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WIKIMAG n. 5 - Aprile 2013
Italian literature
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Italian literature is
literature written in the
Italian language, particularly within
Italy. It
may also refer to literature written by
Italians or in Italy in other languages spoken in Italy, often
languages that are closely related to modern Italian.
Early
medieval Latin literature
A depiction of Boetius teaching his students (1385).
Boetius, a 6th century Christian philosopher, helped keep
alive the classic tradition in post-Roman Italy.
As the
Western Roman Empire declined, the Latin tradition was kept alive by
writers such as
Cassiodorus,
Boethius, and
Symmachus. The liberal arts flourished at
Ravenna
under
Theodoric, and the Gothic kings surrounded themselves with masters
of
rhetoric and of
grammar.
Some lay schools remained in Italy, and noted scholars included
Magnus Felix Ennodius,
Arator,
Venantius Fortunatus,
Felix the Grammarian,
Peter of Pisa,
Paulinus of Aquileia, and many others.
Italians who were interested in
theology gravitated towards
Paris.
Those who remained were typically attracted by the study of
Roman
law. This furthered the later establishment of the medieval
universities of
Bologna,
Padua,
Vicenza,
Naples,
Salerno,
Modena
and Parma.
These helped to spread culture, and prepared the ground in which the new
vernacular literature developed. Classical traditions did not
disappear, and affection for the memory of Rome, a preoccupation with
politics, and a preference for practice over theory combined to
influence the development of Italian literature.
High
medieval literature
Trovatori
The earliest vernacular literary tradition in Italy was in
Occitan, a language spoken in parts of northwest Italy. A tradition
of vernacular
lyric poetry arose in
Poitou
in the early 12th century and spread south and east, eventually reaching
Italy by the end of the 12th century. The first
troubadours (trovatori in Italian), as these Occitan lyric
poets were called, to practise in Italy were from elsewhere, but the
high aristocracy of
Lombardy was ready to patronise them. It was not long before native
Italians adopted Occitan as a vehicle for poetic expression, though the
term Occitan did not really appear until the year 1300, "langue d'oc" or
"provenzale" being the preferred expressions.
Among the early patrons of foreign troubadours were especially the
House of Este, the
Da Romano,
House of Savoy, and the
Malaspina.
Azzo VI of Este entertained the troubadours
Aimeric de Belenoi,
Aimeric de Peguilhan,
Albertet de Sestaro, and
Peire Raimon de Tolosa from
Occitania and
Rambertino Buvalelli from
Bologna,
one of the earliest Italian troubadours. The influence of these poets on
the native Italians got the attention of Aimeric de Peguilhan in 1220.
Then at the Malaspina court, he penned a poem attacking a quintet of
Occitan poets at the court of
Manfred III of Saluzzo:
Peire Guilhem de Luserna,
Perceval Doria,
Nicoletto da Torino, Chantarel, and Trufarel. Aimeric apparently
feared the rise of native competitors.
The
margraves of Montferrat—Boniface
I,
William VI, and
Boniface II—were patrons of Occitan poetry.
Peire de la Mula stayed at the Montferrat court around 1200 and
Raimbaut de Vaqueiras spent most of his career as court poet and
close friend of Boniface I. Raimbaut, along with several other
troubadours, including Elias Cairel, followed Boniface on the
Fourth Crusade and established, however briefly, Italo-Occitan
literature in
Thessalonica.
Azzo VI's daughter,
Beatrice, was an object of the early poets "courtly
love". Azzo's son,
Azzo VII, hosted
Elias Cairel and
Arnaut Catalan. Rambertino was named
podestà
of Genoa
between in 1218 and it was probably during his three-year tenure there
that he introduced Occitan lyric poetry to the city, which later
developed a flourishing Occitan literary culture.
Among the Genoese troubadours were
Lanfranc Cigala, a judge;
Calega Panzan, a merchant;
Jacme Grils, also a judge; and
Bonifaci Calvo, a knight. Genoa was also the place of genesis of the
podestà-troubadour phenomenon: men who served in several cities
as podestàs on behalf of either the
Guelph or Ghibelline party and who wrote political poetry in
Occitan. Rambertino Buvalelli was the first podestà-troubadour
and in Genoa there were the Guelphs
Luca Grimaldi and
Luchetto Gattilusio and the Ghibellines
Perceval and
Simon Doria.
The Occitan tradition in Italy was more broad than simply Genoa or
even Lombardy.
Bertolome Zorzi was from
Venice.
Girardo Cavallazzi was a Ghibelline from
Novara.
Nicoletto da Torino was probably from
Turin. In
Ferrara
the Duecento was represented by
Ferrari Trogni.
Terramagnino da Pisa, from
Pisa, wrote
the Doctrina de cort as a manual of courtly love. He was one of
the late 13th-century figures who wrote in both Occitan and Italian.
Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia, from
Pistoia,
was another. Both wrote
sonnets,
but while Terramagnino was a critic of the
Tuscan school, Paolo has been alleged as a member. On the other
hand, he has much in common with the
Sicilians and the
Dolce Stil Novo.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the Italian troubadour
phenomenon was the production of
chansonniers and the composition of
vidas and
razos.
Uc de Saint Circ, who was associated with the Da Romano and
Malaspina families, spent the last forty years of his life in Italy. He
undertook to author the entire razo corpus and a great many of
the vidas. The most famous and influential Italian troubadour,
however, was from the small town of
Goito
near Mantua.
Sordello (1220s–1230s) has been praised by such later poets as
Dante Alighieri,
Robert Browning,
Oscar Wilde, and
Ezra Pound. He was the inventor of the hybrid genre of the
sirventes-planh
in 1237.
The troubadours had a connexion with the rise of a school of poetry
in the
Kingdom of Sicily. In 1220
Obs de Biguli was present as a "singer" at the coronation of the
Emperor Frederick II, already
King of Sicily.
Guillem Augier Novella before 1230 and
Guilhem Figueira thereafter were important Occitan poets at
Frederick's court. Both had fled the
Albigensian Crusade, like Aimeric de Peguilhan. The Crusade had
devastated
Languedoc and forced many troubadours of the area, whose poetry had
not always been kind to the Church hierarchy, to flee to Italy, where an
Italian tradition of papal criticism was begun. Protected by the emperor
and the Ghibelline faction criticism of the Church establishment
flourished.
Chivalric romance
The Historia de excidio Trojae, attributed to
Dares Phrygius, claimed to be an eyewitness account of the Trojan
war. It provided inspiration for writers in other countries such as
Benoît de Sainte-Maure,
Herbort von Fritzlar, and
Konrad von Würzburg. While Benoît wrote in French, he took his
material from a Latin history. Herbort and Konrad used a French source
to make an almost original work in their own language.
Guido delle Colonne of
Messina,
one of the
vernacular poets of the Sicilian school, composed the
Historia destructionis Troiae. In his poetry Guido was an
imitator of the
Provençals, but in this book he converted Benoît's French romance
into what sounded like serious Latin history.
Much the same thing occurred with other great legends.
Qualichino of Arezzo wrote
couplets
about the legend of
Alexander the Great. Europe was full of the legend of
King Arthur, but the Italians contented themselves with translating
and abridging French romances.
Jacobus de Voragine, while collecting his
Golden Legend (1260), remained a historian. He seemed doubtful
of the truthfulness of the stories he told. The intellectual life of
Italy showed itself in an altogether special, positive, almost
scientific form in the study of Roman law. Farfa,
Marsicano, and other scholars translated
Aristotle, the precepts of the school of
Salerno,
and the travels of
Marco Polo, linking the classics and the Renaissance.
At the same time, epic poetry was written in a mixed language, a
dialect of Italian based on French: hybrid words exhibited a treatment
of sounds according to the rules of both languages, had French roots
with Italian endings, and were pronounced according to Italian or Latin
rules. In short, the language of the epic poetry belonged to both
tongues. Examples include the
chansons de geste,
Macaire,
the Entre en Espagne written by
Niccola of Padua, the
Prise de Pampelune, and others. All this preceded the appearance
of a purely Italian literature.
The emergence of native vernacular literature
The French and Occitan languages gradually gave way to the native
Italian. Hybridism recurred, but it no longer predominated. In the
Bovo d'Antona and the Rainaldo e Lesengrino the
Venetian dialect is clearly felt, although the language is
influenced by French forms. These writings, which
Graziadio Isaia Ascoli has called miste (mixed), immediately
preceded the appearance of purely Italian works.
There is evidence that a kind of literature already existed before
the 13th century: The
Ritmo cassinese,
Ritmo di Sant'Alessio,
Laudes creaturarum,
Ritmo lucchese,
Ritmo laurenziano,
Ritmo bellunese are classified by
Cesare Segre, et al. as "Archaic Works" (Componimenti Arcaici):
"such are labeled the first literary works in the Italian vernacular,
their dates ranging from the last decades of the 12th century to the
early decades of the 13th" (Segre: 1997). However, as he points out,
such early literature does not yet present any uniform stylistic or
linguistic traits.
This early development, however, was simultaneous in the whole
peninsula, varying only in the subject matter of the art. In the north,
the poems of
Giacomino da Verona and
Bonvicino da Riva were specially religious, and were intended to be
recited to the people. They were written in a dialect of
Milanese and Venetian; their style bore the influence of French
narrative poetry. They may be considered as belonging to the "popular"
kind of poetry, taking the word, however, in a broad sense. This sort of
composition may have been encouraged by the old custom in the north of
Italy of listening in the
piazzas
and on the highways to the songs of the
jongleurs. The crowds were delighted with the stories of romances,
the wickedness of
Macaire,
and the misfortunes of
Blanziflor, the terrors of the Babilonia Infernale and the
blessedness of the Gerusalemme celeste, and the singers of
religious
poetry vied with those of the chansons de geste.
Sicilian School
The year 1230 marked the beginning of the
Sicilian School and of a literature showing more uniform traits. Its
importance lies more in the language (the creation of the first standard
Italian) than its subject, a love-song partly modeled on the Provençal
poetry imported to the south by the
Normans
and the
Svevs under
Frederick II. This poetry differs from the French equivalent in its
treatment of the woman, less
erotic and more
platonic, a vein further developed by
Dolce Stil Novo in later 13th century Bologna and
Florence. The customary repertoire of
chivalry terms is adapted to Italian
phonotactics, creating new Italian vocabulary. The French suffixes
-ière and -ce generated hundreds of new Italian words in
-iera and -za (for example, riv-iera and
costan-za). These were adopted by
Dante and his contemporaries, and handed on to future generations of
Italian writers.
To the Sicilian school belonged
Enzio, king of
Sardinia,
Pietro della Vigna,
Inghilfredi,
Guido and
Odo delle Colonne,
Jacopo d'Aquino,
Ruggieri Apugliese,
Giacomo da Lentini,
Arrigo Testa, and others. Most famous is No m'aggio posto in core,
by Giacomo da Lentini, the head of the movement, but there is also
poetry written by Frederick himself. Giacomo da Lentini is also credited
with inventing the
sonnet,
a form later perfected by Dante and
Petrarch. The
censorship imposed by Frederick meant that no political matter
entered literary debate. In this respect, the poetry of the north, still
divided into
communes or
city-states with relatively democratic governments, provided new
ideas. These new ideas are shown in the
Sirventese genre, and later, Dante's
Commedia: his lines are full of invectives against contemporary
political leaders and popes.
Though the conventional love-song prevailed at Frederick's (and later
Manfred's) court, more spontaneous poetry existed in the
Contrasto attributed to
Cielo d'Alcamo. This contrasto (dispute) between two lovers
in the
Sicilian dialect is not the most ancient or the only southern poem
of a popular kind. It belongs without doubt to the time of the emperor
Frederick II (no later than 1250), and is important as proof that there
existed a popular, independent of literary, poetry. The Contrasto
is probably a scholarly re-elaboration of a lost popular rhyme and is
the closest to a kind of poetry that perished or was smothered by the
ancient Sicilian literature. Its distinguishing point was its possession
of all qualities opposite to the poetry of the rhymers of the "Sicilian
School", though its style may betray a knowledge of Frederick's poetry,
and there is probably a
satiric
intent in the mind of the
anonymous poet. It is vigorous in the expression of feelings. The
conceits,
sometimes bold and very coarse, show that its subject matter is popular.
