POLIZIANO, ANGELO. – From Montepulciano, where he was born on 14 July 1454 and from which he later took the name Politianus, Agnolo Ambrogini soon came to Florence, to relatives somewhat less impoverished, who set him on the path of study. Very early he found a way to distinguish himself in the humanistic circle of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Of a most lively and keen intellect, his extraordinary power of assimilation and his taste, ever better trained, he demonstrated at once with the translation into Latin hexameters, sustained by Virgilian elegance, of several books of the Iliad, as a continuation of the humanistic "piety" already willed by Nicholas V, and begun with the version of Book I by Carlo Aretino.
In this P. was able to give fine proof of his capacity to grasp the most varied harmonies and techniques, and to adhere with refinement to the originals, rendered, as he himself would say then of a version of his from Callimachus, "non sensu modo, sed numeris etiam, quod est difficillimum, coloribusque servatis". Between the predilection of Ficino, who called him an "Homeric youth," and the affectionate protection of the Magnificent, to whom the translated books (6, it seems; but Mai rediscovered and published 4 of them in 1839) were dedicated one by one, P. refines his poetic genius. In 1473 he is received into the Medici household to educate Lorenzo's second-born son, Piero: years of discreet comforts, but also of quarrels and animosities, of which the Latin verses of the time, the vernacular letters, and also that curious collection of exercises in the vernacular and in Latin, the Latini, bear witness, which P. composed (1481) for Piero's use, annotating in them genuine feelings, moral considerations and everyday events; all with bitterish and somewhat gossipy tinges, which were moreover in the tradition of Poggio and Filelfo and Valla. But to Latin and Greek epigrams and invectives (the bloody ones In Mabilium), P. also added his classical poems of delicate workmanship: such as the admirable elegy on the death of Albiera degli Albizzi (1473) and the exquisite distichs In violas, most sweet and enlivened by a watchful melancholy of love, by a poignant awareness of the transience of all that is beautiful; or the verses to Lalage, or those to his maiden (De Angeli puella), a carmen lively in its numbers and expression, festive and sprightly. P.'s fame, however, established itself above all through his most frankly courtly work, Le stanze per la giostra (1475-78), which definitively sealed his devotion to the Medici: a devotion of which his Coniurationis Pactianae commentarium (1478) also seeks to give proof, a chronicle interwoven with Tacitean and Sallustian motifs, but without true psychological development or objectivity, in a Latin prose that rarely has dramatic accents. The Stanze, on the theme of a Florentine tournament of Jan. '75, sing of the falling in love of Giuliano de' Medici with the beautiful Simonetta; but, although interrupted halfway through book II (either because of the death of the young friend, or because of the evident weariness of the subject), they are nevertheless of exceptional importance for the history of our vernacular poetry. Still a youthful expression of P.'s humanism, they diffuse the initial epic movement into a chivalric atmosphere that still has nothing of Ariosto's smiling detachment, and soon loses momentum and runs aground in the exaltation of nature, now with popular freshness (in the footsteps of Sacchetti), now with melancholy accents, now with a refinement of details inspired by the Latin poets of the decadence. The mythological apparatus is relived in them with grace, without apparent contrivance, in an octave chiselled and harmonious and darting with classical reminiscences. So that Ariosto's octave cannot be conceived without P.'s, nor can the history of our poetic language disregard Poliziano's refinement. Simonetta remains, as was well said, "between the human and the divine," as in the pure transfiguring forms of Botticelli's Primavera and in the Magnificent's commentary on his own sonnets: they were moreover works all conceived in the same humanistic climate. In P., it is true, the themes of love and death grow dim in a "bittersweet" yearning over spiritual and physical feminine beauty; this was moreover his personal way of inserting himself, with his Latin and vernacular poetry, into the Neoplatonic tradition philosophized by Ficino: the divine theory of love. The Stanze already have much of the humanistic spirituality of the Orfeo and the Sylvae: their limits lie in an excess of contemplativeness and intellectualism and in a certain preciousness of chiselling that savours more of the medieval than of the classical.
