Carlo Ginzburg on Machiavelli and Michelangelo

In his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli compared the act of imposing new political orders on an uncivilized population to the carving of a statue from a piece of rough marble: an allusion, according to many scholars, to Michelangelo’s David. Did Michelangelo respond in some way to Machiavelli’s allusion?

The University of Pennsylvania is the joint producer of this series—through the Italian Studies section of the Department of Romance Languages, the Center for Italian Studies, and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts.

Carlo Ginzburg (born 1939) has taught at the University of Bologna, at UCLA, and at the Scuola Normale of Pisa. His books, translated into more than twenty languages, include The Night Battles; The Cheese and the Worms; Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method; The Enigma of Piero della Francesca; History, Rhetoric, and Proof; The Judge and the Historian; Wooden Eyes; No Island is an Island; Threads and Traces; Fear Reverence Terror: Five Essays in Political Iconography; and Nondimanco. Machiavelli, Pascal. He received the Aby Warburg Prize (1992), the Humboldt-Forschungs Prize (2007), and the Balzan Prize for the History of Europe, 1400-1700 (2010).