Renaissance in Italy, Volume 5 (of 7) / Italian Literature, Part 2

by John Addington Symonds

Relation of Satiric to Serious Literature—Italy has more Parody and Caricature than Satire or Comedy—Life of Folengo—His Orlandino—Critique of Previous Romances—Lutheran Doctrines—Orlando's Boyhood—Griffarosto—Invective against Friars—Maccaronic Poetry—The Travesty of Humanism—Pedantesque Poetry—Glottogrysio Ludimagistro—Tifi Odassi of Padua—The Pedant Vigonça—Evangelista Fossa—Giorgio Alione—Folengo employs the Maccaronic Style for an Epic—His Address to the Muses—His Hero Baldus—Boyhood and Youth—Cingar—The Travels of the Barons—Gulfora—Witchcraft in Italy—Folengo's Conception of Witchcraft—Entrance into Hell—The Zany and the Pumpkin—Nature of Folengo's Satire—His Relation to Rabelais—The Moscheis—The Zanitonella—Maccaronic Poetry was Lombard—Another and Tuscan Type of Burlesque—Capitoli—Their Popular Growth—Berni—His Life—His Mysterious Death—His Character and Style—Three Classes of Capitoli—The pure Bernesque Manner—Berni's Imitators—The Indecency of this Burlesque—Such Humor was Indigenous—Terza Rima—Berni's Satires on Adrian VI. and Clement VII.—His Caricatures—His Sonnet on Aretino—The Rifacimento of Boiardo's Orlando—The Mystery of its Publication—Albicante and Aretino—The Publishers Giunta and Calvi—Berni's Protestant Opinions—Eighteen Stanzas of the Rifacimento printed by Vergerio—Hypothesis respecting the Mutilation of the Rifacimento—Satire in Italy.

In all classical epochs of literature comedy and satire have presented their antithesis to ideal poetry, by setting the actual against the imagined world, or by travestying the forms of serious art. Thus the Titanic farce of Aristophanes was counterposed to Æschylean tragedy; and Molière portrayed men as they are, before an audience which welcomed Racine's pictures of men as the age conceived they ought to be. It is the mark of really great literature when both thesis and antithesis, the aspiration after the ideal and the critique of actual existence, exhibit an equality of scale. The comic and satiric species of poetry attain to grandeur only by contact with impassioned art of a high quality, or else by contrast with a natural greatness in the nation that produces them. Both mask and anti-mask reveal the mental stature of the people. Both issue from the conscience of society, and bear its impress.

If so much be admitted, we can easily understand why burlesque poetry formed the inevitable pendent to polite literature in Italy. There was no national tragedy; therefore there could be no great comedy. The best work of the age, typified by Ariosto's epic, was so steeped in irony that it offered no vantage-ground for humorous counterpoise. There was nothing left but to exaggerate its salient qualities, and to caricature its form. Such exaggeration was burlesque; such caricature was parody. In like manner, satire found no adequate sphere. The nation's life was not on so grand a scale as to evolve the elements of satire from the contrast between faculties and foibles. Nor again could a society, corrupt and satisfied with corruption, anxious to live and let live, apply the lash with earnestness to its own shoulders. Facit indignatio versus, was Juvenal's motto; and indignation tore the heart of Swift. But in Italy there was no indignation. All men were agreed to tolerate, condone, and compromise. When vices come to be laughingly admitted, when discords between practice and profession furnish themes for tales and epigrams, the moral conscience is extinct. But without an appeal to conscience the satirist has no locus standi. Therefore, in Italy there was no great satire, as in Italy there was no great comedy.

The burlesque rhymsters portrayed their own and their neighbors' immorality with self-complacent humor, calling upon the public to make merry over the spectacle. This poetry, obscene, equivocal, frivolous, horribly sincere, supplied a natural antithesis to the pseudo-platonic, pedantic, artificial mannerism of the purists. In point of intrinsic value, there is not much to choose between the Petrarchistic and the burlesque styles. Many burlesque poets piqued themselves with justice on their elegance, and clothed gross thoughts in diction of elaborate polish. Meanwhile they laid the affectations, conventions and ideals of the age impartially under contribution. The sonneteers suggested parodies to Aretino, who celebrated vice and deformity in women with hyperboles adapted from the sentimental school.[384] The age of gold was ridiculed by Romolo Bertini.[385] The idyl found its travesty in Berni's pictures of crude village loves and in Folengo's Zanitonella. Chivalry became absurd by the simple process of enforcing the prosaic elements in Ariosto, reducing his heroes to the level of plebeian life, and exaggerating the extravagance of his romance. The ironical smile which played upon his lips, expands into broad grins and horse-laughter. Yet, though the burlesque poets turned everything they touched into ridicule, these buffoons were not unfrequently possessed of excellent good sense. Not a few of them, as we shall see, were among the freest thinkers of their age. Like Court jesters they dared to utter truths which would have sent a serious writer to the stake. Lucidity of intellectual vision was granted at this time in Italy to none but positive and materialistic thinkers—to analysts like Machiavelli and Pomponazzi, critics like Pietro Aretino, poets with feet firmly planted on the earth like Berni and Folengo. The two last-named artists in the burlesque style may be selected as the leaders of two different but cognate schools, the one flourishing in Lombardy, the other in Florence.