Everything about the Contrasto is original.
The poems of the Sicilian school were written in the first known
standard Italian. This was elaborated by these poets under the direction
of Frederick II and combines many traits typical of the Sicilian, and to
a lesser, but not negligible extent,
Apulian
dialects and other southern dialects, with many words of Latin and
French origin. Dante's styles illustre, cardinale, aulico, curiale
were developed from his linguistic study of the Sicilian School, which
had been re-founded by
Guittone d'Arezzo in
Tuscany.
The standard changed slightly in Tuscany, because Tuscan
scriveners perceived the five-vowel system used by southern Italian
as a seven-vowel one. As a consequence, the texts that Italian students
read in their anthology contain lines that do not rhyme with each other
(sometimes Sic. -i > -e, -u > -o), and that may account for its decrease
in popularity through the 19th and early 20th century.
Religious
literature
In the 13th century a religious movement took place in Italy, with
the rise of the
Dominican and
Franciscan Orders. The earliest preserved sermons in an Italian
language are from
Jordan of Pisa, a Dominican.[1]
Francis of Assisi, mystic and reformer in the
Catholic Church, the founder of the Franciscans, also wrote poetry.
Though he was educated, Francis's poetry was beneath the refined poetry
at the center of Frederick's court. According to legend, Francis
dictated the
hymn
Cantico del Sole in the eighteenth year of his penance,
almost rapt in ecstasy; doubts remain about its authenticity. It was the
first great poetical work of Northern Italy, written in a kind of verse
marked by
assonance, a poetic device more widespread in Northern Europe. Other
poems previously attributed to Francis are now generally recognized as
lacking in authenticity.
Jacopone da Todi was a poet who represented the religious feeling
that had made special progress in
Umbria.
Jacopone was possessed by St. Francis's mysticism, but was also a
satirist who mocked the
corruption and
hypocrisy of the Church personified by
Pope Boniface VIII, persecutor of Jacopone and Dante. Jacopone's
wife died after the stands at a public tournament collapsed, and the
sorrow at her sudden death caused Jacopone to sell all he possessed and
give it to the poor. Jacopone covered himself with rags, joined St.
Francis's
Third Order, took pleasure in being laughed at, and was followed by
a crowd of people who mocked him and called after him Jacopone,
Jacopone. He went on raving for years, subjecting himself to the
severest sufferings, and giving vent to his religious intoxication in
his poems. Jacopone was a
mystic, who from his
hermit's
cell looked out into the world and specially watched the papacy,
scourging with his words
Pope Celestine V and Pope Boniface VIII, for which he was
imprisoned.
The religious movement in Umbria was followed by another literary
phenomenon, the religious drama. In 1258 a hermit,
Raniero Fasani, left the cavern where he had lived for many years
and suddenly appeared at
Perugia.
Fasani represented himself as sent by God to disclose mysterious
visions, and to announce to the world terrible visitations. This was a
turbulent period of political faction (the
Guelphs and Ghibellines),
interdicts and
excommunications issued by the popes, and reprisals of the imperial
party. In this environment, Fasani's pronouncements stimulated the
formation of the
Compagnie di Disciplinanti, who, for a penance, scourged themselves
until they drew blood, and sang
Laudi in dialogue in their
confraternities. These laudi, closely connected with the
liturgy,
were the first example of the drama in the vernacular tongue of Italy.
They were written in the
Umbrian dialect, in verses of eight syllables, and, according to the
1911
Encyclopædia Britannica, "have not any artistic value." Their
development, however, was rapid. As early as the end of the 13th century
the Devozioni del Giovedi e Venerdi Santo appeared, mixing
liturgy and drama. Later, di un Monaco che ando al servizio di Dio
("of a monk who entered the service of God") approached the definite
form the religious drama would assume in the following centuries.
First Tuscan
literature
13th century Tuscany was in a unique situation. The Tuscans spoke a
dialect that closely resembled Latin and afterward became, almost
exclusively, the language of literature, and which was already regarded
at the end of the 13th century as surpassing other dialects. Lingua
Tusca magis apta est ad literam sive literaturam ("The Tuscan tongue
is better suited to the letter or literature") wrote
Antonio da Tempo of
Padua, born about 1275. After the fall of the
Hohenstaufen at the
Battle of Benevento in 1266, it was the first province of Italy.
From 1266, Florence began a political reform movement that led, in 1282,
to the appointment of the
Priori delle Arti, and establishment of the
Arti Minori. This was later copied by
Siena
(with the
Magistrato dei Nove), by
Lucca, by
Pistoia,
and by other Guelph cities in Tuscany with similar popular institutions.
The guilds
took the government into their hands, and it was a time of social and
political prosperity.
In Tuscany, too, popular love poetry existed. A school of imitators
of the Sicilians was led by
Dante da Majano, but its literary originality took another line —
that of humorous and satirical poetry. The entirely democratic form of
government created a style of poetry that stood strongly against the
medieval mystic and chivalrous style. Devout invocation of God or of a
lady came from the
cloister and the
castle;
in the streets of the cities everything that had gone before was treated
with ridicule or biting
sarcasm.
Folgore da San Gimignano laughs when in his sonnets he tells a party
of Sienese youths the occupations of every month in the year, or when he
teaches a party of Florentine lads the pleasures of every day in the
week.
Cenne della Chitarra laughs when he parodies Folgore's sonnets. The
sonnets of
Rustico di Filippo are half-fun and half-satire, as is the work of
Cecco Angiolieri of Siena, the oldest humorist we know, a far-off
precursor of
Rabelais and
Montaigne.
Another kind of poetry also began in Tuscany. Guittone d'Arezzo made
art quit chivalry and Provençal forms for national motives and Latin
forms. He attempted political poetry, and, although his work is often
obscure, he prepared the way for the Bolognese school. Bologna was the
city of science, and
philosophical poetry appeared there.
Guido Guinizelli was the poet after the new fashion of the art. In
his work the ideas of chivalry are changed and enlarged. Only those
whose heart is pure can be blessed with true love, regardless of class.
He refuted the traditional credo of courtly love, for which love is a
subtle philosophy only a few chosen knights and princesses could grasp.
Love is blind to blasons but not to a good heart when it finds one: when
it succeeds it is the result of the spiritual, not physical affinity
between teo souls. Guinizzelli's democratic view can be better
understood in the light of the greater equality and freedom enjoyed by
the city-states of the center-north and the rise of a middle class eager
to legitimise itself in the eyes of the old nobility, still regarded
with respect and admiration but in fact dispossessed of its political
power. Guinizelli's
Canzoni
make up the bible of Dolce Stil Novo, and one in particular, "Al cor
gentil" ("To a Kind Heart") is considered the manifesto of the new
movement that bloomed in Florence under Cavalcanti, Dante, and their
followers. His poetry has some of the faults of the school of d'Arezzo.
Nevertheless, he marks a great development in the history of Italian
art, especially because of his close connection with Dante's
lyric poetry.
In the 13th century, there were several major
allegorical poems. One of these is by
Brunetto Latini, who was a close friend of Dante. His Tesoretto
is a short poem, in seven-syllable verses, rhyming in couplets, in which
the author is lost in a wilderness and meets a lady, who represents
Nature and gives him much instruction. We see here vision, allegory, and
instruction with a moral object—three elements we find again in the
Divine Comedy.
Francesco da Barberino, a learned lawyer who was secretary to
bishops,
a judge,
and a
notary, wrote two little allegorical poems, the Documenti d'amore
and Del reggimento e dei costumi delle donne. The poems today are
generally studied not as literature, but for historical context. A
fourth allegorical work was the Intelligenza, which is sometimes
attributed to Compagni, but is probably only a
translation of French poems.
In the 15th century, humanist and publisher
Aldus Manutius published Tuscan poets
Petrarch and
Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy), creating the model for
what became a standard for modern Italian.
Development of early prose
Italian prose of the 13th century was as abundant and varied as its
poetry. The earliest example dates from 1231, and consists of short
notices of entries and expenses by
Mattasala di Spinello dei Lambertini of Siena. At this time, there
was no sign of literary prose in Italian, though there was in
French. Halfway through the century, a certain Aldobrando or
Aldobrandino, from either Florence or Siena, wrote a book for
Beatrice of Savoy, countess of Provence, called Le Régime du
corps. In 1267
Martino da Canale wrote a history of Venice in the same Old French (langue
d'oïl).
Rusticiano of Pisa, who was for a long while at the court of
Edward I of England, composed many chivalrous romances, derived from
the
Arthurian cycle, and subsequently wrote the
Travels of Marco Polo, which may have been dictated by Polo
himself. And finally
Brunetto Latini wrote his Tesoro in French. Latini also wrote
some works in Italian prose such as La rettorica, an adaptation
from Cicero's
De inventione, and translated three orations from Cicero:
Pro Ligario,
Pro Marcello and
Pro rege Deiotaro. Another important writer was the Florentine
judge
Bono Giamboni, who translated
Orosius's Historiae adversus paganos,
Vegetius's
Epitoma rei militaris, made a translation/adaptation of Cicero's
De inventione mixed with the
Rethorica ad Erennium, and a translation/adaptation of
Innocent III's De miseria humane conditionis. He also wrote
an allegorical novel called Libro de' Vizi e delle Virtudi whose
earlier version (Trattato delle virtù e dei vizi) is also
preserved.
Andrea of Grosseto, in 1268, translated three Treaties of
Albertanus of Brescia, from Latin to
Tuscan dialect.
After the original compositions in the langue d'oïl came
translations or adaptations from the same. There are some moral
narratives taken from religious legends, a romance of
Julius Caesar, some short histories of ancient knights, the
Tavola rotonda, translations of the Viaggi of
Marco Polo, and of Latini's Tesoro. At the same time,
translations from Latin of moral and ascetic works, histories, and
treatises on
rhetoric and
oratory appeared. Some of the works previously regarded as the
oldest in the Italian language have been shown to be forgeries of a much
later time. The oldest prose writing is a scientific book,
Composizione del mondo by
Ristoro d'Arezzo, who lived about the middle of the 13th century.
This work is a copious treatise on
astronomy and
geography. Ristoro was a careful observer of natural phenomena; many
of the things he relates were the result of his personal investigations,
and consequently his works are more reliable than those of other writers
of the time on similar subjects.
Another short treatise exists: De regimine rectoris, by
Fra Paolino, a
Minorite
friar of Venice, who was probably
bishop of Pozzuoli, and who also wrote a Latin chronicle. His
treatise stands in close relation to that of
Egidio Colonna, De regimine principum. It is written in the
Venetian language.
The 13th century was very rich in tales. A collection called the
Cento Novelle antiche contains stories drawn from many sources,
including Asian, Greek and Trojan traditions, ancient and medieval
history, the legends of
Brittany,
Provence and Italy, the
Bible,
local Italian traditions, and histories of animals and old
mythology. This book has a distant resemblance to the Spanish
collection known as El Conde Lucanor. The peculiarity of the
Italian book is that the stories are very short, and seem to be mere
outlines to be filled in by the narrator as he goes along. Other prose
novels were inserted by
Francesco Barberino in his work Del reggimento e dei costumi
delle donne, but they are of much less importance.
On the whole the Italian novels of the 13th century have little
originality, and are a faint reflection of the very rich legendary
literature of France. Some attention should be paid to the
Lettere of Fra Guittone d'Arezzo, who wrote many poems and also some
letters in prose, the subjects of which are moral and religious.
Guittone's love of antiquity and the traditions of Rome and its language
was so strong that he tried to write Italian in a Latin style. The
letters are obscure, involved and altogether barbarous. Guittone took as
his special model
Seneca the Younger, and hence his prose became bombastic. Guittone
viewed his style as very artistic, but later scholars view it as
extravagant and grotesque.
