Delio Cantimori e il Warburgkreis

The second issue of the “Journal of the Warburg Institute”, published in London in 1937, opens with an essay by Delio Cantimori Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism, translated into English by Frances Yates. The young historian, a close collaborator of Giovanni Gentile, at the time Director of the Scuola Normale of Pisa and in those years still, formally, fascist, proposed a study with a particular vision – the seminal theme of the political value of Rhetoric – which he undertakes in an entirely unconventional way. In his thesis and in the argumentative articulation of his essay, Cantimori proposes to overthrow the stereotype of Italian Humanism as a “purely literary phenomenon, verbose, empty” and “rhetorical in the worst sense of the term”. After the war, Cantimori himself together with Gertrud Bing would promote what for decades would be the only international edition of Warburg’s writings: La Rinascita del paganesimo antico, printed by the Italian publisher La Nuova Italia in 1966.