No less important, as Carducci already saw, is P.'s popular poetry, the Nugae in the vernacular which the author shows he holds in little account in the Miscellanea. These poems of P., rispetti both linked and separate and canzoni a ballo and canzonette, which moreover continue the Tuscan popular traditions, preserve an elegance of their own, a particular technical craftsmanship of their own. Without harsh melancholies, without difficult and forbidding allegorisms, without spiritual contemplations or suffered vicissitudes, they constitute the development of the customary themes of love sought or denied or won, amid the festive consent of all nature. Even in the attained simplicity, the technique is rich in impeccably scanned rhythms. The vernacular language, after the classicism of the great fourteenth-century writers, seems with P. to have reached that maturity which answered the desire and hope of the Magnificent, a collector, from as early as 1466, of Tuscan poetry and defender of the vernacular language, "not poor, not rough, but abundant and most polished." Merits to which only P. knew how to add elegance and freshness.
In 1480, having left Florence because of pedagogical disagreements with Lorenzo's consort, P. reached Mantua. There, on the occasion of celebrations of the House of Gonzaga, and at the request of Card. Francesco, he composed for the theatre a pastoral fable, the Orfeo: "in stilo vulgare perché dagli spettatori meglio fusse intesa," which proves once again how the vernacular and the Latin form were equivalent in his experience as an artist, in the latter of which, moreover, as a universal medium of wisdom, he humanistically believed. The Orfeo is a scenario of a lyric drama on a bucolic background; and it follows the forms of the ballata (the initial episode, of Aristaeus and Mopsus, is a true eclogue; the closing one, the orgiastic bacchanal for the killing of the Thracian singer, is a carnival song), intercalating in it a Latin Sapphic ode sung by Orpheus and vernacular stanzas of lament and prayer to Pluto.
Even better than in the Stanze per la Giostra, in this pastoral fable, woven of Ovidian, Virgilian and popular motifs, one perceives the echoes of Ficinian Neoplatonic allegorism, of the mythical symbolism which precisely in those years Landino was interpreting on the text of the Commedia (1481) and had theorized in the Disputationes Camaldulenses (c. 1475) and in the commentary on the Aeneid (1478). P., that is, carries into the Mantuan environment and transmutes into poetry the conciliatory tendency of classical and Christian elements that was traditional in humanism, and that he found both in the Ovidian allegories of the Commedia and in the fai-
poetic works restudied by Boccaccio in the Genealogies; in the latter, e.g. bk. V, the myth of Orpheus is still explained, following Lactantius and Fulgentius, in a universal and Christian sense; that is, as the Florentine Neoplatonists received it. Moreover, in the Magnifico's Altercazione and in P.'s Miscellanea, Orpheus is compared precisely to Ficino.
The meaning of P.'s work (unless the author himself preferred the veil of mystery for his fable) may escape us; but the Ficinian inspiration that the soul must have should lead one to consider it not "profane matter" or a "revolt of free paganism," but as a vernacular synthesis of the classical and the Christian, each anticipated and completed by the other.
