POETRY and Identity in QUATTROCENTO Naples Frontispiece: Fiorentino, Adriano (Ca
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POETRY AND IDENTITY IN QUATTROCENTO NAPLES Frontispiece: Fiorentino, Adriano (ca. 1450/60–1499). Portrait medal of Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), Italian poet, historian and statesman. Obverse: Urania. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY. Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples MATTEO SORANZO McGill University, Canada First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2014 Matteo Soranzo Matteo Soranzo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Soranzo, Matteo. Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples / by Matteo Soranzo. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4724-1355-0 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Italian poetry—15th century—History and criticism. 2. Italian literature—Italy— Naples—History and criticism. 3. Naples (Italy)—Intellectual life—15th century. I. Title. PQ4101.S67 2014 851’.209—dc23 2013035910 ISBN 9781472413550 (hbk) ISBN 9781315600963 (ebk) Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Latin at the Castle 13 2 Poetry and Patria 29 3 Elegies for a Bride 47 4 Pastoral Affiliations 71 5 Written in the Stars 89 6 The Cloud-Shrouded Tower 117 Conclusion 143 Works Cited 147 Index 167 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgments This book is the result of an intellectual itinerary started in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. What was initially conceived as a survey of neo-Latin poems from fifteenth-century Italy brought me on the one hand to reconsider my way of looking at literature from a theoretically informed perspective, and on the other hand to narrow down my focus on a specific area (Naples) and time period (the Aragonese domination). In doing so, I am very much indebted to the rare combination of flexibility and rigor that characterized the research and teaching philosophy of my professors and colleagues at UW–Madison and, especially, to the courses and seminars offered by the Departments of French and Italian and History of Science. Identity and its interplay with poetry emerged as the theme of this book and became the top priority in my research agenda only after 2008, while teaching at Bowdoin College and McGill University. The imaginative scholarship and multiple backgrounds of my colleagues at the Departments of Romance Languages at Bowdoin and Languages, Literatures and Cultures at McGill, combined with the challenge of presenting and explaining my research in front of a multidisciplinary audience of literary critics, art historians, anthropologists, religious historians and sociologists, brought me to engage in a dialogue with the social sciences that – at least in my intentions – still continues to inspire my work. Part of the material and ideas that made their way into this book have already been published in other journals and edited volumes. Chapters 1 and 2 expand on “Umbria Pieridum Cultrix (Parthenopeus I: 18): Poetry and Identity in Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503),” Italian Studies 67.1 (2012): 27–40; Chapter 3 is based upon “Poetry and Society in Quattrocento Naples: Giovanni Pontano’s Elegies of Married Love,” in Marriage in Premodern Europe, ed. Jacqueline Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Chapter 4 builds on ideas sketched in “Audience and Quattrocento Pastoral: the Case of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia,” Skepsi 2.1 (2009): 49–65; Chapter 5 revisits part of “Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503) on Astrology and Poetic Authority,” Aries 11.1 (2011): 23–52; while Chapter 6 re-examines ideas outlined in “Words of Conversion: Poetry and Identity in Early Modern Italy,” Journal of Religion in Europe 6.2 (2013): 229–62. I thank the Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies in Toronto and the other publishers for granting me permission to use this material for the present book. Throughout the years numerous individuals and institutions have encouraged and challenged my work with their input and criticism. Prof. Armando Balduino from the University of Padua, however, deserves a special mention for having viii Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples first directed my interest to Quattrocento Italian literature, and in particular to the largely unexplored poetry in Latin. Since the long-gone days of my early studies in Italy, his exhortation to “look at history through texts, and not at texts through history” has haunted me like an enigma, to which this book has the ambition to offer a first, albeit incomplete, solution. Montreal, December 1, 2013 