Emanuele Tesauro’s politician Aesop

Abstract

The thousands years old history of Aesop’s fables truly lived their renaissance in the renaissance and baroque age: it enriched the communication, supported by rhetorical-ethical-iconological intent, by visualizing with diverse form, languages and emblems. This study examines the little-known fable collection of Emanuele Tesauro, one of the most important author of the 17th century Italian literature: his literary work intituled The Phrygian Aesop’s policy is the mirror of the period, the morality and anti-Machiavellian politics worldview. When Tesauro rewrote the Aesop’s fables with sharpening to aphorisms, he consciously used the moral philosophical projection of the rhetorical function, and the evidence of it is trackable in his main works, thus the comparison with them is inescapable. Considering, that in the prestigious part of these tales animals incorporate the human virtues and sins, the paper pays attention to the typical moral philosophical aspects of the zoo symbolism.