SOURCE: "The Breaking of the Circle: Giordano Bruno and the Poetics of Immeasurable Abundance," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, April-June, 1977, pp. 317-27.

Since its publication, Torquato Tasso painfully corrected his unorthodox Gerusalemme liberata (1575) in compliance with traditional requirements imposed by critical opinion. A few years later, Giordano Bruno declared in his Eroici furori (1584-85) that "poetry is not born of rules, except by the merest chance, but that the rules derive from the poetry. For that reason there are as many genres and species of true rules as there are of true poets". Having found its own form, inner expression stimulates originality instead of conformity.

In his humanistic De vinculis in genere (1591-92) Bruno dismissed the fifteenth-century emphasis on general norms of beauty, which should be replaced by individual models:

Because beauty, whether it consists in some kind of proportion or in something incorporeal which shines through physical nature, is manifold and works on countless levels; just as the irregularity of a stone does not fit, coincide, and join with the irregularity of any other stone (but only there where the reliefs and hollows best correspond), in the same way any appearance will not strike just any mind.

Since art has relinquished general contexts, each stone must assert its own beauty. Furthermore, relative standards involve, as Eugenio Battisti remarks, "by relativism in relationships. Each one of us is moved by a particular kind of beauty, according to his own temperament and culture [Rinascimento e Barocco, 1960]. Each spectator defines art and becomes its critic. The static and structured world-view of Umanesimo—as exemplified in the works of Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca—assumed that the successful work of art would dominate its public, whereas Bruno and seventeenth-century writers deliberately looked for public consensus. Contact between artist and spectator was sought after, for the reason that, as Battisti points out, "the Seicento strongly felt the need for law; since it could not be based on reason, it was founded on consensus [Rinascimento e Barocco, 1960]."

Bruno's work is a cry for consensus. With reference to the Dialoghi italiani, one can point out the sympathetic relations between the Nolan (Bruno's drammatis persona) and Tansillo, the interloculators' acceptance of the Nolan's ideas, the gods' approval of Jove's deliberations and their impact in the streets of Nola and Naples. From an external point of view, one might consider Bruno's search for a consensus on the Copernican theories, and his own, in the Cena delle ceneri. Moreover, Bruno's appeals to Sidney, Greville, and Queen Elizabeth were obviously meant to gain their consent. The very nature of the dialogue form facilitated such an attitude, which Bruno reiterated by repeatedly calling on the reader. The sophisticated and exclusive aloofness of Humanistic art involved rational and hidden harmonies, which spectacularly surfaced under the open skies of the late Cinquecento. The traditional notions of decorum, eloquence, and narrative distance were superseded by a conception of art that deliberately attacked the intellectual and social exclusivism of Umanesimo (which the Controriforma had already proceeded to modify). As a result, art became more popular, temporal and even sensational, so as to express a unified, exuberant and limitless conception of man and the universe.

In the literary tradition of Umanesimo, Bruno presented the new scientific and cultural relativism of the late sixteenth century in a collection of treatises, which played a fundamental role in a culture that was evolving from acceptance of a closed world toward recognition of an infinite universe. Yet, despite the fact that the prominence of Bruno has been acknowledged in the fields of science, philosophy and history of ideas, literary scholarship has remained hesitant and elusive on the subject of his artistic stature. Giorgio Bárberi-Squarotti considers him as prebarocco, while Carlo Calcaterra refers to him in the context of the anti-barocco. In the realm of aesthetics and art criticism, Eugenio Battisti and Robert Klein see definite baroque positions in Bruno's work, whereas Arnold Hauser defines him as a philosopher of Mannerism. Although this essay declines to label Bruno in any way, it nevertheless draws on such criticism. In addition, the stable world-view of Umanesimo will represent a point of comparison in the assessment of Bruno's historical position. In the spirit of the ongoing researches on poetic theories at the end of the Cinquecento, it is hoped that the present analysis will contribute to a more articulate understanding of the poetic aspects of such a crucial and complex age.

