The ‘Morgante Maggiore’ was the beginning of the romantic epopee, which successfully laid hold of the cycle of Carolingian legends that had been rendered accessible to the Italian nation by the ‘Chronicle’ of Turpin and the book of the ‘Reali di Francia.’ This choice of a subject was all the happier because Florence attributed her restoration to Charlemagne, as may be read carved in stone in the church of the Apostles. The style of the work is original. Amid all its prodigies the old knightly romance is serious and full of faith. Christianity is always the foil to the chivalry which sprang from it, and which is animated by its spirit. ‘Morgante’ (the story takes its name from the giant who accomplishes his strange exploits) is not a satire on chivalry, but it is so saturated with burlesque that it assumes a very peculiar character. Neither is it a denial of Christianity, from which, on the contrary, it derives here and there a deeply religious tone; but it is Christianity struggling with scepticism and denial, so that the faith of the Church and the people is driven into the background. In this respect ‘Morgante’ is a true mirror of the time. With its perfect command of the subject, bound down to no poetical rules or precedents, it is a mixture of seriousness and irony, Christianity and unbelief, Biblical texts and profane witticisms. It is full of the most glaring contrasts of sound common-sense and folly, of elegance and coarseness, of lofty intellectual flights and mere buffoonery. There is in this poem more richness of imagination and spontaneity than perhaps in any other work before the appearance of the ‘Orlando Furioso;’ passages occur full of the deepest pathos, and showing a feeling that belongs only to a real poet—passages too often followed by a grotesqueness that tends to destroy their effect. The qualities here united in very unequal degrees were developed and discriminated by later poets. The importance of Luigi Pulci lies less in his poem, which falls short of perfection in every way, than in the fact that his work contains the germs of the romantic epopee in all its various branches. In considering that the two parent poems of chivalry in Italian, the ‘Morgante’ and ‘Ciriffo,’ originated in the Medicean house, let it be remembered how much this branch of poetry, up to the ‘Jerusalem Delivered,’ with which it terminates, was connected with that Court life which is so constantly represented in its varied productions. From the household of Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, who at the highest pinnacle of their fame did not abandon the simplicity and comfort of free citizen life, to the ceremonious Court of Alfonso of Este, is certainly a very long step. Though the Pulci did not go so far as to weave into their ottava rima a genealogy of their patrons reaching back to demigods, still theirs was a kind of poetry destined to enliven stately banquets.
Luigi Pulci’s intimacy with Lorenzo is shown by his oft-quoted letters, which throw some side-lights on the various relations between patron and client, and on the commissions, rather political than literary, entrusted to the latter. The author of ‘Morgante’ was sincerely attached to his young patron. When the latter was going to Southern Italy in 1466, before the Neroni and Pitti conspiracy, Pulci wrote to him from the convent of Alverina:[26] ‘Dost thou really mean to leave me buried in the snow among these woods, lonely and comfortless, while thou goest to Rome? Is it really my fate that, whatever thou mayest think of me, as the climax of my ill-luck, I must never mount a horse by thy side? Am I to come to that only when I am an old man? How often have we talked about Rome, and now shall I not accompany thee?—can it be because I should increase the expenses of the journey? Let not that trouble thee; amid all my troubles I will yet do thee credit. A horse is all I ask of thee; for I shall find so many friends yonder, and will manage so well, that I will not be a burthen to thee, as perhaps thou fearest. Truly thou art wrong to pass me by, not to mention that it would hurt me more than anything in this world. Do not treat me as if I were old iron, for I shall soon be well if thou carest for me.’ And Lorenzo really did care for him. Two years later Pulci wrote to him from Pisa: ‘If thou dost not wish people to believe or know that I am thy friend, and have some influence with thee, placard it on the walls—at thine own expense, of course; as for some time past having had no money to pay away, I have been paying with thy name instead. Wherever I show myself people whisper, “That is Lorenzo’s great friend.”’ That Pulci’s money matters were not in brilliant order we have already seen. His brother’s business misfortunes brought him into great difficulties. ‘Never yet have I made a plan,’ he wrote to Lorenzo after Luca’s failure, ‘that Fate did not destroy in an hour what I had taken a year to build up. I must have come into the world like hares and other poor animals, doomed to be the prey of the huntsman. It is my fate to love thee, and to be very little in thy company.’ That the Medicean bank helped him out, but that the loans were very unimportant and notorious besides, we learn from a petition dated from his estate at Mugello, May 14, 1479, to the effect that Lorenzo would grant him a longer delay for the repayment of a hundred gold florins. He was evidently included in the measures which were rendered necessary by the bad state of the Medicean finances at that time. Pulci, who among others was very intimate with the Sanseverini, seems to have been employed by Lorenzo especially at Naples, Bologna, and Milan, both before and after this period. The last of the poet’s letters known to us, written from Verona, August 28, 1484, shows him to us in the suite of Roberto da Sanseverino and his son Fracasso, who were on their way to Venice. He died in Padua shortly after, but nothing is known about his death.[27]
