© Lodi Nauta, in Imagination in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times,

eds. Lodi Nauta & Detlev Pätzold, Peeters: Leuven, 2004, 93-113

LORENZO VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION

Lodi Nauta

Introduction

One would expect the concept of imagination to play an important role in

the writings of the humanist Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457).1 As a fervid and
devoted student of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, which he said he knew
almost by heart, he was certainly acquainted with Quintilian’s sections
about the emotions and the ways in which the orator can manipulate them
by using various kinds of vivid descriptions. Valla considered himself to be
Quintilian’s spokesman, tirelessly campaigning for rhetoric and eloquence
and the revival of good, classical Latin. His bitter quarrels with other
humanists and his attacks on traditional systems of thought required at least
the use of rhetorical techniques, and it would have been a simple step for
him to proceed to reflect on one of the key concepts of the rhetorician’s art,
imaginatio. But while he employed the imagination in a specific, rhetorical
sense in his dialogue De vero falsoque bono, Valla also recognised the
dangers of the imagination, especially when employed by scholastic
philosophers and theologians. He frequently praised eloquence2 and wrote
extensively on types of argumentation in his work on dialectic, assessing
their strength in terms of persuasiveness and usefulness, but he did not treat
the concept of imaginatio and its power to manipulate the emotions in
explicit terms, nor does one find such discussions in the glosses to his copy
of Quintilian.3
In this article several aspects of Valla’s thought and scholarship will be
discussed, which may have rendered him less sympathetic to the faculty of
imagination: his aversion to abstract terms and entities; his criticism of

1
For a brief and excellent introduction to Valla’s thought and scholarship, see Mon-
fasani’s article in REP, vol. 9, pp. 568-573 with further bibliography. The literature
on Valla is vast. In this article I shall only cite what is most relevant to my theme
and argument.
2
See below, pp. 103-110.
3
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, esp. VI.2 and VIII.3. Valla, Le Postille (eds. Marti-
nelli and Perosa); see below, pp. 103-110. For a recent treatment of imaginatio in
Quintilian and Renaissance authors, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, pp. 182-188,
and Peter Mack’s contribution to this volume.
94 LODI NAUTA

Aristotelian psychology; the association of imagination with feigning and

faking; and his emphasis on the social and cultural role of language in
society rather than on the creative, imaginative use of it by individual
speakers. In addition, Valla did not profess to teach eloquence or to write
about the precepts of rhetoric, but wanted to study the finer semantic and
formal distinctions of words in Latin. His aim was not to teach how to
summon up arresting pictures, arising from the power of imagination, and
how to employ the tropes of simile and metaphor in order to convey these
pictures to an audience. His interests focused on the intricacies of the Latin
language and vocabulary, on semantic precision, on elegantia rather than
eloquence. Moreover, in the rhetorical tradition imaginatio was considered
to be an important faculty, but the dangerous and darker sides were also
acknowledged. (Quintilian even spoke of ‘a vice of the mind’.) Imagination,
then, was not an unproblematic concept.

Abstraction

In itself the process of imagining things in the mind or portraying things in

art is something valuable. In a brief note on the verb fingere in the
Elegantiae, Valla writes:4

Fingere refers, strictly speaking, to the potter or figulus who makes forms from
clay. From this it is extended in a general way to other things skilfully made by
a man’s talent and skill, especially if they are unusual or novel. Effingere is to
fingere in the form of something else, to portray by means of fingere … From
effingere is derived the noun effigies, which is a figure made in the living
likeness of something or someone else, or in the image of truth, including
paintings and sculptures.

He gives quotations from Cicero and Quintilian. The latter for instance
wrote that Cicero, who ‘devoted himself heart and soul to the imitation of
the Greeks, succeeded in reproducing (effinxisse) the force of Demosthenes,
the copious flow of Plato, and the charm of Isocrates’.5
Though there is no separate section devoted to imaginari in the
Elegantiae, the product of imaginari or fingere in this normal sense of

4
Elegantiae Linguae Latinae V.43, in Opera Omnia, vol. 1, p. 178. I quote from
Baxandall’s translation in his Giotto, p. 10.
5
Institutio oratoria X.1.108 (ed. and transl. Butler), vol. 4, p. 62. Cf. Valla’s remark
on rhetorical exercises in the schools: in conventu scholasticorum fictam causam
orat, id agens, ut in veris postea causis possit orare (Elegantiae IV.81, Opera
Omnia, vol. 1, pp. 148-149).
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 95

making, portraying or imagining something or someone does often occur:

imago is simply the image, portrait, picture and so forth, materially (statue,
sculpture, painting) or mentally (mental picture).6
These verbs, however, often have negative connotations, as appears
from Valla’s Oration on the Falsely-Believed and Forged Donation of
Constantine, in which the verb fingere is invariably used in the negative
sense of falsifying or dreaming things up: the forger of the document is said
to feign, to make things up (fingere), the forgery being a fictum.7
Of a different kind are the ficta of philosophers, which are not lies in
the sense of forgeries but certainly no less harmful. Valla was averse to
abstract terms and concepts, loathing scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy
with its rebarbative and ungrammatical terminology and distinctions.
Abstraction as the process which leads to abstract terms and entities was
therefore highly suspect, because it turns one’s attention away from the
world of common sense and its objects. At several places in his
Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, Valla reacts against abstraction and
treats its products as fictions or chimeras. In the first version of this work,
dating from about 1431/33, Valla criticises the process of abstraction that
leads to abstract entities such as whiteness and blackness:

But first of all one ought to mock their belief that quality can exist without any
subject or at any rate that quality can be separated mentally (certe cogitatione
fingi). They call abstract, words like ‘whiteness’, ‘blackness’. I do not
remember ever thinking (finxisse) of things like this even when I was burning
with a fever. For whoever pictures (imaginatur) these things must imagine
(imaginantur) them united with some subject or substance: either snow, or a
cloud, or a wall, or a piece of clothing, if he thinks of whiteness … But these
people want to imagine (fingi) man, horse, lion, animal without any individual
instance. Not even angels could grasp this with their imaginations
(imaginatione). But let us pass over these inanities.8