Having drawn a line between the old and the new, Bruno also discriminates between professional imitators and true poets. In the latter category, Bruno identifies the poet of the myrtle (love poets) and those of the laurel, "who instruct heroic souls through speculative and moral philosophy". Consequently, poetry is conducive to "philosophical studies," which Bruno considers "mothers of the Muses". The structure of the Eroici furori articulates both levels of expression, since the work consists of philosophical and critical commentaries on a collection of poems. Furthermore, as Bruno states in the explanatory epistle of the Spaccio della bestia trionfante, art gives order and clarity to "moral philosophy according to the internal light that the divine Intellectual Sun has radiated and still radiates within" the artist himself. Bruno reiterates this association in the Explicatio triginta sigillorum, in which he states that "the philosophers are poets and painters; the poets, the painters and philosophers." Consistent with the concept of ut pictura poesis, the artist defines beauty and truth by means of poetic images that can be interpreted in different contexts. Bruno's exploitation of metaphorical and mythical imagery (phoenix, Acteon, Icarus) also reflect the historical criticism of language, which no longer functioned as a stable carrier of universal truths.

Emphasis on poetic images identifies Bruno's distinction between suggestive and documentative tools. In the Cena Bruno separates poetry from history as follows:

When one is attempting to establish tradition and give laws, certainly it is necessary to speak at the level of common understanding and to avoid becoming involved with maintaining the unbiased tongue of science. The historian, in handling his material, would be crazy if he expected to introduce an unusual vocabulary. If he were to do this, the reader would be more apt to interpret him as an artist rather than to understand him as a historian. One who desires to give to the general populace laws and guidelines for living is worse, if he uses terms that only he understands or only a few understand.

Such a conceptual and artistic position moves the heroic and myth-making nature of Umanesimo beyond history, which usually accommodated mythopoeic constructions. Following Francesco Guicciardini, Bruno expects history to present "events and results," whereas the search for truth belongs to philosophy. Like Bruno, the Humanists separated poetry from history, but they did not extend such a distinction to language (even though they discriminated between high and low levels of style).

Surely, Bruno's unequivocal pronouncements in favor of poetic relativism had to be based on a thorough revision of Aristotelian standards. In fact, Bruno reacted against the codification which the philosopher had undergone in the hands of sixteenth-century critics like Minturno and Giraldi Cinthio, who "do not recognize that these rules [Aristotle's] are there only to show us the kind of epic poet Homer was, and not to serve as modes of instruction to other poets who could in other veins, skills, and frenzies be in their several kinds equal, similar or even greater than Homer". Like Virgil and Lucretius, Homer was "not a poet who depended upon the rules, but he is the cause of the rules". Hence, the standardization of invention represents a later phenomenon, which served the Humanistic translation of the classical lesson into geometric and rational systems. Bruno vindicated artistic originality; in his eyes, the past no longer represented a fixed mirror, but it became a basis for evolution. Having clarified the originality of Homeric poetry, Bruno implicitly recognizes Aristotle as a critic. As a matter of fact, Bruno himself attempts a combination of criticism and invention in the Eroici furori; the Nolan becomes a new Homer and a new Aristotle. It is important to notice that Tansillo's criticism is drawn from within the work of art; Bruno did not make Tasso's mistake. As Giorgio Bárberi-Squarotti remarks, the former's position caused the "dissolution of man's faith in the university of the theoretical postulates of art."

Even the Horatian concept of poetry assumes an innovative character in the case of Bruno. His historical vindication of the principle of utile dulcis aimed at a return to a comprehensive definition of art. In the first half of the sixteenth century, in fact, the utile had often been separated from the dulcis, that Castelvetro had proposed as the goal of art (in spite of the pervasive didacticism that was elicited by the spirit of the Controriforma). As a result, Bruno criticized the intellectual sterility of Petrarchism, the licentious style and radical criticism of Folengo, Berni, and Aretino, who nevertheless influenced his antitraditionalism. Variety of poetic expressions was thus committed to the recovery of a stylistic and conceptual unity that had been dissipated in the meanderings of earlier literature, manneristic or otherwise.

Convinced of the didactic value of poetry, Bruno vehemently confronts the Petrarchists in the Argument of the Eroici furori:

What a tragicomedy! What act, I say, more worthy of pity and laughter can be presented to us upon this world's stage, in this scene of our counsciousness, than of this host of individuals who became melancholy, meditative, unflinching, firm, faithful, lovers, devotees, admirers and slaves of a thing without trustworthiness.

While spiritual love is due to God, its human counterpart belongs to man. The Petrarchists, instead, followed neither nature nor God, since they intellectualized the former and reduced the latter to any unworthy human similitude.

