"I doi philosophi": un tema ficiniano dall'affresco di casa Visconti al poemetto di Antonio Fregoso

The paper is a reading of the two poems by Fregoso, with a particular focus on their connections to Marsilio Ficino’s epistulae De stultitia and miseria hominum and their translation in Italian in the Sermoni morali. The poems, dedicated to the laughing of Democritus and the weeping of Heraclitus over human folly, are considered on the background of Milan historical and cultural environment between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century. Particular attention is paid to the fresco by Donato Bramante with the same subject, now kept in Brera, whose client had been Gaspare Ambrogio Visconti. The meaning of the poem Li doi philosophi (which is dedicated to Iafredo Carlo) can also be indicated in a reproposal of the cultural reflections of the "Visconti circle" to the new French rulers, in view of a renewed civil harmony.