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Antonio Pistoia: the Poetic World of a Customs Collector

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Antonio Pistoia: the Poetic World of a Customs Collector Valentina Olivastri ANTONIO PISTOIA: THE POETIC WORLD OF A CUSTOMS COLLECTOR A Thesis Submitted in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University College London, University of London Supervisors of Research: Anna Laura Lepschy, Giovanni Aquilecchia September 1999 ProQuest Number: U641904 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest U641904 Published by ProQuest LLC(2015). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract The object of the present study is Antonio Pistoia (1436?- 1502); a jocular poet and customs collector who worked mainly in Northern Italy. Although his reputation as a notable literary figure has suffered from neglect in recent times, his work was appreciated by and known to his contemporaries including Pietro Aretino, Ludovico Ariosto, Matteo Bandello, Francesco Berni and Baldesar Castiglione. Research on his life and work came to a halt at the beginning of this century and since then he has failed to attract significant attention. The present study attempts to review and re-examine both the man and his work with a view to putting Antonio Pistoia back on the literary map. My thesis is based on the idea that a poet can be explored from various points of view and with different methodologies tailored to the objects under investigation. In the case of Pistoia a biographical history alone or an interpretation of his work alone would provide only partial results. By combining the two I have attempted to see how he and his work fitted within the cultural scene, the social and historical setting of Renaissance Italy in a period of political and military crisis. Based on archive work and on new textual material retrieved from a number of European libraries, this study challenges and tests widely held theories concerning both his biography and his literary production. By collecting fresh references and winnowing old ones, it throws new light on a series of specific issues from matters of identification relating to the poet's life, the 2 critical fortune of his collection of sonnets, his play Panfila and other minor works, and to problems of uncertain authorship, including poems of undisputed, doubtful and arbitrary attribution; the final section is devoted to his Canzoniere, its composition and the tradition to which it belongs and a thematic and stylistic overview of his poems. A codicological analysis of the allegedly autograph manuscript and a listing of Pistoia's archival documents, manuscripts and early printed sources, completely assembled for the first time and comprehensive of additional new findings, conclude the study. Acknowledgment s I should like to express my profound thanks to Professors Anna Laura Lepschy and Giovanni Aquilecchia for their unswerving support and for having patiently supervised my dissertation. I am indebted to the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Society for Renaissance Studies, the Central Research Fund and the Graduate School of University College London for having generously supported my research throughout the years. My thanks also go to Professors Albinia de La Mare and Lauro Martines as well as to the staff of the British Library, the Bodleian Library and to all those European libraries and archives which I have visited in the course of my study. I wish to dedicate my work to Diego Zancani who, for the past years, has put up with me and Pistoia with great sprezzatura. Preface Apart from a very faint school recollection, it was really in the quondam British Library that I came across that 'spirito bizzarro del Pistoia' as Francesco Berni had aptly described him almost five hundred years ago. More curiosity was aroused after a reading of a few of his poems, some lines of which had been widely quoted by his contemporaries as evidence of his facility of composition and originality. So the question from which I started was a straightforward 'Why was Antonio Pistoia bizzarro? and 'Was there a model for such bizzarria? ' . After having enjoyed a short but fairly intense popularity following his death in 1502, his poetry had quickly fallen into a steady decline until the middle of last century when together with many other poets I of his time, his work was resurrected from obscurity. It was Ï thanks to the interest and discoveries of five scholars, namely ■: Antonio Cappelli, Severino Ferrari, Ottaviano Targioni Tozzetti, ■ Rodolfo Renier and above all Erasmo Pèrcopo that Pistoia, or ' perhaps I should say, like most, Antonio Cammelli detto II 'i Pistoia, became more than just a name. It was from this period up to the beginning of the current century that the most