This he has touched earlier in reprehending Homer (31) for letting Nausicaa wash clothes. Here (63-65) he insists that romance, in bringing on kings as well as shepherds and nymphs, must make each consistent with his type. After pausing to disagree with the Italian followers of Hermogenes, he passes to style (83-159), including verse. The section on verse, sometimes dubious, is often suggestive, as on Ariosto’s admirable facility (145) in making verse run as easily as prose [i.e., without inversions]. Petrarch is cited (147) as the ideal combination of weight and ease.
The concluding section (160-184) on the soul of the poem manages to lean even more on rhetoric. In oratory anima depends on delivery; in poetry, not only on this, but on such expressive words as put things before our eyes (energia, sotto gli occhi). An appendix (188-197) repeats the Horatian counsels on advice and revision.
The main significance of the treatise in 1549 is its recognition of the actual difference of romance from epic. Giraldi’s attempts at reconciling the two in theory seem evasions because he misses Aristotle’s controlling view of poetic as having its own ways of sequence, distinct from those of rhetoric.
4. MUZIO
Muzio published among his Italian poems a poetic in verse (Rime diverse del Mutio Iustinopolitano: tre libri di arte poetica ... Venice, 1551). Diffused through some 1,600 lines (pages 68-94), it is often thin and sometimes vague, the sort of treatise written not to teach, nor much to theorize, but to express the author’s culture and taste via Horace’s “Ars poetica.” What individuality it has transpires for the most part incidentally; but the treatment of metric is fairly distinctive.
Why use Greek terms: ode, hymn, epigram, elegy (71*)? Why talk of dactyls and spondees (72)? The difference between quantitative and accentual verse forbids the transfer. You will make a hodgepodge like Coccai’s.
Non puote orecchie haver giudicio saldo
Di quantità & di tempo ove la lingua
De l’accente conviene esser seguace. (72*)