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Had not the troubadours developed their theory of courtly love, with its influence upon human nature, we cannot say what course early Italian literature might have run. Moreover, the troubadours provided Italy and other countries also with perfect models of poetical form. The sonnet, the terza rima and any other form used by Dante are of Provençal origin.
How he loved his father may be seen in the terza rima poem on his death in 1534. Notice this expression in a letter to his father, written from Rome, about 1512, "Bastivi avere del pane, e vivete ben con Cristo e poveramente; come fo io qua, che vivo meschinamente." It does not seem that he ever altered this poor way of living.
The death of Lodovico and Buonarroto, happening within a space of little more than five years, profoundly affected Michelangelo's mind, and left an indelible mark of sadness on his life. One of his best poems, a capitolo, or piece of verse in terza rima stanzas, was written on the occasion of his father's decease. In it he says that Lodovico had reached the age of ninety.
They are composed throughout in terza rima without any division into acts or scenes, and are the work of one Alessandro Caperano of Faenza, thus hailing, like the later Amaranta, from the Romagna . In 1517 we find a fantastic pastoral entitled Pulicane, written in octaves by Piero Antonio Legacci dello Stricca, a Sienese, who was also the author of several rustic pieces, in which is introduced a monster half dog and half man.
Like buds that lie half-hidden in leaves, rhymes should peep out, sparkling but modest, from the cover of words, falling on the ear as though they were the irrepressible strokes of a melodious pulse at the heart of the verse. The terza rima already in use Dante adopted as suitable to continuous narrative.
They are composed, like some of Sâ de Miranda's, in the short measures more natural to the language than the terza rima and intricate stanzas of the Italianizing poets.
In Italy, at all events, it was rather due to an abundant sense of style, as is further proved by the mass of contemporary reports, histories, and even pamphlets, in the 'terza rima. Just as Niccolo da Uzzano published his scheme for a new constitution, Machiavelli his view of the history of his own time, a third, the life of Savonarola, and a fourth the siege of Piombino by Alfonso the Great, in this difficult meter, in order to produce a stronger effect, so did many others feel the need of hexameters, in order to win their special public.
Several years before he had commissioned the poets at his court to translate some of the plays of Plautus and Terence into terza rima, and had produced them. Guarino, Berardo, Collenuccio, and even Bojordo had been employed in this work by him. As early as 1486 an Italian version of the Menæchmi, the favorite play of Plautus, had been produced in Ferrara.
In the Athenæum both brothers give splendid testimony to their astonishing and epoch-making gift in transferring classical and Romance metrical forms into elegant, idiomatic German; they give affectionate attention to the insinuating beauty of elegiac verse, and secure charming effects in some of the most alien Greek forms, not to mention terza rima, ottava rima, the Spanish gloss, and not a few very notable sonnets.
But the fourteenth-century school of Petrarch had not been entirely without its representative in Italian. At least one poem included by Boccaccio in his Ameto is a strict eclogue, composed throughout in terza rima, which was destined to become the standard verse-form for 'pastoral, as ottava rima for 'rustic, composition.
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