Aesop and the humanist apologue

As Quattrocento humanists rediscovered Aesop in Greek, they were inspired to compose original Latin apologues. Leon Battista Alberti's Centum apologi (1437) spawned numerous imitations: Bartolomeo Scala's Apologi centum (1481) and Apologorum liber secundus (1488–92), Leonardo da Vinci's scattered favole ( c. 1485–95), Lorenzo Astemio's two Hecatomythia (1495, 1505), and Bernardino Baldi's 1582 Cento apologhi (first published in 1590). Alberti's apologues are couched as philosophical apothegms which tend to be more personal and less political than ancient Aesopic fables. Scala composes elaborate Latin apologues whose allegorical mythologizing arouses the admiration and emulation of Marsilio Ficino. In the marginalia to his notebooks, Leonardo writes Italian favole about plants and inanimate objects with notable borrowing from Alberti. In a more popular vein, Astemio creates two collections of Latin fables that blend Aesopic fable and novellistic facetia . And the Urbinate polymath Baldi creates a set of 100 Italian apologues inspired by Cosimo Bartoli's 1568 translation of Alberti. (pp. 9–26)