The Partitiones oratoriae (Venice and Paris, 1558) of Jacopo Brocardo is exactly described by its sub-title as elegans et dilucida paraphrasis of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Now translating, now paraphrasing, it provides in its marginal headings a sufficient table of contents.
But the revival of the full classical tradition is most obvious in the comprehensive Italian rhetoric of Bartolomeo Cavalcanti (La retorica, 1555; second edition, Venice, 1558/9, reprinted Pesaro, 1574). Through 563 closely printed pages this is strictly and consistently a rhetoric of the classical character and scope. The exceptional avoidance of confusion with poetic appears in the bare mention of Vergil and in the ousting of Petrarch from his monopoly as exemplar of everything desirable in prose as well as in verse. Plato is rare; Plutarch, rarer. The main body of analyzed examples is from the orations of Cicero. Demosthenes is only less frequent. From Livy and Thucydides the examples are usually of the imaginary harangues to troops. All the examples that are not themselves Italian are translated. Hermogenes is cited some half-dozen times; Quintilian, twice as often; but the main source of doctrine is the Rhetoric of Aristotle and, next to that, his Logic. The book is constantly and consistently Aristotelian.
Instead of devoting himself after the Renaissance habit mainly to style, Cavalcanti gives it only one of his seven books (V). All the rest are spent on composition. Book I is a lucid survey of the field; II shows the ways of inventio in each of the three types of oratory; III deals with argument; IV, with appeal to emotion and to moral habit; V, besides the usual lists of figures, has an unusually definite treatment of sentence management (compositio) and a meager summary of dispositio; VI presents the typical parts of an oration, avoiding the common confusion of narratio (statement of the facts) with narrative; VII deals with confirmation and conclusion. Its incidental recurrence to dispositio is again vague. Cavalcanti had excuse enough in the ancient tradition, which is generally weakest in its counsels for sequence.
Fortunately Cavalcanti’s own plan is clear and fairly progressive; and his adjustment to his own time appears in the prominence given to the third of the ancient types of oratory, such speeches on occasion as were the main Renaissance field. His defect is the common Renaissance vice of diffuseness. Beyond its intrinsic value Cavalcanti’s Retorica has historical significance. It gave the wider audience a just and distinct view of classical rhetoric.
The sixteenth century closed with the full classical doctrine operative in the Ratio studiorum and in the Rhetoric of Soarez.
Chapter IV
IMITATION IN LYRIC AND PASTORAL
1. LYRIC
The lyrics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries show an extensive revival of Augustan measures in Latin. Meantime imitation of Petrarch made him an Italian classic and a European model. Thus, in England, revival from a meager and languid fifteenth century was stimulated in the sixteenth by Italy. But France shows the history of vernacular lyric in clearest stages: (1) in the formalizing of medieval modes by the rhétoriqueurs; (2) in the verse forms and diction of Lemaire and Marot, seeking variety without rejecting tradition; (3) in the Pléiade program of revolt from tradition to classicism, and especially in Ronsard’s experiments with the Greek ode; (4) in the final predominance of the sonnet.