Francesco Sansovino e la prudenza

This article is about the peculiar work Dialogo della pratica della ragione, written between 1538 and 1542 by Francesco Sansovino, who was educated as a jurist but then became a «polygraph». The author is particularly focused on the concept of prudence, which arises from the Dialogo. It is likely that Sansovino himself ignored that such concept became the symbol of an important theoretical and historical transition at the beginning of the modern age. The author traces the genesis of the prudentia in the Aristotelian phronesis and in its subsequent stabilization within Thomas Aquinas’ moral theology. He shows that in the Diagolo, also because of the combination with the rather different theories of Bartolo and Machiavelli, such concept is back in its practical role of habito attivo con ragione. Such virtue also becomes the expression of that typical knowledge of civil humanism, where social life and intellectual knowledge are strictly combined.