Faustino Perisauli
Faustino Perisauli (1450 – 2 December 1523) was an Italian Roman Catholic priest and humanist.
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Biography
Faustino Perisauli was born in Tredozio. A clergyman, he was a courtier and tutor in the family of Francesco Colonna, lord of Palestrina, a humanist himself (according to some author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili with splendid engravings attributed to artists such as Mantegna and Raphael). During this period he wrote De honesto appetitu, which is inspired by the Epicurean philosophy of his patron and friend. Faustino Perisauli died in Rimini.
Perisauli's most famous work is De triumpho stultitiae, a poem in Latin hexameters published posthumously in 1524, which according to Alberto Viviani and Giannino Fabbri he composed between 1480 and 1490 and which bears extraordinary similarities to the Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium or Stultitiae laus), written by Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1509 and published in 1511.[1]
Already Giovanni Papini had noted that Perisauli's work "resembles in its general framework the Erasminian operetta."[2] It is not possible to say whether Erasmus knew Perisauli and his poem, although he was in Italy between 1506 and 1509. It is certain, however, from the comparison of the texts, that Erasmus elaborated the theme of De triumpho stultitiae on his own and with excellent art, the motifs and picturesque phrases of which seem to resurface in Erasmus' work. Undoubtedly the small and puny (as he is described to us by contemporaries) priest of Tredozio had the glimmer of a sense of universality before Erasmus, and he had it with pleasing wit.
The work was reprinted in its entirety about a century later, by Antonio Ulmus, a physician from Padua, in his Physiologia barbae umanae, published in folio in Bologna in 1603.
Notes
References
- Camaioni, Michele (2015). "Perisauli, Faustino." In: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Vol. 82. Roma: Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana.
- Ijsewijn, Jozef; Jacqueline Jacobs (1964). "De Triumphus Stultitiae van Faustinus Perisauli en de Laus Stultitiae van Erasmus," Handelingen van de Koninklijke Zuidnederlandse Maatschappij voor Taal- en Letterkunde en Geschiedenis, pp. 241–50.
