But there is no Ciceronianism in Castiglione’s adopting the form of Cicero’s De oratore for his Cortegiano. Though he naturally shows awareness of Cicero’s expert periods, he is bent not on conformity of style, but on focusing the typical man of his own time in the literary frame used by Cicero for the typical Augustan Roman. Renaissance imitation of Vergil’s style was often futile; but Tasso’s Jerusalem was animated and guided by Vergil’s epic sequence. Robert Garnier, imitating the style of Euripides, missed the dramatic composition; but Corneille caught the whole scheme of a Greek tragedy. Such larger imitation imposes no restraint on originality. Its recognition of ancient achievement is in practical adaptation to one’s own conception and object and time. In this direction the classicism of the seventeenth century became more fruitful than that of the sixteenth.
3. RHETORICS
Manuals and treatises on rhetoric published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exhibit marked differences in tradition, scope, and tendency. They range from narrow concentration on style to a full treatment of the five parts of rhetoric. They exhibit sophistic as well as rhetoric. Some persist in medieval preconception as others recover the classical heritage of Aristotle and Quintilian. The works mentioned below are typical of the many Renaissance manuals.
The Rhetorica (1437?) of George of Trebizond shows in brief the whole classical scope:[22] inventio, the exploration of the subject and the determination of its status; dispositio, plan and order; elocutio, style; memoria, the art of holding a point for effective placing; and pronuntiatio, delivery. He is most expansive on the first, which had been both neglected and misapplied by the Middle Age.[23]
The presentation of rhetoric by Juan Luis Vives (De ratione dicendi, Bruges, 1532; reprinted in Vol. II of the Majansius edition of his works) is both meager and vaguely general.
Vives urges that rhetoric is not a study for boys, and that it should not be confined to diction. But he himself offers hardly anything specific about composition. Book I deals mainly with sentences (compositio), e.g., with dilation and conciseness as in the Copia of Erasmus, and with the period. Book II offers brief generalizations on type or tone of style, on the conventionalized measure of native ability against study and revision, on consideration of emotions and moral habits, on the threefold task of instructing, winning, and moving, and on appropriateness. Book III deals with narration (history, exempla, fables, poetry), paraphrase, epitome, commentary. History as composition is hardly even considered.
His incidental discussion of rhetoric in De causis corruptarum artium and De tradendis disciplinis (Vol. VI of the collective edition) is no more satisfying. In Book IV of the former Vives so far misconceives the classical inventio as to rule it out of rhetoric altogether. Thus he practically ratifies the procedure of those Renaissance logicians who classified inventio and dispositio under logic. The classification was not a reform; it merely recorded tardily the medieval practice of reducing rhetoric to style by relying for all the active work of composition on debate. Yet Vives pays repeated homage to both Aristotle and Quintilian.
On the other hand the concise manual of Joannes Caesarius (Rhetorica, Paris, 1542) returns to the full classical scope. The source cited most explicitly and quoted most frequently is Quintilian.
But that later ancient tradition called sophistic, which had deviated the rhetoric of the Middle Age, had also its Renaissance revival. Giulio Camillo (1479-1550), known in France as well as in Italy, published together a treatise on the orator’s material, the oratorical fund, and another on imitation (Due trattati ... l’uno delle materie che possono venir sotto lo stile dell’eloquente, l’altro della imitatione, Venice, 1544-1545). His constant preoccupation is with the topics, headings, commonplaces (loci) which guide the writer’s preparation. Such are the headings of the sophistic recipe for encomium: birth and family, native city, deeds, etc. But sophistic had elaborated such obvious suggestions for exploring one’s material into a system applicable both to material and to style. Camillo’s source is:
the Ideas of Hermogenes, who in each considers eight things: the sense, the method, the words, the verbal figures, the clauses, their combination, sentence-control (fermezza), and rhythm. But my method is perhaps easier, since I proceed not from the forms (forme) to the materials, but from the materials to the forms.... I have sought how many things can combine to produce the forms, and I find (as I have argued in my Latin orations) not eight things, as Hermogenes writes, but fourteen which may enter to modify any material. They are these: conceptions, or inventions (Trovati), passions, commonplaces, ways of speaking (le vie del dire), arguments, order, words, verbal figures, clauses, connectives, sentence forms, cadence (gli estremi), rhythms, harmonies.