L'anima d'Aristotele

Description

The work, offered by Francesco Sansovino to Pandolfo Attavanti, is presented as a translation of Aristotle's On the Soul, but it is rather a compendium of Aristotelian psychology. The name of the translator is not explicitly mentioned, though the work is often assigned to Sansovino himself (this happens in several library catalogues, but not in Edit16, which records the translation as anonymous). As it appears in the explicit of the compendium, the work is conceived as a sort of introduction to Aristotle's Ethics. It is worth mentioning that the publisher - Bartolomeo Imperatore - is the same publisher of Bernardo Segni's translation of Aristotle's Ethics: the two works, bound together in the Oxford copy (Byw. K 2.4), show the very same layout and typographical elements. It would be interesting to check whether the Venetian editions of Segni's translations of Aristotle were part of a wider project which included the compendium of the Aristotelian treatise On the Soul. Cigogna 1834: 40, assigning the translation to Sansovino, mentions both the preface letter and a letter by Sansovino to Magnanini (Secret., f. 200v) in which the author lists the work together with some other translations of his. The work is listed among Sansovino's ones in Sansovino-Martinioni 1663: 627.

Eugenio Refini, ‘L'anima d'Aristotele’, in Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy Database (VARIDB)
  <https://vari.warwick.ac.uk/items/show/4986> [accessed 25 April 2024]