Playing “Pythagoras” in Padua and Florence: a Sixteenth-Century Rithmomachia manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania
Ann E. MOYER
Published in Games from Antiquity to Baroque
Keywords: Florence, History of Education, History of Mathematics, Padua, Pythagoreanism, Rithmomachia, Universities.
A manuscript in the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries (UPenn LJS 232) contains a manual for the medieval game rithmomachia by Carlo di Ruberto Strozzi, preceded by a brief treatise on proportion by Benedetto Varchi, both in vernacular; they were inspired by the Latin publication of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples. An examination of the treatise and the circle of learned Florentines involved in its production offer an example both of the ways that the game spread in European university cultures, and the limits of interest in the Boethian mathematics of proportion that the game was intended to exercise.
The musical esoterism of Francesco Zorzi (1466-1540) in the work De harmonia mundi totius (1525)
André GABY
Original title: O esoterismo musical de Francesco Zorzi (1466-1540) na obra De harmonia mundi totius (1525)
Published in Music in Antiquity, Middle Ages & Renaissance
Keywords: Christian Kabbalah, Esoterism, Philosophy of music, Pythagoreanism, Renaissance.
The humanism and the musical renaissance derived from it are both the result of Italian thinkers contact with the Neoplatonic and Hermes Trimegistus works – coming from Byzantium thanks to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 – and with Kabbalistic works brought by Jews definitively expelled from Spain. in 1492. Among so many names in Italian humanist thought, stands out in Venice the Franciscan friar Francesco Zorzi (Giorgi). He learned the Hebrew language and the teachings of Kabbalah, dedicating his intellectual efforts to the continuation of the synthesis work of ideas on spiritual elevation (Platonic, Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, Hermetic, Jewish, or Christian) initiated by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Zorzi believed that Kabbalah could prove the truths of the faith of Christianity present in the Bible, that is, the numbers generated by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet would be related to the Pythagorean “Harmony of the Spheres” conception, and the truths of the cosmos reality would be described in the scriptures enterlines of Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Our work consists of presenting to the Portuguese language community the esoteric-kabbalist musical conception present in the work Harmonia mundi totius by Francesco Zorzi, together with some extract’s translation into Portuguese.
