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Updated: May 31, 2025
The more innocent form of the superstition, in which the mendicant friar could venture to appear as the competitor of the witch, is shown in the case of the witch of Gaeta whom we read of in Pontano.
See Pontano, de Immanitate, vol. i. p. 326, concerning Niccolo Fortibraccio, Antonio, Pontadera, and the Riccio Montechiaro, who stabbed and strangled for the pleasure of seeing men die. I have already discussed the blood-madness of some of the despots.
It is curious, for instance, to notice how far Gioviano Pontano carried this confusion. He speaks of a saint not only as 'divus, but as 'deus'; the angels he holds to be identical with the genii of antiquity; and his notion of immortality reminds us of the old kingdom of the shades. This spirit occasionally appears in the most extravagant shapes.
There was Pontano, the founder of the Academy of Naples, who was busy writing his Latin eclogues on the myrtle bowers of Baiae and the orange groves of Sorrento. There was her aunt, the accomplished Ippolita Sforza, Duchess of Calabria, who had learnt Greek of the great teacher Lascaris in her young days at Milan, and whose wedding had brought the magnificent Lorenzo to the court of the Sforzas.
Angelo Poliziano, those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Gioviano Pontano, with a singular gusto, those of Alfonso of Calabria. The poem in question betrays unconsciously the odious disposition of the Aragonese ruler; in these things too, he must needs be the most fortunate, else woe be to those who are more successful!
Since then caricature has been constantly, and often brilliantly, represented on the Italian Parnassus. About the middle period of the Renaissance a theoretical analysis of wit was undertaken, and its practical application in good society was regulated more precisely. The theorist was Gioviano Pontano.
Later writers have, it is true, always admitted the honour on behalf of the Republic, and Pontano goes so far as to call Amalfi magnetica in compliment thereof, whilst during the later crusades the Amalfitani, who were evidently convinced of the genuine nature of Gioja’s claim, had an heraldic figure of the mariner’s compass emblazoned on their banners.
But in the old writers there was another and less pleasing picture of the world to come the shadowy realms of Homer and of those poets who had not sweetened and humanized the conception. This made an impression on certain temperaments. Gioviano Pontano somewhere attributes to Sannazaro the story of a vision which he beheld one morning early while half awake.
'Nothing, says Pontano, 'is cheaper here than human life. But other districts could also show a terrible list of these crimes. It is hard, of course, to classify them according to the motives by which they were prompted, since political expediency, personal hatred, party hostility, fear, and revenge, all play into one another.
What Giovanni Sforza said was this: 'anzi haverla conosciuta infinite volte, ma chel Papa non gelha tolta per altro se non per usare con lei. This confession of the injured husband went the round of all the Courts of Italy, was repeated by Malipiero and Paolo Capello, formed the substance of the satires of Sannazaro and Pontano, crept into the chronicle of Matarazzo, and survived in the histories of Machiavelli and Guicciardini.
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