6
E.g. Elegantiae II.36, IV.37, V.11, VI.47. See Laurentii Vallae Elegantiarum
concordantiae (eds. García Pinilla and Herráiz Pareja), ad loc.
7
Valla, De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (ed. Setz), p. 60: Nam
aliquot iam seculis aut non intellexerunt donationem Constantini commenticiam
fictamque esse aut ipsi finxerunt …; p. 140: ut appareat eum, qui sic locutus est,
mentitum esse nec scisse fingere, quod Constantinum dixisse ac fecisse verisimile
esset; cf. pp. 133 and 151. In this sense fingere is identical with commentiri (cf. pp.
60:5, 146:6, 148:7 and 154:8).
8
Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie (ed. Zippel), vol. 2, pp. 373-374. (I shall
quote the volume and page number of Zippel’s edition. Vol. 1 contains Valla’s third
version of the Repastinatio, including a critical apparatus which lists variant
readings from the second version. Vol. 2 contains the first version.) I quote the
96 LODI NAUTA

Valla here points to the limits of imagination. Imagination in itself may be

useful in combining pictures of existing things (though Valla does not
discuss this traditional function), but when one tries to conjure up
something without a determinate nature such as a universal horse which
lacks any individual characteristics, it leads to nonsense and vain and empty
concepts and words. The verbs imaginari and fingere are used
interchangeably by Valla for this process of feigning things which in reality
cannot exist. And in his De vero falsoque bono the Epicurean spokesman
Maffeo Vegio rejects the concept of honestas as a res imaginaria, which
does not correspond to anything in reality. 9
For Valla imagination is clearly bound by our ordinary conception of
the everyday world, which is adequately described by classical Latin, that
is, the Latin of the great authors. He would certainly not have repudiated
mythological things such as centaurs or other non-existent things like
golden mountains, which may be used by poets – they have a summa
dicendi licentia after all, because their fictive nature is obvious.10
Philosophers, however, use these terms and concepts as if they describe
things which really exist.
In the passage from the Repastinatio just quoted, Valla, however, goes
one step further, criticising not just the existence of abstract entities, but any
act of mental abstraction. The passage does not recur in the later versions of
the Repastinatio. Perhaps Valla realised that in his own account of
substance and quality he also considers things in separation from each
other, which in reality are always united (e.g. the substance of the soul and

translation of this passage from Mack, Renaissance Argument, p. 60. Bishop

Berkeley was later to express a similar point when he attacked the doctrine of
abstract ideas because they would require a mental image of something which has
no determinate nature, for instance a triangle which is ‘neither oblique, nor
rectangle, equilateral … but all and none of these at once’; Principles of Human
Knowledge, in Berkeley, Works (eds. Luce and Jessop), vol. 2, p. 13.
9
I refer to the text which is edited under its first title De voluptate by Lorch. I quote
the transl. of Hieatt and Lorch: p. 140; cf. pp. 90 and 187. The usefulness of the
English translation is marred by several transpositions of blocks of texts and a dis-
order of pages (pp. 66-71: read: 66, 70, 68, 72; 275: transpose the first line to the
bottom of the page; p. 277: transpose first 18 lines to the bottom of the page; pp.
285-289: read: 284, 288, 286, 290; p. 301: transpose last 13 lines to the beginning of
the page).
10
Repastinatio (ed. Zippel), vol. 1, p. 59 and vol. 2, p. 434. But even the figmenta of
the poets, Valla writes in the preface to his Gesta Ferdinandi regis Aragonum,
linking poetry and history, should be based on true, historical events: Nec fieri
potest, ut poete figmenta sua non in rerum gestarum veritate velut fundamentis
edificent (ed. Besomi, p. 5).
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 97

its three qualities). Nevertheless, he would certainly think that his point
remains valid, namely that one cannot even think of something like a horse
without any individual instance. Other examples clearly illustrate this. In his
critique of matter and form, for example, he accuses the peripatetica natio
of inviting us to imagine something which cannot be imagined: prime
matter without any form or form without matter. We can only imagine
something which has an image, and then we cannot but imagine something
as having a corporeal body. 11 Likewise, in his discussion of the category of
quantity, which he seeks to reduce to that of quality, Valla gives a physical
interpretation of mathematical entities. He rejects the view that lines are
longitudes without width and that points are indivisible quantities which
occupy no space. He thinks it is ridiculous to hold that a multiplication of
lines does not result in something wider than the original line, and that a
multiplication of points does not lead to something bigger. He also holds
that points are parts of a line and not, as Aristotle and his medieval
followers thought, the termination of a line, for how can termination be
without a place? Our imagination seems an important instrument for Valla
in rejecting entities, posited by scholastic philosophers and other theorists:
whatever we cannot imagine does not exist and whatever exists should be
imaginable. We simply cannot imagine (imaginari) a point which is not a
part of a line nor a line which cannot be brought back or reduced to a line.12
Those who believe that a point can be divided further imagine (imaginari)
something smaller than what God has made and what the nature of things
offers.13
This attack on abstract concepts and entities is often linked to
Ockham’s nominalist programme. It is not difficult to see why. Both
Ockham and Valla admit of only substances and inhering qualities, reducing
the ten Aristotelian categories (quantity, relation, time, place, etc.) to these
two (or three in the case of Valla, who is dubious about action as a separate
category). Both thinkers show an aversion to abstract entities of various
kinds, attack ‘one’ as a transcendental term, criticise the notion of privation,
and equate action with passion. It is therefore not surprising that scholars

11
Repastinatio (ed. Zippel), vol. 1, p. 111: Tum, quod materiam quandam faciunt ab
omni forma seiunctum, quam vocant “materiam primam”, hoc pereque stultum est
atque formam qualitatemve facere citra materiam, ne dicam stultius … Et eam
iubent nos imaginari, que imagine caret. Accipe rationem propositione sua dignam:
“ut imaginamur formam sine materia, ita possumus imaginari materiam sine
forma”. “Imaginamur” quod “imaginem” habet, non quod non habet. Et tamen in
illo quoque mentiuntur: nihil enim imaginamur nisi tanquam corpus.
12
Ibidem, p. 147.
13
Ibidem, p. 146: que ipsorum insania erit, qui tum conentur aliquid nosse aut
imaginari minutius quam id quod Deus fecit et quam natura rerum fert ….
98 LODI NAUTA

have spoken about Valla’s ‘nominalism’, or even his ‘occamismo’ and

about his ‘Anknüpfung an Ockham’.14 This, however, is incorrect, as I have
argued in a recent article where I have compared the two thinkers: the
similarities between the two are superficial and fortuitous and are
overshadowed by differences in interests, arguments, techniques and
intellectual outlook.15
In a similar vein Valla also criticises the speculations of natural
philosophers who dare to say what the nature of the heavens is. Their
speculations are dreams, for they go beyond the evidence of the senses.16 As
soon as the imagination is not bound by the senses anymore and not
directed at concrete things of the world in which we live, it produces the
fantasies and empty concepts of philosophers and others.

