V’adoprassi, ovvero il Tè’—etc.
A great deal of the effect of poems of this kind consists in their hovering between jest and earnest.... The ‘Bacco in Toscana’ partakes more or less of the mock-heroic throughout, except in the very gravest lines of the author’s personal panegyrics. It is to the Ode and the Dithyrambic what the ‘Rape of the Lock’ is to the Epic, with all the inferiority which such a distinction implies.... The great fault of the poem is undoubtedly what his friend Ménage objected to in it—namely, that Bacchus has all the talk to himself, and Ariadne becomes a puppet by his side. Redi, partly in answer to this objection, and partly, perhaps, out of a certain medical conscience (for it must not be forgotten that his vinosity is purely poetical, and that he was always insisting to his patients on the necessity of temperance and dilutions), projected a sort of counter-dithyrambic in praise of water, in which all the talk was to be confined to Ariadne.... He wrote but a paragraph of this hydrambic. The inspiration was not the same. As to his drinking so little wine and yet writing so well upon it, it is a triumph for Bacchus instead of a dishonour. It only shows how little wine will suffice to set a genial brain in motion. A poet has wine in his blood. The laurel and ivy were common, of old, both to Bacchus and Apollo; at least Apollo shared the ivy always, and Bacchus wore laurel when he was young and innocent,
‘What time he played about the nestling woods,
Heaping his head with ivy and with bay.’”
(Page [45].)
Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti, a Bolognese, was the author of one of those collections of short stories so numerous in Italian literature, which often furnished subjects to our Elizabethan playwrights. The dates of his birth and death are uncertain, but the former must have been before 1450, and the latter not earlier than 1506. Besides the Porrettane (so called because the stories are supposed to be told by a holiday party at the baths of Porretta), he wrote poems, treatises, and biographies. (Page [19].)
Franco Sacchetti was a Florentine, about contemporary with Chaucer, being born in 1335. He was brought up to a commercial life, but afterwards devoted himself to literature, and took a considerable part in politics, being sent on various embassies by the Florentine Republic. On one of them he was plundered at sea by the Pisan war-ships; and, at a later date, the property he possessed near Florence was laid waste in the war with Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The date of his death is uncertain, but it probably took place during the first few years of the fifteenth century. He wrote sonnets, canzoni, madrigals, and other poems; but his best known works are his Novelle or short stories. They were originally 300 in number, but we only possess 258, the remainder having been lost. They are not fitted into any framework, like that of Boccaccio’s Decameron. The best of them are of a humorous character; and the style is more simple and colloquial than Boccaccio’s. The story given as a specimen probably exists (under one form or another) in the folk-tales of every European nation. We possess it in the ballad of “King John and the Abbot of Canterbury.” (Page [10].)
