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Updated: June 1, 2025
There is a kind of jocose or burlesque satire peculiar to Italy, in which the literature is extremely rich. If it serves the cause of wisdom, it is always in the mask of folly. Comic poetry, hitherto known in Italy as burlesque, of which Burchiello was the representative in the fifteenth century, received from Berni the name of Bernesque, in its more refined and elegant character.
He is the portrait of perpetual irony, the spirit of the golden Sixteenth Century which delicately laughed at the whole world of thoughts and things, the quintessence of the poetry of Ariosto, the wit of Berni, all condensed into one incarnation and immortalised by truthfullest art.
Poggio, who wrote theFacetiae, was a clergyman; Francesco Berni, the satirist, held a canonry; Teofilo Folengo, the author of theOrlandino, was a Benedictine, certainly by no means a faithful one; Matteo Bandello, who held up his own order to ridicule, was a Dominican, and nephew of a general of this order. Were they encouraged to write by the sense that they ran no risks.
From these she passes on to the followers of the romantic style begun by Pulci, Cieco da Ferrara, Burchiello, Bojardo; then Berni, born at the end of the fifteenth century, who carried on or recast Bojardo's Orlando Innamorato, which was followed by Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the delight of Italy.
Next year , we find her studying Mme de Staël, Epictetus, Milton, Racine, and Spanish ballads, 'with great delight. Anon she is engrossed with the elder Italian poets, from Berni down to Pulci and Politian; then with Locke and the ontologists; then with the opera omnia of Sir William Temple.
See Greg. Stadt Rom, vol. viii. pp. 382, 383. The details about Adriano are chiefly taken from the Relazioni of the Venetian embassadors, series ii. vol. iii. pp. 75-120. His father's name was Florus or Flerentius, of the Flemish family, it is supposed, of Dedel. Berni calls him a carpet-maker. Other accounts represent him as a ship's carpenter. The Pope's baptismal name was Adrian.
The reader may imagine a similar occurrence in England, by supposing that Dryden had re-written the whole of Chaucer, and that his reconstruction had in the course of time as much surpassed the original in popularity, as his version of the Flower and the Leaf did, up to the beginning of the present century. I do not mean to compare Chaucer with Boiardo, or Dryden with Berni.
The invention is his; the first earnest impulse; the unmisgivings joy; the primitive morning breath, when the town-smoke has not polluted the fields, and the birds are singing their "wood-notes wild." Besides, after all, one cannot be sure that Berni could have invented as Boiardo did. If he could, he would probably have written some fine serious poem of his own.
He writes exquisitely harmonious, supple, and brilliant Tuscan verse, with an infinite richness of diction; while poor Boiardo jogs along in a language which is not the Lombard dialect in which he speaks, and which is very uncouth and awkward, as is every pure language for a provincial; indeed, so much so, that the pedantic Tuscans require Berni to make Tuscan, elegant, to ingentilire, with infinite loss to quaintness and charm, the "Orlando Innamorato" of poor Ferrarese Boiardo.
See, for instance, Berni's sonnets. In one of these, Berni very powerfully describes the vacillation and irresolution of Clement's state-policy. See Varchi's picture of the state of Rome, St. Fior. ii. So Luigi Guicciardini in his account of the sack of Rome relates. It is well known that at this crisis the Emperor seriously thought of putting an end to the State of the Church.
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