Valla on the soul

Valla accused philosophers of reifying terms, concepts and entities, which

in fact were the products of their all too fanciful imagination. His aversion
extended to processes such as sensation and cognition, as can be seen from
his discussion of the soul in his Repastinatio. In this work, which is mainly
devoted to a critique of Aristotelian-scholastic metaphysics and dialectics,
Valla also found opportunity to deal with points pertaining to zoology,
astronomy, ethics, theology, and psychology, including the soul. The soul
was of course one of the most crucial themes which were discussed among
the scholastics, particularly in their commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima
and its Arabic commentators. Thomas Aquinas, for example, had
enumerated five genera of powers, namely vegetative, sensitive, appetitive,
locomotive and intellectual.17 The vegetative powers of the soul included
nutrition, growth and reproduction; the sensitive included the functions of
the five exterior senses as well as the four or five inner senses (common
sense, imagination, the estimative or cogitative power and memory, all of
which are located in the brain). Intellectual knowledge is the result of a
process of abstraction which starts with sense perception, resulting in
images or phantasms. These phantasms, in their turn, are grasped by the
active intellect which abstracts the form from the image, producing in the
possible intellect a form (intelligible species) by means of which intellectual

14
Zippel, introduction to his edition, vol. 1, p. lxxxviii and xci; cf. cxviii. Kessler,
‘Die Transformation’ and idem, ‘Die verborgene Gegenwart Ockhams’. While I am
critical of Kessler’s interpretation, I am much indebted to his stimulating work.
15
Nauta, ‘William of Ockham and Lorenzo Valla’.
16
Repastinatio (ed. Zippel), vol. 2, p. 422.
17
E.g. Summa contra Gentiles IV.58.
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 99

knowledge is achieved. The details of this process and the roles of the
various powers were hotly debated in the universities, especially in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries but also later.18 Because of its middle
function between the lower process of sensation and the higher process of
intellectual cognition, the imagination had an important role in providing
the intellect with images. It could also easily lead to various kinds of errors
and mistakes, when its function was disturbed (during, e.g., hallucination).
Dreams and visions also made use of images, which were provided by the
imagination. Following Avicenna, Albert the Great distinguished imagi-
natio from phantasia but this distinction was not universally accepted.
Valla has no truck with all these faculties or functions which scholastics
had distinguished within the human soul, and he returns to the Augustinian
picture of the soul as a wholly spiritual and immaterial substance which was
made in the image of God, consisting of intellect, memory and will.19 Of
course, this Augustinian view of the soul remained influential in the later
Middle Ages, especially among Franciscans, but it was combined with
Aristotelian concepts and distinctions such as the active and the passive
intellect. Valla does not show that he was aware of the scholastic debates on
the soul, and his simplification of the processes of sensation and cognition
is mainly achieved by neglecting them. Without much discussion he rejects
the various functions of the soul (vegetative, sensitive, imaginative,
intellectual),20 implying that medieval scholars had accepted a plurality of
souls. He discusses the five exterior senses, focusing on the way we talk
about objects. He does not exhibit any inclination to treat the physiological
aspects of sensation. The term ‘species’ does not occur at all. The inner
senses are likewise ignored. And he does not mention imaginatio nor the vis
estimativa, while the common sense is only mentioned in order to be
refuted.21
Valla seems to think that the soul’s unity is imperilled if the various
processes of sensation and cognition are distinguished and allotted to

18
The literature is vast. Good introductions are the chapters by Boler, Kuksewicz
and Mahoney in the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, and those by
Park (including a diagram of the faculties of the soul on p. 466) and Kessler in the
Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, as well as K. Park’s introduction to
G.P. della Mirandola, Über die Vorstellung/De imaginatione, which includes a good
bibliography. For the important Avicennean tradition see Hasse, Avicenna’s De
anima, pp. 127-153.
19
Repastinatio (ed. Zippel), vol. 1, pp. 59-73 and vol. 2, pp. 408-411 and 418-419.
For a more extensive treatment of Valla’s views on the soul see my ‘Lorenzo
Valla’s Critique’.
20
Repastinatio (ed. Zippel), vol. 2, p. 409.
21
Ibidem, vol. 1, p. 73.
100 LODI NAUTA

different faculties or powers, and he therefore stresses that it is one and the
same soul which perceives, reasons and wills.22 Nevertheless, he too cannot
avoid giving these capacities separate functions: memory, which covers
sensation, comprehends and retains things; reason (which, he says, is
‘identical to the intellect’) examines and judges them; and will desires or
rejects them.23 Memory is fundamental, being the ‘mother’ of reason or the
soul’s life.24 As the first capacity it is said to see, hear, taste, smell and
touch outer things, but Valla is not interested in the subsequent steps of the
processes of sensation and cognition. He apparently feels that the soul’s
nobility is jeopardised if we allow it to become subject to experiences from
outside. Valla wants the soul to be an autonomous, immaterial entity, which
takes the initiative in sensing and knowing, the outer objects being only the
occasion of sensation and cognition. This is confirmed by his brief
treatment of the question whether colours, sounds and other sense
perceptions extend to the senses, as the peripatetics hold (the theory known
as intramission) or whether the power of the senses reach out to them, as
Macrobius, Lactantius and ‘many philosophers’ hold (extramission). Valla
prefers the extramissionist theory, because, on account of the presence of
our soul in the senses, it is much easier for our soul to extend, by way of the
rays of the eye, to the colours than that the colours come to the eye. The
senses, he writes, function as a multiple mirror.25 This is not a very helpful
image, for a mirror is passive in receiving images of things. In later versions
too Valla writes that extramission is to be preferred because ‘colours and
shapes are not carried to the vision by help of brightness, but come to the
eye as though to a mirror’.26 This is not the place to go into a detailed
exegesis of the entire passage – I have done that elsewhere27 – but the
relevant point here is the occurrence of the term imagines. Even an
extramissionist account of perception, in which the soul is the active
principle, cannot do without the existence of images; they seem to be
necessary as carriers of information, for how else can processes such as
‘comprehending’, ‘retaining’ and ‘judging things’ be performed? As is
often the case, Valla does not provide further details, since he is clearly not
interested in the psychological and physiological side of sensation and
cognition. I therefore do not think that Valla ‘is undoubtedly referring’ to
the scholastic controversy about the existence and nature of sensible

