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Updated: June 26, 2025
Here, among many others, were to be found such "epoch-makers" as Poliziano, Ficino, and Landino, Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michelangelo, Luigi Pulci men who glorified their age by crowning it with the nimbus of their genius. The literary and artistic greatness of Florence was not due, however, to the comparative intellectual poverty of the other states in Italy.
During the lives of Pulci and Boiardo, the fierce passions and severe ethics of Dante had been gradually giving way to a gentler and laxer state of opinion before the progress of luxury; and though Boiardo's enamoured Paladin retains a kind of virtue not common in any age to the heroes of warfare, the lord of Scandiano, who appears to have recited his poem, sometimes to his vassals and sometimes to the ducal circle at court, intimates a smiling suspicion that such a virtue would be considered a little rude and obsolete by his hearers.
Well, I will pit any two pulci of Porto Rico against any ten you can bring from Italy, and I should be sure to see them bite the dust before the bites of our Porto Rico breed." His letters are filled with apothegms and reflections on life in general and his own in particular, and they alone would almost fill a book. In a letter to Mr. Kendall, of March 30, we find the following:
It reminds us of the wager laid by the poor queen in the play of Richard the Second, when she overhears the discourse of the gardener: "My wretchedness unto a roar of pins, They'll talk of state." Did Pulci expect his friend Lorenzo to keep a grave face during the recital of these passages?
I most heartily congratulate you on your marriage. But where is this same Lovell? I have never seen him: I wish to congratulate him too. You are quite as handsome as the Meridiana of Pulci, Ursula, ay, or the Despina of Riciardetto. Riciardetto, Ursula, is a poem written by one Fortiguerra, about ninety years ago, in imitation of the Morgante of Pulci.
In Italian we also find something of the same kind, as, for example, the descriptions of the famous Medicean tournament by Politian and Luca Pulci.
The paintings of Bernardo were many and in much esteem, and above all the Chapel of S. Lorenzo and of S. Stefano, belonging to the Pulci and Berardi, in S. Croce, and many other paintings in diverse places in the said church.
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.
Yet I should think it impossible for Pulci in general to be severe at the expense of some more agreeable quality; and I am sure that the portion of his wit most obvious to a foreigner may claim, if not to have originated, at least to have been very like the style of one who was among its declared admirers, and who was a very polished writer, Voltaire.
Exposed to all the rough usage of the half-savage street-lads in a Roman country town, Sutri, the little Orlando grows up before our eyes into the hero, the priest-hater, and the disputant. The conventional world which had been recognized since the time of Pulci and had served as a framework for the epos, here falls to pieces.
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