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

by John Addington Symonds

Tu ne dirai e farai tante e tante, Lingua fracida, marcia, senza sale.

It proceeds with execration; and when the required fourteen lines have been terminated, it foams over into rage more voluble and still more voluble, unwinding the folds of an interminable Coda with ever-increasing crescendo of vituperation, as though the passion of the writer could not be appeased. The whole has to be read at one breath. No quotation can render a conception of its rhetorical art. Every word strikes home because every word contains a truth expressed in language of malignant undiluted heartfelt hate. That most difficult of literary triumphs, to render abuse sublime, to sustain a single note of fierce invective without relaxing or weakening the several grades that lead to the catastrophe, has been accomplished. This achievement is no doubt due in some measure to the exact correspondence between what we know of Pietro Aretino and what Berni has written of him. Yet its blunt fidelity to fact does not detract from the skill displayed in the handling of those triple series of rhymes, each one of which descends like a lash upon the writhing back beneath:

Ch'ormai ogni paese Hai ammorbato, ogn'uom, ogn'animale, Il ciel e Dio e 'l diavol ti vuol male. Quelle veste ducale, O ducali accattate e furfantate, Che ti piangono addosso sventurate, A suon di bastonate Ti saran tratte, prima che tu muoja, Dal reverendo padre messer boja, Che l'anima di noja, Mediante un capestro, caveratti, E per maggior favore squarteratti; E quei tuoi leccapiatti, Bardassonacci, paggi da taverna, Ti canteranno il requiem eterna. Or vivi e ti governa, Bench'un pugnale, un cesso, overo un nodo Ti faranno star cheto in ogni modo.

From this conclusion the rest may be divined. Berni paid dearly for the satisfaction of thus venting his spleen. Aretino had found more than his match. Though himself a master in the art of throwing dirt, he could not, like Berni, sling his missiles with the certainty of gaining for himself by the same act an immortality of glory. This privilege is reserved for the genius of style, and style alone. Therefore he had to shrink in silence under Berni's scourge. But Aretino was not the man to forego revenge if only an opportunity for inflicting injury upon his antagonist, full and effectual, and without peril to himself, was offered. The occasion came after Berni's death; and how he availed himself of it, will appear in the next paragraphs.

Though the Capitoli and sonnets won for their author the high place he occupies among Italian poets, Berni is also famous for his rifacimento or remodeling of the Orlando Innamorato. He undertook this task after the publication of the Furioso; and though part was written at Verona, we know from references to contemporary events contained in the rifacimento, that Berni was at work upon it in the last years of his life at Florence. It was not published until some time after his death. Berni subjected the whole of Boiardo's poem to minute revision, eliminating obsolete words and Lombard phrases, polishing the verse, and softening the roughness of the elder poet's style. He omitted a few passages, introduced digressions, connected the episodes by links and references, and opened each canto with a dissertation in the manner of Ariosto. Opinions may vary as to the value of the changes wrought by Berni. But there can be no doubt that his work was executed with artistic accuracy, and that his purpose was a right one. He aimed at nothing less than rendering a noble poem adequate to the measure of literary excellence attained by the Italians since Boiardo's death. The Innamorato was to be made worthy of the Furioso. The nation was to possess a continuous epic of Orlando, complete in all its parts and uniformly pure in style. Had Berni lived to see his own work through the press, it is probable that this result would have been attained. As it happened, the malignity of fortune or the malice of a concealed enemy defeated his intention. We only possess a deformed version of his rifacimento. The history, or rather the tragedy, of its publication involves some complicated questions of conjecture. Yet the side-lights thrown upon the conditions of literature at that time in Italy, as well as on the mystery of Berni's death, are sufficiently interesting to justify the requisite expenditure of space and time.

