A Manual of Italian Literature

by Francis Henry Cliffe

[CHAPTER V.]

WRITERS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

In striking contrast to the Fourteenth Century, the Fifteenth is conspicuous for a great dearth of eminent authors. The same may be noticed in the literary development of England. After the brilliant apparition of Chaucer, more than a hundred years elapsed before an eminent writer arose. This may be partly accounted for by the Civil Wars which devastated the island and brought misery and anarchy in their train. Widely different was the plight of Italy. There were wars and disturbances, it is true, but the wealth of the country became more enormous than ever, and great princes extended munificent patronage to science and learning. But all intellectual energies were directed, not to the cultivation of the Italian language, but to the study of the writers of antiquity. Greek and Latin were alone held in estimation, the vulgar tongue was contemptuously neglected.

The only eminent prose writer was Feo Belcari, a Florentine magistrate, who wrote the Lives of the Blessed Giovanni Colombini and other Friars, and who reproduced the beauty and elegance of the best authors of the Fourteenth Century. He died at an advanced age in 1484.

Leon Battista Alberti was a universal genius. He distinguished himself as painter, sculptor and architect, but his Italian writings would hardly be of sufficient importance to mention, had not the dearth of names in this barren century made historians of literature thankful for any means of filling up the blank.

Leonardo Da Vinci wrote a Treatise on Painting, and he impressed upon all artists the necessity of being original, and of not copying their predecessors. It would have been well if the writers of the age had laid this injunction to heart as well as the painters, for as years advanced, the servile imitation of conventional forms became more and more the bane of Italian literature.

Pulci is celebrated for his mock-heroic poem, the Morgante Maggiore. The giant Morgante is the hero, but we also make the acquaintance of Orlando, Rinaldo, Charlemagne, and many other characters that appear in the more famous poems of Bojardo and Ariosto. It was unfortunate for Pulci that he had such great successors. He had abundance of wit and originality, but he had neither the poetical imagination of Bojardo nor the magic style of Ariosto, so that it is no cause for astonishment that he fell into neglect.

Matteo Bojardo, Count of Scandiano, was born in 1430 and died in 1494. He was favoured by nature and fortune; a soldier and a statesman, he had every opportunity of enriching his mind with varied experiences, nor can we say that those opportunities were neglected. His Orlando Innamorato, which he did not live to finish, long as it is, displays great wealth of imagination and considerable creative power; but unfortunately, his style is heavy and rough, and was completely eclipsed by the extraordinary merits of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, which professes to be only a continuation of the earlier poem. Fifty years later, Berni entirely re-wrote Bojardo's work and certainly succeeded in giving it greater elegance, but he did not make it more interesting to modern readers. In truth, the knights of the epic cycle beginning with the Morgante Maggiore and ending in the Eighteenth Century with the Ricciardetto, appear terribly uninteresting in the present day, and it requires the picturesque and melodious style of a really great poet like Ariosto to entice the reader through the account of their numerous adventures.

The celebrated scholar, Angelo Poliziano, shows a poetical mind in his poems, and his Orfeo may claim the credit of being the first dramatic work of any literary value in the Italian language. It has many lyric beauties and the choruses are spirited.[1]