Dolce Stil Novo
In the year 1282 a period of new literature began, developing from
the Tuscan beginnings. With the school of
Lapo Gianni,
Guido Cavalcanti,
Cino da Pistoia and
Dante Alighieri, lyric poetry became exclusively Tuscan. The whole
novelty and poetic power of this school, consisted in, according to
Dante, Quando Amore spira, noto, ed a quel niodo Ch'ei detta dentro,
vo significando: that is, in a power of expressing the feelings of
the soul in the way in which love inspires them, in an appropriate and
graceful manner, fitting form to matter, and by art fusing one with the
other. Love is a divine gift that redeems man in the eyes of God, and
the poet's mistress is the angel sent from heaven to show the way to
salvation. This a neo-platonic approach widely endorsed by Dolce Stil
Novo, and although in Cavalcanti's case it can be upsetting and even
destructive, it is nonetheless a metaphysical experience able to lift
man onto a higher, spiritual dimension. Gianni's new style was still
influenced by the Siculo-Provençal school.
Cavalcanti's poems fall into two classes: those that portray the
philosopher, (il sottilissimo dialettico, as
Lorenzo the Magnificent called him) and those more directly the
product of his poetic nature imbued with
mysticism and
metaphysics. To the first set belongs the famous poem Sulla
natura d'amore, which in fact is a treatise on amorous
metaphysics, and was annotated later in a learned way by renowned
Platonic philosophers of the 15th century, such as
Marsilius Ficinus and others. In other poems, Cavalcanti tends to
stifle poetic imagery under a dead weight of philosophy. On the other
hand, in his Ballate, he pours himself out ingenuously, but with
a consciousness of his art. The greatest of these is considered to be
the ballata composed by Cavalcanti when he was banished from
Florence with the party of the Bianchi in 1300, and took refuge at
Sarzana.
The third poet among the followers of the new school was Cino da
Pistoia, of the family of the
Sinibuldi. His love poems are sweet, mellow and musical.
The 14th century: the roots of Renaissance
Dante
Dante, one of the greatest of Italian poets, also shows these lyrical
tendencies. In 1293 he wrote
La Vita Nuova ("new life" in English, so called to indicate that
his first meeting with
Beatrice was the beginning of a new life), in which he idealizes
love. It is a collection of poems to which Dante added narration and
explication. Everything is supersensual, aerial, heavenly, and the real
Beatrice is supplanted by an idealized vision of her, losing her human
nature and becoming a representation of the divine. Dante is the main
character of the work, and the narration purports to be
autobiographical, though historical information about Dante's life
proves this to be poetic license.
Several of the lyrics of the La Vita Nuova deal with the theme
of the new life. Not all the love poems refer to Beatrice, however—other
pieces are philosophical and bridge over to the
Convivio.
The Divine
Comedy
Divina Commedia made Dante immortal, and raised him above all
other men of genius in Italy.[dubious
–
discuss] It tells of the poet's travels through the
three realms of the dead—Hell,
Purgatory, and
Paradise—accompanied by the Latin poet
Virgil.
An allegorical meaning hides under the literal one of this great epic.
Dante, travelling through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, symbolizes
mankind aiming at the double object of temporal and eternal happiness.
The forest where the poet loses himself symbolizes the civil and
religious confusion of society, deprived of its two guides, the emperor
and the pope. The mountain illuminated by the sun is universal monarchy.
The three beasts are the three vices and the three powers that
offered the greatest obstacles to Dante's designs. Envy is Florence,
light, fickle and divided by the
Black Guelphs and the White Guelphs. Pride is the house of France.
Avarice is the papal court. Virgil represents reason and the empire.
Beatrice is the symbol of the supernatural aid mankind must have to
attain the supreme end, which is God.
The merit of the poem does not lie in the allegory, which still
connects it with
medieval literature. What is new is the individual art of the poet,
the classic art transfused for the first time into a Romance form.
Whether he describes nature, analyses passions, curses the vices or
sings hymns to the virtues, Dante is notable for the grandeur and
delicacy of his art. He took the materials for his poem from
theology, philosophy, history, and mythology, but especially from
his own passions, from hatred and love. Under the pen of the poet, the
dead come to life again; they become men again, and speak the language
of their time, of their passions.
Farinata degli Uberti,
Boniface VIII,
Count Ugolino,
Manfred,
Sordello,
Hugh Capet, St.
Thomas Aquinas,
Cacciaguida,
St. Benedict, and
St. Peter, are all so many objective creations; they stand before us
in all the life of their characters, their feelings, and their habits.
The real chastizer of the sins and rewarder of virtues is Dante
himself. The personal interest he brings to bear on the historical
representation of the three worlds is what most interests us and stirs
us. Dante remakes history after his own passions. Thus the Divina
Commedia is not only a lifelike drama of contemporary thoughts and
feelings, but also a clear and spontaneous reflection of the individual
feelings of the poet, from the indignation of the citizen and the exile
to the faith of the believer and the ardour of the philosopher. The
Divina Commedia defined the destiny of Italian literature, giving
artistic lustre to all forms of literature the
Middle Ages had produced.
Petrarch
Statue outside the
Uffizi, Florence
Two facts characterize the literary life of
Petrarch: classical research and the new human feeling introduced
into his lyric poetry. The facts are not separate; rather, the former
caused the latter[citation
needed]. The Petrarch who unearthed the works of
the great Latin writers helps us understand the Petrarch who loved a
real woman, named Laura, and celebrated her in her life and after her
death in poems full of studied elegance. Petrarch was the first
humanist, and he was at the same time the first modern lyric poet.
His career was long and tempestuous. He lived for many years at
Avignon,
cursing the corruption of the papal court; he travelled through nearly
the whole of Europe; he corresponded with emperors and popes, and he was
considered the most important writer of his time.
His Canzoniere is divided into three parts: the first
containing the poems written during Laura's lifetime, the second the
poems written after her death, the third the Trionfi. The one and
only subject of these poems is love; but the treatment is full of
variety in conception, in imagery and in sentiment, derived from the
most varied impressions of nature. Petrarch's lyric verse is quite
different, not only from that of the Provençal
troubadours and the Italian poets before him, but also from the
lyrics of Dante. Petrarch is a psychological poet, who examines all his
feelings and renders them with an art of exquisite sweetness. The lyrics
of Petrarch are no longer transcendental like Dante's, but keep entirely
within human limits. The second part of the Canzoniere is the
more passionate. The Trionfi are inferior; in them Petrarch tried
to imitate the Divina Commedia, but failed. The Canzoniere
includes also a few political poems, one supposed to be addressed to
Cola di Rienzi and several sonnets against the court of Avignon.
These are remarkable for their vigour of feeling, and also for showing
that, compared to Dante, Petrarch had a sense of a broader Italian
consciousness. He wooed an Italy that was different from any conceived
by the people of the Middle Ages. In this, he was a precursor of modern
times and modern aspirations. Petrarch had no decided political idea. He
exalted Cola di Rienzi, invoked the emperor
Charles IV, and praised the
Visconti; in fact, his politics were affected more by impressions
than by principles. Above all this was his love of Italy, which in his
mind was reunited with Rome, the great city of his heroes,
Cicero
and
Scipio. Petrarca, some say, began the Renaissance humanism.
Boccaccio
From an edition of Boccaccio's "De Casibus Virorum
Illustrium" showing Lady Fortune spinning her wheel.
Boccaccio had the same enthusiastic love of antiquity and the same
worship for the new Italian literature as Petrarch. He was the first to
put together a Latin translation of the
Iliad
and, in 1375, the
Odyssey.
His classical learning was shown in the work De genealogia deorum,
in which he enumerates the gods according to genealogical trees from the
various authors who wrote about the pagan divinities. The Genealogia
deorum is, as
A. H. Heeren said, an encyclopaedia of mythological knowledge; and
it was the precursor of the
humanist movement of the 15th century. Boccaccio was also the first
historian of women in his
De mulieribus claris, and the first to tell the story of the
great unfortunates in his De casibus virorum illustrium. He
continued and perfected former geographical investigations in his
interesting book De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus,
stagnis, et paludibus, et de nominibus maris, for which he made use
of
Vibius Sequester. Of his Italian works, his lyrics do not come
anywhere near to the perfection of Petrarch's. His narrative poetry is
better. He did not invent the
octave stanza, but was the first to use it in a work of length and
artistic merit, his
Teseide, the oldest Italian romantic poem. The
Filostrato relates the loves of Troiolo and Griseida (Troilus
and Cressida). It may be that Boccaccio knew the French poem of the
Trojan war by
Benoit de Sainte-More; but the interest of his poem lies in the
analysis of the passion of love. The
Ninfale fiesolano tells the love story of the nymph Mesola and
the shepherd Africo. The
Amorosa Visione, a poem in triplets, doubtless owed its origin
to the Divina Commedia. The
Ameto is a mixture of prose and poetry, and is the first Italian
pastoral romance.
The Filocopo takes the earliest place among
prose romances. In it Boccaccio tells the loves of Florio and
Biancafiore. Probably for this work he drew materials from a popular
source or from a
Byzantine romance, which
Leonzio Pilato may have mentioned to him. In the Filocopo,
there is a remarkable exuberance in the mythological part, which damages
the romance as an artistic work, but contributes to the history of
Boccaccio's mind. The Fiammetta is another romance, about the
loves of Boccaccio and Maria d'Aquino, a supposed natural daughter of
King Robert, whom he always called by this name of Fiammetta.
Boccaccio became famous principally for the Italian work,
Decamerone, a collection of a hundred novels, related by a party
of men and women who retired to a villa near Florence to escape the
plague in 1348. Novel-writing, so abundant in the preceding
centuries, especially in France, now for the first time assumed an
artistic shape. The style of Boccaccio tends to the imitation of Latin,
but in him prose first took the form of elaborated art. The rudeness of
the old
fabliaux
gives place to the careful and conscientious work of a mind that has a
feeling for what is beautiful, that has studied the classic authors, and
that strives to imitate them as much as possible. Over and above this,
in the Decamerone, Boccaccio is a delineator of character and an
observer of passions. In this lies his novelty. Much has been written
about the sources of the novels of the Decamerone. Probably
Boccaccio made use both of written and of oral sources. Popular
tradition must have furnished him with the materials of many stories,
as, for example, that of Griselda.
Unlike Petrarch, who was always discontented, preoccupied, wearied
with life, disturbed by disappointments, we find Boccaccio calm, serene,
satisfied with himself and with his surroundings. Notwithstanding these
fundamental differences in their characters, the two great authors were
old and warm friends. But their affection for Dante was not equal.
Petrarch, who says that he saw him once in his childhood, did not
preserve a pleasant recollection of him, and it would be useless to deny
that he was jealous of his renown. The Divina Commedia was sent
him by Boccaccio, when he was an old man, and he confessed that he never
read it. On the other hand, Boccaccio felt for Dante something more than
love—enthusiasm. He wrote a biography of him (which some critics
deprecate the accuracy of) and gave public critical lectures on the poem
in
Santa Maria del Fiore at Florence.
Others
Imitators
Fazio degli Uberti and
Federico Frezzi were imitators of the Divina Commedia, but
only in its external form. The former wrote the Dittamondo, a
long poem, in which the author supposes that he was taken by the
geographer
Solinus into different parts of the world, and that his Commedia
guide related the history of them. The legends of the rise of the
different Italian cities have some importance historically. Frezzi,
bishop of his native town
Foligno,
wrote the Quadriregio, a poem of the four kingdoms Love, Satan,
the Vices, and the Virtues. This poem has many points of resemblance
with the Divina Commedia. Frezzi pictures the condition of man
who rises from a state of vice to one of virtue, and describes hell,
limbo, purgatory and heaven. The poet has
Pallas
for a companion.
