CECCHI, GIOVANNI MARIA. - Man of letters, b. in Florence, according to the most reliable date, on 15 March 1518. Following the family tradition he was a notary (1542-1577); he held honorary offices, and engaged in commerce in partnership with the Adimari, Segni and Baldesi families.
His fame is linked to his activity as a playwright.
An admirer of Plautus and Terence, he began with profane comedies, but from this close imitation C. gradually moved away, led by his temperament as an observer of contemporary life (cf. the Prologue to the Assinoio, the best among his Commedie osservate, but also the most licentious, derived from a novella by Boccaccio), especially in the popular farces. As the years passed, as the spirit of religious piety grew sharper in him, he felt remorse for this production of his, and sought to make amends by composing, for the edification and amendment of his listeners, exclusively comedies on sacred subjects for convents and pious confraternities, not without an admixture of the biblical and the fantastic. He took up again the tradition of the sacred representations, reducing them almost to the classical form, and modernizing them by adopting the use of blank verse, as in the Esaltazione della croce (Florence 1586), which for a long time remained the only one of his sacred dramas to be published. Only in 1895 was a collection of them obtained, in which Il figliuol prodigo is notable, elaborated, with the customary Plautine intrusions and some realistic intemperance, on the Gospel outline, whose intimate pathos it fails to evoke.
Much praised in C. is the vividness of his Florentine language, for which he was cited by the Accademia della Crusca. It should be remembered that he scrutinized historical subjects (Compendio di più ritratti..., Bologna 1867) and composed some poems. He died in his villa at Lastra a Signa on 28 Oct. 1587 and was buried in the church of S. Michele, which he had restored and endowed with a small convent.
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Anna Cattani