chapter 14 Mockery and Erudition: Alessandro Tassoni’s Secchia rapita and Francesco Redi’s Bacco in Toscana

Carlo Caruso

Authors as diverse as Alessandro Tassoni ( 1565–1635) and Francesco Redi (Arezzo 1626– 1697) are not dealt with in the same essay as a matter of course.* Situated at the opposite ends of the seventeenth century, their pro- files and works show few apparent points of contact and the contexts in which they operated could not be further apart. Tassoni laboriously negotiated the transition from the late Renaissance to the Baroque age serving under differ- ent masters, dealing with the strictures of ecclesiastical censorship and more generally operating during one of the most litigious periods in the history of , for which he was admittedly very well-equipped to trade blow for blow.1 At the other end of the century stands Redi, Arch-Consul of the and court physician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, exuding ease and self-confidence, engaged in erudite conversation with his European peers through the double network of the republic of letters and the republic of science.2

* The research conducted for this essay has benefited from a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. 1 On Tassoni see Muratori Ludovico Antonio, Vita di Alessandro Tassoni (Modena, Bartolommeo Soliani: 1739), reprinted and augmented in Tassoni Alessandro, La secchia rapita, ed. G.A. Barotti (Modena, Bartolommeo Soliani: 1744) 1–60; Puliatti P., Bibliografia di Alessandro Tassoni, 2 vols. (Florence: 1969). For a recent and comprehensive profile of Tassoni’s life and work, see the catalogue of the exhibition held at Modena, Musei Civici: Biondi G. – Stefani C. (eds.), Alessandro Tassoni spirito bisquadro (Modena: 2015). 2 Among the vast bibliography available on Redi, see in particular Imbert G., Il Bacco in Toscana di Francesco Redi e la poesia ditirambica (Città di Castello: 1890); idem, Francesco Redi. L’uomo (dal carteggio edito e inedito e da’ Ricordi). La Villa medicea di Pratolino secondo i viaggiatori francesi e i poeti (Milan – – Naples: 1925); Viviani U., Vita, opere, iconografia, bibliografia, vocabolario inedito delle voci aretine e libro inedito de’ Ricordi di Francesco Redi, 3 vols. (Arezzo: 1924–1931); Bernardi W. – Guerrini L. (eds.), Francesco Redi. Un protagonista della scienza moderna. Documenti, esperimenti, immagini, Biblioteca di Nuncius 33 (Florence: 1999); and the website www.francescoredi.it curated by W. Bernardi.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004396593_016 396 Caruso

Yet there is one point the two authors do have in common, which brings them in line with the topic of this volume: each of them fitted his most famous work in verse with a commentary. Tassoni’s mock-heroic poem La secchia ra- pita (‘The Rape of the Pail’ or ‘The Stolen Bucket’), first published in in 1622 under the title La secchia, re-appeared in the definitive 1630 edition with a set of notes fictitiously ascribed to a friend of the author, Gaspare Salviani. Redi’s dithyramb Bacco in Toscana (‘Bacchus in Tuscany’), first published in Florence in 1685, is complemented with a wonderfully disproportionate self- commentary, in which the seemingly inexhaustible sources of its author’s learning are allowed to shine. A further link between the two texts is provided by Lorenzo Lippi’s Malmantile racquistato, a mock-heroic, Tassoni-inspired poem, posthumously published in Florence in 1676 and re-issued with an ex- tensive commentary by Paolo Minucci in 1688, which in the annotated version served as a partial model for Redi’s – as will be seen in due course. On a more general level, an overall playful attitude resulting in a tendency to speak tongue-in-cheek characterises the two works under examination here. The anonymous preface to Tassoni’s 1630 Secchia rapita stated that ‘i dotti leg- gono ordinariamente le poesie per ricreazione e si dilettano più de le baie, quando sono ben dette, che de le cose serie’ (‘learned men ordinarily read po- etry for recreation and enjoy mockery – so long as it is delivered effectively – more than serious stuff’).3 By way of three eloquent epigraphs placed before his Bacco in Toscana, Redi stressed the relaxing effect of occasional distrac- tions and (allegedly) unambitious poetry.4 Leigh Hunt, who ‘decantered’ Redi’s poem into English in 1825, claimed that ‘when a trifle is original, even a trifle becomes worth something’, and wished upon his version ‘a good humoured

3 Tassoni Alessandro, La secchia rapita. I. Prima redazione. II. Redazione definitiva, ed. O. Besomi, 2 vols., Medioevo e umanesimo 68, 76 (Padua: 1987–1990) vol. 2, 5. All quotations are from this edition; all translations from Tassoni are mine unless otherwise stated. The anonymous preface was in fact by Tassoni, who in a previous edition had signed the same text with his academic name: ‘Il Bisquadro Accademico Umorista di Roma’ (see Tassoni, La secchia rapita, ed. Besomi, vol. 2, 4). 4 Two quotations from Valerius Maximus, Dicta et facta memorabilia viii.8 (‘De otio laudato’) report respectively on Quintus Mutius Scaevola alternating serious business with facetious conversation and on Socrates enjoying playing with children; the third quotation is from a sonnet by Giovanni Della Casa in praise of humble style, given as sonnet no. 34 by Redi, 35 in modern editions: cf. Della Casa G., Rime, ed. S. Carrai, Testi italiani commentati 2 (Milan: 2014) 112. See Redi Francesco, Bacco in Toscana, con una scelta delle ‘Annotazioni’, ed. G. Bucchi, Scrittori italiani commentati 13 (Rome – Padua: 2005) 3. Reference will be made to this edition unless otherwise stated.