Le metamorfosi di Bonifacio: ombre e furori nel Candelaio di Giordano Bruno

My thesis is a comparative reading of two major works by the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno: Il Candelaio (The Candle Bearer) and De Umbris Idearum (The Shadows of Ideas). The two texts were published in the lapse of three years and scholarship has for the major part interpreted the Candle Bearer, which is a comedy, in light of the philosophy of images exposed by Bruno in The Shadows of Ideas. IN this view, the literary work was an expansion of the philosophical discourse. In my thesis I counter this reading reverting the approach: I thus read the philosophical work in light of the images built by Bruno in his literary text. The goal of my analysis is to show how Bruno introduced into the philosophical discourse strategies belonging to the dynamics of literature and how these strategies modify the epistemological foundations of the philosophical discourse itself. My analysis is based on the comparison of those images in the two texts which reciprocally complete each other and at the same time undermine their epistemological validity. I explore how The Shadows of Ideas is constructed according to a model of which The Candle Bearer is the original mold and thus how Bruno turns the philosophical discourse into a process of interpretation of figures of speeches, images, and rhetorical devices. This reading of these two early Bruno’s works proposes to illustrate how, on the level of the production of speech and writing, at the end of the 16th century the philosophical speculation becomes progressively a matter of self-reflection on the epistemological foundation trough which philosophy strives to represent its object. In conclusion of my thesis, I argue how literature represents for philosophy the gateway to a new nuanced and mystifying language which blurs the borders between words and images, speech and writing. In the last instance, Bruno’s works are an ideal bridge that joins the pinnacle of the Renaissance to the upcoming age of Baroque.M.A.Includes bibliographical referencesby Alessio Lerr