BANDELLO, MATTEO. - Novella writer, b. at Castelnuovo sulla Scrivia around 1485. He entered the Dominican Order at a very young age, perhaps in Rome; his uncle Vincenzo Bandello was general of that order precisely at that time (1501-1506). He moved to the Milanese convent of the Grazie, where he did not stay long, being continually on the road to Genoa, Florence, Naples and Calabria. He later widened still further the circle of his travels and acquaintances, having entered in 1506 into the good graces of the Bentivoglio, exiles in Milan from their Bologna; several times the young Dominican then crossed the Alps on diplomatic business. After the battle of Marignano (1515) he moved to Mantua, to the court of Isabella Gonzaga; when six years later Francesco II Sforza was made duke of Milan, he returned there for a few brief years, until the Morone conspiracy (1526) placed him under suspicion and he had to change air, returning to his Gonzaga, this time as secretary to Luigi, captain of the Holy League. Having left the Gonzaga, in 1528 we find Bandello again with Cesare Fregoso, captain first for Venice and then for France, and afterwards with the latter's widow, Costanza Rangoni, a guest of Francis I of France, when Fregoso fell by the hand of Charles V's assassins (1541). In the calm retreat of Barens the adventurous friar devoted himself to the learned conversations of the circle that gathered around the Rangoni and to composing his novellas and his rhymes. On 1 September 1550 he was appointed bishop of Agen by the king of France, reserving half the revenues of the mensa to Ettore Fregoso, a Veronese cleric; but it was a purely provisional appointment, because Bandello resigned at the beginning of 1555, when Giano Fregoso was appointed to that see; the castle of Bazen, situated in the diocese, was then granted to him. He died in France in 1561.
A Petrarchan poet of some effectiveness in the Rime, in which the group inspired by the very young Lucrezia Gonzaga stands out, Bandello owes his importance in literary history to the Novelle. Published, during the author's lifetime, at Lucca in 1554 and divided from the outset into four tomes or parts, they are one of the most characteristic works of the sixteenth century. Certain of his novellas - as already some of Boccaccio's - enjoyed extraordinary fortune: one need only think of the cases of Juliet and Romeo or those of Ugo and Parisina, from which Shakespeare and D'Annunzio took their starting point from him.
In Bandello the describer prevails over the artist and, consequently, historical document acquires greater interest than the tale itself. Historical figures and remote events come alive again in his dense pages; but even more so do men and facts of real life, which the practiced eye of the contemporary scrutinizes and displays without veils.
Departing from the scheme of the Decameron, although so widespread in the sixteenth century, Bandello leaves his two hundred and fourteen novellas independent of one another, though prefacing them with dedicatory letters in which, among other things, he sets out how and where the novella was narrated on another occasion, thus recreating around the work the colour of the time. From the religious point of view, his work attempts to undermine the very foundations of morality: licentiousness, in this case ecclesiastical, passes from talk to a complete lack of respect for sacred things: from Boccaccian laughter to the most extreme immorality.
Works: Tutte le opere di M. B., edited by F. Flora, Milan 1934-35.
Bibliography8 works
Pier Fausto Palumbo