Bruno's independent assessment of Aristotle and Petrarchism is extended to Plato as well. Accordingly, Bruno criticizes those individuals who have become "habitations of the gods or divine spirits, speak and do admirable things for which neither they themselves nor anyone else understand the reason". In the Ion Plato clearly stated that poetry is created "in a state of divine insanity," which places definite limitations on artistic ingenuity. Firstly, such a divine inspiration is not brought to life by the poet himself, but it is extended to him by the deity. Since he creates poetry in a state of receptive passivity, the artist also relinquishes the more rational powers of his mind, "for whilst a man retains any portion of the thing called reason, he is utterly incompetent to produce poetry or to vaticinate". Plato reiterates such a conviction in the Phaedrus: "Whosoever without the madness of the Muses comes to knock at the doors of poesy, from the conceit that haply by force of art he will become an efficient poet, departs with blasted hopes, and his poetry, the poetry of sense, fades into obscurity before the poetry of madness." Under these conditions, the poet "is excellent in proportion to the extent of his participation in the divine influence, and the degree in which the Muse itself has descended on him". It is in such a state of inspired rapture that the poet becomes a divine mouthpiece. Clearly, Plato emphasizes the poet's communicative—rather than creative—powers.

Bruno, instead, cherishes those individuals who:

Tansillo—because of a custom or habit of contemplation, and because they are naturally endowed with a lucid and intellectual spirit, when under the impact of an internal stimulus and spontaneous fervor spurred on by the love of divinity, justice, truth and glory, by the fire of desire and inspired purpose, they make keen their senses and in the sulphurous cognitive faculty enkindle a rational flame which raises their vision beyond the ordinary. And these do not go about speaking and acting as mere receptacles and instruments, but as chief inventors and authors.

Although basically critical of Plato's position, Bruno shares with the philosopher the conviction that a frenzied impulse is necessary in order to achieve ultimate revelation and beauty. In both instances, the highest stage of human experience lies beyond reason. However, while detachment from reason conditions any poetic process in the Ion and the Phaedrus, Bruno's frenzied experience is based on, and supported by, a "rational flame" up to the higher realms of human fulfillment. As in the case of John Donne and St. Ignatius, emotional experiences are controlled by intellectual preparation and self-awareness. As a result, man plays a more active role in the development of the creative process.

Since poetry is intimately related to philosophy, the experience of the heroic frenzy—that is divine beauty and truth—also implies that of art. The experience of poetry is thus defined as a conscious activity that requires a constructive process of internalization. Under these conditions, Bruno's chief inventor shares several features with Sidney's notion of the poet as a maker. In light of the fact that the latter's Defense of Poesie was finished before Bruno became his personal friend and scholarly admirer, this similarity could indeed be less than accidental. In both instances we find yet another expression—one might think of the Humanistic concept of virtù and the system of linear perspective—of the modern artist's attempts to assert his creative genius beyond the boundaries of the classical lesson.

With regard to the creative interaction between fantasy and intellect, it must be pointed out that, for Bruno as well as for Donne, the concept of frenzy, or ecstasy, does not elicit unbridled expressions of emotional raptures, as was the case with the exemplary St. Teresa of Bernini. The mind always controls the heart in the case of Bruno. One must remember that the nature of the Eroici furori is that of an expository treatise, which is not particularly conducive to immediate mystical flights. Furthermore, Bruno adds that "these frenzies do not arise from forgetfulness, but from remembrance". As a furor recollected in tranquillity, the heroic frenzy transcends the senses. Giovanni Gentile conclusively remarks that "the knowledge of divinity, as championed by Bruno, is not ecstasy, or immediate union, even though it is union that it has as its end…. It is a rational process, a discourse of the intellect [Il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento, 1955].

It is apparent that imagination and the senses only provide a first impulse for experiences which belong to the intellect. In the Eroici furori the human will, through reason, "governs the affections of the inferior potencies against the surge of their natural violence." In terms of artistic process, fantasy participates in the cycle by leading toward inferior things, whereas the intellect raises the mind heavenward. In the spirit of his reconciliation of contraries, Bruno states that "if it is unjust that the sense outrage the law of reason, it is equally blamable that the reason tyrannize the law of the senses". While the intellect stands for rest and identity, the imagination supports movement and diversity; it is the poet's rational faculty that reconciles the "one and the many, the same and the diverse, motion and position, the inferior with the superior". As a result, Bruno avoids a polarization between the real and the ideal, the perceptual and the intellectual.