Ser
Giovanni Fiorentino wrote, under the title of Pecorone, a
collection of tales, which are supposed to have been related by a monk
and a nun in the parlour of the monastery Novelists of Forli. He closely
imitated Boccaccio, and drew on Villani's chronicle for his historical
stories.
Franco Sacchetti wrote tales too, for the most part on subjects
taken from Florentine history. His book gives a lifelike picture of
Florentine society at the end of the 14th century. The subjects are
almost always improper, but it is evident that Sacchetti collected these
anecdotes so he could draw his own conclusions and moral reflections,
which he puts at the end of each story. From this point of view,
Sacchetti's work comes near to the Monalisaliones of the Middle Ages. A
third novelist was
Giovanni Sercambi of Lucca, who after 1374 wrote a book, in
imitation of Boccaccio, about a party of people who were supposed to fly
from a plague and to go travelling about in different Italian cities,
stopping here and there telling stories. Later, but important, names are
those of
Masuccio Salernitano (Tommaso Guardato), who wrote the Novellino,
and
Antonio Cornazzano whose Proverbii became extremely popular.
Chronicles
Chronicles formerly believed to have been of the 13th century are now
mainly regarded as forgeries. At the end of the 13th century there is a
chronicle by
Dino Compagni, probably authentic.
Giovanni Villani, born in 1300, was more of a chronicler than an
historian. He relates the events up to 1347. The journeys that he made
in Italy and France, and the information thus acquired, mean that his
chronicle, the Historie Fiorentine, covers events all over
Europe. He speaks at length, not only of events in politics and war, but
of the stipends of public officials, the sums of money used to pay for
soldiers and public festivals, and many other things of which knowledge
is valuable. Villani's narrative is often encumbered with fables and
errors, particularly when he speaks of things that happened before his
time.
Matteo was the brother of Giovanni Villani, and continued the
chronicle up to 1363. It was again continued by Filippo Villani.
Ascetics
The Divine Commedia is ascetic in its conception, and in a
good many points of its execution. Petrarch's work has similar
qualities; yet neither Petrarch nor Dante could be classified among the
pure ascetics of their time. But many other writers come under this
head. St
Catherine of Siena's mysticism was political. This extraordinary
woman aspired to bring back the Church of Rome to evangelical virtue,
and left a collection of letters written in a high and lofty tone to all
kinds of people, including popes. Hers is the clearest religious
utterance to have made itself heard in 14th century Italy. Although
precise ideas of reformation did not enter her head, the want of a great
moral reform was felt in her heart. She must take her place among those
who prepared the way for the religious movement of the 16th century.
Another Sienese,
Giovanni Colombini, founder of the order of
Jesuati,
preached poverty by precept and example, going back to the religious
idea of St Francis of Assisi. His letters are among the most remarkable
in the category of ascetic works in the 14th century.
Jacopo Passavanti, in his Specchio della vera penitenza,
attached instruction to narrative.
Domenico Cavalca translated from the Latin the Vite de' Santi
Padri.
Rivalta left behind him many sermons, and
Franco Sacchetti (the famous novelist) many discourses. On the
whole, there is no doubt that one of the most important productions of
the Italian spirit of the 14th century was religious literature.
Popular works
Humorous poetry, largely developed in the 13th century, was carried
on in the 14th by
Bindo Bonichi,
Arrigo di Castruccio,
Cecco Nuccoli,
Andrea Orgagna,
Filippo de Bardi,
Adriano de Rossi,
Antonio Pucci and other lesser writers. Orgagna was specially comic;
Bonichi was comic with a satirical and moral purpose.
Pucci was superior to all of them for the variety of his production.
He put into triplets the chronicle of Giovanni Villani (Centiloquio),
and wrote many historical poems called Serventesi, many comic
poems, and not a few epico-popular compositions on various subjects. A
little poem of his in seven cantos treats of the war between the
Florentines and the
Pisans from
1362 to 1365.
Other poems drawn from a legendary source celebrate the Reina
d'Oriente, Apollonio di Tiro, the Bel Gherardino, etc. These poems,
meant to be recited, are the ancestors of the romantic epic.
Political works
Many poets of the 14th century produced political works.
Fazio degli Uberti, the author of Dittamondo, who wrote a
Serventese to the lords and people of Italy, a poem on Rome, and a
fierce invective against Charles IV, deserves notice, as do
Francesco di Vannozzo,
Frate Stoppa and
Matteo Frescobaldi. It may be said in general that following the
example of Petrarch many writers devoted themselves to patriotic poetry.
From this period also dates that literary phenomenon known under the
name of Petrarchism. The Petrarchists, or those who sang of love,
imitating Petrarch's manner, were found already in the 14th century. But
others treated the same subject with more originality, in a manner that
might be called semi-popular. Such were the Ballate of Ser
Giovanni Fiorentino, of Franco Sacchetti, of
Niccolo Soldanieri, and of
Guido and
Bindo Donati. Ballate were poems sung to dancing, and we have
very many songs for music of the 14th century. We have already stated
that Antonio Pucci versified Villani's Chronicle. It is enough to
notice a chronicle of
Arezzo
in
terza rima by
Gorello de Sinigardi, and the history, also in terza rima, of
the journey of Pope Alexander III to Venice, by
Pier de Natali. Besides this, every kind of subject, whether
history, tragedy or husbandry, was treated in verse.
Neri di Landocio wrote a life of St Catherine;
Jacopo Gradenigo put the Gospels into triplets.
Renaissance
humanism
Renaissance humanism developed during the 14th and the beginning of
the 15th centuries, and was a response to the challenge of Mediæval
scholastic education, emphasizing practical, pre-professional and
-scientific studies.
Scholasticism focused on preparing men to be doctors, lawyers or
professional theologians, and was taught from approved textbooks in
logic, natural philosophy, medicine, law and theology.[2]
The main centers of humanism were
Florence and
Naples.[3]
Rather than train professionals in jargon and strict practice,
humanists sought to create a citizenry (including, sometimes, women)
able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity. Thus, they would be
capable of better engaging the civic life of their communities and
persuading others to virtuous and prudent actions. This was to be
accomplished through the study of the
studia humanitatis, today known as the
humanities: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy.[4]
Early humanists, such as
Petrarch,
Coluccio Salutati and
Leonardo Bruni, were great collectors of antique manuscripts. Many
worked for the organized Church and were in holy orders (like Petrarch),
while others were lawyers and chancellors of Italian cities, like
Petrarch's disciple, Salutati, the Chancellor of Florence, and thus had
access to book copying workshops.
In Italy, the humanist educational program won rapid acceptance and,
by the mid-15th century, many of the upper classes had received humanist
educations. Some of the highest officials of the Church were humanists
with the resources to amass important libraries. Such was Cardinal
Basilios Bessarion, a convert to the Latin Church from Greek
Orthodoxy, who was considered for the papacy and was one of the most
learned scholars of his time. There were five 15th-century Humanist
Popes,[5]
one of whom,
Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II), was a prolific author and
wrote a treatise on "The Education of Boys".[6]
Literature in the Florence of the Medici
At Florence the most celebrated humanists wrote also in the vulgar
tongue, and commented on Dante and Petrarch, and defended them from
their enemies.
Leone Battista Alberti, the learned Greek and Latin scholar, wrote
in the vernacular, and
Vespasiano da Bisticci, while he was constantly absorbed in Greek
and Latin manuscripts, wrote the Vite di uomini illustri,
valuable for their historical contents, and rivalling the best works of
the 14th century in their candour and simplicity.
Andrea da Barberino wrote the beautiful prose of the Reali di
Francia, giving a coloring of romanità to the chivalrous
romances.
Belcari and
Girolamo Benivieni returned to the mystic idealism of earlier times.
But it is in
Lorenzo de Medici that the influence of Florence on the Renaissance
is particularly seen. His mind was formed by the ancients: he attended
the class of the Greek
John Argyropulos, sat at Platonic banquets, took pains to collect
codices, sculptures, vases, pictures, gems and drawings to ornament the
gardens of San Marco and to form the library later named after him. In
the saloons of his Florentine palace, in his villas at
Careggi,
Fiesole
and
Anibra, stood the wonderful chests painted by
Dello di Niccolò Delli with stories from
Ovid, the
Hercules of
Pollaiuolo, the Pallas of
Botticelli, the works of
Filippino and
Verrocchio. De Medici lived entirely in the classical world; and yet
if we read his poems we only see the man of his time, the admirer of
Dante and of the old Tuscan poets, who takes inspiration from the
popular muse, and who succeeds in giving to his poetry the colors of the
most pronounced realism as well as of the loftiest idealism, who passes
from the Platonic
sonnet
to the impassioned triplets of the Amori di Venere, from the
grandiosity of the Salve to Nencia and to Beoni, from the
Canto carnascialesco to the lauda. The feeling of nature
is strong in him; at one time sweet and melancholy, at another vigorous
and deep, as if an echo of the feelings, the sorrows, the ambitions of
that deeply agitated life. He liked to look into his own heart with a
severe eye, but he was also able to pour himself out with tumultuous
fulness. He described with the art of a sculptor; he satirized, laughed,
prayed, sighed, always elegant, always a Florentine, but a Florentine
who read
Anacreon, Ovid and
Tibullus, who wished to enjoy life, but also to taste of the
refinements of art.
Next to Lorenzo comes
Poliziano, who also united, and with greater art, the ancient and
the modern, the popular and the classical style. In his Rispetti
and in his Ballate the freshness of imagery and the plasticity of
form are inimitable. A great Greek scholar, Poliziano wrote Italian
verses with dazzling colors; the purest elegance of the Greek sources
pervaded his art in all its varieties, in the Orfeo as well as
the Stanze per la giostra.
A completely new style of poetry arose, the Canto carnascialesco.
These were a kind of choral songs, which were accompanied with symbolic
masquerades, common in Florence at the carnival. They were written in a
metre like that of the ballate; and for the most part they were
put into the mouth of a party of workmen and tradesmen, who, with not
very chaste allusions, sang the praises of their art. These triumphs and
masquerades were directed by Lorenzo himself. In the evening, there set
out into the city large companies on horseback, playing and singing
these songs. There are some by Lorenzo himself, which surpass all the
others in their mastery of art. That entitled Bacco ed Arianna is
the most famous.
Epic: Pulci
and Boiardo
Italy did not yet have true
epic poetry; but had, however, many poems called
cantari, because they contained stories that were sung to the
people; and besides there were romantic poems, such as the
Buovo d'Antona, the
Regina Ancroja and others. But the first to introduce life into
this style was
Luigi Pulci, who grew up in the house of the Medici, and who wrote
the
Morgante Maggiore at the request of
Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of
Lorenzo the Magnificent. The material of the Morgante is
almost completely taken from an obscure chivalrous poem of the 15th
century, rediscovered by
Pio Rajna. Pulci erected a structure of his own, often turning the
subject into ridicule, burlesquing the characters, introducing many
digressions, now capricious, now scientific, now theological. Pulci
raised the romantic epic into a work of art, and united the serious and
the comic.
With a more serious intention
Matteo Boiardo, count of
Scandiano, wrote his
Orlando innamorato, in which he seems to have aspired to embrace
the whole range of
Carolingian legends; but he did not complete his task. We find here
too a large vein of humour and burlesque. Still Boiardo was drawn to the
world of romance by a profound sympathy for chivalrous manners and
feelings; that is to say, for love, courtesy, valour and generosity. A
third romantic poem of the 15th century was the Mambriano by
Francesco Bello (Cieco of Ferrara). He drew from the
Carolingian cycle, from the romances of the
Round Table, and from classical antiquity. He was a poet of no
common genius, and of ready imagination. He showed the influence of
Boiardo, especially in the use of fantasy.
Other
History had neither many nor very good students in the 15th century.
Its revival belonged to the following age. It was mostly written in
Latin.
Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo wrote the history of Florence,
Gioviano Pontano that of Naples, in Latin.
