.
II. The anxiety to exhibit Petrarch leads to strange rendering of the conventional divisions of rhetoric. Inventio, “first of those five strings on which the orator makes smoothest harmony,” is “imagining things that have truth, or at least verisimilitude,” and is forthwith confused with dispositio (compartimento). Petrarch exemplifies not only exordium and narratio, but even proof and rebuttal. Of the “three styles” of oratory the highest is Boccaccio’s in Fiammetta, the median in the Decameron. But since among verse forms the highest are canzone, sestina, and madriale; the plainest, ballata, stanza, and capitolo; the sonnet, Petrarch’s favorite form, must be median. Under style the doctrine of “tone-color” is easily reduced to unintentional absurdity.
III. The distinction of poet from orator is discovered at great length to be—verse. The Ferrarese are best in comedies, the Venetians in sonnets, the Marchigiani in capitoli, they of Vicenza in ballate, the Romans in odes and hymns, the Paduans in tragedies, the Florentines in blank verse. Inventio in poetry is the rehearsal of myths, of which the poet is lord and guardian. An interruption! How can you put Petrarch above Dante when you began by urging that the poet should be a philosopher? Answer (240): Petrarch had all the philosophy he needed, and used it more poetically. Though Dante was the greater philosopher, Petrarch was the better poet. When Aristotle calls Sophocles more perfect than Euripides, he does not mean in style [!]. In poetry dispositio is evenness, consistency, harmony; and narratio has the same rules as in oratory. Horace’s precepts, to begin in mediis, to combine instruction with charm, to seek advice, and to revise, are all repeated. On a request for more about style follows a discussion of words, simple and compound, proper and figurative, new and old. Finally the company joins in citing many examples.
Having run out of headings, Tomitano thus runs down. He had not in the least profited by the revival of Cicero and Quintilian.
Renaissance Platonism, disputing Aristotle’s philosophy, attacked also his rhetoric. Francesco Patrizzi (1529-1597) published in his youth a collection of ten vernacular dialogues on rhetoric (Della retorica, dieci dialoghi, Venice, 1552), “in which,” the sub-title adds, “the talk is of the art of oratory, with reasons impugning the opinion held of it by ancient writers.” The Platonic dialogue, followed superficially, is quite beyond Patrizzi’s achievement. Discussing oratory (I) at large, he goes on to its materials (II, III, IV), its ornaments (V), its divisions (VI), the quality of the orator (VII), the art of oratory (VIII), the perfect rhetoric (IX), and rhetorical amplification (X). Evidently neither a logical division nor a sequence, these categories are rather successive openings for attack. Patrizzi appears not only as a Platonist, but as an anti-Aristotelian. His main quarrels are with the scope of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with the doctrine of imitation, and with making rhetoric an art.
As to scope and materials Aristotle is inconsistent. He says both that the orator has no material and that he has all materials (25). Why, then, did he spend most of his Rhetoric on teaching the materials, slighting the ends, the ideas, the forms, the instruments, and omitting status? [The misinterpretation amounts to gross misstatement.] Perhaps we lack any clear definition of the orator because professors insist on including under a single word all sorts of discourse (27). Even the oratorical ornaments are not peculiar to the orator. His materials are the same as the economist’s, the historian’s, the poet’s (37). Having given oratory so much scope, how can Aristotle restrict it to three kinds? (60). [Evidently superficial, this is rather quarrel and quibble than refutation.]
As to imitation, Patrizzi holds that a painter represents not his conception (concetto), but the objects themselves Similarly he finds that rhetoric is not an art because Plato says it is merely a skill (peritia). The significance of this work is that in 1552 a Venetian seeking recognition at twenty-two could use some distinguished names in dialogues smartly rapping Aristotle, and even find a publisher. The English rhetoric of Thomas Wilson (The art of rhetorique, for the use of all such as are studious of eloquence, set forth in English, London, 1553 [reprinted down to 1593; ed. G. H. Mair, Oxford, 1909]) covers the ancient scheme practically, using Cicero and Quintilian as well as the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and deriving much from Erasmus.