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Updated: June 1, 2025
Two years after, at seventeen, she writes: "I am studying Madame de Staël, Epictetus, Milton, Racine, and the Castilian ballads, with great delight.... I am engrossed in reading the elder Italian poets, beginning with Berni, from whom I shall proceed to Pulci and Politian." How almost infinitely above "beaus and dresses" was such intellectual work as this!
The first edition of Berni was prohibited in consequence of its containing a severe attack on the clergy; but even the prohibition did not help to make it popular.
I had already a slight general notion of Italian letters from Leigh Hunt, and from other agreeable English Italianates; and I knew that I wanted to read not only the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, Berni, and the rest, who, from what I knew of them, I thought would be even more to my mind.
The worst is that no one will imagine anything sublime in a superior donkey, so my simile is unfair and false. Is it not strange? I love Wordsworth best, and yet Byron has the greater power over me. How is that?" The letter pursued: "I have finished Boiardo and have taken up Berni. The latter offends me. I suppose we women do not really care for humour.
There were indeed whole months during which he never ventured to cross his threshold at Venice, lest he should fall in with some incensed Florentine like the younger Strozzi. Nor did he escape the cudgels and the daggers of his enemies, although they failed to have the effect which Berni prophesied him in a famous sonnet. Aretino died in his house, of apoplexy.
As examples of his lighter vein, we might allude to the sonnet on the Sistine and the capitolo in answer to Francesco Berni, written in the name of Fra Sebastiano. Sometimes his satire becomes malignant, as in the sonnet against the people of Pistoja, which breathes the spirit of Dantesque invective.
Satires, ii. But the characteristic vice of the Italian was not coarse sensuality. He required the fascination of the fancy to be added to the allurement of the senses. It is this which makes the Capitoli of the burlesque poets, of men of note like Berni, La Casa, Varchi, Mauro, Molsa, Dolce, Bembo, Firenzuola, Bronzino, Aretino, and de' Medici, so amazing.
It is alternately burlesque and serious, and it abounds with passages of great pathos and beauty. It was, however, remodeled by Berni, sixty years after the death of the author, and from the variety and novelty of the adventures, the richness of its descriptions, the interest excited by its hero, and the honor rendered to the female sex, it excels the Morgante.
The epic poets of the Italian Renaissance, Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto, even the stately and sentimental Tasso, are no epic poets at all. They are mere light and amusing gossips, some of them absolute buffoons. Their adventures over hill and dale are mere riding parties; their fights mere festival tournaments, their enchantments mere pageant wonders.
Even the great Galileo, who was a man of wit, bred up in the pure Tuscan school of Berni and Casa, and who was an idolator of Ariosto, wrote, when he was young, a "review" of the Jerusalem Delivered, which it is painful to read, it is so unjust and contemptuous.
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