I Teatri del Mondo. Fonti e sviluppi rinascimentali

 The aim of the thesis is to inquire into the life of an intellectual object between 1500s and 1600s: the theatre of the world. With this expression I mean a kind of text strcutured like a theatre (or similar architectonic forms) with mnemonic and universal implications; the content of these texts is therefore effecrtively made mentally visible for easy comprehension and retention. At the beginning it is fundamental to observe the origins of this textual tradition: the ancient and medieval Hermeticism and Marsilio Ficino's Platonism, which would later be systematized by Giulio Camillo Delminio during the 1500s. His work the Idea del Theatro (1550) founded the paradigm of all the text-theatres that would be written in the following years. All of this is linked to the hermetic aspiration of human domination of the world through language. The transformation of this dream from the 1400s to 1500s constitue important clues to better investigate the text-theatres. Indeed, if Ficino described the human being as the imago mundi, Camillo and his successors described the theatre as the imago mundi. The transformation from a natural form to an artificial one reveal an important increase in the faith put into human ars. At the end, it is fundamental to observe the fundamental counterpart to Camillo's model: the Universae naturae theatrum (1596) of Jean Bodin. The analysis of this reinterpretation of the text-theatres is essential to understand the progressive transformation of the philosophical-gnoseological paradigm of this textual tradition. Indeed, despite their titles, the visualization of the knowledge in these late works is obtained not through a mnemotechnical-architectonic form but through logical trees from Ramus' tradition. This metamorphososis constitute the end for the text-theatres and it is parallel to the expansion of the world's conception.