Luigi Pulci was about seventeen years older than his princely friend Lorenzo de’ Medici, while the man who entered into the closest and most productive intellectual relations with Lorenzo was a few years his junior. In 1464 a boy of ten came to Florence to seek maintenance and instruction in the house of some not very wealthy relatives. He had been rendered fatherless by one of those tragedies which bring to light and stigmatise the wild passions and party hatred that in the Tuscan communes of the fifteenth century mocked at justice, and which, though so fearful in punishment, was so powerless for the protection of the citizens. Benedetto Ambrogini of Montepulciano, a jurist of a not undistinguished family, who had held civil and judicial offices at home and abroad, had in the previous year applied to Piero de’ Medici[28] for protection against the bloodthirsty enmity of fellow-citizens and neighbours, to which he soon after fell a victim, leaving unprovided a widow with five children, of whom the above-named boy was the eldest.[29] Angelo, who took from his birthplace the name of Poliziano, early became acquainted with the serious side of life; for although as a child he showed brilliant talents and made rapid progress, he was in danger of being compelled to seek a living as assistant in a shop, and of renouncing the studies to which he was ardently devoted. At fifteen he expressed this tormenting dread in a Latin poem addressed to the young but celebrated philologer, Bartolommeo Fonte, who at that time assisted him with guidance and encouragement.[30] In the year 1469-70 he studied at the Florentine university, and at seventeen he wrote Greek epigrams. He had the privilege of listening to the men who kept alive the traditions of the university’s best days, Argyropulos and Andronikos Kallistos, Landino and Ficino. That polite literature attracted him more than philosophical lectures he declares himself, saying that he had done with philosophy as dogs with the Nile: one drink, and then away! ‘Nature and youth drew me to Homer, and with all the zeal and industry of which I was capable I set myself to translate him into Latin verse.’ In one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of his Latin poems, the distichs addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici in commendation of his master Kallistos, he sets forth how the latter was reading the Trojan war in Argive verse. In this poem he alludes to the time when he hopes to sing the deeds of Lorenzo, then limited to youthful exercises, and his adroit conduct in the matter of the Pitti conspiracy, which Poliziano commemorates in a later elegy.[31]
It must have been about 1470 that he began to translate the ‘Iliad.’ Carlo Marsuppini had translated the first book; Angelo began with the second. It was a great undertaking for a young man. A Latin Homer had been the in votis up to that time; and now the work was begun by one who had but just entered the world and was still unknown, but who displayed an ease and grace of diction, melodiousness and richness of versification, that caused general surprise. This work and the admiration it excited opened the Medicean house to the young poet. It was probably Ficino who recommended the ‘Homeric youth’ to Lorenzo. The young head of the house, who had only become independent the year before, took him up; and whatever changes outward and inward occurred in Lorenzo’s life, the man who owed his brilliant endowments to Heaven, and their early and happy recognition to him kept faithful; he stood beside his patron’s death-bed and ere long followed him to the tomb. The dedication of the second book contains praises of the generous protector—praises lavish according to custom, but not untrue if the custom and the glory with which the young ruler of Florence had surrounded himself be taken into consideration.[32] A troop of panegyrists followed, Marsilio Ficino at their head. There was no lack of exaggeration. The head of the Platonists raised a flattering doubt whether any one could discover if the Greek or the Latin text of this Iliad was the original; another asked who had the greatest merit, he who had given occasion for the undertaking, or he who had accomplished it. Meanwhile the translator went on with his work; and when, two years after the completion of the second book, he presented the third to his patron, he expressed a hope that after finishing the whole he might begin an epic poem on a subject taken from Lorenzo’s own life, the war of Volterra. The ‘Iliad’ was never finished, the epic was never written. Lorenzo, who knew the world much better than did Angelo, probably objected to the glorification of an expedition of questionable prowess and of unquestionable barbarity. In like manner, when his son Leo was raised to the cardinalate, he disapproved of the eulogium which Poliziano addressed to the Pope. When Poliziano described the most important and dramatic event of his patron’s life, the conspiracy of the Pazzi, it was in prose.
