BERNI, FRANCESCO. - Born at Lamporecchio in the Val di Nievole in 1497, he studied in Florence, took the clerical habit, and in 1517 came to the Rome of Leo X, trusting also in the protection of a powerful distant relative, Dovizi da Bibbiena. When the latter died in 1520 and the Pope in 1521, Adrian VI came to the throne, and he lasted a short time and was little favorable to men of letters, to poets and to Florentines. He was succeeded by another Medici, Clement VII, but with little advantage for B., who then entered the poorly paid service of Cardinal Angelo Dovizi, nephew of the former; then he passed into the service, paid even less, of the datary Giberti, bishop of Verona, and he followed him to that city. But it was time to return to Rome for the sack of 1527. Last of all he served Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici. His concealed Lutheranism is a legend. Vergerio invented it in 1554; and he sought to give it credit by publishing in a pamphlet, as extracts from the Rifacimento dell'Orlando innamorato, eighteen stanzas that in reality had never been there and that others had fabricated for this purpose: a literary forgery. It is true, however, that the forger had taken his cue from four authentic octaves against Roman corruption and that in the Dialogo contro i poeti B. reproaches the humanistic custom of confounding in one and the same veneration and almost in one and the same religious principle the poetry of the sacred Bible and profane poetry. Whatever may seem to be the case, B. was prone to moral resentment; and he demonstrated it in a famous terrible caudate sonnet against Aretino, which, for the quality of its indignation, has no real counterpart in the anti-Aretine literature of Franco, the Doni, etc.
In the rest of his poetic work the genius of poetry almost always concealed this moral impulse in parody, in caricature, and perhaps even in jest; and from this came the capitoli in praise of the least praiseworthy things (the plague, the heat of the bed, the gudgeons, the eels, debt, etc.), which initiated a new literary genre rich in future, the Bernesque capitolo, a love of the 18th century, a passion of Baretti, a nostalgia of the Romantics. The Bernesque capitolo sustains itself on the ambiguous grace of word and style that almost always manages to float above vulgarity and to avoid long-windedness. The same may be said of the caudate sonnets. Naturally not all are masterpieces. B. does not lack comic fantasy which, purged of the last passionate residues, could generate the great capitolo to Fracastoro in remembrance of the hospitality received from a boorish priest. Guarded by this poet, facts take shape naturally in the perspective of the grotesque. In order to create he needed to know and see things from the kitchen and the antechamber; poetic destiny was propitious to him; it made him live among the wings of the theater of life and in the subordinate ranks of the great world. From there came the caudate sonnets on Clement VII, witty in their vulgarity. Some letters of his also remain; but they are not much and we are not surprised that B., a humanist in spite of everything, continued to feel little for vernacular prose. One of his rustic comedies in verse, the Catrina, interests almost only for the sparkle of its popular language. This unruly fellow, in short, was a refined man of letters; and fundamental, in his best inspiration, remains his sensibility as a linguist. Only thus is explained the most surprising of his labors, the Rifacimento dell'Orlando innamorato of Boiardo. To justify it psychologically the critics set out in search of hidden intentions: that he wished to parody it; or to triple its obscenity; or to purify it; or to wink at the Reformation through the prologues and additions. None of all this. The rifacimento came at exactly the right moment with the polemics over language: itself a relay runner of the nascent purism and of the Accademia della Crusca, it was to owe its fortune to the fortune of these. The Orlando innamorato was the only great romance poem not written in Tuscan and the Tuscans were distressed at not being able to admire it without this reservation. B. thought to remove it. Whether by this he also rendered a service to that masterpiece is more than doubtful; but certainly the rifacimento succeeded in supplanting the original for centuries. Some delicate Latin compositions complete B.'s literary work.