important manuscripts were located and edited, archival documents were published and a major biography, together with a number of articles, were written; all this work was going to be crowned, much later on in the 1970s, by an exhaustive entry prepared by Domenico De Robertis for the Dizionario biografico degli Italian!. It really sounded as if nothing much could be added 5 apart from a critical edition of his Canzoniere. And yet this was far from the truth as I hope my research will prove. Apart from the correction of factual errors, and the discovery of a few new testimonies of Pistoia's work - some of which are described in a short article of mine in Schede umanistiche - I felt that some more questions needed further investigation, but without a thorough examination of the foundations on which previous work was based it was impossible to proceed. It was through the task of re-tracing the steps of previous scholars that I realized the importance of a full re-examination of their work. Thanks to the perusal of archival documents I was able to establish the poet's I real name and to shed new light on matters which had never been ^ tested before but simply taken for granted (this explains the ;■ reason why it was necessary to peg down almost every sentence with footnotes). The exciting task of directly consulting documentary and textual material, which was partially known or completely fresh, allowed me to establish new facts and to question old ones; a codicological study of the Ambrosiana manuscript H.223 inf., the very codex which was believed to be autograph, proved of great importance and a comparison between Antonio Pistoia's hand, known to us from some personal letters, and the script of MS H.223 inf. gave remarkable results. It soon became clear that a complete reassessment of both the life and the work of Antonio Pistoia was really necessary and the research could not therefore privilege or focus on one aspect instead of another. Pistoia was primarily a tax collector of the Duke of Ferrara, beset by financial worries and by ill-health largely caused by venereal disease, and yet he was able to produce a 6 substantial amount of poetic compositions which he collected to donate to the Marchioness of Mantua. Therefore I was constantly aware of the need to investigate many more aspects of his work than was possible in the present thesis. The need to keep it within manageable limits of space has dictated many constraints. Each of the topics discussed here might deserve a book to itself, but it is hoped that my work, which I consider preliminary and incomplete, will prove a sound starting point for future research in which individual issues can be investigated and assessed in greater detail. From a practical point of view, I have tried to double check all my material, including quotations and sources. This has involved a considerable amount of time and patience, but I hope it was worth it, as I commend this work to the benevolo lettore or lettrice. Contents : Abstract 1 ; Acknowledgments 3 I Preface 4 ! Contents 7 ! List of tables and illustrations 10 List of abbreviations 11 Transcription criteria 14 CHAPTER ONE Antonio Pistoia: the life of a customs collector 16 1.1 An unlikely courtier 31 1.2 Questions of identification 34 CHAPTER TWO The circulation of Pistoia's works 53 2.1 The Canzoniere 53 2.2 Antonio Pistoia’s three plays: the Panfila and the two lost 'comedie' 79 2.3 The frottola for Isabella 85 CHAPTER THREE Problems of attribution: an open question 87 3.1 Five elegiac sonnets of undisputed attribution 88 3.2 Sonnets of doubtful authenticity 91 3.3 Arbitrary attributions: 101 The tirade against Nicolo Ariosto, ; the carmina maledica and the invectives against Ferrara and Gregorio Zampante 101 A strambotto, an untraceable sonnet and the latest discoveries 117 3.4 La nuda terra s'ha già messo il manto: a disperata in search of an author 119 CHAPTER FOUR The Canzoniere 131 4.1 The tradition of the Canzoniere 131 4.2 The Ambrosiana collection: an introduction 142 4.3 The compilation of the Canzoniere 146 4.4 The macrotext and the microtexts 149 4.5 The poet's view: reading instructions and directions for use 152 4.6 The opening and concluding sonnets 156 4.7 The Canzoniere: from macrotext to microtexts in search of a structure 161 CHAPTER FIVE A thematic and stylistic overview of the Canzoniere 170 5.1 Introduction 170 5.2 The fashioning and projection of a human identity 177 5.3 Sycophant, deserter and turncoat: a man of his time 204 5.4 Poetic jousts 239 5.5 The 'art of silk' and otheramorous pursuits 255 5.6 In the footsteps of the barber of Calimala 276 5.7 Death, immortality and other spiritual matters: a jocular view 301 5.8 Miscellanea 309 9 5.9 Glossary 318 CHAPTER SIX A codicological description of MS H.223 inf.
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