A Manual of Italian Literature

by Francis Henry Cliffe

"Quì pur foste, o Città; nè in voi quì resta
Testimon di voi stesse un sasso solo,
In cui si scriva: Quì s'aperse il suolo,
Qui fu Catania, e Siracusa è questa!"

Very beautiful are some of his religious verses:

"Avess' io scritto meno, e assai più pianto;
E stil men terso avessi, alma più bella,
Men chiaro ingegno, e cor più puro e santo!"

The final impression left by Filicaia's poems is that he was a great nature rather than a perfect poet, and that it is owing to the loftiness of his spirit rather than to the mastery of his art, that his pages, too often cumbrous and conventional, are irradiated with flashes so brilliant and striking that they leave an indelible impression on the reader and place the poet on a pedestal more lofty and honourable than many writers, gifted with keener wit and more vivid imagination, can ever hope to ascend.

As Chiabrera took Pindar for his model, so did Fulvio Testi endeavour to appear in the character of an Italian Horace. And, in truth, he had many qualities to justify his undertaking the task. He has wit, ingenuity, clear and pointed expression, and a mind genuinely poetical. He seems to have developed early, and some of his best pieces were written before he was twenty-five. He dedicated an edition of his poems to Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, and thereby incurred the wrath of the Spanish Governor of Lombardy, and had to take refuge in flight. The Duke of Modena became his patron and gave him a pension, and his successor, Francis I, was even more favourable to the poet, and took him in his suite to Madrid in 1638, when Philip IV of Spain conferred upon him a lucrative office. Testi resembled Ariosto in being made Governor of the Province of Garfagnana, and Tasso in exciting the most intense hatred and jealousy. For some unexplained reason, he was arrested early in 1646 and thrown into prison, where he met his death on the twenty-eighth of August. It is suspected that he was executed within the precincts of the prison, but nothing certain is known; all is suspicion and mystery. If he has not left anything very memorable, his poems are at least spirited and elegant, and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he is never dull and ponderous. Some of his letters are witty and vivacious.

The great painter, Salvator Rosa, often amused his leisure with writing verses, and if his attention had not been so strongly directed to the sister art of painting, he might have achieved notable success in poetry. Some of his ballads are spontaneous and natural, and his satires show genuine powers of observation and ridicule. That on the painters of his day is, perhaps, the best, and is well worth reading.

Another satirist of merit was Benedetto Menzini. Like Filicaia, he enjoyed the patronage of Christina of Sweden. Never, since the terrible catastrophe of the sack of Rome under Clement VII, did the Eternal City present such a magnificent aspect as in the latter part of the Seventeenth Century. The stately days of Leo X seemed to be revived. Alexander VII signalised his Pontificate by extraordinary splendour. The colonnade enclosing the square before St. Peter's was erected by Bernini in his reign. Christina vied with the Pope in the magnificence of her Court. The Ambassadors to the Vatican endeavoured to out-shine each other in pomp and luxury. If Menzini who lived in the heart of this splendid society, did not transfer more than a dim reflection of its brilliancy to his pages, he writes at least as a man who has seen and observed much, and he is neither a pedant nor an empty declaimer. He wrote an Art of Poetry—in verse, almost as good as that written in France at the same period by Boileau. His sonnets and serious poems are much more conventional. He was a good Latinist, but the great series of Italian writers of Latin poems closed with the sparkling epigrams of the brothers Amaltei.

Another lyric poet attracted to Rome by the liberality of the Queen of Sweden was Alessandro Guidi. He found a patron not only in that Princess, but also, early in the Eighteenth Century, in Pope Clement XI, whose Latin homilies he turned into Italian verse. Previous writers had, in the composition of their Odes, observed the most rigid rules of metre and rhyme. The same stanza, the same order of rhymes, was maintained throughout each poem. Guidi, whether from want of skill, or from indolence, or from love of originality, was thé first to discard this iron regularity, and to write Odes in irregular stanzas, even occasionally leaving verses without giving them a succeeding rhyme. This was followed at intervals by other writers, until it culminated in the boundless freedom of Leopardi, who, in his last productions, introduces rhymes so sparingly as to make his metre little more than a modification of blank verse. After Leopardi's imitators had tired the public ear with their slipshod effusions, a reaction set in, and regular stanzas are now more than ever in favour, the long and elaborate stanzas of Filicaia being, however, neglected for the lighter and more pointed quatrains.

By this license, strongly censured at the time, Guidi undoubtedly gained greater freedom of movement, and he is never obliged to force his thoughts and twist his phrases. But it cannot be said that his conceptions are more natural and unconventional than those of his predecessors. He has no great glow of imagination, no rainbow hues of fancy, no depth of thought, nor has he any powers of pathos or tenderness. But he is always tasteful and scholarly, and his works are perfectly free from any taint of coarseness or vulgarity.

Alessandro Marchetti was remarkable rather for his magnificent translation of Lucretius than for any of his original productions. The book was considered in Italy of a tendency too dangerous to be allowed to pass the censorship, and it had to be printed in London and smuggled surreptitiously into the country of its origin.