22
Ibidem, vol. 1, p. 75.
23
Ibidem, vol. 1, pp. 66-67 and vol. 2, p. 410.
24
Ibidem, vol. 1, p. 73 and vol. 2, p. 410.
25
Ibidem, vol. 2, p. 446.
26
Ibidem, vol. 1, p. 156; cf. De voluptate (ed. and transl. Hieatt and Lorch), p. 273:
‘the eye which is made in order to delight in receiving color’.
27
‘Lorenzo Valla’s Critique’.
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 101

species, as has been suggested by Trinkaus.28 The relevant terms are not
even mentioned, and his discussion about the direction of sense perception
– an age-old discussion going back to the ancient Greeks – is not the same
as the scholastic controversy about the existence and nature of sensible
species. Even Ockham, who rejects sensible species, does not question that
objects act on the senses with efficient causation to produce cognition, that
is, intuitive cognition according to Ockham’s theory. 29 It might seem that
Valla comes close to Ockham in holding that perception is immediate, but
Ockham’s theory of the soul is markedly different from Valla’s, and the
context of the debate (the role of species), distinctions (such as intuitive and
abstract cognition), sources and arguments differ vastly – a point which will
not be discussed here.
Thus, the power of imagination as a faculty of the soul does not play
any role in Valla’s discussion of the soul, nor do the other faculties and
powers which the scholastics had distinguished. Valla may not have
disagreed with the standard view of imaginatio that it retains images of
things no longer present and that it is able to combine various images into
new concepts, but he does not even mention this obvious point.

‘Imaginatio’ in the rhetorical tradition

Because of his critique of scholastic terms and concepts, it is only to be

expected that in his treatment of the soul Valla did not discuss the various
faculties and powers of the soul, which are responsible for processes of
sensation and cognition. Perhaps he felt that to do so would be falling into
the trap of reifying processes and things. Imaginatio, however, had not only
found a home in the scholastic discussions on the soul, based on Aristotle’s
De anima and the commentary tradition thereon, but also in the rhetorical
tradition. Basically, it concerns the general power most people have to
imagine things, sometimes even to such an extent that they really believe in
their imaginations; for instance, some people conjure up images of wealth
in such a vivid way that they truly believe they are rich. This, of course, is
mere daydreaming or hallucination. Yet, this ‘vice of the mind’ (hoc animi
vitium), as Quintilian calls it,30 can be used by orators in a profitable way
(ad utilitatem). They can summon up pictures in their own mind, and thanks
to their rhetorical qualities, communicate these images in the minds of their

28
Trinkaus, ‘Valla’s Anti-Aristotelian Natural Philosophy’, p. 301.
29
In Libros Sententiarum II.13 (eds. Gál and Wood), p. 276. For a comparison
between Ockham’s and Valla’s views on the soul, see my ‘Lorenzo Valla’s
Critique’.
30
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria VI.2.30 (ed. and transl. Butler), vol. 2, p. 434.
102 LODI NAUTA

listeners who, on seeing these images in their own mind’s eye, come to
accept the orator’s point of view. This may come close to demagoguery and
manipulation, but this is anticipated by Quintilian’s insisting that the figure
of the orator is the true vir civilis, who promotes and defends the common
good.
The perfect orator, then, must possess the means to inflame or work
upon an audience in order to bring them over to accept his point of view. A
good knowledge of the emotions and how to arouse them is essential, and
so is the ability to conjure up vivid mental images (imagines, fantasias,
visiones): ‘those vivid conceptions … together with everything that we
intend to say … must be kept clearly before our eyes and admitted to our
hearts: for it is feeling and force of imagination (vis mentis) that make us
eloquent’.31 Although Quintilian never used the noun imaginatio, he used
the verbs imaginari and fingere and the nouns imago, visio or sometimes
phantasia.
Though one looks in vain in Valla’s works for an explicit treatment of
this power to summon up pictures and to convey them by means of
rhetorical tropes and similes, Valla often speaks about the power of the
word to move the audience or the reader. Without discussing his broader
views on eloquence and oratory, I shall draw attention to a few passages
which are relevant to my theme. Like Quintilian, Valla sees the importance
of the orator in furthering the public good: ‘it has always been my intention
to please God and help men through the study of oratory’.32 An orator is
someone who causas orare vel in iudiciis vel in concionibus, qui Graece
dicitur , id est rhetor, but Valla adds that the Latin word ‘rhetor’
refers to a declamator, that is, someone who studies rhetoric (e.g. in the
school of a rhetor) rather than to an orator.33 An orator is traditionally
someone who teaches, delights and moves, while the dialectician, focusing
on arguments and reasoning, only teaches.34
The moving force of words is underscored by Valla in a comment in his
Raudensiane note, which is a critique of the Imitationes rhetorice by
Antonio da Rho (‘Raudensis’).35 Criticising a suggestion by Antonio da Rho

31
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, X.7.15 (ed. and transl. Butler), vol. 4, pp. 140-141.
32
Valla, Epistole (ed. Besomi and Regoliosi), p. 147: is mihi semper animus fuit ut
oratoriis studiis Deo placerem hominibusque prodessem; cf. Quintilian, Institutio
oratoria, Proem. I.13, II.15.34, XII.1.1. See also Valla’s Elegantiae, I, proemium.
This proemium has been critically edited by Regoliosi in her Nel cantiere del Valla.
33
Elegantiae IV.81, Opera Omnia, vol. 1, p. 148.
34
Repastinatio, II, proemium (ed. Zippel), vol. 1, p. 176. The rhetorical triad to
teach, to move and to delight is often mentioned in De vero falsoque bono (e.g. De
voluptate (ed. and transl. Hieatt and Lorch), p. 278.
35
On this work, see Regoliosi, ‘Umanesimo lombardo’, and the literature cited
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 103

that crying is something only for women, effeminate and weak people and
not something which can be brought about artificially, Valla explicitly
defends this third task of the orator, giving examples of orators, including
Cicero, who brought people to tears.36

Do you not realise, Antonio da Rho, that you contradict Cicero and truth itself
and the entire Roman bent? Did Cicero not move people to tears? Certainly by
ars, not because the tears flowed spontaneously from the speaker or audience.
Do you still deny this? Thus, was it stupid of Cicero to teach how to bring
people to tears? What? Did Marius not weep in the case of Aquilius on account
of Antonius’ peroration? Did not the oration itself, being wistful, mournful and
fit to provoke tears, bring this about? Did not the entire populace of Rome shed
tears when Gaius Gracchus wept at the murder of his brother? Do we not read
of a thousand other instances where the audience was moved to tears, solely by
the power of speech?