Bernardino Corio wrote the history of
Milan in
Italian, but in a rude way.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote a treatise on painting,
Leone Battista Alberti one on sculpture and architecture. But the
names of these two men are important, not so much as authors of these
treatises, but as being embodiments of another characteristic of the age
of the Renaissance; versatility of genius, power of application along
many and varied lines, and of being excellent in all. Leonardo was an
architect, a poet, a painter, an hydraulic engineer and a distinguished
mathematician. Alberti was a musician, studied jurisprudence, was an
architect and a draughtsman, and had great fame in literature. He had a
deep feeling for nature, and an almost unique faculty of assimilating
all that he saw and heard. Leonardo and Alberti are representatives and
almost a compendium in themselves of all that intellectual vigour of the
Renaissance age, which in the 16th century took to developing itself in
its individual parts, making way for what has by some been called the
golden age of Italian literature.
Piero Capponi, author of the Commentari deli acquisto di Pisa
and of the narration of the Tumulto dei Ciompi, belonged to both
the 14th and the 15th centuries.
Albertino Mussato of
Padua
wrote in Latin a history of
Emperor Henry VII. He then produced a Latin tragedy on
Ezzelino da Romano, Henry's imperial vicar in northern Italy, the
Eccerinus, which was probably not represented on the stage. This
remained an isolated work.
The development of the drama in the 15th century was very great. This
kind of semi-popular literature was born in Florence, and attached
itself to certain popular festivities that were usually held in honor of
St
John the Baptist, patron saint of the city. The
Sacra Rappresentazione is the development of the medieval
Mistero (mystery
play). Although it belonged to popular poetry, some of its authors
were literary men of much renown: Lorenzo de Medici, for example, wrote
San Giovanni e Paolo, and
Feo Belcari wrote San Panunzio, Abramo ed Isaac, and
more. From the 15th century, some element of the comic-profane found its
way into the Sacra Rappresentazione. From its Biblical and legendary
conventionalism Poliziano emancipated himself in his Orfeo,
which, although in its exterior form belonging to the sacred
representations, yet substantially detaches itself from them in its
contents and in the artistic element introduced.
After the
Renaissance
Baldassare Castiglione. Portrait by
Raphael
The fundamental characteristic of the literary epoch following that
of the Renaissance is that it perfected itself in every kind of art, in
particular uniting the essentially Italian character of its language
with classicism of style. This period lasted from about 1494 to about
1560—1494 being when Charles VIII descended into Italy, marking the
beginning of Italy's foreign domination and political decadence.
The famous men of the first half of the 16th century had been
educated in the preceding century.
Pietro Pomponazzi was born in 1462,
Marcello Adriani Virgilio in 1464,
Baldassare Castiglione in 1468,
Niccolò Machiavelli in 1469,
Pietro Bembo in 1470,
Michelangelo Buonarroti and
Ariosto in 1474,
Jacopo Nardi in 1476,
Gian Giorgio Trissino in 1478, and
Francesco Guicciardini in 1482. Literary activity that appeared from
the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 16th century was the
product of the political and social conditions of an earlier age.
The science of history: Machiavelli and Guicciardini
Machiavelli and Guicciardini were the chief originators of the
science of history.
Machiavelli's principal works are the Istorie fiorentine, the
Discorsi sulla prima deca di Tito Livio, the Arte della guerra
and the Principe. His merit consists in having emphasized the
experimental side of the study of political action in having observed
facts, studied histories and drawn principles from them. His history is
sometimes inexact in facts; it is rather a political than an historical
work. The peculiarity of Machiavelli's genius lay, as has been said, in
his artistic feeling for the treatment and discussion of politics in and
for themselves, without regard to an immediate end in his power of
abstracting himself from the partial appearances of the transitory
present, in order more thoroughly to possess himself of the eternal and
inborn kingdom, and to bring it into subjection to himself.
Next to Machiavelli both as an historian and a statesman comes
Guicciardini. Guicciardini was very observant, and endeavoured to reduce
his observations to a science. His Storia d'Italia, which extends
from the death of
Lorenzo de Medici to 1534, is full of political wisdom, is
skillfully arranged in its parts, gives a lively picture of the
character of the persons it treats of, and is written in a grand style.
He shows a profound knowledge of the human heart, and depicts with truth
the temperaments, the capabilities and habits of the different European
nations. Going back to the causes of events, he looked for the
explanation of the divergent interests of princes and of their
reciprocal jealousies. The fact of his having witnessed many of the
events he related, and having taken part in them, adds authority to his
words. The political reflections are always deep; in the Pensieri,
as
Gino Capponi says, he seems to aim at extracting through
self-examination a quintessence, as it were, of the things observed and
done by him; thus endeavouring to form a political doctrine as adequate
as possible in all its parts. Machiavelli and Guicciardini may be
considered as distinguished historians as well as originators of the
science of history founded on observation.
Inferior to them, but still always worthy of note, were
Jacopo Nardi (a just and faithful historian and a virtuous man, who
defended the rights of Florence against the Medici before Charles V),
Benedetto Varchi,
Giambattista Adriani,
Bernardo Segni, and, outside Tuscany,
Camillo Porzio, who related the Congiura de baroni and the
history of Italy from 1547 to 1552;
Angelo di Costanza,
Pietro Bembo,
Paolo Paruta, and others.
Ludovico Ariosto
Ariosto's
Orlando furioso was a continuation of Boiardo's Innamorato.
His characteristic is that he assimilated the romance of chivalry to the
style and models of classicism. Romantic Ariosto was an artist only for
the love of his art; his epic.
His sole aim was to make a romance that would please himself and his
generation. His Orlando has no grave and serious purpose. On the
contrary, it creates a fantastic world in which the poet rambles,
indulges his caprice, and sometimes smiles at his own work. His great
desire is to depict everything with the greatest possible perfection;
the cultivation of style is what occupies him most. In his hands the
style becomes wonderfully plastic to every conception, whether high or
low, serious or sportive. With him, the octave stanza reached a high
level of grace, variety, and harmony.
Pietro Bembo
Pietro Bembo was an influential figure in the development of the
Italian language, specifically Tuscan, as a literary medium, and his
writings assisted in the 16th-century revival of interest in the works
of
Petrarch. As a writer, Bembo attempted to restore some of the
legendary "affect" that
ancient Greek had on its hearers, but in Tuscan Italian instead. He
held as his model, and as the highest example of poetic expression ever
achieved in Italian, the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio, two 14th
century writers he assisted in bringing back into fashion.
In the Prose della volgar lingua, he set Petrarch up as the
perfect model, and discussed
verse composition in detail, including rhyme, stress, the sounds of
words, balance and variety. In Bembo's theory, the specific placement of
words in a poem, with strict attention to their consonants and vowels,
their rhythm, their position within lines long and short, could produce
emotions ranging from sweetness and grace to gravity and grief in a
listener. This work was of decisive importance in the development of the
Italian madrigal, the most famous secular musical form of the 16th
century, as it was these poems, carefully constructed (or, in the case
of Petrarch, analyzed) according to Bembo's ideas, that were to be the
primary texts for the music.
Torquato Tasso
The historians of Italian literature are in doubt whether
Tasso should be placed in the period of the highest development of
the Renaissance, or whether he should form a period by himself,
intermediate between that and the one following. Certainly he was
profoundly out of harmony with his own century. His religious faith, the
seriousness of his character, the deep melancholy settled in his heart,
his continued aspiration after an ideal perfection—all place him outside
the literary epoch represented by Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Berni. As
Carducci said, Tasso is the legitimate heir of Dante: he believes,
and reasons on his faith by philosophy; he loves, and comments on his
love in a learned style; he is an artist, and writes dialogues of
scholastic speculation that would be considered Platonic. He was
only eighteen years old when, in 1562, he tried his hand at epic poetry,
and wrote Rinaldo, in which be said that he had tried to
reconcile the Aristotelian rules with the variety of Ariosto. He later
wrote the Aminta, a pastoral drama of exquisite grace, but the
work to which he had long turned his thoughts was an heroic poem, and
that absorbed all his powers. He explains his intentions in the three
Discorsi, written while he composed the Gerusalemme: he would
choose a great and wonderful subject, not so ancient as to have lost all
interest, nor so recent as to prevent the poet from embellishing it with
invented circumstances. He would treat it rigorously according to the
rules of the unity of action observed in Greek and Latin poems, but with
a far greater variety and splendour of episodes, so that in this point
it should not fall short of the romantic poem; and finally, he would
write it in a lofty and ornate style. This is what Tasso has done in the
Gerusalemme liberata, the subject of which is the liberation of
the
sepulchre of
Jesus Christ in the 11th century by
Godfrey of Bouillon. The poet does not follow faithfully all the
historical facts, but sets before us the principal causes of them,
bringing in the supernatural agency of God and Satan. The Gerusalemme
is the best heroic poem that Italy can show. It approaches to classical
perfection. Its episodes above all are most beautiful. There is profound
feeling in it, and everything reflects the melancholy soul of the poet.
As regards the style, however, although Tasso studiously endeavoured to
keep close to the classical models, one cannot help noticing that he
makes excessive use of
metaphor, of
antithesis, of far-fetched conceits; and it is specially from this
point of view that some historians have placed Tasso in the literary
period generally known under the name of Secentismo, and that
others, more moderate in their criticism, have said that he prepared the
way for it.
Minor writers
Meanwhile, side by side with the romantic, there was an attempt at
the historical epic.
Gian Giorgio Trissino of
Vicenza
composed a poem called Italia liberata dai Goti. Full of learning
and of the rules of the ancients, he formed himself on the latter, in
order to sing of the campaigns of
Belisarius; he said that he had forced himself to observe all the
rules of
Aristotle, and that he had imitated
Homer. In
this again, we see one of the products of the
Renaissance; and, although Trissino's work is poor in invention and
without any original poetical coloring, yet it helps one to understand
better what were the conditions of mind in the 16th century.
Lyric poetry was certainly not one of the kinds that rose to any
great height in the 16th century. Originality was entirely wanting,
since it seemed in that century as if nothing better could be done than
to copy Petrarch. Still, even in this style there were some vigorous
poets. Monsignore
Giovanni Guidiccioni of
Lucca
(1500–1541) showed that he had a generous heart. In fine sonnets he
expressed his grief for the sad state of his country.
Francesco Molza of
Modena
(1489–1544), learned in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, wrote in a graceful
style and with spirit.
Giovanni della Casa (1503–1556) and
Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), although Petrarchists, were elegant. Even
Michelangelo was at times a Petrarchist, but his poems bear the stamp of
his extraordinary and original genius. And a good many ladies are to be
placed near these poets, such as
Vittoria Colonna (loved by Michelangelo),
Veronica Gambara,
Tullia d'Aragona, and
Giulia Gonzaga, poets of great delicacy, and superior in genius to
many literary men of their time.
Many tragedies were written in the 16th century, but they are all
weak. The cause of this was the moral and religious indifference of the
Italians, the lack of strong passions and vigorous characters. The first
to occupy the tragic stage was Trissino with his Sofonisba,
following the rules of the art most scrupulously, but written in sickly
verses, and without warmth of feeling. The Oreste and the
Rosmunda of
Giovanni Rucellai were no better, nor
Luigi Alamanni's
Antigone.
Sperone Speroni in his
Canace and
Giraldi Cintio in his
Orbecche tried to become innovators in tragic literature, but
provoked criticisms of grotesquerie and debate over the role of decorum.
They were often seen as inferior to the Torrismondo of
Torquato Tasso, specially remarkable for the choruses, which
sometimes remind one of the chorus of the
Greek tragedies.
The Italian comedy of the 16th century was almost entirely modelled
on the Latin comedy. They were almost always alike in the plot, in the
characters of the old man, of the servant, of the waiting-maid; and the
argument was often the same. Thus the Lucidi of
Agnolo Firenzuola, and the Vecchio amoroso of
Donato Giannotti were modelled on comedies by
Plautus,
as were the Sporta by
Giambattista Gelli, the Marito by
Lodovico Dolce, and others. There appear to be only three writers
who should be distinguished among the many who wrote comedies:
Machiavelli, Ariosto, and
Giovan Maria Cecchi. In his Mandragola Machiavelli, unlike
the others, composed a comedy of character, creating personalities that
seem living even now because he copied them from reality with a finely
observant eye. Ariosto, on the other hand, was distinguished for his
picture of the habits of his time, and especially of those of the
Ferrarese nobles, rather than for the objective delineation of
character. Lastly, Cecchi left in his comedies a treasure of spoken
language, which lets us, in a wonderful way, acquaint ourselves with
that age. The notorious
Pietro Aretino might also be included in the list of the best
writers of comedy.
