Tesauro’s Il Cannocchiale aristotelico in the Twenty-First Century.

In Light of the Recent Critical Edition

Abstract

The article examines the recent publication of the first critical edition of Emanuele Tesauro’s Cannocchiale aristotelico (1670), edited by Maicol Cutrì for Fondazione Pietro Bembo / Ugo Guanda Editore. This major editorial achievement restores full visibility to a key work of seventeenth-century rhetorical theory and reaffirms its theoretical and literary stature within the European Baroque. The new edition is therefore taken as a critical vantage point from which to reconsider both the internal architecture of the treatise and the main interpretative lines developed in recent scholarship. Particular attention is devoted to the formal and conceptual features of Cutrì’s edition and, above all, to the editor’s introduction, read as a synthesis of his hermeneutic approach. From this perspective, the essay reconstructs major critical trajectories concerning metaphor and knowledge, rhetoric and dialectic, optics and scientific imagery, and the performative and stylistic dimensions of the work, mapping the most significant theoretical contributions devoted to the Cannocchiale over the last twenty-five years. Frare’s 2000 monograph provides a natural starting point, while Cutrì’s 2024–2025 edition offers a new basis for reassessing the field as a whole.