Giving poetic expression to his heroic pursuit, Bruno synthesizes his philosophical and artistic outlook in the following sonnet of the Eroici furori:

This phoenix which enkindles itself in the golden sun and bit by bit is consumed, while it is surrounded by splendor, returns a contrary tribute to its star;… because that which ascends from it to the sky, becomes tepid smoke and purple fog, which cause the sun's rays to remain hidden from our eyes, and obscure that by which it glows and shines.

Thus my spirit (which the divine splendor inflames and illumines), while it goes about explaining that which glows so brightly in its thoughts, … sends forth verses from its high conceit, only to obscure the shining sun, while I am completely consumed and dissolved by the effort.

Ah me! This purple and black cloud of smoke darkens by its style what it would exalt, and renders it humble.

Poetic similitudes obscure truth, much as they provisionally make it more accessible. While Raphael and Michelangelo portrayed the divine as a similitude of the human in the Disputà and the Creation of Adam in the Vatican, Bruno moves beyond the clarity of anthropomorphic equations, since "the divinity can be the object only in similitude, and not a similitude". Whereas the former conception of similitude supports clear and final concordances, its latter version introduces a new cultural and aesthetic relativism. Incapable of reducing divine beauty to human concepts, Bruno states that "the highest and most profound knowledge of divine things is negative and not affirmative". Short of ultimate equations, Bruno promotes verbal speculations which lead to a "similitude the mind can discern by virtue of the intellect".

By stating that the divinity can be perceived in similitude and in negative terms, Bruno drastically modified the whole system of humanistic correspondences. At the same time, however, he gave the artist a new freedom. Since poetry assumes as many shapes as human ingenuity can devise, the experience of the heroic frenzy takes unlimited forms. In the Eroici furori Tansillo recommends that we "distinguish between the end which is absolute in truth and essence, and that which is so by similitude, shadow and participation". The principle of relativism is again at work. The prosaic usage of language expresses history and criticism. Metaphorical images suggest the divinity in similitude, but ultimate beauty must be contemplated in silence, since such beauty is without "similitude, analogy, image or species". As the frenzied lover assimilates the divinity into himself, the real and the ideal coalesce; finally, beauty is truth. Contrasts and tensions have been dissolved in the eternal harmony of the Monads.

Inasmuch as "it is neither fitting nor natural that the infinite be understood, or that it present itself as finite, for then it would cease to be infinite," the Nolan's ultimate vision becomes the rare praxis of the divine furor, which eludes representational expressions, be it a luminous point (Dante), angelic revelations (Bernini) or the sea (Leopardi). It is thus clear that art becomes a vehicle for a quest that leads to "frenzies" and "philosophical speculations" which resist artistic illusionism. Art offered the Humanist an independent realm in which his provisional experience of reality was organized in patterns of intellectual harmony. In Bruno's poetics of relativism, instead, art becomes a stage in the boundless cycle of human experiences.

The relative and exceptional knowledge of truth and reality leads Bruno to stress process rather than goals. Accordingly, he admits that "cognition can never be perfect to the extent that our intellect has the power to understand the highest object; but only to the extent that our intellect has the power to understand this object…. It is enough that all attempt the journey. It is enough that each one do whatever he can". Nevertheless, the poet must face the task of translating such a limitless effort into the confines of a literary form. The aesthetic implications of this frame of mind are apparent and complex. While Humanistic art was as stable and precise as the system of linear perspective which it created, Bruno's artistic guidelines grow, change and expand in accord with the rhythm and mutations of life itself. The principles of selection and limitation are superseded by those of inclusiveness and proliferation.

In the Dialoghi italiani, attributes, images, definitions, and levels of narrative multiply themselves to an unprecedented degree. A system of artistic and conceptual frames structures the Eroici furori. Its first level of narration is represented by the Nolan's sonnets, which, at the second stage, are commented upon by the interlocutors in philosophical and critical terms. The imaginative nature of the verse is expanded into the expository clarity of a prosaic commentary, in the tradition of Dante's Vita nuova. In the process, the narrative extends from the poems to the artist's mind; finally, commentary and invention, exposition and revelation merge together. Like the ricordo of Guicciardini and the essai of Montaigne, Bruno's dialogue analyzes, dissects, and criticizes the whole intellectual process, "proceeding to the depths of the mind". The literary artifact exemplifies a portrait of the mind.

