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ITALY (POETRY.) 



other poem, Del Reggimento e de 1 Costumi delle 

 Donne, also a moral and didactic poem. Fazio degli 

 Uberti wrote, at the same period, his Dittamondo a 

 system of astronomy and geography in verse, in 

 which Dante served him as a model. Without dwell- 

 ing on the less important lyrical poets, Benuccio 

 Salirabeni, Bindo Bonichi, Antonio da Ferrara, Fran- 

 cesco degli Albizzi, Sennuccio del Bene, a friend of 

 Petrarca, we come immediately to the latter. (See 

 Petrarca.) His love did not, like Dante's, inspire 

 the idea of one great poem, treating of all the acts 

 and efforts of man, and his religious conceptions were 

 still more strongly the ideal of love. His sonnets and 

 canzoni are very differently esteemed ; but if they 

 appear to many readers of our age frequently over- 

 strained, and sometimes devoid of the spirit and full- 

 ness of genuine poetry, to others they are a model of 

 lyrical excellence ; and his influence on the language 

 of Italian poetry has been very great, rendering it 

 softer and more flexible than Dante had left it. 

 Petrarca was an excellent scholar, and well acquainted 

 with Roman elegance, and he elevated his language 

 to the greatest purity, beauty, and melody. His fol- 

 lowers are innumerable. Among them, in the 

 fourteenth century, are the two Buonaccorsi da Mon- 

 temagno, and Franco Sacchetti, the writer of novelle. 

 The glory which Petrarca had acquired in a species 

 of poetry easy in itself, and so consonant with the 

 taste which his nation has preserved even to the pre- 

 sent time, and to the spirit of the age, was too enticing; 

 but the Petrarchists forgot that it is the spirit of their 

 master which gained him his fame, and not merely 

 the harmonious sound of his musical rhymes ; and they 

 poured forth innumerable poems, a comparison of 

 which with those of Petrarca could only raise him 

 still higher. Petrarca not only wrote lyrical poems, 

 but in his capitoli, or triumphs, approaches the 

 didactic. He composed also Latin poems, eclogues, 

 and an epic, Africa, celebrating his favourite hero, 

 Scipio, the latter of which obtained him the poetic 

 laurel, in the capitol, in Rome, and which so easily 

 do great poets mistake their own merits he himself 

 valued most, whilst he considered his lyrical poems of 

 little value, and in his old age wished that he had 

 not written them. Not less famous than Petrarca is 

 his friend Boccaccio. (See the article Boccaccio for 

 an account of his great service in the formation of 

 Italian prose.) The satirical sonnets of Pucci, the 

 didactic essay on agriculture by the Bolognese 

 Paganino Bonafede, and the Four Kingdoms of Love, 

 Satan, Vice, and Virtue, by his countryman Frederigo 

 Frezzi, under the title Quadriregno, an unsuccessful 

 imitation of Dante, belong also to this period. In 

 the fifteenth century, Giusto de' Conti first meets us 

 an imitator of Petrarca. In his sonnets he celebrates 

 the beautiful hand of his mistress, on which account 

 the whole collection is called La Bella Mano. About 

 1413, the barber Burchiello, at Florence, acquired 

 no little reputation by his peculiar, but, for us, un- 

 intelligible sonnets. The attempt of the painter and 

 architect, Leon Battista Alberti (somewhat later, 

 under Cosmo de' Medici), to compose hexameters 

 and pentameters in Italian, is worthy of mention. 

