Angelo Poliziano

“ It is quite impossible to furnish a complete view of Italian society under this aspect. Students must be referred to the stories of the novelists, who collected the more dramatic incidents and presented them in the form of entertaining legends. It may suffice here to mention Bartolommeo Colleoni, Angelo Poliziano, and Pontano, all of whom owed their start in life to the murder of their respective fathers by assassins; to Varchi and Filelfo, whose lives were attempted by cut-throats; to Cellini, Perugino, Masaccio, Berni, in each of whose biographies poison and the knife play their parts. ”

“ We cannot from the wreck of time recover very many that were absolutely written for the people by the people; but we can judge of their quality by Angelo Poliziano's imitations. [325] He borrowed so largely from all sources, and his debts can be so accurately traced in his rispetti, that it is fair to credit the popular Muse with even such delicate work as La Brunettina, while the disputed authorship of the May-song Ben venga Maggio and of the Ballata Vaghe le montanine e pastorelle is sufficient to prove at least their widespread fame. ”

“ This momentous step was taken late in the fifteenth century with the performance of Angelo Poliziano's "Favola di Orfeo" at the Court of Mantua to celebrate the return of the Cardinal Gonzaga. The Italian authorities are by no means agreed as to the importance of this production. Rossi says:10
"The circle of plot in the religious drama, at first restricted to the life of Christ, had been 56 gradually broadened. ”

“ X. In the meantime Michael Angelo prosecuted his studies, showing the result of his labours to the Magnificent each day. In the same house lived Poliziano, a man, [pg 14] as every one knows, and as is testified by his works, most learned and witty. This man recognising the lofty spirit of Michael Angelo loved him exceedingly, and little as he needed it, spurred him on in his studies, always explaining things to him and giving him subjects. One day, amongst others, he suggested "The Rape of Deianira" and "The Battle of the Centaurs," telling him in detail the whole of the story. ”

“ Poliziano is at once the truest classical scholar, and, with the possible exception of Boiardo (who belongs to Ferrara, and does not come within the scope of the present volume) , the greatest Italian poet of the fifteenth century. He is, indeed, the last and most perfect fruit of Florentine Humanism. His father, Benedetto Ambrogini, had been murdered in Montepulciano by the faction hostile to the Medici; and the boy Angelo, coming to Florence, and studying under Ficino and his colleagues, was received into Lorenzo's household as tutor to the younger Piero. ”

“ As the notion of a writer who dates the subversion of Art from the epoch and style of M. Angelo, it must appear ludicrous even to the most declared votary of that great name on this side of idolatry.
[71] The mask of an antique Satyr, and the basso-relievo of the Centaurs, undertaken at the suggestion of Poliziano.
[72] One has been preserved, and as a document of the relation in which power at that time stood with art, may interest the reader. ”

“ Poliziano was great as a scholar, as a professor, as a critic, and as a Latin poet at an age when the classics were still studied with the passion of assimilative curiosity, and not with the scientific industry of a later period. He was the representative hero of that age of scholarship in which students drew their ideal of life from antiquity and fondly dreamed that they might so restore the past as to compete with the classics in production and bequeath a golden age of resuscitated paganism to the modern world. Yet he was even greater as an Italian poet. ”

“ What has been said about his verse, applies with no less-253- force to his prose composition. Poliziano wrote Latin, as though it were a living language, not culling phrases from Cicero or reproducing the periods of Livy, but trusting to his instinct and his ear, with the facility of conscious power. The humanism of the first and second periods attained to the freedom of fine art in Poliziano. Through him, as through a lens, the rays of previous culture were transmitted in a column of pure light. ”

“ He appears before us as the dictator of Italian culture in a double capacity—as the man who most perfectly expressed the Italian conception of humanism, and brought erudition into accord with the pursuit of noble and harmonious form, and also as the man whose vernacular compositions were more significant than any others of the great revolution in favour of Italian poetry which culminated in Ariosto. Beyond the sphere of pure scholarship and pure literature Poliziano did not venture. ”

“ As a professor, none of the humanists achieved more brilliant successes than Poliziano. Among his pupils could be numbered the chief students of Europe. Not to mention Italians, it will suffice to record the names of Reuchlin, Grocin, Linacre, and the Portuguese Tessiras, who carried each to his own country the culture they had gained in Florence. The first appearance of Poliziano in the lecture-room was not calculated to win admiration. ”

“ They had an immediate, a lasting and a wide renown, encouraging the scholars of the next century and a half to throw their occasional discoveries in the field of scholarship into a form at once so attractive and so instructive. Poliziano was not, however, contented with these simply professorial and scholastic compositions. Nature had endowed him with literary and poetic gifts of the highest order. These he devoted to the composition of Latin and Greek verses, which count among the best of those produced by men of modern times in rivalry with ancient authors. ”

“ Poliziano was now known as the "Homeric youth." It was not long before he was hailed the king of Italian scholars and the literary genius of his time. When he was but thirty he became professor of Greek and Latin in the University of Florence, and drew to his feet students from all parts of Europe. John Reuchlin hastened from Germany, William Grocyn from the shades of Oxford, and from the same seat of learning the mighty Thomas Linacre, later to found the 71 Royal College of Physicians. Lorenzo's sons, Piero and Giovanni, were for a time his pupils, but their mother took them away. ”

“ Among Poliziano's minor poems it is enough to mention the elegiac couplets on some violets sent him by his mistress, the verses descriptive of a beautiful girl, and the lamentation for the wife of Sismondo della Stufa. [430] They illustrate the delicacy of his style and the freedom of his fancy in the treatment of occasional themes, and are far superior to his epigrams and epitaphs. [431] The numerous encomiastic elegies addressed to Lorenzo de' Medici and other patrons are wholly without value. Poliziano was a genuine poet. He needed the inspiration of true feeling or of lively fancy ”

