POLIZIANO, ANGIOLO. – From Montepulciano, where he was born on 14 July 1454 and from which he later derived the name Politismus, Agnolo Ambrogiu soon came to Florence, to relatives somewhat less well-off, who set him on the path of study. Very soon he found a way to distinguish himself in the humanist circle of Lorenzo il Magnifico. Of exceptionally lively and keen intelligence, he immediately demonstrated his extraordinary power of assimilation and his increasingly refined taste through the translation into Latin hexameters, sustained by Virgilian elegance, of several books of the Iliad, continuing the work of humanist “piety” already desired by Niccolò V and begun with the translation of book I by Carlo Aretino.
There P. gave splendid proof of his ability to grasp the most varied harmonies and techniques, and to adhere with refinement to the originals, rendered, as he himself would say
then of one of his translations from Callimachus, “non sensu modo, sed numeris etiam, quod est difficillimum, coloribusque servatis”. Between Ficino’s predilection, which led him to call him an “Homeric youth,” and the affectionate protection of Lorenzo the Magnificent, to whom the translated books (six, apparently; but Mai found and published four of them in 1839) were successively dedicated, P. refined his poetic genius. In 1473 he was received into the Medici household to educate Lorenzo’s second son, Piero: years of moderate comfort, but also of quarrels and animosities, documented by the Latin verses of the period, the letters in the vernacular, and also by that curious collection of exercises in the vernacular and in Latin, the Latini, which P. composed (1481) for Piero’s use, annotating them with genuine sentiments, moral reflections, and everyday events; all tinged with a somewhat bitter and mildly gossipy tone, which was, moreover, part of the tradition of Poggio, Filelfo, and Valla. But in addition to Latin and Greek epigrams and invectives (the In Mabilium being particularly bloodthirsty), P. also added his classical poems of delicate workmanship: such as the splendid elegy on the death of Albiera degli Albizzi (1473), and the exquisite couplets In violas, exceedingly sweet and enlivened by a vigilant melancholy of love, by a poignant awareness of the transience of everything beautiful; or the verses to Lalage, or those addressed to his young girl (De Angeli puella), a poem vibrant in rhythm and expression, festive and lighthearted. P.’s fame, however, was established above all by his most genuinely courtly work, Le stanze per la giostra (1475–78), which definitively sealed his devotion to the Medici: a devotion of which he also wished to give proof in his Coniurationis Pactianae commentarium (1478), a chronicle interwoven with Tacitean and Sallustian motifs, but lacking genuine psychological development or objectivity, written in a Latin prose that only rarely achieves dramatic accents. The Stanze, on the theme of a Florentine tournament held in January ’75, sing of Giuliano de’ Medici’s falling in love with the beautiful Simonetta; but although interrupted halfway through Book II (whether because of the death of his young friend or because of the evident exhaustion of the subject), they are nevertheless of exceptional importance for the history of our vernacular poetry. Still a youthful expression of P.’s humanism, they dissipate the initial epic movement into a chivalric atmosphere that has none yet of Ariosto’s smiling detachment, and soon loses its momentum and founders in the exaltation of nature—now with popular freshness (following Sacchetti’s example), now with melancholy accents, now with a refinement of detail inspired by the Latin poets of the decadence. The mythological apparatus is re-experienced there with grace, without any apparent artificiality, in a chiseled and harmonious octave, darting with classical reminiscences. Thus Ariosto’s octave cannot be conceived without P.’s, nor can the history of our poetic language dispense with Poliziano’s refinement. Simonetta remains, as was rightly said, “between the human and the divine,” as in the pure transfiguring forms of Botticelli’s Primavera and in the Magnificent’s commentary on his own sonnets: these works, after all, were all conceived in the same humanistic climate. It is true that in P. the themes of love and death become clouded in a “sweet-and-bitter” contemplation of feminine spiritual and physical beauty; this was, moreover, his personal way of inserting himself, through his Latin and vernacular poetry, into the Neoplatonic tradition philosophized by Ficino: the divine theory of love. The Stanze already possess much of the humanistic spirituality of the Orfeo and the Sylvae: their limitations lie in their excessive contemplativeness and intellectualism, and in a certain chiseled preciosity that is more medieval than classical.