 Lorenzo de' Medici, after the deatli of his grand- 

 father (1464), the Pericles of the Florentine repub- 

 lic, was inspired by his passion for Lucretia Donati, 

 a noble Florentine lady, to imitate Petrarca ; yet he 

 did it with independence. He was the pupil of the 

 Platonist Marsiglio Ficino. Besides sonnets and 

 canzoni, we have capitoli, stanze, terzine, and car- 

 nival songs, by him. His Symposium, or the Drink- 

 ers (Beoni), a sportive imitation of Dante, describes 

 three journeys into a wine cellar. The most dis- 

 tinguished of the contemporaneous poets was Angelo 

 Ambrogini, called Poliziano, from the rmall village 



Montepulciano, who is celebrated also as a scholar 

 and philosopher. Besides a dramatic poem, Orfeo, 

 tfiere is a fragment by him, in beautiful stanzas, in 

 praise of Julian of Medici, on occasion of a tourna- 

 ment, exhibited by the brothers, at Florence. A 

 friend of his was the graceful amatory poet Girolamo 

 Benivieni. Of the three brothers Pulci, Bernardo 

 wrote two elegies, a poem on the passion of Christ, 

 and was the first who translated the eclogues of 

 Virgil into Italian. Luca was the author of the 

 Heroides, a poem in ottave rime, in which he cele- 

 brated, earlier, but not less beautifully than Polizi- 

 ano, a tournament of Lorenzo of Medici, a pastoral, 

 also in ottave rime, entitled Driadeo d'Amore, and 

 an epic poem of chivalry, Ciriff'o Calvaneo, which in 

 itself is of little value, and was left incomplete (Ber- 

 nardo Giambullari finished it after the death of the 

 poet), but which is remarkable as the commence- 

 ment of those ironical and serious poems of chivalry, 

 which, with the decline of chivalry and the poetry 

 of the middle ages, became natural, and, we might 

 almost say, necessary to the poetical spirit of the 

 Italians. Luigi, the most celebrated of the three, 

 owes his fame not to the whimsical sonnets in which 

 he and his friend, Matteo Franco, held each other 

 up to the laughter of Lorenzo and his guests (often 

 in the most indecent language), nor to his Beca da 

 Dicomano, &c., but to his Morgante Maggiore, by 

 which he became the predecessor of Ariosto, who, 

 however, surpassed him as much as he himself sur- 

 passed the first rude attempts of the fourteenth and 

 fifteenth centuries in this department, of which the 

 Buovo d'Antona, La Spagna Historiata,and La Regina 

 Ancroya, are the most known. The Membriano of 

 Francesco Cieco da Ferrara, which is not unworthy 

 to stand by the side of the Morgante, served to 

 amuse the Gonzaga, at Mantua ; but a more im- 

 mediate predecessor of Ariosto was Matteo Maria 

 Boiardo, author of the Orlando Innamorato, which at 

 first was not much relished by the Italians, on ac- 

 count of its gravity, as they had already become too 

 fond of irony in these epics of chivalry ; so much so, 

 that Boiardo, continued by Niccolo degli Agostini, 

 was entirely recast by Domenichi, and, at a later 

 period, by Berni. Contemporary with these epic 

 poets were the satirist Bern. Bellicioni, and number- 

 less Petrarchists, as Francesco Cei, Gasparo Visconti, 

 Agostino Staccoli d'Urbino, Serafino d'Aquila, An- 

 tonio Tebaldeo, Bernardo Accolti, a celebrated im- 

 provvisatore, who assumed the modest surname 

 L' Unico, a Neapolitan under the name of Notturno, 

 a Florentine, Cristoforo, under the name of L'Altts- 

 simo, &c. Antonio Fregoso, surnamed Fileremo, 

 wrote a moral erotic poem, La Cerva Bianca, of 

 moderate value, with Selve, and gay and melancholy 

 capitoli. Gian Filoteo Achillini deserves to be men- 

 tioned, on account of his scientific-moral poems, // 

 riridario and // Fedele, and Cornazzano dal Vorsetti, 

 for his poem on the art of war, entitled De Re 

 Militari. Distinguished as female poets of this cen- 

 tury are, Battista Montefeltro, wife to Galeazzo 

 Malaspina, her niece Constanza, Bianca of Este, 

 Damigella Trivulzi, Cassandra Fedele, and the two 

 Isottas. The sixteenth century, the period of Italian 

 poetry, in which the princes of Italy, and particularly 

 the popes, extended the most munificent patronage 

 to poetry and the arts, begins with the Orlando and 

 other poems of the admirable Ariosto. Giovanni 

 Giergio Trissino attempted, without success, the 

 serious epic. His work is dry and cold. Giovanni 

 Ruccellai displays much tenderness and feeling in his 

 didactic poem Le Api. Luigi Alamanni, author of a 

 didactic poem on agriculture (La Coltivazione), a 

 romantic epic, Girone il Cortese, and Avarchide (a 

 \ modern Iliad, on the whole a failure), belongs rather 



