[CHAPTER XXV]
Poetry under the Montefeltri—Sonnets—The Filelfi—Giovanni Sanzi—Porcellio Pandonio—Angelo Galli—Federigo Veterani—Urbani Urbinate—Antonio Rustico—Naldio—Improvisatori—Bernardo Accolti—Serafino d’Aquila—Agostino Staccoli—Early comedies—La Calandra—Corruption of morals—Social position of women.
WERE the lettered court of Duke Federigo to be judged by its minstrels, a harsh sentence might perhaps be awarded. Nor would this be quite fair. Their cold and common-place ideas, their rude and vapid verses, are indeed far beneath the standard of our fastidious age, and scarcely repay those who decipher them in venerable parchments. Yet have we ample evidence of their superiority to many poetasters of Italy, who then emulated Virgil's hexameters, or abused the facilities of their vernacular versification; and it is just the fact of these laureates of Urbino so long surviving the countless rhymers of other principalities, that proves the discriminating patronage of a sovereign, who attached to his court the best writers of his time. Nor must we fail to remember that the now prominent blemishes of their works were then their most admired qualities. The classical sympathies which we usually leave in schools and colleges, or which, when carried prominently about us in the busy world are stigmatised as a pedantic and ungraceful encumbrance, were then in high fashion. They were indispensable to the man of liberal education as his sword and buckler to the soldier; they were adopted among the conventional elements of all literature, poetry, and taste. A standard being thus set up so antipathic to the ideas of our practical age, we are called upon, before proceeding to judgment, to divest ourselves of prejudices which may in their turn become the marvel and ridicule of our posterity.
The inherent defects of that minstrelsy,
"Whose melody gave ease to Petrarch's wounds,"
have been aptly set forth by Roscoe, but he appears to overlook its special adaptation for the Italian tongue. Limited to one theme, which it is required to exhaust in a fixed number of lines, and fettered by the frequent and stated recurrence of a few rhymes, no language less copious and pliant can be woven into a sonnet, without occasionally betraying, in bald, formal, or rugged versification, the torture to which it has been subjected. Again, the constraint and mannerism which often deform this metrical composition in other idioms are here its safeguard from a mellifluous but insipid verbiage, so often fatal to the lyrics of Italy: on a poetry habitually turgid and redundant, terseness is thus absolutely imposed.
With these few words of apology for doggerel hexameters and indifferent sonnets, we shall shortly pass in review some of those who thus wooed the muses in the Montefeltrian court.
Among the most widely known names of this age was Francesco Filelfo, whose venal pen often wantoned in biting lampoons, whose sickening vanity was obtruded in the most repulsive egotism, and whose vagrant habits strangely combined assiduous study with lax morals. In most respects he anticipated the bad notoriety acquired a century later by Pietro Aretino, and like him alternately fawned upon and flagellated princely patrons of literature. Were his life to be written, it would be difficult to extract truth by balancing his own self-vaunting letters against the scurrilous philippics of his untiring enemy Poggio Bracciolini. But we are fortunately spared this task, and may refer to Tiraboschi, Roscoe, and Shepherd for illustrations of his restless existence and fractious temper.[82] In both these respects Gian Maria,[*83] the son, seems to have resembled Francesco the father, whilst he even exceeded him in the number and variety of his compositions. He sought audiences in many cities of Italy and Provence for his prelections in grammar and philosophy, as well as for his improvisations of Latin or Italian verse; and among the numerous patrons he thus courted was the good King René, who bestowed on him the laurel crown, a guerdon which his rude numbers ill-deserved at the hands of that graceful troubadour. Tiraboschi makes no allusion to his intercourse with Duke Federigo, whereof we know little beyond two works which he inscribed to that Prince, and which remain unedited in the Vatican Urbino Library. The former of these, dated at Modena in 1464, was corrected by the author, "doctor in arts and both faculties of law, knight, and poet laureat," he being then in his thirty-eighth year. It is numbered 702, and contains about two thousand five hundred Latin hexameters and pentameters, entitled Martiados, an obvious imitation of his father's Sfortiados. The theme is thus set forth in a dedication to the Duke of Urbino:—