Percorsi metamorfici della natura nel Cinquecento L’acqua e le fontane nell’ecfrasi di Annibal Caro e Claudio Tolomei

Sixteenth-century literary correspondences have been the subject of renewed interest in recent years, with including significant digitization projects. The two documents that are analysed in this essay (Caro’s letter to Guidiccioni and Tolomei’s letter to Grimaldi), have been repeatedly analysed by historiography as a privileged source for a new sensibility for fountains and water features that was emerging in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The present study highlights the ecphrastic abilities displayed by the two authors in portraying the metamorphic aspects of water, from the point of view of a peculiar valorization of the technical aspects underlying water plays and fountains.