The saints, apostles and Christ himself wept and by their weeping moved
others to tears. Christ even commanded us to weep.37 And Valla goes on to
describe the effects of reading of great literature on himself and on the
reader in general:38

there.
36
Opera Omnia, vol. 1, p. 425: Non sentis Raudensis, te Ciceroni quoque, atque ipsi
ueritati, omnique indoli Romane repugnare? An non mouit lachrymas Cicero? certe
ex arte, non quia lachryme ipsae uel actori, uel auditoribus sua sponte erumperent,
negas adhuc? Stulte igitur Cicero de mouendis lachrymis praecipit, quid? Marius in
causa Aquilii Antonio perorante non flebat, aut non oratio ipsa M. Antonii id
efficiebat, moesta, flebilis, et apposita ad lachrymas commouendas? Non uniuersus
populus Romanus lachrymas fudit Cn. Graccho necem fratris deflente? Non mille
alios legimus audientium lachrymas concitasse, sola ui orationis?. Quintilian often
praises the brothers Gracchi as models of eloquence and mentions Antonius’
defence of the praetor Aquilius in Inst. orat. II.15.7.
37
Ibidem: Non denique sancti ipsi atque apostoli et fleuerunt, et fletum auditoribus
excusserunt? Non Christus et fleuit, et fletum non tantum mouit, sed flere non iussit?
38
Ibidem: Quid? non ipsa lectione rerum mirabilium ab optimis auditoribus
compositarum ita mouemur, ut iram, gaudium, timorem, spem, dolorem
concipiamus, et saepe lachrymas erumpentes cohibere nequeamus? quid de se
excellentissimi quique confitentur? nemo non heroum qui ad Troiam pugnarunt,
inducitur aut indignatione aut dolore aut misericordia aut gaudio aut desiderio
lachrymasse? Et certe humani potissimum homines, nec agrestes nec efferati, uel
sponte uel ad actionem optimi oratoris in fletum erumpunt.
104 LODI NAUTA

What? Is it not through the reading of marvellous things, described by the best
authors, that we are moved so that we conceive anger, joy, fear, hope, and grief
and cannot but break out in weeping?

A similar point is made by Valla in his notes on Quintilian’s text. Quintilian

had described the power to dispel ‘the graver emotions of the judge by
exciting his laughter’, so that his attention is diverted from the facts of the
case.39 Valla glosses this by saying that he does not understand why
Ambrose had denied that holy men can be moved to laughter, and he quotes
the example of the priest Helias.40
The moving effects of eloquence are also emphasised by Valla in his
introduction to his treatise On the Profession of the Religious. The orator’s
excellence constitutes the value of a topic rather than its intrinsic nature:
‘we do not measure a topic so much by its intrinsic nature as by the skill of
the writer, with the result that subjects are generally judged to be either
sublime or insignificant according to the degree of the author’s ability’.41
‘Those who discourse sublimely, eloquently, and with grandeur, do not
necessarily owe their success to the subject matter …. The cause lies with
the writer rather than with that which is written about’.42 Hence, our
emotional responses are fully determined by the way an orator (either in
speech or in written text) is able to evoke them:43

even in judicial cases one orator’s speech is passionate, while another’s is cold,
and when the first declaims, the judges and the audience first become angry,
then calm down; at one point they rejoice, cheer, and laugh; at another, feeling
pity and sorrow, they weep; whereas when the other delivers his speech, they
can hardly resist sleep or even succumb to it?

39
Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, VI.3.1 (ed. and transl. Butler), vol. 2, p. 438.
40
Le Postille (eds. Martinelli and Perosa), p. 135: Hoc solum Ambrosius in libris
Officiorum [I, 23, 102] negat esse sancti viri, movere risum, quod cur velit non
video, cum Helias ille solitarius horridus pellitus ac pilosus in sacerdotes Baal
facetus fuerit, de quo scribitur libro Regum IIIo: [reg. 3, 18, 27] et deridebat eos
Helias propheta dicens: “invocate ingenti voce, ne forte occupatus sit aut dormiat”
etc. Quod si deridere permittit, quanto magis risum aliter movere, quod fit
multipliciter. Another passage from Ambrose is quoted without comment. See also
De voluptate (ed. and transl. Hieatt and Lorch), pp. 256-257 (on laughter).
41
De professione religiosorum (ed. Cortesi), pp. 3-4; transl. Zorzi Pugliese, p. 17.
42
Ibidem, p. 9; transl. Pugliese, pp. 18-19 (slightly adapted).
43
Ibidem, p. 7; transl. Pugliese, p. 18. Cf. also Repastinatio, in which Valla inserts a
long section from Quintilian (Inst. orat. V.11) on examples used by orators to
enliven their speech in order to convince the audience. In particular fables and
stories are mentioned as useful in speeches to an audience of simple people (ed.
Zippel), vol. 1, pp. 338-339.
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 105

Another example of the employment of eloquence in order to promote

morals and the public good can be found in Valla’s preface to his Gesta
Ferdinandi regis Aragonum, in which historians are ranked above poets and
philosophers.44 Poetry and history are praised for their combination of utile
and dulce. It is much more effective to teach morals in an indirect, non-
doctrinal way by portraying the illustrious deeds of Homeric heroes such as
Nestor, Agamemnon and Hector rather than by trying to inculcate moral
lessons in dry, theoretical discourse: 45

It is extremely annoying when people want to prescribe moral lessons to others,

for this comes close to arrogance and vanity. Our mind is sublime and proud,
and despises accepting lessons from someone who is supposed to be wiser than
we, while it finds pleasure in listening to someone who teaches indirectly by
way of examples and in an attractive way.

History must be ranked even higher than poetry because history is more true
(verior), even though their aims are the same, that is, to teach and to
delight.46 History teaches morals by examples. It contains much more
gravitas, prudentia and civilis sapientia than philosophy does. Cicero and
Quintilian are cited to confirm the highly exemplary value of the study of
history. As always, Quintilian is a most important source for Valla whose
interpretation does not always do justice to Quintilian’s position on the
relationship between oratory and philosophy:47

it is desirable that we should not restrict our study to the precepts of philosophy
alone. It is still more important that we should know and ponder continually all
the noblest sayings and deeds that have been handed down to us from ancient
times. And assuredly we shall nowhere find a larger or more remarkable store
of these than in the records of our own country. Who will teach courage,
justice, loyalty, self-control, simplicity, and contempt of grief and pain better

44
Ed. Besomi. On this work, see Ferraù, ‘La concezione’, pp. 270-272; Gaeta,
Lorenzo Valla, pp. 169-192.
45
Geste Ferdinandi (ed. Besomi), p. 4: Nam precipere aliis velle fere odiosum est,
quia arrogantiam et tumorem animi olet. Mens enim nostra subilimis ac superba ut
rectam preceptionem tanquam a sapientiore dedignatur accipere, sic eidem oblique
per exempla et blande subeunti acquiestcit.
46
Ibidem, p. 5: idem propositi sit historico quod poete, ut prosit et, quo magis
prosit, etiam delectet; nimirum tanto robustiorem esse historiam, quanto est verior.
47
Institutio oratoria XII.2.29 (ed. and transl. Butler), vol. 4, p. 399. On Valla’s
interpretation of Quintilian, see the pertinent remarks by Martinelli, ‘Le Postille’,
pp. 33-34 and note 24, and pp. 37-39.
106 LODI NAUTA

than men like Fabricius, Curius, Regulus, Decius, Mucius and countless others?
For if the Greeks bear away the palm for moral precepts, Rome can produce
more striking examples of moral performance, which is a far greater thing.

