L’amico mascherato. Ortensio Lando nei panni di ‘Physitheus’ nell’Aranei encomion di Celio Secondo Curione (1540)

In the preface to Aranei encomion ( 1540 ), the humanist and heretic Celio Secondo Cu-rio mentioned a mysterious character named ‘Physitheus’, whose identity has never been questioned in the scholarly literature, but which is crucial for the choice of the theme and of the dedicatee. This essay argues for a possible identification with Ortensio Lando and discusses the consequences that this overlap might have for the biographies of these two sixteenth-century, heterodox humanists