Francesco Redi wrote one very celebrated work, Bacco in Toscana, a dithyramb, full of fire and enthusiasm, a species of poem of which there are few examples in the Italian language. He was a physician by profession, and greatly advanced the science of his time. He died in 1698.
Carlo Maria Maggi wrote some pleasing poems in the Milanese dialect, and some of his Sonnets addressed to Italy have the patriotic fire so much extolled in Filicaia.
Felice Zappi and Faustina Maratti, his wife, wrote some noble and spirited Sonnets. One by Zappi on the Moses of Michael Angelo, has most striking beauty and originality.
The Seventeenth Century was not rich in comic poets. The versifiers of the age are mostly distinguished by a rather monotonous seriousness. Two poets, however, are remarkable for their comic inventions, Lorenzo Lippi and Alessandro Tassoni.
The former, a Florentine, was painter as well as poet. He wrote a burlesque poem in Ottava Rima called the Malmantile. It is valued as a storehouse of Tuscan phrase, and is, indeed, so full of the slang of the Mercato Vecchio as to be almost unintelligible to Italians themselves, much more to foreigners, without the copious annotations of the commentators.
Alessandro Tassoni was a native of Modena, born in 1565, died in 1635. He distinguished himself as a Commentator on Petrarch, but more especially by his mock-heroic poem, La Secchia Rapita, which may be translated The Rape of the Bucket. Like so many other writers of the day, he passed his life in the service of Cardinals md Princes, and he suffered much from the caprice of his masters and the envy of his rivals. But he ended his days peacefully as a pensioner of Francis I, Duke of Modena. His principal work, La Secchia Rapita, has much ingenuity of thought to recommend it, but his style is somewhat deficient in colour, and his subject is not very interesting in itself, nor is it made so by its author. Misled by the similarity of the names, Dickens, in his Pictures from Italy, attributes the Secchia Rapita to Tasso. Among mock-heroic poems of modern times, Boileau's Lutrin may be said to be slightly inferior to the Secchia Rapita, but Pope's Rape of the Lock and Leopardi's Paralipomeni vastly superior, both in brilliancy of thought and perfection of style.
In comparing the poetry of the Seventeenth Century with that of the Sixteenth, we are struck by the curious fact that its authors have a more old-fashioned air than their predecessors. This is partly to be-accounted for by their search for ingenious conceits, which prevents them from being as flowing and natural as the contemporaries of Ariosto and Tasso. Their style, too, is more cumbrous. They are fonder of long and complicated periods than the poets of the Sixteenth Century. But they have many compensating qualities. Their very fault of being too artificial in thought and imagery argues the possession of no little imagination and fertility. A man cannot pervert into strange and fantastic forms his thoughts and conceptions without being at considerable pains to do so. None of these writers spare themselves any trouble, and they often choose the most difficult metres which the language can present. Their great defect is conventionality of phraseology, which began with Tasso and only ended in the Nineteenth Century with Monti. They bedeck themselves with the rags of Ancient Mythology, and do not seem for a moment to suspect that they would look much better in unborrowed garments. Instead of talking of the wind, they talk of Boreas. Instead of mentioning the sea, they mention Neptune and Thetis. All this makes even the best of them unnatural and pedantic to a degree, and it is only in their very finest passages that they are enjoyable to the modern reader. The intense love for Classical Antiquity had died out with the Renaissance, and the allusions to the Gods of Greece and Rome were but the outcome of habit and convention. Instead of adorning their works, these allusions positively make them dry, for it is only Marino who uses them as they should be used: for the display of brilliant pageants of description and imagery. He conjures up a fairyland of his own as Keats did two hundred years later.
[1] Lord Somers was a great admirer of Filicaia. See Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors, and Macaulay's History.