Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo

299 Pages·1996·9.847 MB·English

by  Martin L. McLaughlin

Literary Imitation
in the
Italian Renaissance
The Theory and Practice of
Literary Imitation in Italy
from Dante to Bembo
m a r t in l . McLa u g h l in
CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD
1995
Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford 0x2 6dp
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McLaughlin, M. L. (Martin L.)
Literary imitation in the Italian Renaissance : the theory and
practice of literary imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo / Martin
L. McLaughlin.
—(Oxford modem languages and literature monographs)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Italian literature—To 1400—History and criticism. 2. Italian
literature—15th century—History and criticism. 3. Italian
literature—Classical influences. 4. Imitation in literature.
I. Title. II. Series.
pQ.4°75-M45 1995 850.9'002—dcso 95-8869
ISBN o-ig—S15S99—8
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd., Hong Kong
Fainted in Great Britain
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PREFACE
F OR the many Latin quotations in what follows I have provided
my own translations, except in those instances where the context
makes it clear what the Latin means.
In the lengthy preparation of this book I have incurred many
debts of gratitude to friends, colleagues, and family. My greatest
intellectual debt is to Cecil Grayson, who first encouraged me to
study literary imitation in Renaissance Italy, and whose own
writings are the indispensable foundation for this book. I am
also grateful to other colleagues who read draft chapters of the
book at an earlier stage: Peter Brand, Letizia Panizza, David
Robey, and Jon Usher. A number of institutions assisted me in
the preparation of the book: a grant from the British Academy
enabled me to carry out fundamental research in Italy, Edin­
burgh University provided sabbatical leave at an important stage
in my research, and Christ Church, Oxford, has been particu­
larly generous with sabbatical leave and with funds for research
in Italy. I have also benefited from the help of several libraries
and librarians: particularly the Taylor Institution library in
Oxford, but also libraries in Avignon, Edinburgh, Florence,
Milan, Padua, and Rome. Last, but certainly not least, I am
grateful to the patience and support given me by my wife and
daughter, Cathy and Mairi.
I
CONTENTS
Introduction i
PART one: the TRECENTO 9
1. Dante 11
2. Petrarch 22
3. Boccaccio 49
4. Coluccio Salutati 67
PART tw o: THE EARLY QUATTROCENTO 79
3. Leonardo Bruni 81
(i. Humanist Educators 98
7. The Dispute between Poggio and Valla 126
part three: vernacular humanism 147
8. Leon Battista Alberti 149
9. Cristoforo Landino 167
PART four: the major disputes
AROUND 15OO 185
10. The Dispute between Poliziano and Cortesi 187
11. The Dispute between The Elder Pico and
Barbaro 228
Vlll CONTENTS
12. The Dispute between Giovan Francesco Pico
and Bembo
249
Conclusion
275
Bibliography
279
Index
297
INTRODUCTION
Mold vogliono giudicare i stili e parlar de’ numeri e della
imitazione; ma a me non sanno gia essi dare ad intendere
che cosa sia stile ne numero, ne in che consista la imitazione.
i. Aims and Methodology
The remark quoted above is made by one of the interlocutors
in a key passage of Baldesar Castiglione’s 11 libro del cortegiano
(i. 39). Coming as it does, at the end of a long discussion about
linguistic and literary imitation, it reflects the importance of
imitatio as one of the dominant critical concepts of the time, and
suggests that the term was more often used than understood. If
i( was true of Castiglione’s time—II cortegiano was published in
1528—that many discussed imitation without fully understand­
ing its implications, it is also true of later generations of critics
who define Italian Renaissance humanism and literature as
imitative without exploring the implications of the term.
For a long time works dealing with imitation in Renaissance
llaly concentrated on the period after 153o, when all literary
questions were considered in the light of Aristotle’s Poetics, which
re-emerged to critical prominence in the post-1530 period; but in
fact the Aristotelian notion of imitation of nature is essentially
different from the rhetorical imitation studied here. Consequently
scholars such as Ulivi and Weinberg either considered the
period 1400-1530 as a brief prologue to the polemics of the later
Cinquecento;1 or dismissed the Quattrocento entirely as contrib­
uting only a ‘minor impetus in the domain of literary criticism’.2
Fortunately more recent studies have provided us both with
1 F. Ulivi, L’imitazione nella poetica del Rinascimento (Milan, 1959), deals only with
Petrarch and Poliziano in his first brief chapter.
J B. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (2 vols.; Chicago,
iy(ii), i, p. ix.
2 INTRODUCTION
insights into the importance of the imitation debate,3 and with
critical editions and analytical studies of key fifteenth-century
texts by humanists of the stature of Valla, Alberti, Landino, and
Poliziano.4 The primary aim of this book, then, is to investigate
what is probably the most significant literary concept of a period
in Italian literary history which is only now beginning to receive
the scholarly attention it merits.
The more specific objectives of this research are, first, to es­
tablish what theories of literary imitation were current in the
period 1400-1530; second, to consider how these theories were
applied in practice to writing in both Latin and the vernacular;
and, third, to chart the rise of Ciceronianism in both languages,
and to document the influence of the classical texts which deter­
mined imitation theory and practice. In this way I hope to illus­
trate the manifold activity that lies behind the generalization
that literature in Quattrocento Italy is largely concerned with
imitation.
The premiss on which the research is based is that the literary
theory and practice of fifteenth-century Italy is worth studying
both in its own right, and because it has indissoluble links with
the literary history of the Cinquecento. Literary criticism in Italy
does not begin with the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics. This study
aims to supply that early material which is either absent or is no
more than a sketchy prologue in current studies of Renaissance
literary criticism. As long ago as 1954 Spongano observed that,
