Turpitudo minime noxia: ridicoli figurati e figure ingegnose nel «Trattato de’ Ridicoli» di Emanuele Tesauro

Among the deepening of the reflection on rice in the seventeenth century, Emanuele Tesauro's «Treatise de 'Ridicoli» stands out for its placement within the «Aristotelian Cannocchiale», for its ingenious style, for the daring intention to start from a concise definition by Aristotle, for the author's ability to bring rhetorical classifications and rules of civil conversation back to a moral dimension strongly anchored to a metaphysics. The contribution aims to retrace the systematization operated by Tesauro to contextualize it within the contemporary production on the subject and to highlight its novelty character, both on the level of the logical-rhetorical form of the discussion - centered on the dialectic of matter-form - and because the usual reference to the Aristotelian «Ethics to Nicomachos» not only contributes to founding the distinction between ridicule and slander from a philosophical point of view, but also allows us to recognize in the ontological depth of the metaphor the principle of legitimacy of the category of the ridiculous.