Like a judge in court, the historian must be an independent, impartial and

keen observer of facts, able to weigh the various and often contradictory
accounts of one and the same event. And, of course, he must possess a
perfect style to match this task.48
Though the two primary tasks of the historian are to teach and to
delight, teaching by examples does of course require the capacity to give a
lively portrait of historical persons and past events – a capacity which is
based on a good knowledge of the emotions and patterns of human
behaviour in various different circumstances. This enables the historian to
give a more verisimilar account of the past, and such an account stimulates
the reader to try to emulate the illustrious deeds and actions of historical
figures (or to avoid the wicked ones). Valla does not speak about fancy or
imagination, but his comparison of the human mind with a mirror, that
receives the records of illustrious deeds of the past and consequently gives
us hope and stimulates us to emulate them,49 suggests that a historian must
possess a good imagination, that is, knowledge of how to summon up
pictures in one’s own mind, and by dint of rhetoric, communicate these
images. The primary aim of the historian, however, is not to arouse
sympathies, to evoke strong emotional response or to bring people over to
one’s position (although this aspect of movere is surely present in so far as
historical writings encourage us to imitate the good deeds of historical
personages) but to narrate the past in a truthful and edifying manner.
Consequently, Valla emphasises the qualities of impartiality, discretion and
wisdom in a historian, whose account must be based on the fides historiae.50
Linked to this, I believe, is Valla’s analysis of fictive examples. In his
De vero falsoque bono, for instance, he relates the fable of Gyges as it is
found in Herodotus, whom Valla had translated, Plato’s Republic and
Cicero’s De officiis. Gyges had a ring which enabled him to become
invisible and do wicked things. While its function was to raise moral
questions about our behaviour in the absence of external restraint, it is
interesting to note that Valla subjects the fable to the criterion of internal
consistency, that is, whether the sequence of events told by the fabula is

48
Gesta Ferdinandi (ed. Besomi), pp. 7-8.
49
Ibidem, p. 4: velut pictura personarum et spem inducat animo et stimulos emula-
tionis incutiat.
50
Valla uses this phrase in a letter to Flavio Biondo from 1444, in Epistole (ed.
Besomi and Regoliosi), p. 254.
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 107

internally consistent and convincing.51 The author of the fable, Valla says,
‘did not know how to invent a tale properly: this one does not square with
itself and lacks coherence’,52 and he then discusses a number of details from
the fable which are implausible.
Such an appeal to internal consistency also informs Valla’s
demonstration that the constitutum Constantini is a forgery. Valla marshals
a wide array of arguments, pointing to chronological impossibilities,
inconsistencies, anachronisms and so forth. Another type of argument used
by Valla in this work brings us close to the rhetorical strategy we have been
considering so far, namely, to summon up pictures. What would Constan-
tine’s sons have done, having discovered their father’s plan to donate a
large part of his imperial domains to Pope Sylvester? Imagine the scene
before your eyes (Ponite igitur illos ante oculos mente):53

he would offend his sons … humiliate his friends, ignore his relatives, injure
his country, plunge everybody into grief, and forget his own interests! But if,
having been such a man as he was, he had been transformed as it were into
another man, there would certainly not have been lacking those who would
warn him, most of all his sons, his relatives, and his friends. Who does not
think that they would have gone at once to the emperor? Picture them to
yourself, when the purpose of Constantine had become known, trembling,
hastening to fall with groans and tears at the feet of the prince, and saying: ‘Is it
thus that you, a father hitherto most affectionate toward your sons, despoil your
sons, disinherit them, disown them?’

In employing the rhetorical strategy of evoking such pictures and fictive

dialogues, Valla’s aim is to show the internal inconsistencies of the case.
The argument of the author of the constitutum Constantini is
psychologically implausible as it makes Constantine behave in a different
way from what one would expect. It goes against the logic of events and the
logic of people’s behaviour. Valla’s analysis of the constitutum Constantini
is similar – at least in this respect – to his interpretation of the fable of
Gyges. Both are ficta, which are internally inconsistent, contradictory and

51
De voluptate (ed. and transl. Hieatt and Lorch), pp. 188-194. See Langer, ‘The
Ring’: ‘Valla’s dialogue … submits the fictional example to standards of dialectical,
that is, logical argumentation surprisingly more characteristic of the treatise’ (p.
144), and ‘pushes it into the realm of “what could have been” and allows it to be
forceful only under those circumstances’ (p. 145).
52
De voluptate (ed. and transl. Hieatt and Lorch), pp. 188-189: huius fabule
auctorem nescisse probe fingere, cuius fictio non quadrat nec sibi constat.
53
Valla, De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione (ed. Setz), p. 68; transl.
Coleman, The treatise, p. 37.
108 LODI NAUTA

implausible. Valla’s use of fictive examples and speeches (often in the form
of prosopopeia or oratio ficta) serves the purpose of finding the truth.
Eloquence and truth are two sides of the same coin.
One of the most explicit uses of imaginatio is found in the third book of
De vero falsoque bono in which Antonio da Rho, in the role of Christian
interlocutor, gives a picture of the happiness in Paradise. What was denied
to philosophers, mathematicians and theoreticians, namely to picture things
which go beyond the senses, is here defended by appealing to faith:

if we succeed by an act of the imagination in presenting before their eyes (ante

oculos imaginatione quadam ponamus) those things that do not fall under them,
have we not gained a great support, and something like a token for the faith,
something that is like a miracle? … faith is strengthened greatly if we do get to
54
see what is promised.