in order to correct inaccurate generalizations about imitation in
the Renaissance, ‘sarebbe, piu che utile, necessaria una raccolta,
se non intera, almeno copiosa di tutte quelle pagine in cui, dal
Petrarca al Bembo, e oltre, il problema fu dibattuto e vi si
scontrarono letterati e filosofi, retori e poeti, artisti e pedanti’.5
3 Apart from H. Gmelin, ‘Das Prinzip der Imitatio in den Romanischen Literaturen
der Renaissance’, Romanische Forschungen, 46 (1932), 83-360, see the more recent
studies of G. W. Pigman III, ‘Imitation and the Renaissance Sense of the Past: The
Reception of Erasmus’ Ciceronianus’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, g (1979),
155—77; id., ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980),
1-32; H. C. Gotoff, ‘Cicero versus Ciceronianism in the Ciceronianus’, Illinois Classical
Studies, 5 (1980), 163—73; J. F. D’Amico, ‘The Progress of Renaissance Latin Prose:
The Case of Apuleianism’, Renaissance Quarterly, 37 (1984), 351-92.
* See the bibliography in the relevant chapters of this book (Chs. 7-10).
5 R. Spongano, review of Le epistole ‘De imitatione’ di Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola
e di Pietro Bembo, ed. G. Santangelo (Florence, 1954), in Giomale storico della letteratura
italiana, 131 (1954), 428.
INTRODUCTION 3
The chronological limits of this study are broadly those estab­
lished by Spongano, though I have preferred to start with Dante
rather than Petrarch, since the former’s views on imitation are
both important in themselves, and also offer an instructive con­
trast between a ‘medieval’ approach to imitatio and the humanist
view of imitation which first emerges in Petrarch. The survey
ends in 1530, for by that stage both the substance and the direc­
tion of the imitation debate change. By that time Latin is no
longer a serious alternative to the vernacular for works of litera­
ture, and the question of imitation in Latin has been resolved in
favour of the Ciceronians, headed by Bembo. Bembo’s version of
vernacular Ciceronianism, urging the exclusive imitation of
Petrarch for poetry and Boccaccio for prose, also wins the day
as far as writing in the volgare is concerned, despite the eclecti­
cism of a Castiglione. Italian intellectuals and men of letters,
such as Calcagnini, Giraldi Cinzio, Ricci, and others, continued
to argue about imitation after 1530, but their polemics, which
have in any case been fully studied by Weinberg, were largely
influenced by Aristotelian principles and, although important
for the history of literary criticism, had little bearing on the
future of Italian literature. After 1530 the debate on imitation,
which had always been academic in the literal sense, became
academic in the other sense as well.
It was more difficult to determine how to restrict what was
potentially a limitless topic. Unlike Ulivi and Weinberg, I did
not want to confine my research to imitation theory, especially
as important figures such as Boccaccio and Salutati inaugurated
key developments in practice without elaborating a correspond­
ing theory. On the other hand, by embracing both theory and
practice, in Latin and the vernacular, there was the risk of try­
ing to digest and analyse everything that was written in Italy
between 1400 and 1530. The solution was to consider all the
theoretical statements on imitation, and to sample practical in­
stances of imitation which were relevant, explicitly or implicitly,
to the theory. The result is, as Spongano predicted, that this
study encompasses the works of men of letters, philosophers,
rhetoricians, and poets, as well as a few pedants: imitation was
an idea and practice that was familiar to all intellectuals in the
Quattrocento, from great literary artists like Poliziano to hum­
bler pedagogues such as Antonio da Rho.
4 INTRODUCTION
The first part of the book is devoted to the Trecento, to the
embryonic ideas on imitation found in Dante, and the humanist
elaboration of them in Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Salutati. Part
Two deals with the first half of the fifteenth century. Leonardo
Bruni is accorded a whole chapter, reflecting his importance in
this as in other cultural and literary matters, while Chapter 6
groups together four humanist educators and illustrates how the
idea of imitation was reduced to basic pedagogical notions for
young students, particularly in the work of Barzizza and Antonio
da Rho. Part Three deals with vernacular humanism and dem­
onstrates how men like Alberti and Landino were able to trans­
fer important notions about imitatio from Latin to the vernacular.
Finally Part Four is devoted to three major polemics at the end
of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Poliziano and Cortesi argue on the specific subject of imitation
around 1485, as do Bembo and Giovan Francesco Pico in 1512.
The intermediate polemic, between the elder Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola and Ermolao Barbaro, also in 1485, is officially con­
cerned with the correct Latin style for the writing of philosophy;
but this subject had been related to the imitation debate from
the time of Petrarch, and naturally came to the fore in the hey­
day of Neoplatonic enthusiasm in Florence ushered in by Ficino’s
work on Plato. Here I argue that the dispute between Pico and
Barbaro forms an indispensable link with the other two polemics
about imitation. This study thus explores all the theoretical
ramifications of the imitation debate in Italy, as well as consid­
ering many of its practical consequences. At the same time it
also sheds light on several key features of literary history in the
age of Italian humanism: the gradual but by no means linear
development of Giceronianism in Latin, the formation of a canon
of major and minor ancient authors, the querelle between the
ancients and the moderns, and the transferral of classical termi­
nology and techniques of writing from Latin to the vernacular.
Finally a word about the focus of the individual chapters. The
monographic nature of most of the chapters, concentrating on a
single individual, may seem a rather inflexible instrument for
material that is often fluid and dynamic; but the advantages of
this approach seemed to outweigh its possible defects. It allowed
me to discuss the major contributions to the imitation question
in the context of a writer’s other relevant works, instead of
considering them as monolothic pronouncements with no previous