Scala, Bartolomeo

Abstract

Florence of the Medici is well known for the incredible flourishing, in a relatively short period of time, of outstanding personalities in all the fields of human practical and intellectual activities. It would be wrong to assume that this blessed period of Italian history and the history of entire Europe would have reached such a glorious status without a whole range of minor functionaries and intellectuals that made possible the material organization and development of the city-state. Bartolomeo Scala was one of these individuals. He played an essential role in organizing some of the main political institutions of the Florentine political “state-apparatus.” His wide intellectual interests – which extended to some very specialized fields such as Epicurean philosophy, Neoplatonic mysticism, or geography and cosmology as well as more traditional humanist areas such as moral philosophy, political historiography, or religious thought – are a good example of the particular influence that the new cultural climate exerted in the shaping of early modern sensibility.