BERNI, FRANCESCO. — Born at Lamporecchio in Val di Nievole in 1497, he studied in Florence, donned the clerical habit, and in 1517 came to the Rome of Leone X, also trusting in the protection of a powerful distant relative, Dovizi da Bibbiena. When the latter died in 1520 and the Pope in 1521, Adriano VI came to the throne; he lasted only a short time and was little favorable to men of letters, poets, and Florentines. He was succeeded by another Medici, Clemente VII, but with little benefit to B. He then entered the poorly remunerated service of Cardinal Angelo Dovizi, nephew of the former; afterward he passed into that of the datary Giberti, bishop of Verona, which was even less remunerative, and followed him to that city. But he returned to Rome in time for the sack of 1527. Finally he served Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. His covert Lutheranism is a legend. Vergerio invented it in 1554, and sought to lend it credibility by publishing in a pamphlet, as excerpts from the Rifacimento dell'Orlando innamorato, eighteen stanzas that in reality had never existed and had been fabricated by someone else for this purpose: a literary forgery. It is true, however, that the forger’s inspiration came from four authentic ottave against Roman corruption, and that in the Dialogo contro i poeti, B. reproaches the humanistic tendency to confuse, within a single veneration and almost within a single religious rationale, the poetry of Sacred Scripture with profane poetry. Whatever may appear to be the case, B. was readily susceptible to moral indignation; and he demonstrated this in a famous, terrible caudate sonnet against Aretino which, in the quality of its outrage, has no real counterpart in the anti-Aretine literature of Franco, Doni, and others.
In the remainder of his poetic work, the genius of poetry almost always concealed this moral impulse in parody, caricature, and perhaps even jest; and there emerged the chapters in praise of the least praiseworthy things (the plague, the warmth of the bed, the gobies, eels, debt, etc.), which initiated a new literary genre rich in promise for the future: the Bernesque capitolo, the delight of the eighteenth century, Baretti’s passion, and the Romantics’ nostalgia. The Bernesque capitolo rests upon the ambiguous grace of language and style, which almost always manages to float above vulgarity and avoid prolixity. The same may be said of the caudate sonnets. Naturally, not all of them are masterpieces. B. was not lacking in comic imagination; purged of its final passionate residues, it could produce the great capitolo to Fracastoro, in remembrance of the hospitality received from a boorish priest. Seen through this poet’s eyes, events naturally take shape within a grotesque perspective. To create, he needed to know and see things from the kitchen and the antechamber; poetic destiny favored him, making him live behind the scenes in the theater of life and in the subordinate circles of high society. From there came the caudate sonnets on Clemente VII, witty in their vulgarity. A few letters by him also survive; but they are nothing remarkable, and we are not surprised that B., a humanist in spite of everything, continued to have little feeling for vernacular prose. One of his rustic comedies in verse, the Catrina, is of interest almost solely for the brilliance of its popular language. This unconventional man was, in short, a refined man of letters; and fundamental, in his finest inspiration, remains the