The rifacimento appeared in a mutilated form at Venice in 1541, from the press of the Giunti, and again in 1542 at Milan from that of Francesco Calvo. These two issues are identical, except in the title and tail pages. The same batch of sheets was in fact divided by the two publishers. In 1545 another issue, called Edizione Seconda, saw the light at Venice, in which Giunta introduced a very significant note, pointing out that certain stanzas were not the work of "M. Francesco Berni, but of one who presumptuously willed to do him so great an injury."[473] This edition, differing in many respects from those of 1541 and 1542, was on the whole an improvement. It would seem that the publishers, in the interval between 1541 and 1545, regretted that Berni's copy had been tampered with, and did their best, in the absence of the original, to restore a correct text. Still, as Giunta acknowledged, the rifacimento had been irretrievably damaged by some private foe.[474] The introductory dedication to Isabella Gonzaga, where we might have expected an allusion to Boiardo, is certainly not Berni's; and the two lines,

Nè ti sdegnar veder quel ch'altri volse Forse a te dedicar, ma morte il tolse,

must be understood to refer to Berni's and not to Boiardo's death. Comparison of the two editions makes it, moreover, clear that Berni's MS. had been garbled, and the autograph probably put out of the way before the publication of the poem.

Who is to be held responsible for this fraud? Who was the presumptuous enemy who did such injury to Berni? Panizzi, so far back as 1830, pointed out that Giovanni Alberto Albicante took some part in preparing the edition of 1541-2. This man prefixed sonnets written by himself to the rifacimento; "whence we might conclude that he was the editor."[475] Signor Virgili, to whose researches attention has already been directed, proved further by references to Pietro Aretino's correspondence that this old enemy of Berni had a hand in the same work. Writing to Francesco Calvo from Venice on February 16, 1540, Aretino approaches the subject of the rifacimento in these words:[476] "Our friend Albicante informs me, with reference to the printing of Orlando defamed by Berni, that you are good enough to meet my wishes, for which I thank you.... You will see that, for the sake of your own modesty, you are bound either not to issue the book at all, or else to purge it of all evil-speaking." He then states that it had been his own intention "to emend the Count of Scandiano's Innamoramento, a thing in its kind of heroic beauty, but executed in a trivial style, and expressed with phrases at once plebeian and obsolete." This task he renounced upon reflection that it would bring him no fame to assume the mask of a dead man's labors. In another letter to the same Calvo, dated February 17, 1542, Aretino resumes the subject. Sbernia (so he chooses to call Berni) has been "overwhelmed beneath the ruins he pulled down upon himself by his undoing of the Innamoramento."[477] Now, it is certain that the ruin proclaimed by Aretino did really fall on Berni's labors. In 1545 Lodovico Domenichi published a second rifacimento, far inferior in style to that of Berni, and executed with the slovenliness of a literary hack. But this was several times reprinted, whereas Berni's remained neglected on the shelves of the librarians until the year 1725, when it was republished and welcomed with a storm of exaggerated enthusiasm.

We have therefore reached this conclusion, that Aretino, aided by Albicante, both of them notable literary brigands, contrived to send a mutilated version of the rifacimento to press, with a view of doing irreparable mischief to Berni's reputation.[478] We have also seen that there was something dangerous in Berni's work, described by Aretino as maldicentia, which he held as a threat over the Milanese publisher. Lastly, Giunta recognized too late that he had made himself the party to some act of malice by issuing a garbled copy. Aretino had, we know, a private grudge to satisfy. He could not forget the castigation he received at Berni's hands, in the sonnet which has been already described. The hatred subsisting between the two men had been further exasperated by the different parts they took in a literary duel. Antonio Broccardo, a young Venetian scholar, attacked Pietro Bembo's fame at Padua in 1530, and attempted to raise allies against the great dictator. Aretino took up the cudgels for Bembo, and assailed Broccardo with vehement abuse and calumny. Berni ranged himself upon Broccardo's side. The quarrel ended in Broccardo's death under suspicious circumstances in 1531 at Padua. He was, indeed, said to have been killed by Aretino.[479] Berni died mysteriously at Florence four years later, and Aretino caused his rifacimento, "purged of evil-speaking," to be simultaneously published at Venice and Milan.