Following Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, Bruno considers process and mutability as inherent in man and necessary to nature. This conception also stems from their Hermetic background, which views nature alive and in a state of flux. In the first dialogue of the Spaccio Bruno states that "where there is contrariety, there is action and reaction, there is motion, there is diversity … there is vicissitude". The attraction of contraries stands as a principle of human and universal relationships, on account of which justice, knowledge—and by extension art and beauty—depend on, and are exalted by, the experience of their opposites. In this spirit, Bruno remarks that "the pain of not having the thing desired is absent, and present is the joy of ever finding the thing sought." Consequently, one ought to produce "an infinite effort". This development from being to becoming from goal to attempts, finds an appropriate illustration in a comparison of two works of sculpture that were produced at both ends of the Cinquecento: the ideally aloof David of Michelangelo and the humanly engaged figure of Bernini.

Such a dynamic frame of mind obviously effected the Humanistic system of ideal similitudes. While Michelangelo represented Adam in a godly image of timeless perfection, Bruno subordinated Jove to "the Fate of Mutation" in (Spaccio,) Anthropomorphic perfection is superseded by natural growth, according to which the body reaches perfection, but it "cannot eternally nestle among the same temperaments, perpetuating the same threads, and preserving those same arrangements, in one and the same composite". Such a position evidently shatters the humanistic elimination of chance and process in the faultless world of art.

From a literary point of view, process and development lead Bruno to move from simple similarities to complex metaphors, and, finally, to contemplations without "speeches and discourses, but in silence". At one point in the Eroici furori the narrative enters the Nolan's mind taking the form of his very thoughts. It seems that human expression is breaking free from the expressive restrictions of literary artistry. In turn, the frenzied ascent has liberated poetry from the traditional notions of imitation and representation. The image of light becomes light itself at the point where "infinite potency and infinite act coincide". Silence supersedes eloquence, to the extent that Bruno can experience the "simplicity of the divine essence". In the case of Bruno, silence implies total vision and complete beauty, which exist beyond the reach of representational means. To a degree, art is subservient to imagination and the senses, whereas intellectual speculations allow the mind to "lose love and affection for every other sensible as well as intelligible object, for joined to that light it becomes that light, and consequently becomes a god". At this stage, the external projections of humanistic art are brought back to the artist himself, as the Nolan confidently states in one of his sonnets:

My heart is in the place and form of Parnassus, which I must ascend for my safety; my muses are the thoughts which at every hour reveal to me their glorious tale…

The beauty of art testifies to the greater magic of the artist-Magus, who can finally ignore the appeal of public acclaim, which Petrarch and Tasso could not resist.

At the level of poetic images and external projections, Bruno compares the changing nature of the gods to their ageless appearance in the artworks. As an illustration, the idealized forms of Giorgione's Venus give way, in the Spaccio, to "the wrinkles you have developed, and the furrows dug into your face by the plough of time". Jove adds that the goddess' decay would "make it more and more difficult for the painter, who, if he does not wish to lie, must paint you as you are". Bruno's detailed description of Venus suggests that the literary vehicle can represent life more realistically than painting. This positions seems to negate Bruno's declared endorsement of the concept of ut pictura poesis. The contradiction, however, is only apparent. In the first place, Bruno's dynamic world-view would inevitably resist the medium of painting, which physically restricts the expression of time, space, and development. Secondly, Bruno is probably criticizing the static nature of humanistic art. Aiming at a new synthesis of pictura and poesis beyond Humanistic conventions, Bruno also seems to search for an expressive vehicle that would combine linguistic mobility with the immediate and suggestive evidence of painting in the new context of a relativistic conception of art. This position represent a significant development from the unilateral discriminations on art that characterize the positions of Leonardo (painting), Alberti (architecture), Michelangelo (sculpture), and Montaigne (literature).

With regard to the relation between universal mutations and the humanistic notion of man as the measure of all things, Bruno points out that human life "is symbolized in the wheel of fortune". Such a traditional cycle is, however, less fatalistic and more individualized than its medieval precedent. Man moves along the wheel in a spirit of initiative rather than resignation. Surely, the individual ceases to be the external and fixed measure of the universe. On the other hand, he becomes a relative center of the cosmos, within which virtù and fortuna operate in harmony with the eternal vicissitudes of life. Under these conditions, the connection between the individual point and infinite trajectory eventually brings forward, as Bruno states in De la causa, principio e uno, "the concept of the coincidence of matter and form, potency and act, so that being, logically divided into what is and what it can be, is seen as physically undivided, and one; and this being is at one and the same time infinite, immobile, indivisible, without difference of whole parts, principle and principled."