The 15th century included humorous poetry.
Antonio Cammelli, surnamed the Pistoian, is specially deserving of
notice, because of his pungent bonhomie, as
Sainte-Beuve called it. But it was
Francesco Berni who and satire, carried this kind of literature to
perfection in the 16th century. From him the style has been called
bernesque poetry. In the Berneschi we find nearly the same phenomenon
that we already noticed with regard to Orlando furioso. It was
art for arts sake that inspired and moved Berni to write, as well as
Antonio Francesco Grazzini, called Il Lasca, and other lesser
writers. It may be said that there is nothing in their poetry; and it is
true that they specially delight in praising low and disgusting things
and in jeering at what is noble and serious. Bernesque poetry is the
clearest reflection of that religious and moral scepticism that was a
characteristic of Italian social life in the 16th century, and that
showed itself in most of the works of that period—a scepticism that
stopped the religious
Reformation in Italy, and which in its turn was an effect of
historical conditions. The Berneschi, and especially Berni himself,
sometimes assumed a satirical tone. But theirs could not be called true
satire. Pure satirists, on the other hand, were
Antonio Vinciguerra, a Venetian, Lodovico Alamanni and Ariosto, the
last superior to the others for the
Attic elegance of his style, and for a certain frankness, passing
into malice, which is particularly interesting when the poet talks of
himself.
In the 16th century there were not a few
didactic works. In his poem Le Api Giovanni Rucellai
approaches the perfection of
Virgil.
His style is clear and light, and he adds interest to his book by
frequent allusions to the events of the time. The most important
didactic work, however, is Castiglione's Cortigiano, in which he
imagines a discussion in the palace of the dukes of
Urbino
between knights and ladies as to what gifts a perfect
courtier requires. This book is valuable as an illustration of the
intellectual and moral state of the highest Italian society in the first
half of the 16th century.
Of the novelists of the 16th century, the two most important were
Grazzini, and
Matteo Bandello; the former as playful and bizarre as the latter is
grave and solemn. Bandello was a
Dominican
friar and a bishop, but that notwithstanding his novels were very
loose in subject, and that he often holds up the ecclesiastics of his
time to ridicule.
At a time when admiration for qualities of style, the desire for
classical elegance, was so strong as in the 16th century, much attention
was naturally paid to translating Latin and Greek authors. Among the
very numerous translations of the time those of the
Aeneid
and of the Pastorals of
Longus
the Sophist by
Annibale Caro are still famous; as are also the translations of
Ovid's
Metamorphoses by
Giovanni Andrea dell' Anguillara, of
Apuleius's
The Golden Ass by Firenzuola, and of
Plutarch's Lives and Moralia by Marcello Adriani.
The 17th century: A period of decadence
From about 1559 began a period of decadence in Italian literature.
Tommaso Campanella was tortured by the
Inquisition, and
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake.
Cesare Balbo says that, if the happiness of the masses consists in
peace without industry, if the nobility's consists in titles without
power, if princes are satisfied by acquiescence in their rule without
real independence, without sovereignty, if literary men and artists are
content to write, paint and build with the approbation of their
contemporaries, but to the contempt of posterity, if a whole nation is
happy in ease without dignity and the tranquil progress of corruption,
then no period ever was so happy for Italy as the 140 years from the
Peace of Cateau Cambrésis to the
War of the Spanish Succession. This period is known in the history
of Italian literature as the Secentismo. Its writers resorted to
exaggeration; they tried to produce effect with what in art is called
mannerism or barocchism. Writers vied with one another in their use
of metaphors, affectations,
hyperbole and other oddities and draw it off from the substantial
element of thought.
Marinism
At the head of the school of the Secentisti was
Giambattista Marino of Naples, born in 1569, especially known for
his long poem, Adone. He used the most extravagant metaphors, the
most forced antitheses and the most far-fetched conceits. He strings
antitheses together one after the other, so that they fill up whole
stanzas without a break.
Claudio Achillini of Bologna followed in Marino's footsteps, but his
peculiarities were even more extravagant. Almost all the poets of the
17th century were more or less infected with Marinism.
Alessandro Guidi, although he does not attain to the exaggeration of
his master, is bombastic and turgid, while
Fulvio Testi is artificial and affected. Yet Guidi as well as Testi
felt the influence of another poet,
Gabriello Chiabrera, born at
Savona
in 1552. Enamoured of the Greeks, he made new metres, especially in
imitation of
Pindar,
treating of religious, moral, historical, and amatory subjects.
Chiabrera, though elegant in form, attempts to disguise a lack of
substance with poetical ornaments of every kind. Nevertheless,
Chiabrera's school marks an improvement; and sometimes he shows lyrical
capacities, wasted on his literary environment.
Arcadia
The belief arose that it would be necessary to change the form in
order to restore literature. In 1690 the
Academy of Arcadia was instituted. Its founders were
Giovan Maria Crescimbeni and
Gian Vincenzo Gravina. The Arcadia was so called because its
chief aim was to imitate the simplicity of the ancient shepherds who
were supposed to have lived in
Arcadia in the golden age. As the Secentisti erred by an
overweening desire for novelty, so the Arcadians proposed to return to
the fields of truth, always singing of subjects of pastoral simplicity.
This was merely the substitution of a new artifice for the old one; and
they fell from bombast into effeminacy, from the hyperbolical into the
petty, from the turgid into the over-refined. The Arcadia was a
reaction against Secentismo, but a reaction that only succeeded
in impoverishing still further and completely withering Italian
literature. The poems of the Arcadians fill many volumes, and are made
up of
sonnets,
madrigals,
canzonette and
blank verse. The one who most distinguished himself among the
sonneteers was
Felice Zappi. Among the authors of songs,
Paolo Rolli was illustrious.
Innocenzo Frugoni was more famous than all the others, a man of
fruitful imagination but of shallow intellect. The members of the
Arcadia was almost exclusively men, but at least one woman,
Maria Antonia Scalera Stellini, managed to be elected on poetical
merits.
Vincenzo da Filicaja, a Florentine, had a lyric talent, particularly
in the songs about
Vienna
besieged by the
Turks, which raised him above the vices of the time; but even in him
we see clearly the rhetorical artifice and false conceits. In general
all the lyric poetry of the 17th century had the same defects, but in
different degrees. These defects may be summed up as absence of feeling
and exaggeration of form.
The
independent thinkers
Whilst the political and social conditions in Italy in the 17th
century made it appear that every light of intelligence was
extinguished, some strong and independent thinkers, such as
Bernardino Telesio,
Lucilio Vanini, Bruno and Campanella turned philosophical inquiry
into fresh channels, and opened the way for the scientific conquests of
Galileo Galilei, the great contemporary of
René Descartes in France and of
Francis Bacon in England. Galileo was not only a great man of
science, but also occupied a conspicuous place in the history of
letters. A devoted student of Ariosto, he seemed to transfuse into his
prose the qualities of that great poet: clear and frank freedom of
expression, precision and ease, and at the same time elegance. Galileo's
prose is in perfect antithesis to the poetry of his time and is regarded
by some as the best prose that Italy has ever had.
Another symptom of revival, a sign of rebellion against the vileness
of Italian social life, is given us in
satire,
particularly that of
Salvator Rosa and
Alessandro Tassoni. Rosa, born in 1615 near Naples, was a painter, a
musician and a poet. As a poet he mourned the sad condition of his
country, and gave vent to his feeling (as another satire-writer,
Giuseppe Giusti, said) in generosi rabbuffi. He was a
precursor of the patriotic literature that inaugurated the revival of
the 18th century. Tassoni showed independent judgment in the midst of
universal servility, and his Secchia Rapita proved that he was an
eminent writer. This is an heroic comic poem, which is at the same time
an epic and a personal satire. He was bold enough to attack the
Spaniards in his Filippiche, in which he urged Duke
Carlo Emanuele of Savoy to persist in the war against them.
Agriculture
Paganino Bonafede in the Tesoro de rustici gave many precepts
in agriculture, beginning that kind of georgic poetry later fully
developed by
Alamanni in his Coltivazione, by
Girolamo Baruffaldi in the Canapajo, by
Rucellai in Le api, by
Bartolomeo Lorenzi in the Coltivazione de' monti, and by
Giambattista Spolverini in the Coltivazione del riso.
The revival in the 18th century: the Age of Reason and Reform
In the 18th century, the political condition of Italy began to
improve, under
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, and his successors. These princes
were influenced by philosophers, who in their turn felt the influence of
a general movement of ideas at large in many parts of Europe, sometimes
called
The Enlightenment.
History and society: Vico, Muratori and Beccaria
Giambattista Vico showed the awakening of historical consciousness
in Italy. In his Scienza nuova, he investigated the laws
governing the progress of the human race, and according to which events
develop. From the psychological study of man he tried to infer the
comune natura delle nazioni, i.e., the universal laws of history, by
which civilizations rise, flourish and fall. From the same scientific
spirit that inspired Vico came a different kind of investigation, that
of the sources of Italian civil and literary history.
Lodovico Antonio Muratori, after having collected in his Rerum
Italicarum scriptores the
chronicles, biographies, letters and diaries of Italian history from
500 to 1500, and having discussed the most obscure historical questions
in the Antiquitates Italicae medii aevi, wrote the Annali
d'Italia, minutely narrating facts derived from authentic sources.
Muratori's associates in his historical research were
Scipione Maffei of Verona and
Apostolo Zeno of Venice. In his Verona illustrata Maffei left
a treasure of learning that was also an excellent historical monograph.
Zeno added much to the erudition of literary history, both in his
Dissertazioni Vossiane and in his notes to the Biblioteca
dell'eloquenza italiana of Monsignore
Giusto Fontanini.
Girolamo Tiraboschi and Count
Giovanni Maria Mazzuchelli of Brescia devoted themselves to literary
history.
While the new spirit of the times led to the investigation of
historical sources, it also encouraged inquiry into the mechanism of
economic and social laws.
Francesco Galiani wrote on currency;
Gaetano Filangieri wrote a Scienza della legislazione.
Cesare Beccaria, in his Trattato dei delitti e delle pene,
made a contribution to the reform of the penal system and promoted the
abolition of
torture.
Metastasio and the melodramma
The reforming movement sought to throw off the conventional and the
artificial, and to return to truth.
Apostolo Zeno and
Metastasio (the Arcadian name for Pietro Trapassi, a native of Rome)
had endeavoured to make
melodrama and reason compatible. Metastasio gave fresh expression to
the affections, a natural turn to the dialogue and some interest to the
plot; if he had not fallen into constant unnatural overrefinement and
mawkishness, and into frequent
anachronisms, he might have been considered the first dramatic
reformer of the 18th century.
Carlo Goldoni
Carlo Goldoni, a Venetian, overcame resistance from the old popular
form of comedy, with the masks of
pantalone, of the doctor,
harlequin,
Brighella, etc., and created the comedy of character, following
Molière's
example. Goldoni's characters are often superficial, but he wrote lively
dialogue. He produced over 150 comedies, and had no time to polish and
perfect his works; but for a comedy of character we must go straight
from Machiavelli's Mandragola to him. Goldoni's dramatic aptitude
is illustrated by the fact that he took nearly all his types from
Venetian society, yet managed to give them an inexhaustible variety.
Many of his comedies were written in
Venetian dialect.
