Chiabrera, Gabriello

CHIABRERA, GABRIELLO. - Poet, b. at Savona in 1552, d. there in 1638. He was a student at the Roman College; in Rome he also had contacts with the humanists Speroni, Manuzio and Muret. Having entered the service of Cardinal Corner, he fought a duel over a question of honor and had to return to his homeland, from which another incident of the same kind forced him to absent himself for some time. At the age of fifty he married the very young Leila Pavese. He received business commissions from his city to the Genoese signoria and was in relations with the Savoys, the Gonzagas, with Urban VIII (cf. the papal brief addressed to C. in Lettere di G. C. a B. Castello, Genoa 1838, p. 14), and especially with the Medici. At Mantua and at Florence he staged spectacles on the occasion of solemn events of those courts.

He tried his hand at lyric poetry, with celebratory canzoni, amorous and bacchic canzonette, narrative poemetti, eclogues, sonnets, satires; at the heroic poem with La Gotiade, La Firenze, L'Amadeide, Il Foresto and Il Ruggero; at drama with tragedies on romantic subjects and some pastoral fables. C. wished to renew the poetic language on Greek and Latin models, according to the ideas set out in his prose writings (l'Autobiografia and i Dialoghi dell'arte poetica) and, sporadically, in his correspondence; ideas that he takes up from the Hellenistic school of Speroni and from the writers on poetics of the 16th century (Trissino, Daniello, Muzio, du Bellay, Minturno). He therefore set about seeking more agile metrical structures and chose subjects more closely bound to the sensibility of his time, such as the enterprises of Christendom against the Ottomans and against Protestant heresy. He succeeded as an innovator in lyric poetry (Leopardi defined him: «the only truly Pindaric poet»), even though he worked in part on Latin translations of Pindar, Sappho, Anacreon and on the Gallo-Hellenic models of the French Pléiade. Worthy of mention are the Vendemmie di Parnaso, the Scherzi, the 30 Sermoni in which he develops the satire of 17th-century manners, and especially the Poemetti, among which are some on biblical subjects: Il leone di David, La liberazione di s. Pietro, La conversione di Maria Maddalena. To the new Chiabreran technique, widely imitated in Arcadia, Parini, Monti, Foscolo and Carducci also owe not a little.

414-70 (a supplementary note with the same title in Atti della Soc. stor. savonese, 2 [1889-90], pp. 425-57); S. Ferrari, G. C. e la Corona di Apollo, in Giornale ligustico di arch. storia e lett., 15 (1888), pp. 266-75; F. Neri, Il C. e la Pléiade francese, Turin 1920; F. L. Mannucci, La lirica di G. C., storia e caratteri, Naples 1925; G. Maugain, Ronsard en Italie, Paris 1926, chaps. 3-4; G. Negri, G. C., Savona 1938; Tito da Ottone, G. C. Vita e arte, ibid. 1940; A. Bianchi, C. e Cebà poeti pindarici, in Atti Accad. ligure scienze e lett., 1 (1941), pp. 239-61.

Enzo Noè Girardi