Emanuele Tesauro was a rhetorician, dramatist, Marinist poet

Marinism

Marinism is the name now given to an ornate, witty style of poetry and verse drama written in imitation of Giambattista Marino , following in particular La Lira and L'Adone.-Features:The critic James V...

, and historian from Turin

Turin

Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...

.

His Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico is a work on trope

Trope (literature)

A literary trope is the usage of figurative language in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning...

s, literally the oxymoronic "Aristotelian telescope". Its main concern is the invention and wit of ingenious metaphor

Metaphor

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

s. It has been called "one of the most important statements of poetics ins seventeenth-century Europe". Metaphor he calls the "Great Mother of All Witticisms". In Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...

's The Island of the Day Before

The Island of the Day Before

The Island of the Day Before is a 1994 novel by Umberto Eco.It is the story of a 17th century Italian nobleman who is the only survivor of a shipwreck during a fierce storm. He finds himself washed up on an abandoned ship in a harbour through which, he convinces himself, runs the International...

, these themes are self-consciously taken up, through the character Padre Emanuele and his metaphor-machine.

Partial bibliography

• Ermenegildo, Edippo, Ippolito (1621)
• L’Idea delle perfette imprese (1622)
• Il Giudicio (1625)
• Panegirici sacri (1633)
• Il cannochiale aristotelico (1654)
• Inscriptiones (1670)
• Filosofia morale (1670)
• I Campeggiamenti (1674)
• L’arte delle lettere missive (1674)