Giuseppe Parini
The leading figure of the literary revival of the 18th century was
Giuseppe Parini. Born in a
Lombard
village in 1729, he was educated at Milan, and as a youth was known
among the Arcadian poets by the name of Darisbo Elidonio. Even as an
Arcadian, Parini showed originality. In a collection of poems he
published at twenty-three years of age, under the name of Ripano
Eupilino, the poet shows his faculty of taking his scenes from real
life, and in his satirical pieces he exhibits a spirit of outspoken
opposition to his own times. These poems, though derivative, indicate a
resolute determination to challenge the literary conventionalities.
Improving on the poems of his youth, he showed himself an innovator in
his lyrics, rejecting at once Petrarchism, Secentismo and
Arcadia, the three maladies that he thought had weakened Italian art in
the preceding centuries. In the Odi the satirical note is already
heard, but it comes out more strongly in Del giorno, in which he
imagines himself to be teaching a young Milanese patrician all the
habits and ways of gallant life; he shows up all its ridiculous
frivolities, and with delicate irony unmasks the futilities of
aristocratic habits. Dividing the day into four parts, the Mattino,
the Mezzogiorno, the Vespero, and the Notte, he
describes the trifles of which they were made up, and the book thus
assumes major social and historical value. As an artist, going straight
back to classical forms, aspiring to imitate Virgil and Dante, he opened
the way to the school of
Vittorio Alfieri,
Ugo Foscolo and
Vincenzo Monti. As a work of art, the Giorno is wonderful for
its delicate irony. The verse has new harmonies; sometimes it is a
little hard and broken, as a protest against the Arcadian monotony.
The linguistic
purism
Whilst the most burning political passions were raging, and whilst
the most brilliant men of genius in the new classical and patriotic
school were purists at the height of their influence, a question arose
about
purism of language. In the second half of the 18th century the
Italian language was specially full of French expressions. There was
great indifference about fitness, still more about elegance of style.
Prose needed to be restored for the sake of national dignity, and it was
believed that this could not be done except by going back to the writers
of the 14th century, to the aurei trecentisti, as they were
called, or else to the classics of Italian literature. One of the
promoters of the new school was
Antonio Cesari of Verona, who republished ancient authors, and
brought out a new edition, with additions, of the Vocabolario della
Crusca. He wrote a dissertation Sopra lo stato presente della
lingua italiana, and endeavoured to establish the supremacy of
Tuscan and of the three great writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
In accordance with that principle he wrote several books, taking pains
to copy the trecentisti as closely as possible. But patriotism in
Italy has always had something municipal in it; so to this Tuscan
supremacy, proclaimed and upheld by Cesari, there was opposed a Lombard
school, which would know nothing of Tuscan, and with Dante's
De vulgari eloquentia returned to the idea of the lingua
illustre.
This was an old question, largely and bitterly argued in the
Cinquecento (16th century) by
Varchi,
Muzio,
Lodovico Castelvetro,
Speroni,
and others. Now the question was raised afresh. At the head of the
Lombard school were Monti and his son-in-law Count
Giulio Perticari. This caused Monti to write Pro pasta di alcune
correzioni ed aggiunte al vocabolario della Crusca, in which he
attacked the Tuscanism of the
Crusca, but in a graceful and easy style, so as to form a prose that
is one of the most beautiful in Italian literature. Perticari, whose
intellect was inferior, narrowed and exasperated the question in two
treatises, Degli scrittori del Trecento and Dell'amor patrio
di Dante. The dispute about language took its place beside literary
and political disputes, and all Italy took part in it:
Basilio Puoti at Naples,
Paolo Costa in the
Romagna,
Marc Antonio Parenti at
Modena,
Salvatore Betti at Rome,
Giovanni Gherardini in Lombardy,
Luigi Fornaciari at Lucca, and
Vincenzo Nannucci at Florence.
A patriot, a classicist and a purist all at once was
Pietro Giordani, born in 1774; he was almost a compendium of the
literary movement of the time. His whole life was a battle for liberty.
Learned in Greek and Latin authors, and in the Italian trecentisti,
he left only a few writings, but they were carefully elaborated in point
of style, and his prose was greatly admired in its time. Giordani closes
the literary epoch of the classicists.
Minor Writers
Gasparo Gozzi's satire was less elevated, but directed towards the
same end as Parini's. In his Osservatore, something like
Joseph Addison's Spectator, in his Gazzetta veneta,
and in the Mondo morale, by means of allegories and novelties he
hit the vices with a delicate touch, introducing a practical moral.
Gozzi's satire has some slight resemblance in style to
Lucian's.
Gozzi's prose is graceful and lively, but imitates the writers of the
14th century. Another satirical writer of the first half of the 18th
century was
Giuseppe Baretti of Turin. In a journal called the Frusta
letteraria he mercilessly criticized the works then being published
in Italy. He had learnt much by travelling; his long stay in Britain had
contributed to the independent character of his mind. The Frusta
was the first book of independent criticism directed particularly
against the Arcadians and the pedants.
In 1782 was born
Giambattista Niccolini. In literature he was a classicist; in
politics he was a
Ghibelline, a rare exception in
Guelph Florence, his birthplace. In imitating
Aeschylus, as well as in writing the Discorsi sulla tragedia
greca, and on the Sublime Michelangelo, Niccolini displayed
his passionate devotion to ancient literature. In his tragedies he set
himself free from the excessive rigidity of Alfieri, and partly
approached the English and German tragic authors. He nearly always chose
political subjects, striving to keep alive in his compatriots the love
of liberty. Such are
Nabucco,
Antonio Foscarini,
Giovanni da Procida,
Lodovico il Moro and others. He assailed papal Rome in
Arnaldo da Brescia, a long tragic piece, not suited for acting,
and epic rather than dramatic. Niccolini's tragedies show a rich lyric
vein rather than dramatic genius. He has the merit of having vindicated
liberal ideas, and of having opened a new path to Italian tragedy.
Carlo Botta, born in 1766, was a spectator of French spoliation in
Italy and of the overbearing rule of Napoleon. He wrote a History of
Italy from 1789 to 1814; and later continued Guicciardini's
History up to 1789. He wrote after the manner of the Latin authors,
trying to imitate Livy, putting together long and sonorous periods in a
style that aimed at being like Boccaccio's, caring little about what
constitutes the critical material of history, only intent on declaiming
his academic prose for his country's benefit. Botta wanted to be
classical in a style that could no longer be so, and hence he failed
completely to attain his literary goal. His fame is only that of a man
of a noble and patriotic heart. Not so bad as the two histories of Italy
is that of the Guerra dell'indipendenza americana.
Close to Botta comes
Pietro Colletta, a Neapolitan born nine years after him. He also in
his Storia del reame di Napoli dal 1734 al 1825 had the idea of
defending the independence and liberty of Italy in a style borrowed from
Tacitus;
and he succeeded rather better than Botta. He has a rapid, brief,
nervous style, which makes his book attractive reading. But it is said
that
Pietro Giordani and
Gino Capponi corrected it for him.
Lazzaro Papi of Lucca, author of the Commentari della rivoluzione
francese dal 1789 al 1814, was not altogether unlike Botta and
Colletta. He also was an historian in the classical style, and treats
his subject with patriotic feeling; but as an artist he perhaps excels
the other two.
The Revolution: Patriotism and classicism
The ideas behind the
French Revolution of 1789 gave a special direction to Italian
literature in the second half of the 18th century. Love of liberty and
desire for equality created a literature aimed at national objects,
seeking to improve the condition of the country by freeing it from the
double yoke of political and religious despotism. The Italians who
aspired to political redemption believed it inseparable from an
intellectual revival, and thought that this could only be effected by a
reunion with ancient classicism. This was a repetition of what had
occurred in the first half of the 15th century.
Vittorio Alfieri
Patriotism and classicism were the two principles that inspired the
literature that began with
Vittorio Alfieri. He worshipped the Greek and Roman idea of popular
liberty in arms against tyranny. He took the subjects of his tragedies
from the history of these nations and made his ancient characters talk
like revolutionists of his time. The Arcadian school, with its verbosity
and triviality, was rejected. His aim was to be brief, concise, strong
and bitter, to aim at the sublime as opposed to the lowly and pastoral.
He saved literature from Arcadian vacuities, leading it towards a
national end, and armed himself with patriotism and classicism.
Vincenzo Monti
Vincenzo Monti was a patriot too, but in his own way. He had no one
deep feeling that ruled him, or rather the mobility of his feelings is
his characteristic; but each of these was a new form of patriotism that
took the place of an old one. He saw danger to his country in the French
Revolution, and wrote the Pellegrino apostolico, the
Bassvilliana and the Feroniade; Napoleon's victories caused
him to write the Pronreteo and the Musagonia; in his
Fanatismo and his Superstizione he attacked the
papacy; afterwards he sang the praises of the
Austrians.
Thus every great event made him change his mind, with a readiness that
might seem incredible, but is easily explained. Monti was, above
everything, an artist. Everything else in him was liable to change.
Knowing little Greek, he succeeded in translating the Iliad in a
way remarkable for its Homeric feeling, and in his Bassvilliana
he is on a level with Dante. In him classical poetry seemed to revive in
all its florid grandeur.
Ugo Foscolo
Ugo Foscolo was an eager patriot, inspired by classical models. The
Lettere di Jacopo Ortis, inspired by
Goethe's
Werther,
are a love story with a mixture of patriotism; they contain a violent
protest against the
Treaty of Campo Formio, and an outburst from Foscolo's own heart
about an unhappy love-affair of his. His passions were sudden and
violent. To one of these passions Ortis owed its origin, and it
is perhaps the best and most sincere of all his writings. He is still
sometimes pompous and rhetorical, but less so than, for example, in the
lectures Dell'origine e dell'ufficio della letteratura. On the
whole, Foscolo's prose is turgid and affected, and reflects the
character of a man who always tried to pose in dramatic attitudes. This
was indeed the defect of the
Napoleonic epoch; there was a horror of anything common, simple,
natural; everything must assume some heroic shape. In Foscolo this
tendency was excessive. The Sepolcri, which is his best poem, was
prompted by high feeling, and the mastery of versification shows
wonderful art. There are most obscure passages in it, where it seems
even the author did not form a clear idea. He left incomplete three
hymns to the
Graces, in which he sang of beauty as the source of courtesy, of all
high qualities and of happiness. Among his prose works a high place
belongs to his translation of the
Sentimental Journey of
Laurence Sterne, a writer by whom Foscolo was deeply affected. He
went as an exile to England, and died there. He wrote for English
readers some Essays on Petrarch and on the texts of the
Decamerone and of Dante, which are remarkable for when they were
written, and which may have initiated a new kind of literary criticism
in Italy. Foscolo is still greatly admired, and not without reason. The
men who made the
revolution of 1848 were brought up on his work.
19th century: Romanticism and the Risorgimento
The romantic school had as its organ the Conciliatore
established in 1818 at Milan, on the staff of which were
Silvio Pellico,
Lodovico di Breme,
Giovile Scalvini,
Tommaso Grossi,
Giovanni Berchet,
Samuele Biava, and
Alessandro Manzoni. All were influenced by the ideas that,
especially in Germany, constituted the movement called
Romanticism. In Italy the course of literary reform took another
direction.
Alessandro Manzoni
The main instigator of the reform was Manzoni. He formulated the
objects of the new school, saying that it aspired to try to discover and
express il vero storico and il vero morale, not only as an
end, but as the widest and eternal source of the beautiful. It is
realism in art that characterizes Italian literature from Manzoni
onwards. The Promessi Sposi (The
Betrothed) is the work that has made him immortal. No doubt the idea
of the
historical novel came to him from Sir
Walter Scott[citation
needed], but Manzoni succeeded in something more
than an historical novel in the narrow meaning of that word; he created
an eminently realistic work of art. The reader's attention is entirely
fixed on the powerful objective creation of the characters. From the
greatest to the least they have a wonderful verisimilitude. Manzoni is
able to unfold a character in all particulars and to follow it through
its different phases. Don Abbondio and Renzo are as perfect as
Azzeccagarbugli and Il Sarto. Manzoni dives down into the innermost
recesses of the human heart, and draws from it the most subtle
psychological reality. In this his greatness lies, which was recognized
first by his companion in genius, Goethe. As a poet too he had gleams of
genius, especially in the Napoleonic ode, Il Cinque Maggio, and
where he describes human affections, as in some stanzas of the Inni
and in the chorus of the Adelchi.