No less important, as Carducci already recognized, is P.’s popular poetry, the Nugae in the vernacular, which the author appears to hold in little esteem in the Miscellanea. These poems by P.—continuing and independent rispetti, ballads, and little songs—which in any case carry on the Tuscan popular traditions, retain their own elegance and a particular technical workmanship. Without harsh melancholies, difficult and obscure allegories, spiritual contemplations, or painful experiences, they develop the customary themes of love requested, denied, or won, amid the festive assent of all nature. Despite the simplicity they achieve, their technique is rich in impeccably measured rhythms. After the classicism of the great fourteenth-century poets, the vernacular language seems, with P., to have reached that maturity which answered the desire and hope of the Magnificent, who, since 1466, had collected Tuscan poetry and defended the vernacular language as “not poor, not crude, but abundant and most polished.” To these qualities P. alone knew how to add elegance and freshness.
In 1480, having left Florence because of pedagogical disagreements with Lorenzo’s wife, P. arrived in Mantua. There, on the occasion of celebrations in the Gonzaga household and at the request of Cardinal Francesco, he composed for the theater a pastoral drama, the Orfeo: “in stilo vulgare perché dagli spettatori meglio fusse intesa”—which once again demonstrates how the vernacular and Latin forms were equivalent within his artistic experience, although he humanistically believed in the latter as a universal vehicle of wisdom. The Orfeo is a scenario for a lyrical drama set against a bucolic background; it follows the forms of the ballad (the opening episode, involving Aristaeus and Mopsus, is a genuine eclogue; the concluding one, the orgiastic bacchanal following the killing of the Thracian singer, is a carnival song), interspersing them with a Latin Sapphic ode sung by Orpheus and vernacular stanzas of lament and prayer to Pluto.
Even more clearly than in the Stanze per la Giostra, one perceives in this pastoral drama, woven from Ovidian, Virgilian, and popular motifs, the echoes of Ficinian Neoplatonic allegorism and of the mythical symbolism that Landino, precisely in those years, was interpreting in the text of the Commedia (1481) and had theorized in the Disputaciones Camaldulenses (around 1475) and in his commentary on the Aeneid (1478). P. thus brings into the Mantuan milieu and transforms into poetry the conciliatory tendency toward combining classical and Christian elements that was traditional in humanism, and that he found both in the Ovidian allegories of the Commedia and in the fa-
The meaning of P.’s work (unless the author himself chose to veil his fable in mystery) may elude us; but the Ficinian inspiration that animates it must lead us to regard it not as “profane matter” or as “the revival of free paganism,” but as a vernacular synthesis of the classical and the Christian, each anticipated and completed by the other.
