When we come to consider the romantic poems of Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto, we shall be able to estimate the service rendered by men like Andrea da Barberino to polite Italian literature. The popularity of the cycle to which the Reali belonged, decided the choice of the Carolingian epic by the poets of Florence and Ferrara. Nor were the above-mentioned romances by any means the only works of their kind produced for a plebeian audience in the quattrocento. It is enough to mention La Regina Ancroja, La Spagna, Trebisonda con la Vita e Morte di Rinaldo. Both in prose and verse an abundant literature of the kind was manufactured. Without being positively burlesqued, the heroes of chivalrous story were travestied to suit the taste of artisans and burghers. The element of the marvelous was surcharged; comic and pathetic episodes were multiplied; beneath the armor of the Paladins Italian characters were substituted with spontaneous malice for the obsolete ideals of feudalism. It only needed a touch of conscious irony to convert the material thus elaborated by the people into the airy fabric of Ariosto's art. At the same time the form which the epic of romance was destined to assume, had been determined. The streets and squares of town and village rang with the chants of improvisatori, turning the prose periods of Andrea da Barberino and his predecessors into wordy octave stanzas, rehandling ancient Chansons de Geste, and adapting the mannerism of chivalrous minstrelsy to the requirements of a subtle-witted Tuscan crowd. The old-fashioned invocations of God, Madonna, or some saint were preserved at the beginning of each canto, while the audience received their congé from the author at its close. When the poems thus produced were committed to writing, the plebeian author feigned at least the inspiration of a bard.
While the traditions of medieval song were thus preserved, the prose-romances followed, as closely as possible, the style of a chronicle, and aimed at the verisimilitude of authentic history. The Reali, for example, opens with this sentence: "Fuvvi in Roma un santo pastore della Chiesa, che aveva nome papa Silvestro." The Fioravante, recently edited by Signor Rajna, begins: "Nel tempo che Gostantino imperadore regiea & mantenea corte in Roma grandissima." This parade of historic seriousness, observed by the subsequent romantic poets, contributed in no small measure to the irony at which they aimed. But with the story-tellers of the quattrocento it was no mere affectation. Like their predecessors of the fourteenth century, they treated legend from the standpoint of experience. It was due in no small measure to this circumstance that the Italian prose-romances are devoid of charm. Nowhere do we find in them that magic touch of poetry which makes the forests, seas and castles of the "Mort d'Arthur" enchanted ground. Notwithstanding all their extravagances, they remain positive in spirit, presenting the material of fancy in the sober garb of fact. The Italian genius lacked a something of imaginative potency possessed in overflowing measure by the Northern nations. It required the stimulus of satire, the infusion of idyllic sentiment, the consciousness of art, to raise the romantic epic to the height it reached in Ariosto. Then, and not till then, when the matter of the legend had become the sport of the æsthetic sense, were the inexhaustible riches of Italian fancy, dealing delicately and humorously with a subject which could no longer be apprehended seriously, revealed to the world in a masterpiece of beauty. But that work of consummate art was what it was, by reason of the master's wise employment of a style transmitted to him through generations of plebeian predecessors.
The same positive and workmanly method is discernible in the versified novelle of this period.[297] The popular poets were wont to recast tales from the Decameron and other sources in octave stanzas. Of such compositions we have excellent specimens in Girolamo Benivieni's version of the novel of Tancredi, and in an anonymous rhymed paraphrase of Patient Grizzel.[298] The latter is especially interesting when we compare it with the series of panels attributed to Pinturicchio in the National Gallery, where a painter of the same period has exercised his fancy in illustrating the legend which the poet versified. Detached episodes of semi-mythical Florentine history were similarly treated. Allusion has already been made to the love-tale of Ippolito and Leonora, attributed on doubtful grounds to Alberti.[299] But by far the most beautiful is the story of Ginevra degli Almieri, told in octave stanzas by Agostino Velletti.[300] This poem has rare value as a genuine product of the plebeian muse. The heroine Ginevra's father was a pork-butcher, says the minstrel, and lived in the Marcato Vecchio, where he carried on the best business of the sort in Florence. It is also important for students of comparative literature, because it clearly illustrates the difference between Italian and Northern treatment of an all but contemporary incident. The events narrated are supposed to have really happened in the year 1396. On the Scotch Border they would have furnished materials for a ballad similar to Gil Morrice or Clerk Saunders. In Florence they take the form of a novella, and the novella is expanded in octave stanzas.