L'armonia del mondo

Campanini reconstructs the composition period from two internal date-references: a passage in the First Canticle calculating the Julian calendar's drift "in 1520 anni" (placing that layer around 1520, in the wake of the Fifth Lateran Council's calendar debates), and a passage in the Third Canticle declaring "Ora che ci troviamo nel 1523° anno a partire dalla nascita di Cristo." The work is conceived as a universal concordance of knowledge founded on music as "the grammar of all levels of reality."

Zorzi's magnum opus is published in Venice by Bernardino Vitali, printed with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew typefaces and dedicated to Pope Clement VII. Three canticles, each in eight tones, expound the consonance between the sensible world, the intelligible Archetype, and Christ the restorer of universal harmony. Campanini situates it as one of the high points of the Florentine Neoplatonist tradition inaugurated by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, citing over fifty kabbalistic authors and anonymous works.

Zorzi's second major work appears in Venice (Bernardino Vitali), dedicated to Pope Paul III: three thousand questions on the biblical text in six volumes, with systematic recourse to kabbalistic literature, especially the Zohar. Its fifth volume expounds the doctrine of Zorzi's "seven sages" — Solomon and Job alongside Hermes Trismegistus, Plato, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster. The work also reveals striking empirical interests: anatomical observation ("noi abbiamo visto entrambe"), the question of natural language, and the famous calculation of 22! — the factorial of the Hebrew alphabet — as the mathematical matrix of all reality.

Retired to Asolo, away from the theological battlefield, Zorzi composes the Elegante Poema — a massive vernacular poem modeled on Dante's Commedia, in which biblical patriarchs reveal the occult meaning of Scripture — with an (incomplete) verse-by-verse commentary. More consequential is his commentary on Pico della Mirandola's kabbalistic Conclusiones, recently rediscovered in manuscript: Arcangelo da Borgonovo's published commentary proves to be largely a reportatio of Zorzi's oral teaching. He also designs three roads with fountains ascending to the convent of San Gerolamo at Asolo, conceived as a meditative complement to the climb.

De Harmonia Mundi is translated into French by Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie, a major humanist and translator, extending Zorzi's influence into Francophone intellectual circles and establishing the work as a canonical Renaissance text on harmonic cosmology and Christian Kabbalah.

Following sustained refutations by Sisto da Siena, Roberto Bellarmino, and Marin Mersenne, Zorzi's works are placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum with the formula donec corrigatur — readable only after heavy censorship. The expurgation proves "entirely illusory": the kabbalistic thread runs through the whole fabric. Physical deletions and marginalia scar virtually every surviving Italian copy of the De harmonia mundi and Problemata.

Zorzi's slightly erroneous value of 22! — copied uncritically by Arcangelo da Borgonovo and Blaise de Vigenère (Traicté des chiffres, 1586) — is finally corrected by Marin Mersenne in the Harmonie universelle: a measure of how widely Zorzi was copied, and how rarely checked.

Saverio Campanini publishes the comprehensive critical edition L'armonia del mondo (Bompiani, Il Pensiero Occidentale): full Latin text with complete Italian translation, extensive introductory essay, and a critical apparatus identifying over fifty kabbalistic sources — restoring Zorzi to contemporary scholarly attention.