Alessandro Tassoni was born at Modena in 1565, and died there in 1635, after many intermediate changes of abode. He belonged to a noble family, but was early left an orphan, and his very moderate patrimony was further diminished by law-suits, and by the dishonesty of his guardians. The greater part of his life was spent at court; he began his career by entering the service of Cardinal Ascanio Colonna at Rome, and ended it at the Ducal Court of Modena. He was, like so many Italians of that period, a skilled politician as well as a finished scholar, and was entrusted with various diplomatic missions. His principal works belong to the departments of reflective philosophy and literary criticism, and he was engaged in an acrimonious controversy wherein the chief bones of contention were the poetry of Petrarch and the philosophy of Aristotle, both which idols of the age he attacked unsparingly; but he is best known to posterity by his heroico-comic poem of “La Secchia Rapita” (The Stolen Bucket), said to have been written in 1611. It is based on the tradition that, during a war between Modena and Bologna, the Modenese forces (in 1325) carried off a wooden bucket from a public well in the hostile city. The trophy was hung up in the Cathedral at Modena, and remained there as a witness to the truth of the story—which, as a matter of history, is somewhat doubtful, though none the worse on that account, as the groundwork to Tassoni’s poem. Many contemporaries of the author’s are introduced under fictitious names; and, no doubt, the personal element (which is not the exclusive property of the New Journalism) contributed largely to the success of the work on its first appearance. But apart from this, it is genuine burlesque, and good of its kind, the absurdity being heightened by the introduction of the deities of Olympus in comically modern guise, to represent (and parody) the “machinery” which was considered an indispensable ingredient in a serious epic poem—the “machinery” which, to a certain extent, spoils the Jerusalem and the Lusiad. The passage describing the assembly of the gods in order to deliberate on the fortunes of Modena and Bologna, has been chosen for quotation. The translation is by James Atkinson, and was published in two volumes (London, 1825). After describing “the rape of the bucket” by the Modenese, the poem goes on to narrate how the Bolognese tried to recover it, and challenged the Modenese to a war of extermination. The latter, though seeing their danger, made no efforts to put their city in a state of defence by repairing the ruined fortifications; but contented themselves with appealing to the Emperor for help, and making alliances with Parma and Cremona. Fame having carried the report of what had occurred to Olympus, the Homeric gods assembled in council (as already mentioned), with the result that Minerva and Apollo declared for Bologna, as being a city given to arts and learning. Bacchus and Venus took the part of the merry and pleasure-loving town of Modena—Mars taking the same side for the love of Venus. These incite the various terrestrial potentates to take sides in the feud—in which, at length, the Pope himself interferes. In conclusion, the bucket is left in possession of the Modenese, while the citizens of Bologna keep Enzio, King of Sardinia—son of the German Emperor—who, in fact, ended his days in captivity there. The poem was defined by Tassoni himself as “a monstrous caprice,” intended to make game of modern poets; and it is impossible to give a concise summary of it, more especially as he wove into it all the burlesque adventures which occurred to him, whether real or fictitious. Tassoni was, according to an Italian writer, “of a lively and grotesque fancy, of a cheerful disposition, and fond of jesting, insomuch that he could not refrain from jokes even in his will.” Moreover, he was “averse from the prejudices of literary men, and a lover of novelty”—for which reason he advanced the monstrous proposition that Petrarch’s Rime were not the sole standard of poetry for all ages and all countries. (Page [39].)
Achille Torelli, dramatic author, born at Naples, 1844, is said to be of Albanian descent. His first success was the comedy, After Death, written at the age of seventeen, and acted at Naples and then at Turin. This was succeeded by several comedies, most of which were successful. La Verità, from which the scene given in this volume is extracted, was acted at Naples, Milan, and Turin in 1865. Torelli volunteered for the Italian army in the campaign of 1866, and was laid up for several months in consequence of a fall from his horse at Custozza. Since then he has produced a long list of plays, both tragedies and comedies, of which perhaps the best is Triste Realtà (1871), which won the applause of the veteran Manzoni. Angelo de Gubernatis (in the Dizionario Biografico degli Scrittori Contemporanei, whence the main facts of this notice are gathered) considers I Mariti Torelli’s masterpiece. The play is a good one, but has about as much right to be called a comedy as George Eliot’s Janet’s Repentance. He leads a very retired life, seeing only a few friends, and spends most of his time in study and writing. (Page [262].)
Giorgio Vasari, born at Arezzo, 1512. Studied drawing under Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, and others. Between 1527 and 1529, driven by necessity, and having several relations in need of help, he worked as a goldsmith at Florence, but afterwards returned to painting. Like Ruskin in our own day, however, he was rather a writer on art than an artist. He was the author of several works on painting and architecture, of an autobiography, and, above all, of the celebrated Lives of Famous Painters. The anecdotes quoted in this volume were traditionally current in Vasari’s time, and had already been recorded by Franco Sacchetti. The translation quoted is from Stories of the Italian Artists, by the author of Belt and Spur (Seeley & Co., 1884). (Page 21.)