[301] Ginevra had two lovers, Antonio de' Rondinelli and Francesco degli Agolanti. Antonio loved her the more tenderly; but her parents gave her in marriage to Francesco. Soon after the ceremony, she sickened and fell into a trance; and since Florence was then threatened with the plague, the girl was buried over-hastily in this deep slumber. Her weeping parents laid her in a cippus or avello between the two doors of S. Reparata, where the workmen, unable to finish their job before sunset, left the lid of her sepulcher unsoldered. In the middle of the night Ginevra woke, and discovered to her horror that she had been sent to the grave alive. Happily the moon was shining, and a ray of light fell through a chink upon her bier. She arose, wrapped her shroud around her, and struggled from her marble chest into the silent cathedral square. Giotto's bell tower rose above her, silvery and beautiful, and slender in the moonlight. Like a ghost, sheeted in her grave-clothes, Ginevra ran through the streets, and knocked first at Francesco's door. He was seated awake by the fireside, sorrowing for his young bride's loss:
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Andonne alla finestra e aprilla un poco: Chi è là? Chi batte? Io son la tua Ginevra; Non m'odi tu? Col suo parlar persevera. |
Her husband doubts not that it is a spirit calling to him, bids her rest till masses shall be said for her repose, and shuts the window. Then she turns to her mother's house. The mother, too, is sitting sorrowful by the hearth, when she is startled by Ginevra's cry:
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E spaventata e piena di paura Disse: va in pace, anima benedetta, Bella figliuola mia, onesta e pura; E riserrò la finestra con fretta. |
Rejected by husband and mother, Ginevra next tries her uncle, and calls on him for succor in God's name:
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Fugli risposto; anima benedetta, Va che Dio ti conservi in santa pace. |
The poor wretch now feels that there is nothing left for her but to lie down on the pavement and die of cold. But while she is preparing herself for this fate, she bethinks her of Antonio. To his house she hurries, cries for aid, and falls exhausted on the doorstep. Then comes the finest touch in the poem. Antonio knows Ginevra's voice; and loving her so tenderly, he hurries with delight to greet her risen from the grave. He alone has no fear and no misgiving; for love in him is stronger than death. At the street door, when he reaches it, he finds no ghost, but his own dear lady yet alive. She is half frozen and unconscious; yet her heart still beats. How he calls the women of his household to attend her, prepares a bed, and feeds her with warm soups and wine, and how she revives, and how Antonio claims her for his wife, and wins his cause against her former bridegroom in the Bishop's court, may be read at length in the concluding portion of the tale. The intrinsic pathos of this story makes it a real poem; for though the wizard's wand of Northern imagination lay beyond the grasp of the Italian genius, the novelle are rarely deficient in poetry evoked by sympathy with injured innocence and loyal love.
Of truly popular novelle belonging to the fifteenth century, none is racier or more characteristic than the anonymous tale of Il Grasso, Legnaiuolo.[302] It is written in pure Florentine dialect, and might be selected as the finest extant specimen of homespun Tuscan humor. We have already seen that the point of Sacchetti's stories is nearly always a practical joke, where comedy combines with heartless cruelty in almost equal parts. The theme of Il Grasso is a superlatively comic beffa of this sort, played by Filippo Brunelleschi on a friend of his. The incident is dated 1409, and is supposed to have really occurred. Manetto Ammannatini, a tarsiatore or worker in carved and inlaid wood, was called Il Grasso, because he was a fine stout fellow of twenty-eight years. He had his bottega on the Piazza S. Giovanni and lived with his brother in a house hard by. Among his most intimate associates were Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, Donatello, intagliatore di marmi, Giovanni di Messer Francesco Rucellai, and others, partly gentlemen and partly handicraftsmen; for there was no abrupt division of classes at Florence, and this story shows how artisans and men of high condition dwelt together in good fellowship. The practical joke devised by Brunelleschi consisted in persuading Manetto that he had been changed into a certain Matteo. The whole society of friends were in the secret, and the affair was so cunningly conducted that at last they attained the desired object. They caused Manetto to be arrested for a debt of Matteo, sent Matteo's brothers and then the clergyman of the parish to reason with him on his spendthrift habits, and fooled him so that he fairly lost his sense of identity. The whole series of incidents, beginning with Manetto's indignant assertion of his proper personality, passing through his doubts, and closing with his mystification, is conducted by fine gradations of irresistibly comic humor. At last the poor man resolves to quit Florence and to seek refuge with King Mathias Corvinus in Hungary; which it seems he subsequently did, in company with a certain Lo Spano. There is no reason to suppose that this practical joke did not actually take place.