P. as scholar, critic, philologist and student of philosophy, writer of very fervent Sermons (1467-78) read for a company of doctrine (On the Sacrament of the Eucharist, On the Passion of Jesus Christ, On the Humility of Jesus Christ), in a strong and rich vernacular, and of sacred hymns (quaternary iambics, In Divam Virginem, which would not be out of place, though rather scholastic, in a history of biblical inspiration from Petrarch to Manzoni), marvelously completes the personality of the poet of the Stanze, the Orfeo and the Odae. His wealth of philological culture and his lively aesthetic intuitions he set forth, albeit somewhat disorderly, in the Miscellanea, published in one centuria in 1489. It is a collection of essays and learned observations: now P. sets a passage right or interprets an obscure word in manuscripts, now corrects a judgment on writers and works, now implicitly polemicizes (as he would continue to do in the XII books of the Epistolae, which he arranged a few months before his death, and which others published in '98) with his numerous adversaries: all enlivened by a sincere faith in the eternal values of wisdom. Nothing is more inaccurate than to deny P. religious interests or problems of thought. He knew and meditated on patristic literature, as every humanist did; this is evident not only from his Sermons and his Aristotelian prolusions, but also from his letters and the Miscellanea; and among his translations from Greek into Latin there is also Athanasius' Commentary on the Psalms. It is obvious that to his confident, optimistic humanism the wisdom of God appears already radiated to the mind of pagan poets and philosophers; whence Homer and Aristotle, Plato and Cicero, "prisci theologi," as Ficino taught, are also for him prophets, first possessors of the single wisdom, which Christianity later welcomed and revived in the light of divine love for the salvation of men. His Homer therefore, in the Praefatio ad Homerum and in the "sylva" Ambra, is a prophet and a theologian together, who received and explained to the nations the notion of divine omniscience and providence; like Cicero, he is seen by him with the same eyes as the Saint of the Confessions, that is, a true intermediary of God. Thanks to the Ciceronian Hortensius, he recalls among other things, St. Augustine was indeed able to ask God for "the immortality of wisdom, with incredible ardor of feeling," and was able "to disdain the affections and passions of a time and every vain hope, and to place in God every thought."
P. took a very lively part in the controversy over Cicero and Ciceronianism, especially in his Epistolae. He, who had elevated imitation to an art, and who in style wished to discern "the long leavening of a recondite erudition, of manifold readings, of an ancient habit of study," certainly could not tolerate that others should see of Cicero the "stylum, non pectus," and should ape his cadences and metrical clauses and vocabulary. For P. was well aware of the problem of the unrepeatability of a given language and of the evolution of style: thus he considered the Latinity of Quintilian not "corrupted" with respect to that of Cicero, but simply "changed"; not contaminated by decadence, that is, but different, according to the variation of minds, tastes and environments.
In Florence, where he had returned in the same year 1480, P. regained, amid the renewed favor of Lorenzo, his priory of S. Paolo, entrusted to him three years earlier, and became public professor at the Florentine Studio. He was also a canon of the Metropolitana. Of his literary teaching - always moreover in the key of poet or philologist - there remain the Praelectiones on Homer, Suetonius, Persius, Quintilian and Statius, as also his Sylvae - that is, extemporaneous compositions - in harmonious hexameters: Manto, in praise of Virgil (1482), Rusticus (1483), on the georgic poetry of Hesiod and Virgil, Ambra (1485), in praise of Homer, and Nutricia (1491), in which poetry and the ancient and modern poets are exalted. He carried on his philosophical teaching from '92 until a violent fever prematurely took him from the living (Sept. '94); and his Aristotelian courses on the Priora and on the Dialectic are preserved, as are his general treatises (Lamia, Panepistemon, Dialectica), to which he was certainly urged by his Pico della Mirandola. But a true philosopher P. was not; even if he could say that he renewed the studies of philosophy with his philological expertise, in perpetual polemic with the masters his predecessors, all "arid" or "jejune": these had so devalued the name of philosopher, that he would perhaps prefer for himself that of "grammarian" or of "philosophaster."
P. had a lively awareness of what he represented in Florentine and European culture. With him the times are ripe for a more worthy and conscious life: the medieval darkness, he affirms, may be said to be over; he is proud to illuminate the present better with the voice of the ancient writers who "vie tandem aliquando, sicut erant semilaceri atque trunci multumque a se ipsis immutati, suam hanc in patriam reverterunt." If with his philological work he belongs to the humanistic tradition that continues from Valla down to Erasmus, his Stanze remained a model for all vernacular poetry of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, his Sylvae are a singular example of humanistic mysticism, and his Orfeo furnished material for imitation to the theater of the entire Renaissance, from Rucellai to Trissino. And even in the changing of tastes of our vernacular, his language will be considered a marvelous acquisition not only by theorists like Bembo, but by poets and critics of every age.
Bibliography4 works
Giulio Vallese