Introduction […] ciò che conta non è infatti l’essere anagrafico, che accomuna nella sua indifferenza date di nascita e registrazione di morti, ma l’essere che è cercato e riconosciuto.1 —Ernesto De Martino, Premessa a A. Pierro. Appuntamento. Poesie (1946–1967) A Quest for Helicon On the first folio of a manuscript that used to belong to Angelo Colocci, a book collector living in sixteenth-century Rome, an erudite named Girolamo Borgia described the public performance of a poem entitled Urania on February 1, 1501, in Naples. As Borgia’s annotation informs us, the author and performer of this five-book poem in Latin hexameters, which sets out to explain poetically the astrological causes of earthly events, was the Umbrian humanist Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503), once the leading political and intellectual figure of Quattrocento Naples, an old man retired from public life at the time of the event: February 1, 1501. Pontano began to read his Urania in his academy. Fifteen noble and most erudite men attended the reading almost every day. But I, Girolamo, did not spend one single day without attending, and made sure to write on the margins whatever I could. Indeed, these annotations are extracted from the oracle of their very author.2 Great expectations must have surrounded this official presentation of Pontano’s Urania, a poem that many authoritative critics – among them Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494) – had already praised but only few had the opportunity to read in its entirety.3 More than 30 years had passed since Pontano, in a programmatic text of his youthful collection Parthenopeus (1450–1471; first printed 1498), had solemnly promised a poem on the nature of things to his older friend, and fellow 1 [[…] what counts is not the being that is registered in inventories, which indifferently records dates of birth and death registrations, but the being that is sought after and acknowledged.] 2 Ms. Vat. Lat. 5175 fol. 1r: “Cal. Februarii 1501. Pontanus legere coepit suam Uraniam in sua achademia, cui lectioni fere semper quindecim generosi et eruditissimi viri affuere; nec vero ipse ego Hieronymus ullum unquam praeterii diem, quin adessem, et quae potui in margine anotanda curaverim, quae quidem sunt ab eiusdem auctoris oraculo exprompta.” 3 For an excellent contextualization of Poliziano’s letters to Pontano, see Martelli, “Il ‘Libro delle epistole,’” 204–18. 2 Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples astrologer, Lorenzo Bonincontri from Siena (1410–1491).4 Eventually, during a short stay in Naples, Poliziano’s young pupil Petrus Crinitus (1475–1507) was, exceptionally, allowed to copy part of Urania in an anthology finalized between 1496 and 1499, which managed to disseminate an important specimen of Pontano’s writings among Florentine readers.5 Political duties, family problems, countless intellectual pursuits and a restless labor limae, however, all interfered with Pontano’s promise to Bonincontri. Only in 1505, many years after his friend’s death, was the manuscript of Pontano’s works finally received and printed by Aldo Manuzio in Venice. Pontano, however, would never see his book in print.6 The great expectations attached to Pontano’s long-announced masterpiece, moreover, were destined to be frustrated. When Urania was officially finished, the circumstances were no more favorable to turning this work into the highlight of a legacy, as Pontano himself had envisioned two years before his public performance in a dialog in Latin, which he entitled Actius (1495–1499; first printed 1507) in honor of his designated successor, and enthusiastic reader of Urania, Jacopo “Actius” Sannazaro (1458–1530).7 On July 8, 1501, five months after the performance took place, Federico of Naples was deposed, thus marking the end of the Aragonese rule and the consequent diaspora of the Porticus Antoniana, the prestigious group of intellectuals, largely composed of members of the state bureaucracy, which Pontano had led since the death of its founder Antonio Beccadelli on January 6, 1471.8 Sannazaro, Pontano’s favorite pupil and the recipient of the intellectual legacy symbolized by Urania, left for France with the king and other young intellectuals loyal to the Aragonese crown.9 Upon their return in 1505, immediately after the ephemeral return to the throne of Ferrandino, the last Aragonese king, Sannazaro and his fellow members at Pontano’s academy were deprived of their intellectual guide when the old poet died on September 17, 1503.10 With Pontano’s death, the significance of the public performance of Urania, its long-delayed publication, and the meaning of the unusual combination of astrology and poetry inscribed in this text were irredeemably lost.