In lei sola raccolto
Era quant'è d'onesto e bello al mondo.
. . . . . . . . .
Un'altra sia tra le belle la prima:
Costei non prima chiamesi, ma sola;
Chè 'l giglio e la viola
Cedono e gli altri fior tutti alla rosa.
Pendevon dalla testa luminosa
Scherzando per la fronte e suoi crin d'oro,
Mentre ella nel bel coro
Movea ristretti al suono e dolci passi.

She is the lady of the Stanze, whom Giuliano found among the fields that April morning[510]:

Candida è ella, e candida la vesta,
Ma pur di rose e fior dipinta e d'erba;
Lo inanellato crin dall'aurea testa
Scende in la fronte umilmente superba.
Ridegli attorno tutta la foresta,
E quanto può sue cure disacerba,
Nell'atto regalmente è mansueta;
E pur col ciglio le tempeste acqueta.
. . . . . . . . .
Ell'era assissa sopra la verdura
Allegra, e ghirlandetta avea contesta
Di quanti fior creasse mai natura,
De' quali era dipinta la sua vesta.
E come prima al giovan pose cura,
Alquanto paurosa alzò la testa;
Poi con la bianca man ripreso il lembo,
Levossi in piè con di fior pieno un grembo.

All the defined idealism, the sweetness and the purity of Tuscan portraiture are in these stanzas. Simonetta does not pass by with a salutation in a mist of spiritual glory like Beatrice. She is surrounded with no flames of sensual desire like the Griselda of Boccaccio. She sits for her portrait in a tranquil light, or moves across the canvas with the dignity of a great lady:

Lei fuor di guisa umana
Mosse con maestà l'andar celeste,
E con man sospendea l'ornata veste
Regale in atto e portamento altero.

It was a rare and fugitive moment in the history of art when Poliziano could paint La Simonetta in these verses, and Lippo Lippi showed her likeness on cathedral walls of Prato. Different models of feminine beauty, different ideals of womanly grace served the painters and poets of a more developed age; Titian's Flora and Dosso Dossi's Circe illustrating the Alcina of Ariosto and the women of Guarini. Once more, it is the thought of Simonetta which pervades the landscape of the third canzone I have mentioned. Herself is absent; but, as in a lyric of Petrarch, her spirit is felt, and we are made to see her throned beneath the gnarled beech-branches or dipping her foot in the too happy rivulet. Something just short of perfection in the staccato exclamations of the final trophe reminds us of Poliziano's most serious defect. Amid so much tenderness of natural feeling, he fails to make us believe in the reality of his emotion. Not passion, not thought, but the refined sensuousness of a nature keenly alive to plastic beauty, educated in the schools of classical and Florentine art, and gifted with inexhaustible facility of language, is the dominant quality of Poliziano's Italian poetry. The same quality is found in his Latin and Greek verse—in the plaintive elegies for La Bella Simonetta and Albiera degli Albizzi, in the Violæ and in that ode In puellam suam[511] which is the Latin sister of La brunettina. The Sylvæ add a new element of earnestness to his style; for if Poliziano felt deep and passionate emotion, it was for Homer, Virgil and the poets praised in the Nutricia, while the Rusticus condenses in one picture of marvelous fullness the outgoings of genuine emotion stimulated by his love of the country.

Hanc, o cœlicolæ magni, concedite vitam!
Sic mihi delicias, sic blandimenta laborum,
Sic faciles date semper opes; hac improba sunto
Vota tenus. Nunquam certe, nunquam ilia precabor,
Splendeat ut rutilo frons invidiosa galero,
Tergeminaque gravis surgat mihi mitra corona.

That is the heart-felt prayer of Poliziano. Give me the tranquil scholar's life among the pleasures of the fields; my books for serious thought in studious hours; the woods and fields for recreation; with moderate wealth well-gotten without toil; no bishop's miter or triple tiara to vex my brows. It is the same ideal as Alberti's. From this background of the modest rural life emerge three splendid visions—the Golden Age, when all was plenitude and peace; Orpheus of the dulcet lyre, evoking harmony from discord in man's jarring life; and Venus rising from the waves to bless the world with beauty felt through art. Such was the programme of human life sketched by the representative mind of his century, in an age when the Italians were summoned to do battle with France, Germany and Spain invasive of their borders.

Poliziano died before the great catastrophe. He sank at the meridian of his fame, in the same month nearly as Pico, two years later than Lorenzo, a little earlier than Ficino, in the year 1494, so fatal to his country, the date that marks the boundary between two ages in Italian history.