Luigi Pulci (1432–1484), a member of the literary circle which gathered at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici in the latter half of the sixteenth century and which included, among others, Poliziano, Ficino, and Michelangelo, composed the Morgante Maggiore, “the first romantic poem of the Renaissance.” Designed probably to be read or recited at Lorenzo’s table, it was finally completed in February, 1483, as a poem in ottava rima, containing twenty-eight cantos and some 30,000 lines.[238] Although the plotting and consummation of Gan’s treason against Charlemagne lends a crude unity to the romance, it is actually a series of battles, combats, and marvellous adventures loosely strung together. The titular hero, Morgante, dies in the twentieth canto. The matter is that of the Carolingian legend, now so well-known in the work of Pulci’s successors.
Historically, as the precursor of Berni, Ariosto, and the other singers of Carolingian romance, Pulci occupies the position of pioneer. For our purposes, however, the significance of his work lies less in the incidents of his narrative, the greater part of which he purloined, than in the poet’s personality and the transformation which his grotesque and fanciful genius accomplished with its material. Through much humorous and ironic digression, through some amusing interpolated episodes, through a balancing of the serious and the comic elements of the story, through a style popular in origin and humorous in effect, and through the creation of two new characters, the giant Margutte and the demon Astarotte, he made his poem a reflection of his own bourgeois individuality, clever, tolerant, and irrepressible in its inclination to seize upon the burlesque possibilities in men or events.
That the Morgante Maggiore is a burlesque poem is due not so much to deliberate design on Pulci’s part as to the unconscious reflection of his boisterous, full-blooded, yet at the same time, meditative nature. It is unwise to attribute to him any motive beyond that of amusing his audience. In spite of its apparent irreverence, the Morgante was probably not planned as a satire on chivalry or on the church, Pulci—“the lively, affecting, hopeful, charitable, large-hearted Luigi Pulci,” as Hunt called him—was at bottom kindly and sympathetic, and his work displays a robust geniality and good-humor which had undoubtedly some influence on Don Juan. We rarely find Pulci in a fury; at times his merriment is not far from Rabelaisian, however always without a trace of indignation, for his levity and playfulness seem genuine. This very tolerance is perhaps the product of Renaissance skepticism, which viewed both dogmatism and infidelity with suspicion. Deep emotion, tragedy, and pathos are all to be met with in the Morgante, but each is counter-balanced by mockery, comedy, or realism. It is this recurring antithesis, this continual introduction of the grotesque into the midst of what is, by itself, dignified and serious, that is the distinctive peculiarity of Pulci’s manner. The mere turn of a phrase makes a situation absurd. There is no intensity about this Florentine; he espouses no theories and advocates no creeds; he is content to have his laugh and to set others chuckling.
This summary may be of service in suggesting one reason why, in the later cantos of Don Juan, we sometimes are met with a tolerance almost sympathetic, widely differing from the passionate narrowness of English Bards. Pulci, unlike Byron, was not a declared satirist; his theme was in the past, steeped in legend and myth; but something of his spirit, difficult to analyze as that spirit may be, tempered and modified the satire of the older Byron.
Byron’s first definite reference to Pulci occurs in a portion of Don Juan written in November, 1819:
“Pulci was sire of the half-serious rhyme,
Who sang when chivalry was not Quixotic,
And revelled in the fancies of the time,
True knights, chaste dames, huge giants, Kings despotic.”[239]
However, Don Juan, III, 45, presenting a possible parallelism with the Morgante, XVIII, 115, would indicate that Byron was familiar with Pulci’s poem at least some months before.[240] On February 7, 1820, he wrote Murray: “I am translating the first canto of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, and have half done it.”[241] In speaking of the completion of the translation, of which he was very proud, he told Murray, February 12, 1820: “You must print it side by side with the original Italian, because I wish the reader to judge of the fidelity; it is stanza for stanza, and often line for line, if not word for word.”[242] In the Preface to the translation, printed with it in The Liberal, July 30, 1823, Byron uttered his final word on the Italian writer: “Pulci may be regarded as the precursor and model of Berni altogether.... He is no less the founder of a new style of poetry lately sprung up in England. I allude to that of the ingenious Whistlecraft.” It is evident, then, that Byron estimated Pulci’s work very highly, that he was acquainted, probably, with the entire Morgante Maggiore and had studied the first canto, at least, in detail, and that he considered him the original model of Berni and Frere.