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In his extraordinary study From Politics to Reason of State, Professor Maurizio Viroli (1992) points out the moment when the ancient notion of politics was replaced with the Renaissance and modern understanding of the reason of state. What was left out of the research was the fact that the political theory register introduced a new term which explains this transition and derogation from the classical notion of politics. The Machiavellian term arte dello stato, describing actions of agents of politics, represents a revolutionary innovation, and this is the process whose development I wish to address in this paper, as well as to explain what it means. Finally, with regard to the historical context, I aim to show that it is precisely the practice of political agents of the time that Machiavelli used to frame the new idea.

The article analyses the relationship between gender and the sacred in the prophetic elements of Cereta’s Epistolae Familiares. The author’s letters of autobiography, political engagement and reform of customs are considered by relating them to Savonarola’s influence and the writings of Birgitta of Sweden and, in particular, the language and rhetorical strategies of Catherine of Siena.

The paper underlines the political meaning of attesa in the context of prophecy, which is the tone that marks (with a very high rhetoric) the final page of Machiavelli’s Principe. A text that explicitly recalls the model of the Exodus and, implicitly, the figure of Moses; a page crossing a multiple bundle of suggestions, traces of which can be followed along the entire arc of Machiavellian writing, from the earliest testimonies to the great treatises. Ideas and suggestions in which Savonarola and his unfortunate adventure is an ineluctable presence: he tried to transform his word into prophecy, that is, into a political project, aiming to be the construction of a new reality. A long-distance dialogue, that between Machiavelli and the Domenican friar, which while it seems to speak of practical operational issues (the winning action of the ‘armed’ prophet and the unsuccessful action of the ‘disarmed’ prophet) actually proposes a fundamental reflection on the meaning of political action, and on the dramatic relationship between project and realization, between utopia and realism.

Michael Trivolis’ life history, together with his fervent activity as a translator, lead us to speculate on the particular attention that he was to pay to lexical features in his own works, regarding, for instance, the attribution of new and/or different meanings to traditional lemmas or the introduction of new terms. In order to verify this hypothesis, we examined the occurrences within his works of some key concepts from medieval and humanistic culture. This paper focuses on the terms pазумъ and самовласть/самовластие in the texts included in the first two volumes of the new edition of Maximus the Greek’s works edited by N.V. Sinicyna. The results of the survey are compared with the reconstructed semantics and contexts of use of the chosen words in previous literature, on the basis of the occurrences in the historical section of the National Corpus of the Russian language as well as in a selection of dictionaries of Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic. The analysis allowed us to highlight the deep knowledge of the church fathers, on which the thought of Maximus the Greek was based, and the important role of his Italian experience and the knowledge of Savonarola’s works in his intellectual training.

The present contribution aims to analyze a corpus of writings by Leonardo, entitled Pronostico or proudly signed as “Profezia di Lionardo da Vinci”. The earliest examples are from the last decade of the 15th century, at the time of the quick decline of the Duchy of Milan, in whose service Leonardo was operating. A conjecture is proposed with reference to a possible meeting with Savonarola in Florence in the summer of 1495, as a decisive circumstance in involving Leonardo in the prophetic genre, whose evolution is then followed throughout his career: from the first courtly attempts to conceive prophetic riddles for the Sforza, to the ambitious project of a novel written in the form of a letter, focused on the appearance of a “novo profeta” in Armenia, announcing the “stupenda e dannosa maraviglia” of a natural cataclysm (c. 1500-1502). Some prophetic writings of the time of Leonardo’s return to Florence under the patronage of Soderini (c. 1503-1504), such as the prophecy entitled Un comune, are discussed in the light of their ethical and political value.

O trabalho apresenta um estudo analítico do tema das formas de governo, no pensamento político de Girolamo Savonarola, a partir de Tratatto circa il regimento e governo dela città di Firenze (1498). Parte-se da metodologia bobbiana, analisando-se o tema sob três perspectivas simultâneas: sistemática, axiológica e teleológica.