“ The tragic catastrophe of the Pazzi Conjuration cut short Poliziano's panegyric by the murder of his hero. Meanwhile the poet had achieved his purpose. His torso presented to Italy a model of style, a piece of written art adequate to the great painting of the Renaissance period, a double star of poetry which blent the splendours of the ancient and the modern world. To render into worthy English the harmonies of Poliziano is a difficult task. Yet this must be attempted if an English reader is to gain any notion of the scope and substance of the Italian poet's art. ”

“ The transition to Lorenzo at this point is natural. A solemn peroration in praise of the Medicean prince, himself a poet, whose studies formed the recreation of severer labours, ends the composition. This is written in Poliziano's best style, and, though it is too long to quote, six lines may be selected as indicating the theme of the argument:—
We possess the whole of Poliziano in the 'Nutricia.' It displays the energy of intellect that carried him on bounding verse through the intricacies of a subject difficult by reason of its scope and magnitude. ”

“ Indeed it may be said with truth that Poliziano's most eminent faculty as a descriptive poet corresponded exactly to the genius of the painters of his day. To produce pictures radiant with Renaissance colouring, and vigorous with Renaissance passion, was the function of his art, not to express profound thought or dramatic situations. This remark might be extended with justice to Ariosto, and Tasso, and Boiardo. The great narrative poets of the Renaissance in Italy were not dramatists ”

“ Poliziano is the first Latin poet who compels attention in the fifteenth century; nor was he surpassed, in fertility of conception and mastery of metre, by any of his numerous successors. With all his faults of style and crudities of diction, Poliziano, in my opinion, deserves the chief place among original poets of revived Latin literature. Bembo wrote more elegantly, Navagero more classically, Amalteo with a grace more winning. Yet these versifiers owe their celebrity to excellence of imitation. ”

“ She who is wise is quick to comprehend.
The levity of these love-declarations and the fluency of their vows show them to be 'false as dicers' oaths,' mere verses of the moment, made to please a facile mistress. One long poem, which cannot be styled a Rispetto, but is rather a Canzone of the legitimate type, stands out with distinctness from the rest of Poliziano's love-verses. It was written by him for Giuliano de' Medici, in praise of the fair Simonetta. ”

“ It is difficult to combine in one view the several aspects presented to us by this many-sided man of literary genius. At a period when humanism took the lead in forming Italian character and giving tone to European culture, he climbed with facility to the height of achievement in all the branches of scholarship which were then most seriously prized—in varied knowledge of ancient authors, in critical capacity, in rhetorical and poetical exuberance. This was enough at that epoch to direct the attention of all the learned men of Europe on Poliziano. ”

“ Poliziano studied rhetoric under Cristofero, Landino, and Andronico, philosophy under Argyropoulos and Marsilio Ficino, in the Florentine Studio from his fifteenth to his twentieth year. Lorenzo de’ Medici, after reading his translation of Homer, provided for his education, and he became one of Lorenzo’s most intimate friends, tutor to his children and his librarian. Poliziano took his degree as Doctor of Law, and entering the Church was made a Canon of the cathedral of Florence. He wrote scholia and notes to Ovid, Catullus, Statius, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and the Historicæ Augustæ ”

“ In the history of European scholarship, he stands midway between Petrarch and Erasmus, taking the post of honor at the moment when erudition had acquired ease and elegance, but had not yet passed on into the final stage of scientific criticism. What concerns us here, is Poliziano's achievement as an Italian poet. In the history of the vulgar literature he fills a place midway between Petrarch and Ariosto, corresponding to the station of distinction I have assigned to him in humanistic culture. Of few men can it be said that they have held the same high rank in poetry and learning ”

“ Poliziano describes the agony of suspense of the small group in the new sacristy, who thought the church was in the hands of the Pazzi. “Some feared that the priest’s dagger was poisoned, and Lorenzo’s friend, Antonio Ridolfi, a most excellent youth, sucked the wound in his neck. Lorenzo, however, gave no heed to it, continually repeating, ‘Is Giuliano safe?’ [Pg 191] Then came sharp knocks at the door. ‘We are friends, we are relations. Let Lorenzo come out ere the enemy gains a foothold.’ We were undecided, and shouted, ‘Enemies or friends? ”

“ Nowhere does Poliziano exhibit any appreciation of the æsthetic value of poetry, but his enthusiasm for the great poets, and indeed for all forms of ancient culture, is unmistakable, and combined with his immense erudition marks him as a representative poet of humanism. ”

“ Not passion, not thought, but the refined sensuousness of a nature keenly alive to plastic beauty, educated in the schools of classical and Florentine art, and gifted with inexhaustible facility of language, is the dominant quality of Poliziano's Italian poetry. The same quality is found in his Latin and Greek verse—in the plaintive elegies for La Bella Simonetta and Albiera degli Albizzi, in the Violæ and in that ode In puellam suam [511] which is the Latin sister of La brunettina. ”

“ Love, as understood in Florence of the fifteenth century, was neither; nor was Poliziano the man to have revived Platonic mysteries or chivalrous enthusiasms. When the octave stanzas, written with this amorous intention, were strung together into a continuous poem, this form of verse took the title of Rispetto Gontinuato. In the collection of Poliziano's poems there are several examples of the long Rispetto, carelessly enough composed, as may be gathered from the recurrence of the same stanzas in several poems. All repeat the old arguments, the old enticements to a less than lawful love. ”

“ The fault of this can scarcely be said to have rested with one man more than with another; nor can we lay the blame on Poliziano, though he undoubtedly represented the class who were destined to continue literature upon these lines. It was the combined result of scholarship, which for a whole century had diverted the minds of men to the form and words of literature ”