Girolamo Folengo was born in 1491 of noble parents at Cipada, a village of the Mantuan district. He made his first studies under his father's roof, and in due time proceeded to Bologna. Here he attended the lectures of Pomponazzi, and threw himself with ardor into the pleasures and perils of the academical career. Francesco Gonzaga, a fantastical and high-spirited libertine from Mantua, was the recognized leader of the students at that moment. Duels, challenges, intrigues and street-quarrels formed the staple of their life. It was an exciting and romantic round of gayety and danger, of which the novelists have left us many an animated picture. Folengo by his extravagant conduct soon exhausted the easy patience of the university authorities. He was obliged to quit Bologna, and his father refused to receive him. In this emergency he took refuge in a Benedictine convent at Brescia. When he made himself a monk, Folengo changed his Christian name to Teofilo, by which he is now best known in literature. But he did not long endure the confinement of a cloister. After six years spent among the Benedictines, he threw the cowl aside, and ran off with a woman, Girolama Dieda, for whom he had conceived an insane passion.[386] This was in the year 1515. During the next eleven years he gave himself to the composition of burlesque poetry. His Maccaronea appeared at Venice in 1519, and his Orlandino in 1526. The former was published under he pseudonym of Merlinus Cocaius, compounded of a slang word in the Mantuan dialect, and of the famous wizard's title of romance.[387] The latter bore the nom de plume of Limerno Pitocco—an anagram of Merlino, with the addition of an epithet pointing to the poet's indigence. These works brought Folengo fame but little wealth, and he was fain to return at last to his old refuge.[388] Resuming the cowl, he now retired to a monastery in the kingdom of Naples, visited Sicily, and died at last near Padua, in the convent of S. Croce di Campese. This was in 1544. The last years of his life had been devoted to religious poetry, which is not read with the same curiosity as his burlesque productions.

Teofilo Folengo, or Merlinus Cocaius, or Limerno Pitocco, was, when he wrote his burlesque poems, what the French would call a déclassé. He had compromised his character in early youth and had been refused the shelter of his father's home. He had taken monastic vows in a moment of pique, or with the baser object of getting daily bread in idleness. His elopement from the convent with a paramour had brought scandal on religion. Each of these steps contributed to place him beyond the pale of respectability. Driven to bay and forced to earn his living, he now turned round upon society; and spoke his mind out with a freedom born of bile and cynical indifference. If he had learned nothing else at Bologna, he had imbibed the materialistic philosophy of Pomponazzi together with Gonzaga's lessons in libertinage. Brutalized, degraded in his own eyes, rejected by the world of honest or decorous citizens, but with a keen sense of the follies, vices and hypocrisies of his age, he resolved to retaliate by a work of art that should attract attention and force the public to listen to his comments on their shame. In his humorous poetry there is, therefore, a deliberate if not a very dignified intention. He does not merely laugh, but mixes satire with ribaldry, and points buffoonery with biting sarcasm. Since the burlesque style had by its nature to be parasitical and needed an external motive, Folengo chose for the subject of his parody the romance of Orlando, which was fashionable to the point of extravagance in Italy after the appearance of the Furioso. But he was not satisfied with turning a tale of Paladins to ridicule. He used it as the shield behind which he knew that he might safely shoot his arrows at the clergy and the princes of his native land, attack the fortresses of orthodoxy, and vent his spleen upon society by dragging its depraved ideals in the mire of his own powerful but vulgar scorn.

Folengo has told us that the Orlandino was conceived and written before the Maccaronea, though it was published some years later. It is probable that the rude form and plebeian language of this burlesque romance found but little favor with a public educated in the niceties of style. They were ready to accept the bastard Latin dialect invented for his second venture, because it offended no puristic sensibilities. But the coarse Italian of the Orlandino could not be relished by academicians, who had been pampered with the refinements of Berni's wanton Muse.[389] Only eight cantos appeared; nor is there reason to suppose that any more were written, for it may be assumed that the fragment had fulfilled its author's purpose.[390] That purpose was to satirize the vice, hypocrisy and superstition of the clergy, and more particularly of the begging friars. In form the Orlandino pretends to be a romance of chivalry, and it bears the same relation to the Orlando of Boiardo and Ariosto as the Secchia Rapita to the heroic poems of Tasso's school. It begins with a burlesque invocation to Federigo Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, in which the poet bluntly describes his poverty and begs for largess. Then Folengo passes to an account of his authorities and to the criticism of his predecessors in romantic poetry. He had recourse, he says, to a witch of Val Camonica, who mounted him upon a ram, and bore him to the country of the Goths. There he found forty decades of Turpin's history among the rubbish of old books stolen from Italy. Of these, three decades had already been discovered and translated by Boiardo; but, after versifying a large portion of the second, the poet left the rest of it to Ariosto. The sixth was stolen from him by Francesco Bello. The last he gave with his own hands to Poliziano, who put it into rhyme and allowed Pulci to have the credit of his labors.[391] Folengo himself took a portion of the first decade, and thus obtained material for treating of the birth and boyhood of Orlando. This exordium is chiefly valuable as a piece of contemporary criticism:

Queste tre Deche dunque sin quà trovo Esser dal fonte di Turpin cavate; Ma Trebisonda, Ancroia, Spagna, e Bovo Coll'altro resto al foco sian donate: Apocrife son tutte, e le riprovo Come nemiche d'ogni veritate; Boiardo, l'Ariosto, Pulci, e'l Cieco Autenticati sono, ed io con seco.

If we may accept this stanza as expressing the opinion of Italians in the sixteenth century relative to their romantic poets, we find that it almost exactly agrees with that of posterity. Only the Mambriano of Bello has failed to maintain its place beside the Morgante and Orlando.