166

Note 61:

"First letter: June 24, 1549, Tommaso Spica to Dionigi Atanagi, see Delle lettere facete, vol. I (Venice: A. Salicato, 1601), 178. Atanagi's response, dated from Rome the following of July 23, is adressed to Spica care of Georges d'Armagnac in Gubbio. Atanagi asks Spica to give his regards to Philandrier, who must therefore still have been in Italy in 1549, together with d'Armagnac. The two letters are cited and discussed by Vladimir Juren, "Un nouveau fragment de la correspondance de Primatice," in Il se rendit en Italie: Études offertes à André Chastel (Rome: Edizioni dell'Elefante, 1987), 231-233. See also an unpublished letter written to Primaticcio by Ludovico Columbello, dated from Rome on April 23, 1541. Primaticcio must have had some quarrel with Philandrier and to justify this, Columbello invokes Philandrier's "solita bizzarria, di cui come sapete grandissimi sono gli privilegi." (Columbello's letter is known only through a sixteenth-century copy made by Adrien de Thou, today in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Coll. Dupuy, vol. 736, ff. 4v-5r. The passage is cited and discusses in Juren, "Un nouveau fragment," 231-233.) Columbello was Georges d'Armagnac's doctor in Rome and the author of the preface to the annotations on Quintillian that Philandrier had published in Lyons in 1535. Dionigi Atanagi, a personel friend of Claudio Tolomei, is the author of a collection of letters published in Rome in 1554. In these, Paolo Simoncelli and others have recently recognizes a nicodemite strategy. Already in 1555, Atanagi was criticized on theological grounds by Pier Paolo Vergerio, who wanted him to take a more courageaus stance. Vergerio denounced Atanagi's practice of concealing heterodoxic religious views in an anthology that appeared harmless, and in which only certain readers would hav known how to find a hidden message. See Dionigi Atanagi, Lettere volgari d XIII huomini illustri (Rome, 1554); [P. P. Vergerio], Giudicio sopra le lettere di  tredeci huomnini illustri pubblicate da M. Dionigi Atanagi et stampate in Venetia nell'anno 1554 (no location, 1555); cited and discussed in Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo italiano del Cinquecento, (Rome: Istituto storico ler l'età moderna e contemporanea, 1979), 293–300 (with notes and bibliographiy).