The verb imaginari and fingere are used interchangeably by Antonio, and
essentially mean to ‘picture’, ‘to put before one’s (mental) eye’ and ‘to
see’.55 This use of the imaginatio became an essential tool of preachers in
their orations on the Christian mysteries in Quattrocento Italy.56 As
O’Malley has shown, the development of this tool was influenced by the
revival of the genus demonstrativum, or epideictic genre, of classical
rhetoric, in which praise and blame are appropriately distributed. In
depicting the heavenly rewards, Valla has Antonio make ample use of the
rhetorical technique of illuminatio or evidentia, which, as Quintilian writes,
‘makes us seem not so much to narrate as to exhibit the actual scene, while
our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we were present at the
actual occurrence’.57 This is one of the best examples in Valla’s works of
his explicit use of the rhetorical concept of imaginatio.

Valla’s view of language

Even though Valla recognised and discussed the vis orationis, his primary
interest lay with the refinement of the Latin language. As he writes in the
Elegantiae: ‘I am writing not about eloquence, but about the refinement of
the Latin language, from which one may nonetheless begin the pursuit of

54
De voluptate (ed. and transl. Hieatt and Lorch), p. 287.
55
Ibidem, e.g. p. 286 (temptemus imaginari), 288 (effingenda), 299 (fingamus), 306
(affingere), 312 (pone tibi ante oculos).
56
O’Malley, Praise, passim, but see esp. pp. 63-70.
57
Institutio oratoria VI.2.32 (ed. and transl. Butler), vol. 2, p. 434-435. See Marsh,
‘Struttura’, pp. 311-326, at 323-324.
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 109

eloquence’.58 Valla’s interests in the correct usage of words was influenced

by the study of the Roman law. He praised the writers of the Digest for their
correct and elegant use of Latin. Without these qualities, he suggests, it is
impossible to write about any art or discipline and certainly civil law, which
hinges on fine distinctions: ‘In my judgment, one can neither add to nor
subtract from, not so much their eloquence (to which their subject does not
greatly lend itself) as their Latinity and refinement, without which all
learning is blind and illiberal, especially in civil law’.59
A focus on the proprietas of words, on the various ways in which they
are used in practice and on the distinctions of meanings of a term (or of two
or more related terms), ties the use of language to social conventions and
customs. It stresses the common and ordinary use of language rather than
the unexpected and extraordinary. It may therefore be not too speculative to
suggest that this view of language as primarily a social and cultural vehicle
for communication could easily lead to a comparative lack of attention to
the imaginative aspects of our use of language. Imaginatio was generally
considered to be a power of the mind, that is, of the individual orator or
speaker. To conjure up images or to use powerful imagery is essentially a
personal quality which requires ars and ingenium to develop.60 Valla’s view
of language, while far from ignoring the importance of verbal skills and
oratorical powers in individual men, underscores the aspects of communal
intelligibility and communication. In a famous passage in his Oratio in
principio studii, delivered at Rome in 1455, he develops this view into what
has been termed a ‘theory of culture’. Why could the Roman culture
become so powerful and influential? Because of the language which spread
far and wide:61

For it is ordained by Nature that nothing should be able to progress or grow

very much that is not being built up, elaborated, and refined by many individual
men, particularly men who are in competition with each other and vying with
each other for public esteem.

58
IV, proemium (Opera Omnia, vol. 1, p. 120); I quote Marsh’s translation in his
‘Grammar’, 102.
59
Ibidem, p. 102, quoting Elegantiae III, proemium (Opera Omnia, vol. 1, p. 80).
60
Though Quintilian writes that the attainment of rhetorical effects is easy: ‘We
shall secure the vividness we seek, if only descriptions give the impressions of truth,
nay, we may even add fictitious incidents of the type which commonly occur …
Though the attainment of such effects is, in my opinion, the highest of all oratorical
gifts, it is far from difficult of attainment. Fix your eyes on nature and follow her’
(Inst. orat. VIII.3.70-71, ed. and transl. Butler, vol. 3, pp. 248-251).
61
I quote from the transl. by Baxandall (Giotto, p. 118). On this oration and its
background, see Rizzo, Lorenzo Valla, Orazione.
110 LODI NAUTA

Progress is only made possible by the work of many hands:

no art can be established by a single man, nor indeed by a few men; it needs
many, very many men, and these men must not be unknown to each other –
how otherwise could they vie with each other and contend for glory? But above
all else they must be known and related to each other by virtue of
communication in the same language … Thus the sciences and arts were
meagre and almost nothing as long as each nation used its own peculiar
language. But when the power of the Romans spread and the nations were
brought within its law and fortified by lasting peace, it came about that very
many peoples used the Latin language and so had intercourse with each other.62

Language then is for Valla the vehicle of cultural growth, or at least a

necessary condition of it. As in the other arts, two phases in its development
may be distinguished: the phase of invention and creation by individual
artists and orators, followed by a process of communication of these
achievements to other competitors in the field.63 This process is made
possible by a language which is shared by all, leading to a common
tradition in which individual achievements are recognised and valued.
Language is pivotal, for Roman achievements vanished after the collapse of
the Roman Empire; only the Roman language was preserved, deteriorating,
however, from the time of Boethius onwards. Valla expressed his hopes that
classical Latin would soon regain its importance, even though the
circumstances had vastly changed between classical Rome and fifteenth-
century Italy. But Valla witnessed the flourishing of the arts in his own
time, and why, he asked, could language not follow their example?64
Valla put more emphasis on language as a vehicle of social and cultural
progression and as an instrument of communication than on the
extraordinary, singular and unique features of the use of language by
individual speakers. Language is like a city which could be built only by
many hands and many generations. Hence, his studies of the intricacies and

62
Oratio, transl. in Baxandall, Giotto, p. 119.
63
Ibidem. Cf. also the important remarks by Rizzo, ‘L’Oratio’, p. 76 where it is
suggested that the idea of Latin as the foundation of the developments of arts and
sciences was already expressed by Petrarch.
64
For some good critical remarks on Valla’s position, see Regoliosi, ‘La conce-
zione’, pp. 145-157, esp. 154-157 where it is noted that Valla’s position is not quite
consistent, for while Valla recognised and accepted the development of Latin in the
classical period, he rejected later developments and was blind to the new role which
the vernacular had occupied. In aiming at one universal language, Valla pursued
‘una chimerica ed equivoca illusione’ (p. 157).
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 111

niceties of Latin grammar, syntax and vocabulary were led by his principle
that custom (consuetudo) should rule the use of language. What fell outside
the scope of classical Latin, as exhibited by a wide-ranging reading of
classical authors, was – with a few exceptions – to be rejected.
This does not mean, however, that Valla’s view necessarily entailed a
neglect, let alone a denial of the importance of imaginatio for the
rhetorician. Imaginatio – so one may argue – simply worked at a different
level, that is, at the first stage where orators created powerful language, full
of images and rhetorical tropes. Moreover, rhetoricians advised moderation
in using images and similes: they should not be commonplace, but neither
should they stray too far away from our common language and common
views. Quintilian stressed the need for unexpected and arresting images and
similes: ‘the more remote the simile is from the subject to which it is
applied, the greater will be the impression of novelty and the unexpected
which it produces’.65 On the other hand, our imagery should never be
unduly far fetched. Over-ambitious and extravagant language should be
avoided, for it leads to obscurity. As Quintilian said about metaphor:66

While a temperate and timely use of metaphor is a real adornment to style, on

the other hand, its frequent use serves merely to obscure our language and
weary our audience, while if we introduce them in one continuous series, our
language will become allegorical and enigmatic.

