Invisibile come Dio. La vita e l’opera di Gabriele Biondo by Michele Lodone

Invisibile come Dio. La vita e l’opera di Gabriele Biondo
by Michele Lodone
Published by Edizioni della Normale

In the last decades of the 15th century, the enigmatic Gabriele Biondo made his appearance in the polycentric Italian religious landscape, not yet polarized by the impending Reformation. Even though he had been raised in Rome, Gabriele Biondo left the Papal city for the mountains of Modigliana, in an attempt to distance himself both from the education given him by his father, the humanist Biondo Flavio, and from his brothers’ curial career. While Italy was shaken by war and by the proliferation of prophecies about the end of time, from the seclusion of Modigliana, Biondo became the spiritual guide of a community of both religious and lay women and men. People who lived in various cities of northern Italy (namely Florence, Bologna and Venice) came to experience an innovative and more ‘interior’ way of practicing their faith.

Invisibile come Dio. La vita e l’opera di Gabriele Biondo by Michele Lodone (Edizioni della Normale 2020) reconstructs for the first time the life and works of this ‘irregular’ Christian, who lived between the end of the Middle Ages and the early modern age. The book illustrates how Biondo’s personal experience and literary output reflected the contemporary kaleidoscopic Italian religious panorama, with its figures, experiences and crucial problems. Besides, it helps to understand the epochal impact that the Reformation had on the Italian peninsula – it is no coincidence that Biondo’s mystical and apocalyptic writings, which denounced Girolamo Savonarola as the Antichrist, were, in turn, tried for heresy.