The man who had received the young poet into his house and enabled him to give all his time to study was doubtless also the cause of his sending a specimen of his work to Cardinal Ammanati, who kept up such intimate relations with the Medici. Poliziano’s address to this Prince of the Church[33] was modest. He wrote that he was doing like the eagle, which carries its young as soon as they are out of the shell into the light of the rising sun, that their eyes may become accustomed to its splendour. The cardinal, in whom survived the humanistic tradition of the days of Pius II., returns him phrase for phrase without offending against truth. The verses were wonderfully harmonious for so young a writer; the enterprise was useful as an introduction to great things. But if Homer could be asked whether he wished to be turned into Latin, he feared that the old poet, feeling the impossibility of a perfect rendering, would prefer to remain a citizen of Kolophon rather than become a Florentine, and would consider the pallium a more suitable vesture than the toga. In 1473, our poet had addressed some verses full of sonorous but very ordinary flattery to the spendthrift Cardinal of San Sisto, Pietro Riario, on the occasion of his appointment to the archbishopric of Florence. Instead of the expected present, he was put off with fine speeches, and, after the fashion of poor poets, complained bitterly.[34]
About this time, also, he was rewarded with nothing but words by another cardinal, a very different man from Riario. He must have said to himself that the days of Nicholas V. were over, although Sixtus IV. hardly yielded to him in his zeal for collecting books. He never seems to have become acquainted with the Pope, and the disagreement which gradually arose between the latter and Poliziano’s protector deprived him of all opportunity of doing so. Four books of the translation of Homer are in existence;[35] whether the work proceeded further is uncertain. It was twice interrupted, and the second interruption decided its fate. Poliziano may, in the progress of his studies, have come round to the views of the Cardinal of Pavia, and have doubted whether a Latinity which strove after the elegance of the Augustan age was suited to the old Greek epic.
The first short interruption was a journey to Mantua with Cardinal Francesco da Gonzaga, in August 1472. The intimate relations between the Gonzaga and the Medici, which corresponded to those between the Marquis Lodovico and the city of Florence, have been already spoken of. Francesco took the youthful poet with him from the Medici house. Poliziano, then aged eighteen, had already given proof of uncommon talent on the occasion of a visit to his native city, where his arrival was celebrated with brilliant festivities. Here originated the drama of ‘Orpheus,’ which made an epoch in literature, less by its actual merit than as the first example of a profane drama in the Italian tongue. Mysteries had long been popular; the modern drama, even when treating modern historical subjects, still more when, as in the works of Alberti and Gregorio Correr, it was directly modelled on the antique, had always adhered to the Latin language. In a letter to one of the cardinal’s suite, Messer Carlo Canale (who was, it may be mentioned, the second or third husband of the mother of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia), the author states that ‘Orpheus’ was composed in two days, amid constant noisy distractions, and that it was written in the vulgar tongue in order to be more intelligible to the hearers—‘an imperfect work, fitted to bring its father shame rather than honour, and worthy of the fate prepared by the Lacedæmonians for children born weakly or crippled.’ This ‘favola’ is not a drama; it is a succession of lyrical pieces, with an ode inserted in Latin Sapphics, in praise of the cardinal, which Baccio Ugolini, another member of the Medicean circle and of Landino’s school, sang to the lyre in the character of ‘Orpheus.’[36]
The Mantuan journey was a short episode. Some smaller Latin poems, including the beautiful and pathetic elegy on the death of Albiera degli Albizzi, the charming bride of Sigismondo della Stufa, in 1473, kept Poliziano in the same mood, and cannot fairly be considered as interruptions to his Homeric work. A longer interruption was caused by Giuliano de’ Medici’s tournament, which was a challenge to Angelo to write the fairest flower in his poetic garland.[37] He himself alludes to this interruption in the seventh stanza of the ‘Giostra:’
E se qual fu la fama, il ver rimbomba,
Che d’Hecuba la figlia, o sacro Achille,
Poi che ‘l corpo lasciasti entro la tomba,
T’accenda ancor d’amorose faville,
Lascia un poco tacer tua maggior tromba,
Ch’io fo squillar per l’italice ville.
E tempra tu la cetra a’ nuovi carmi,
Mentr’io canto l’amor di Giulio e l’armi.