Giacomo Leopardi
The great poet of the age was
Giacomo Leopardi, born thirteen years after Manzoni at
Recanati, of a patrician family. He became so familiar with Greek
authors that he used afterwards to say that the Greek mode of thought
was more clear and living to his mind than the Latin or even the
Italian. Solitude, sickness, and domestic tyranny prepared him for
profound melancholy. He passed into complete religious scepticism, from
which he sought rest in art. Everything is terrible and grand in his
poems, which are the most agonizing cry in modern literature, uttered
with a solemn quietness that at once elevates and terrifies us.[citation
needed] He was also an admirable prose writer. In
his Operette Morali—dialogues and discourses marked by a cold and
bitter smile at human destinies that freezes the reader—the clearness of
style, the simplicity of language and the depth of conception are such
that perhaps he is not only the greatest lyrical poet since Dante, but
also one of the most perfect writers of prose that Italian literature
has had.
History and politics in the 19th
As realism in art gained ground, the positive method in criticism
kept pace with it. History returned to its spirit of learned research,
as is shown in such works as the Archivio storico italiano,
established at Florence by
Giampietro Vieusseux, the Storia d'Italia nel medio evo by
Carlo Troya, a remarkable treatise by Manzoni himself, Sopra
alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia, and the very fine
history of the
Vespri siciliani by
Michele Amari. Alongside the great artists Leopardi and Manzoni,
alongside the learned scholars, there was also in the first half of the
19th century a patriotic literature. Vieusseux had a distinct political
object when in 1820 he established the monthly review Antologia.
His Archivio storico italiano (1842) was, under a different form,
a continuation of the Antologia, which was suppressed in 1833
owing to the action of the Russian government. Florence was in those
days the asylum of all the Italian exiles, and these exiles met and
shook hands in Vieusseux's rooms, where there was more literary than
political talk, but where one thought and one only animated all minds,
the thought of Italy.
The literary movement that preceded and was contemporary with the
political revolution of 1848 may be said to be represented by four
writers -
Giuseppe Giusti,
Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi,
Vincenzo Gioberti and
Cesare Balbo. Giusti wrote
epigrammatic satires in popular language. In incisive phrases he
scourged the enemies of Italy. He was a telling political writer, but a
mediocre poet. Guerrazzi had a great reputation and great influence, but
his historical novels, though avidly read before 1848, were soon
forgotten. Gioberti, a powerful
polemical
writer, had a noble heart and a great mind; his philosophical works are
now as good as dead, but the Primato morale e civile degli Italiani
will last as an important document of the times, and the Gesuita
moderno is the most tremendous indictment of the
Jesuits ever written. Balbo was an earnest student of history, and
made history useful for politics. Like Gioberti in his first period,
Balbo was zealous for the civil papacy, and for a federation of the
Italian states presided over by it. His Sommario della storia
d'Italia is an excellent epitome.
Between the 19th and 20th century
After the Risorgimento the political literature becomes less
important. The first part of this period is characterized by two
divergent trends of literature that both opposed Romanticism.
The first trend is the
Scapigliatura, that attempted to rejuvenate Italian culture
through foreign influences, notably from the poetry of
Charles Baudelaire and the works of American writer
Edgar Allan Poe. The second trend is represented by
Giosuè Carducci, a dominant figure of this period, fiery opponent of
the Romantics and restorer of the ancient metres and spirit who, great
as a poet, was scarcely less distinguished as a literary critic and
historian.
The influence of
Emile Zola is evident in the
Verismo.
Luigi Capuana but most notably
Giovanni Verga and were its main exponents and the authors of a
verismo manifesto. Capuana published the novel Giacinta,
generally regarded as the "manifesto" of Italian verismo. Unlike French
naturalism, which was based on
positivistic ideals, Verga and Capuana rejected claims of the
scientific nature and social usefulness of the movement.
Instead Decadentism was based mainly on the
Decadent style of some artists and authors of
France
and
England about the end of the 19th century. The main authors of the
Italian version were
Antonio Fogazzaro,
Giovanni Pascoli, best known by his Myricae and Poemetti,
and
Gabriele D'Annunzio. Although differing stylistically, they
championed idiosyncrasy and irrationality against scientific
rationalism. Gabriele d'Annunzio produced original work in poetry, drama
and fiction, of extraordinary quality. He began with some lyrics
distinguished no less by their exquisite beauty of form than by their
licence, and these characteristics reappeared in a long series of poems,
plays and novels.
Edmondo de Amicis is better known for his moral works and travels
than for his fiction. Of the women novelists,
Matilde Serao and
Grazia Deledda became popular.
Minor writers
Giovanni Prati and
Aleardo Aleardi continue romantic traditions. Other classical poets
are
Giuseppe Chiarini,
Arturo Graf,
Guido Mazzoni and
Giovanni Marradi, of whom the two last named may perhaps be regarded
as special disciples of Carducci.
Enrico Panzacchi was at heart still a romantic.
Olindo Guerrini (who wrote under the pseudonym of Lorenzo
Stecchetti) is the chief representative of verismo in poetry,
and, though his early works obtained a succès de scandale, he is
the author of many lyrics of intrinsic value.
Alfredo Baccelli and
Mario Rapisardi are epic poets of distinction.
Felice Cavallotti is the author of the stirring Marcia de Leonida.
Among dialect writers, the great Roman poet
Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli found numerous successors, such as
Renato Fucini (Pisa) and
Cesare Pascarella (Rome). Among the women poets,
Ada
Negri, with her socialistic Fatalità and Tempeste,
achieved a great reputation; and others, such as
Annie Vivanti, were highly esteemed in Italy.
Among the dramatists,
Pietro Cossa in tragedy,
Ferdinando Martini, and
Paolo Ferrari in comedy, represent the older schools. More modern
methods were adopted by
Giuseppe Giacosa.
In fiction, the historical romance fell into disfavour, though
Emilio de Marchi produced some good examples. The novel of intrigue
was cultivated by
Salvatore Farina.
20th century
and beyond
Important early 20th century writers include
Italo Svevo, the author of La coscienza di Zeno (1923), and
Luigi Pirandello (winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature), who
explored the shifting nature of reality in his prose fiction and such
plays as Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Six
Characters in Search of an Author, 1921)
Poetry was represented by the
Crepuscolari and the
Futurists; the foremost member of the latter group was
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Leading
Modernist poets from later in the century include
Salvatore Quasimodo (winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature),
Giuseppe Ungaretti,
Umberto Saba, who won fame for his collection of poems Il
canzoniere, and
Eugenio Montale (winner of the 1975
Nobel Prize in Literature). They were described by critics as "hermeticists".
Neorealism was developed by
Alberto Moravia (e.g.
Il conformista, 1951),
Primo Levi, who documented his experiences in
Auschwitz in Se questo è un uomo (If
This Is a Man, 1947) and other books,
Cesare Pavese (e.g.
The Moon and the Bonfires (1949),
Corrado Alvaro and
Elio Vittorini.
Dino Buzzati wrote fantastic and allegorical fiction that critics
have compared to
Kafka and
Beckett.
Italo Calvino also ventured into fantasy in the trilogy I nostri
antenati (Our
Ancestors, 1952–1959) and
post-modernism in the novel Se una notte d'inverno un
viaggiatore... (If
on a Winter's Night a Traveller, 1979).
Carlo Emilio Gadda was the author of the experimental Quer
pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957).
Pier Paolo Pasolini was a controversial poet and novelist.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote only one novel,
Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958), but it is one of the
most famous in Italian literature; it deals with the life of a
Sicilian
nobleman in the 19th century.
Leonardo Sciascia came to public attention with his novel
Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl, 1961),
exposing the extent of
Mafia corruption in modern Sicilian society. More recently,
Umberto Eco became internationally successful with the Medieval
detective story Il nome della rosa (The
Name of the Rose, 1980).
References
-
^ Beryl Smalley,
Review of Carlo Delcorno, Giordano da Pisa e l'antica
predicazione volgare (Florence: Olschki, 1975),
The English Historical Review, 91:359 (1976), pp.
412–413.
-
^ Craig W.
Kallendorf, introduction to Humanist Educational Treatises,
edited and translated by Craig W. Kallendorf (Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London England: The I Tatti Renaissance
Library, 2002) p. vii.
-
^
Franco Cardili (historical)
-
^
Early Italian humanism,
which in many respects continued the grammatical and
rhetorical traditions of the
Middle Ages, not merely provided the old
Trivium with a new and more ambitious name (Studia
humanitatis), but also increased its actual scope,
content and significance in the curriculum of the schools
and universities and in its own extensive literary
production. The studia hunanitatis excluded logic,
but they added to the traditional grammar and rhetoric not
only history, Greek, and moral philosophy, but also made
poetry, once a sequel of grammar and rhetoric, the most
important member of the whole group. —Paul Oskar Kristeller,
Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), p. 178.
See also Kristeller's
Renaissance Thought I, "Humanism and Scholasticism In the
Italian Renaissance", Byzantion 17 (1944–45), pp. 346–74.
Reprinted in Renaissance Thought (New York: Harper
Torchbooks), 1961.
-
^ They were
Innocent VII,
Nicholas V,
Pius II,
Sixtus IV, and
Leo X. Innocent VII, patron of Leonardo Bruni, is considered
the first Humanist Pope. See
James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (New
York: Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, 1990), p. 49;
for the others, see their respective entries in Sir John Hale's
Concise Encyclopaedia of the Italian Renaissance (Oxford
University Press, 1981).
-
^ See Humanist
Educational Treatises, (2001) pp. 126–259. This volume (pp.
92–125) contains an essay by
Leonardo Bruni, entitled "The Study of Literature", on the
education of girls.
This
article incorporates text from a publication now in the
public domain: Chisholm,
Hugh, ed. (1911).
Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Bibliography
Further reading
Important German works, besides Gaspary, are those of Wilse and
Percopo (illustrated; Leipzig, 1899), and of
Tommaso Casini (in Grober's Grundr. der rom. Phil., Strasbourg,
1896–1899).
English students are referred to
John Addington Symonds's Renaissance in Italy (especially,
but not exclusively, vols. iv. and v.; new ed., London, 1902), and to
Richard Garnett's History of Italian Literature (London,
1898).
A Short History of Italian Literature, by
J. H. Whitfield (1969,
Pelican Books)
Original
texts and criticism
- De Sanctis, F., Storia della letteratura italiana.
Napoli, Morano, 1870
-
Gardner, E. G.,
The National Idea in Italian Literature, Manchester, 1921
- Momigliano, A., Storia della letteratura italiana.
Messina-Milano, Principato, 1936
- Sapegno, N., Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana.
La Nuova Italia, 1936–47
- Croce, B., La letteratura italiana per saggi storicamente
disposti. Laterza, 1956–60
- Russo, L., Compendio storico della letteratura italiana.
Messina-Firenze, D'Anna, 1961
- Petronio, G., Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana.
Palermo, Palumbo, 1968
- Asor Rosa, A., Sintesi di storia della letteratura italiana.
Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1986
- AA.VV., Antologia della poesia italiana, ed. C. Segre and
C. Ossola. Torino, Einaudi, 1997
- De Rienzo, Giorgio, Breve storia della letteratura italiana.
Milano, Tascabili Bompiani, 2006 [1997],
ISBN 88-452-4815-1
- Giudice, A., Bruni, G., Problemi e scrittori della
letteratura italiana. Torino, 1973
- Bruni F., Testi e documenti. Torino, UTET, 1984
- Bruni, F. L'Italiano nelle regioni. Torino, UTET, 1997
- Ferroni, G, Storia della letteratura italiana, Milano,
Mondadori, 2006
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