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Updated: June 6, 2025
To Florence and to Lorenzo de' Medici in particular is due the honour of having first introduced the rustic speech of the people. His two poems written in the language of the peasants about Florence, La Nencia da Barberino and a canzonet In morte della Nencia, possess a grace to which the quaintness of the diction adds point and flavour. A short extract must suffice to illustrate the style.
Eh! I know it all as if I'd been there, for Nencia, you see, my grandmother's aunt, travelled with the Duchess, and came back with her eyes round as platters, and not a word to say for the rest of the year to any of the lads who'd courted her here in Vicenza.
Just as Lorenzo dei Medici was certainly not without a deliberate purpose of selecting the quaintness and gracefulness of peasant life; even so, and perhaps more, Luigi Pulci must have had a deliberate intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in both cases the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the "Nencia da Barberino" from the genius of Lorenzo, in the "Morgante Maggiore" from the stolidity of Pulci.
For her devotion had that mark of true piety, that she wished it not to be observed; so that Nencia had strict orders, on the chaplain's approach, to warn her mistress if she happened to be in prayer. "Well, the winter passed, and spring was well forward, when my grandmother one evening had a bad fright.
"My grandmother seldom saw her that winter, for though she showed a brave front to all she kept more and more to herself, choosing to have only Nencia about her and dismissing even her when she went to pray.
It is true she quitted her gold-laced gowns and wore a veil over her head; but Nencia would have it she looked the lovelier for the change and so gave the Duke greater displeasure.
His Selve d'Amore, his Corinto, his Ambra, his La Nencia da Barberino, his Laude, his Sonetti, his Cansoni, etc., are all poems that live in the Italian literature of to-day. Not as a man ashamed of the vernacular, and forced to use it because he can command no better, does Lorenzo write.
But Luigi Pulci was vastly less gifted as a poet than Lorenzo dei Medici; Florentine prentices are less æsthetically pleasing than Tuscan peasants, and the "Morgante Maggiore" is a piece of work of a sort utterly inferior to the "Nencia da Barberino." Still the "Morgante Maggiore" remains, and will remain, as a very remarkable production of grotesque art.
It is evidently suggested by the fifth Idyl of Theocritus, and is a fair specimen of a very uncommon class in English. Akin to this is the burlesque variety, of which we have already met with examples in Lorenzo's Nencia and Pulci's Beca, and which is almost equally rare with us. A specimen will be found in the not very successful eclogue in Greene's Menaphon.
The objectivity of the writer is such that we are in doubt whether the speaker the young peasant Vallera, who declares his love to Nencia awakens his sympathy or ridicule. The deliberate contrast to the conventional eclogue is unmistakable. Lorenzo surrenders himself purposely to the realism of simple, rough country life, and yet his work makes upon us the impression of true poetry.
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