Faith in the processes of life also reflects Bruno's reevaluation of nature. Since "perfect figures are not found in natural bodies, and they cannot exist either by the power of nature or art". Bruno concludes that the natural "represents its intrinsic principle, which accounts for its own existence". No longer destined to become an artifice, nature is given a form of its own. In the eyes of Bruno, such a recovery of nature compensates for the humanistic dreams that had become obsolete by the end of the Cinquecento. This conceptual position established a basis for the proliferation of reality (still life, genre scenes, tableaux of common life) which characterizes seventeenth-century art and literature, from Jacopo Bassano and Caravaggio to Cervantes and Velazquez. At all levels, life exemplifies artistic expressions which the artist can simply present and frame. The humanistic reconstruction of reality is followed by a more strict application of the concept of imitation on the part of Bruno, who replaced the representation of universal forms with the imitation of individual manifestations. Although part of the Seicento was to concentrate on the insignificant and even ridiculous particulars of life because it lost faith in higher values, Bruno always believed in the intimate relations between the infimo and the sublime.

By accepting chance and process, Bruno implicitly recognized value and purpose in all manifestations of life along the entire chain of being. Related to his search for universal consensus, Bruno acknowledges the experience of poets and philosophers as exceptional. Much as the Nolan denounces the illusionism of the nectar of the gods, he also warns his audience against the futility of frenzied pursuits on the part of those who are not ready for them. Although a degree of Humanistic and Hermetic exclusivism still identifies Bruno's attitude, he can indeed state that "it is a law of fate and of nature that each thing work according to the condition of its nature. Why, therefore, in pursuit of coveting the nectar of the gods do you lose that nectar which is proper to you, afflicting yourself perhaps with the vain hope of some other nectar?" Bruno's concern with individual limits and faith in human participation parallels Montaigne's contemporary criticism of theoretical excellence and concern for the human condition.

Frenzied souls and common crowds justified—only to a point, one should say—the commonness and vulgarity that characterize much of Bruno's work. Such devices are deliberately meant to preserve a contact between the higher and the lower aspects of life. The principle of diversity evidently pervades Bruno's Dialoghi italiani at all levels of human and artistic experience. It is in this spirit that Jove completes his regeneration of mankind by giving instructions concerning an old woman in Fiurulo, who "by the motion of her tongue moving about in her palate, will succeed with the fourth movement in causing the third molar in her right lower jaw to fall out". Likewise, the stories and affairs of the gods are not too far removed from Martinello's undistinguished son and Paolino's breeches. The heavenly assemblage finds a scholarly counterpart in London. Similarly, the dedication of the Eroici furori celebrates a humanistic concordia di cor (Bruno-Greville-Sidney), whereas the dedicatory letter of the Candelaio, dedicated to Morgana (probably a woman from Nola), is disseminated with obscene overtones. In the Cabala del cavallo pegaseo Bruno states that "the creation of philosophy without ignorance is madness; ignorance is a necessary means for the acquisition of truth." Within the confines of a rather theoretical projection, ignorance humanizes knowledge and equalizes people. The hero and the villain exemplify aspects and moments of an eternal cycle, as Mercury explains in the Spaccio: "Everything, then, no matter how minimal, is under infinitely great Providence; all minutiae, no matter how very lowly, in the order of the whole and of the universe, are most important". Considering once again the symbolic figure of David, Bruno, in a manner similar to Bernini's, can see the hero as well as the shepherd.

In spite of his unprecedented acceptance of mutability and relativism, Bruno's poetic conceptions are firmly committed to freedom of inspiration and expression. Satire, irony and invectives are always connected to a world-view in which man and nature breathe in liberty and happiness, certain as they are that the "death of one century brings life to all the others." The concept of alienation, which Hauser considers a major Manneristic trait, does not find support in the Brunian dimensions of spatial infinity and conceptual plenitude. Consistent with the derogatory connotations of the word baroque, the Seicento did produce much artistic

praxis that was alienated from meaningful contexts. Receptive toward neither dissolution nor despair, Bruno's poetics stimulate an ever more challenging sense of fulfillment, in accord with what Ernst Cassirer has defined as a spirit of "immeasurable abundance" [An Essay on Man.]