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On the lowest tier were arranged false beards, masks, and carnival disguises; above came volumes of the Latin and Italian poets, among others Boccaccio, the 'Morgante' of Pulci, and Petrarch, partly in the form of valuable printed parchments and illuminated manuscripts; then women's ornaments and toilet articles, scents, mirrors, veils and false hair; higher up, lutes, harps, chessboards, playing-cards; and finally, on the two uppermost tiers, paintings only, especially of female beauties, partly fancy pictures, bearing the classical names of Lucretia, Cleopatra, or Faustina, partly portraits of the beautiful Bencina, Lena Morella, Bina and Maria de' Lenzi.
Italian mediæval literature is rich in the Roland romances, founded on the fabulous "Chronicle of John Turpin" and the "Chansons de Gestes," of which the "Song of Roland" is one. Of the Italian romances the "Morgante Maggiore" of Pulci was published as early as 1488, Boyardo's "Orlando Innamorata" in 1496, and Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" in 1515.
At any rate, all the guide-books, Baedeker, Murray, and Hare, are wrong, though not so far out as that gentleman who, having assured us that Boccaccio was a "little priest," and that Petrarch, Poliziano, Lorenzo, and Pulci were of no account as poets, remarks that Shelley's body was found at Lerici, and that he was burned close by. See Carmichael, The Old Road, etc., pp. 183-202.
"A dangerous personage; that poem of his cuts both ways; and then there was Pulci, that Morgante of his cuts both ways, or rather one way, and that sheer against us; and then there was Aretino, who dealt so hard with the poveri frati; all writers, at least Italian ones, are not lick-spittles.
I have no doubt that, making allowance for the age in which he lived, Pulci was an excellent Christian. His orthodoxy, it is true, was not the orthodoxy of the times of Dante or St. Dominic, nor yet of that of the Council of Trent. His opinions respecting the mystery of the Trinity appear to have been more like those of Sir Isaac Newton than of Archdeacon Travis.
Pulci is conjectured, with great probability, to have designed him as a caricature of some real person; for Margutte is a Greek who, in point of morals, has been horribly brought up, and some of the Greek refugees in Italy were greatly disliked for the cynicism of their manners and the grossness of their lives. Margutte is a glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and a blasphemer.
Our old Bardo de' Bardi is so blind that he can see no more of his daughter than, as he says, a glimmering of something bright when she comes very near him: doubtless her golden hair, which, as Messer Luigi Pulci says of his Meridiana's, `raggia come stella per sereno. Ah! here come some clients of mine, and I shouldn't wonder if one of them could serve your turn about that ring."
The young sculptor sat at the same board as Marsilio Ficino, interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of Oriental erudition; Angelo Poliziano, the unrivalled humanist and melodious Italian poet; Luigi Pulci, the humorous inventor of burlesque romance with artists, scholars, students innumerable, all in their own departments capable of satisfying a youth's curiosity, by explaining to him the particular virtues of books discussed, or of antique works of art inspected.
But Italy was not the true soil of chivalry, and the inimitable fictions of Bojardo, Pulci, and Ariosto were composed with that lurking smile of half-supprest mirth which, far from a serious tone, could raise only a corresponding smile of incredulity in the reader. In Spain, however, the marvels of romance were all taken in perfect good faith.
Speaking of his wife he says: "She is dreadfully troubled with a plague which, if you have been in Italy, I am sure you are no stranger to. 'Pulci, pulci. If you have not had a colony of them settled upon you, and quartered, and giving you no quarter, you have been an exception to travellers in Italy.
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