The erudite, critical, philological P., a student of philosophy, author of fervent Sermoni (1467–78), read to a confraternity devoted to learning (Del Sacramento dell'Eucaristia, Della Passione di Gesù Cristo, Dell'umiltà di Gesù Cristo), in a powerful and rich vernacular, and of sacred hymns (iambic quaternaries, In Divam Virginem, which, although rather scholastic, would not be out of place in a history of biblical inspiration from Petrarch to Manzoni), wonderfully complements the personality of the poet of the Stanze, the Orfeo, and the Odae. He set forth, albeit somewhat disorderly, his wealth of philological culture and his lively aesthetic insights in the Miscellanea, published as a centuria in 1489. This is a collection of learned essays and observations: at times P. emends a passage or interprets an obscure word in manuscripts; at times he corrects a judgment concerning writers and works; at times he implicitly engages in polemic (as he would continue to do in the twelve books of the Epistolae, which he arranged a few months before his death and which others published in ’98) with his numerous adversaries; everything is enlivened by a sincere faith in the eternal values of wisdom. Nothing could be more inaccurate than to deny P. religious interests or intellectual concerns. He knew and meditated upon patristic literature, like every humanist; this is evident not only from his Sermoni and his Aristotelian introductory lectures, but also from his letters and the Miscellanea; and among his translations from Greek into Latin there is also Athanasius’s Commento ai Salmi. It is obvious that, for his confident and optimistic humanism, the wisdom of God had already radiated into the minds of pagan poets and philosophers; hence Homer and Aristotle, Plato and Cicero, the prisci theologi, as Ficino taught, are for him also prophets, the first possessors of the
one wisdom, which Christianity later received and rekindled in the light of divine love for the salvation of mankind. His Homer, therefore, in the Praefatio ad Homerum and in the “sylva” Ambra, is both a prophet and a theologian, who received and explained to the nations the notion of divine omniscience and providence; like Cicero, he is viewed by P. with the same eyes as the Saint of the Confessiones, that is, as a true intermediary of God. Through the merit of the Ciceronian Hortensius, he recalls, among other things, that St. Augustine was able to ask God for “the immortality of wisdom, with incredible ardor of feeling,” and was able “to disdain the affections and passions of former times and every vain hope, and to place every thought in God.”
P. took a most vigorous part in the controversy over Cicero and Ciceronianism, especially in his Epistolae. He, who had raised imitation to an art, and who wished to discern in style “the long fermenting of a hidden erudition, of many-sided reading, of an ancient habit of study,” could certainly not tolerate others’ seeing in Cicero merely the “stylum, non pectus,” and aping his cadences, metrical clausulae, and vocabulary. For P. was fully aware of the problem of the irreproducibility of a given language and of the evolution of style: thus he regarded Quintilian’s Latinity as not “corrupted” in relation to Cicero’s, but simply “changed”;
not contaminated, that is, by decadence, but different, in accordance with the changing talents, tastes, and environments.
In Florence, to which he had returned in that same year, 1480, P. once again received, amid Lorenzo’s renewed favor, his priory of S. Paolo, entrusted to him three years earlier, and became a public professor at the Florentine Studio. He was also a canon of the Metropolitan church. His literary teaching—always, moreover, in the key of a poet or philologist—is preserved in the Praelectiones on Homer, Suetonius, Persius, Quintilian, and Statius, as well as in his Sylvae—that is, impromptu compositions—in harmonious hexameters: Manto, in praise of Virgil (1482); Rusticus (1483), on the Georgic poetry of Hesiod and Virgil; Ambra (1485), in praise of Homer; and Nutricia (1491), in which ancient and modern poetry and poets are celebrated. He taught philosophy from ’92 until a violent fever prematurely took him from the living (September ’94); his Aristotelian courses on the Priora and on Dialectic are preserved, as are his general treatises (Lamia, Panepistemon, Dialectica), to which his Pico della Mirandola certainly impelled him. But P. was not a true philosopher; even though he could claim to have renewed the study of philosophy through his philological expertise, in perpetual polemic with his predecessor teachers, all of them “arid” or “jejune,” they had so devalued the name of philosopher that he would perhaps have preferred for himself that of “grammarian” or “little philosopher.”
P. had a lively awareness of what he represented in Florentine and European culture. With him, the times were mature for a more worthy and conscious life: the medieval darkness, he asserted, could be said to have ended; he was proud to illuminate the present more fully with the voice of the ancient writers who “vie tandem aliquando, sicut erant semilaceri atque trunci multumque a se ipsis immutati, suam hanc in patriam reverterunt.” If, through his philological work, he belongs to the humanist tradition that continues from Valla to Erasmus, his Stanze remained a model for all vernacular poetry of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; his Sylvae are a singular example of humanist mysticism; and his Orfeo provided material for imitation by the theater of the entire Renaissance, from Rucellai to Trissino. And even as tastes in our vernacular changed, his language would be regarded as a remarkable acquisition not only by theorists such as Bembo, but by poets and critics of every age.