ABSTRACT

The theorists of artificial poetic wonders were guided by Aristotle's Poetics, Rhetoric and Metaphysics, Horace's Ars Poetica, Cicero's De inventione and Tusculanae Disputationes, Pliny's Natural History, Longinus' treatise On the Sublime, but also and in a more subtle way by Plato, above all by The Sophist, with its division between eikastic and phantastic mimesis, and by the unfinished but influential commentary Marsilio Ficino wrote to it between 1494 and 1496.6 Their main concerns were the poetic means to produce wonders, the psychological aspects of the audience wonderment and, in a more philosophical vein, the definition of the marvelous, its ultimate causes and its participation in epistemology. After the Council of Trent, a mutation in evaluating poetic wonders took place, with an uptake of medieval concepts, mostly through the influence of Thomas Cajetan's Neo-Thomism. The philosopher Francesco Patrizi of Cherso, author of the influential Nova de universis philosophia, took an interesting position on the poetic wonders in Della Poetica.