Imaginatio should therefore never be allowed to wander aimlessly, losing

touch with our ordinary world and conceptions. The orator should be
reminded of Quintilian’s words that ‘all eloquence is concerned with the
activities of life, while every man applies to himself what he hears from
others, and the mind is always readiest to accept what it recognises to be
true to nature’.67 Orators should therefore find a proper balance between the
two extremes, for this ensures good results in trying to convince an
audience or arouse its emotions.
This requirement of striking a good balance between cliché and
eccentricity is fully in line with Valla’s general point of view that eloquence
should be rooted in our activities of life. Moreover, his own works show
that he himself knew well how to approach his audience and how to adapt
his tone (for instance in the Oratio in principio studii in which he praises
the papacy),68 as he also knew how to stir negative response (e.g. in his not

65
Inst. orat. VIII.3.74 (ed. and transl. Butler), vol. 3, pp. 252-253.
66
Inst. orat. VIII.6.14 (ed. and transl. Butler), vol. 3, pp. 306-308.
67
Inst. orat. VIII.3.71 (ed. and transl. Butler), vol. 3, pp. 250-251.
68
Cf. Rizzo, ‘L’Oratio’, p. 80.
112 LODI NAUTA

so flattering lecture on Thomas Aquinas delivered before the congregation

of Dominicans in Rome), inventing new images and similes or adapting
traditional ones to new contexts. He certainly did not have any qualms
about imaginatio as used by orators and rhetoricians – we have seen several
examples from Valla’s works – so long as it stayed within the boundaries
laid down by the classical theorists. Nevertheless, because his main interests
concerned the grammar and semantics of the Latin language, as governed
by consuetudo loquendi, he may have felt it unnecessary to dwell upon the
classical account of imaginatio as a power to arouse the emotions of one’s
public.

Conclusion

The concept of imaginatio was developed and used within several different
contexts. Being primarily a term standing for the faculty of the mind which
combines pictures of objects no longer present, it played an important role
in the commentary tradition on Aristotelian writings on the soul. It was
taken up and developed in the rhetorical tradition, in which Cicero and
Quintilian discussed this vis mentis as an important instrument for the
orator’s task of moving his audience. Though the two traditions were not
entirely independent of each other, it is clear from the case of Lorenzo Valla
that the rhetorical concept did not necessarily involve a consideration of the
philosophical-psychological and, more particularly, the Aristotelian
tradition. Valla did not pay any attention to the imaginative faculty of the
soul, not only because he had an entirely different, more Augustinian
picture of it, but also because he would have considered the listing of
various kinds of faculties as a typically scholastic exercise. According to
Valla, scholastic philosophy made use of procedures in which abstract terms
were reified and considered in abstraction, and these abstractions and
reifications were the product of the imaginatio. This critique of the role of
imagination in philosophical theorising reminds one of Wittgenstein’s. As
David Pears paraphrases Wittgenstein’s views:69

Philosophical theories are a product of the imagination, and they offer us

simple, but seemingly profound pictures, which blind us to the actual
complexities of language. The new philosophy is an organized resistance to this
enchantment, and its method is always to bring us back to the linguistic
phenomena, with which we are perfectly familiar, but which we cannot keep in
focus when we philosophize in the old way.

69
Pears, Wittgenstein, p. 16.
 VALLA AND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATION 113

Taken in isolation, these words may be applied to Valla. It is therefore not

surprising that some scholars have discerned some similarities between
Valla and Wittgenstein (though not with regard to these criticisms of
philosophical theorising as a product of the imagination).70 But even if some
positions may strike us as similar at the surface level, they are motivated
and developed in vastly different ways – naturally so, given the entirely
different worlds in which the two men lived. Moreover, the charge that
philosophers are misled by reification, abstract terms and metaphorical
language, is an old one, going back to Plato. In Plato’s Parmenides, for
instance, the interlocutor Parmenides criticises the young Socrates for
reifying the Forms and taking the essentially metaphorical description of the
relationship between Forms and things in a literal way.
Valla’s negative view of imaginatio seems therefore to have been
restricted to its use in philosophy and theology. While he did not explicitly
deal with the rhetorical interpretation, he was aware – as we have seen in
various passages – of the importance of a good imagination in the orator.
Imaginatio can serve different functions, dependent on the context or the
discipline: a poet has a summa dicendi licentia, an historian aims at a
truthful reconstruction of past events, an orator tries to convince his
audience. They all make use of eloquence, of which imaginative pictures
form an essential part. And each adjusts his language and style to his
audience or readership. A polemical debate requires a different tone than an
historical account or a poem, just as the style and vocabulary of a letter vary
according to the status of the addressee. But while he put these general
maxims into practice all the time, in his reflections on language Valla laid
more stress on its social and cultural function rather than on the use of
language by individual speakers and writers. The fundamental criterion of
the correct use of language is the consuetudo popularis or – to give some
equivalents found in Valla’s Repastinatio – consuetudo sermonis humani,
utissima verborum consuetudo, communis loquendi mos, loqui naturaliter
atque hominum more, naturalis sensus ususque communis.71 This ties
language closely to human activities and conceptions of the everyday world.

70
Camporeale quotes Wittgenstein in his ‘Lorenzo Valla’: Valla’s consuetudo
loquendi ‘non è qualcosa di diverso da ciò che il Wittgenstein … chiama “la
grammatica della parola”’ (p. 233; cf. 217). Waswo has also linked Wittgenstein
with Valla in ‘The ordinary language philosophy of Lorenzo Valla’ and in his
Language and Meaning in the Renaissance. This approach, in particular Waswo’s
interpretation, has been severely criticised (and rightly so, I believe) by Monfasani,
‘Was Lorenzo Valla an Ordinary Language Philosopher?’.
71
Listed by Camporeale, ‘Lorenzo Valla’, pp. 230-231. On the entire question, see
Tavoni, Latino.