Jeux de la métamorphose dans deux textes du Cinquecento florentin : L’Âne d’or de Machiavel et La Circé de Gelli
Metamorphosis and its interplays in two texts of the Florentine Cinquecento : Machiavelli’s Golden Ass and Gelli’sCirce

Summary/Abstract: Machiavelli’s unfinished poem, “The Golden Ass”, undertaken about 1517, was published in 1549, the same year as Giovan Battista Gelli’s “Circe”. Drawing its inspiration from Apuleius’ celebrated “Golden Ass” and Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, this text, by which Machiavelli intends to stand as the judge of his time, ends with the rewriting of one of Plutarch’s famous “moral works” devoted to the superiority of animal condition. Gelli takes up the latter notion illustrating it through a fully distinct work, in the form of a series of dialogues uttered on the island of Circe: Ulysses proposes to the animals to give them back their original human form but they obstinately refuse his offer. Machiavelli’s poem was indeed a vengeful political fable – Gelli’s “Circe”, as far as it is concerned, appears to be as a philosophical and humanistic lesson addressed by the author to his contemporaries.

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