PULCI, LUIGI. – Poet, b. in Florence on 15 August 1432, d. in Padua in November 1484. He soon entered into personal relations of affectionate clientage with the Medici and was the “most devoted servant” of Lorenzo, who entrusted him with missions in various parts of Italy.
From his early years, P. had made himself known as a good poet in the vernacular. At the urging of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of the Magnifico, he began composing (apparently from 1453 to 1470) and reading at the court in Via Larga the cantos of his bizarre chivalric poem in ottava rima, the Morgante, published in part as early as 1480, issued two years later in 23 cantos, and subsequently called “greater” (an epithet rejected by editors today) in the Florentine edition, revised and enlarged by the author into 28 cantos, of 1483 (ed. by G. Fatini, Turin 1948). Shortly before his marriage (1472) to an Albizzi, P. entered the service of the condottiere Roberto da Sanseverino and followed him almost continuously for 12 years, until his death.
At a certain point P. must have represented for the Medici an extreme tendency toward empirical anti-humanism, which was difficult to reconcile with the cultural movements so lively in Florence during the final decades of the century, such as the Christian-Platonic humanism of Marsilio Ficino and the Latin and vernacular neoclassicism of Angelo Poliziano. With Ficino the poet engaged in a polemic that quickly deteriorated into mocking or scurrilous invective; with Poliziano, by contrast, he maintained relations of friendship and gratitude. But it is probable that Lorenzo himself eventually felt some irritation toward him, either because of the changing political situation or because of the complaints of his Florentine friends and of his pious wife Clarice. Hence P.’s virtual exile and his indignation toward the Florentine humanist milieu that rejected him.
Almost ignorant of Latin and the classics, indifferent to the poetic traditions of the fourteenth century, and undoubtedly connected, in his contempt for religious, Aristotelian-Thomistic, or Platonic-Ficinian problems, with the unbelief of Florentine Jews and with scientific Averroism and Paduan naturalism, the poet bent his lively inspiration toward the boisterous reworking of the chivalric themes that he found roughly grouped or parodied in anonymous cantari (such as the Florentine one studied by Rajna, Orlando); and from this arose the Morgante, which the author may initially have intended to title I fatti di Carlo Magno. The ideals of its heroes dissolve in a hectic and buffoonish atmosphere: the religiosity that some have claimed to see preserved, following the pattern of the customary cantari, even in the invocations of the various cantos, is essentially ambiguous and irreducible. It is enough to observe in the poem the mechanical, derisive conversions to the faith and the manifest incredulity that pervades II. There is also an indulgence in rationalistic or materialistic interpretations that seem confusedly to reflect Averroism, theorized, for example, in those years by Nicoletto Vernia at the University of Padua; as well as the gratuitousness of certain deeds of the paladins, which have something puppet-like about them; and
the digressions and reflections, some naïve, others bizarrely heretical, that proliferate in the poem as in P.’s sonnets. The Dantean movement of many of the cantos is evidently parodic. Compared with the gracious and courtly humanism of Boiardo, or with the smiling human comedy to which Ariosto would raise his heroes, finding harmony between the romance of chivalry and the refined culture of his time, P.’s poetic world appears still cruder and more medievally discordant, lacking the detachment proper to true humor, as can be seen, for example, in the insistence with which the grotesque winks at the reader amid the extraordinary and the gigantic, even in scenes where the pathetic is traditional (v. CARLOW); and thus, even in the burlesque tone that strives to intertwine itself with the marvelous and the romantic, it is highly problematic, if not impossible, to find, as Foscolo instead hoped, “a tragic effect, indeed a religious feeling that clothes it in a certain dignity.”
The entire plot of the poem unfolds in familiar and popular modes, with greater richness and originality than its model Orlando. The perfidy of Gano, the goodness and credulity of Carlo, the generous boldness of the paladins Orlando and Rinaldo, the rather crude naivety of the massive Morgante, the mocking impiety of Margutte, the theological subtleties of the demon Astarotte, and the enchantments of the magician Malagigi offer the poet material for innumerable episodes and complications, in deliberately light-hearted and at times vulgar language, and in an ottava rima that, whether in following popular tradition or in adapting itself to the parodic intention, eschews all classical harmony and, through its ataxias and breathless rhythm, underscores the comic tone, the precariousness of psychological situations, and the provisional character of the technique. Yet despite its shortcomings, P.’s poem remains a most singular document of no mean imaginative power, and occupies a precise place in the history of the elaboration and decline of chivalric myths in a parodic or satirical key, a history punctuated, for example, by P.’s Margutte, Folengo’s Cingar, and Rabelais’s Panurge. And of certain of Pulci’s more successful and original figures, such as the syllogizing Astarotte, one must not forget, despite the changing poetic tones and spiritual attitudes, the influence exerted on the romance and epic poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Ariosto to Tasso and Milton.
The popular vein is likewise invoked by the poem in ottava rima, cold and harsh, La Giostra, which P. composed for the wedding of the Magnifico (1469); Poliziano would accomplish something quite different a few years later in singing of a similar tournament. In competition with Lorenzo’s Nencia, P. composed the Beca di Dicomano, a bucolic composition in a burlesque mode, as if mocking the idylls and delicacies of the pastoral world; and he poured his taste for rapid description into various witty letters, and his humor, at once surly and irritating, into Frottole and Sonetti, often delectable or bitter in their invective, like those, malicious and sarcastic, exchanged with Matteo Franco. On the basis of ingenious investigations resting on unconvincing indications, many suppose that P. also had a hand in two works that tradition and the printed editions unanimously attribute to his brother Luca (1431–70): the ottave of the mythological poem Driadeo d'Amore (1465) and those of the comic poem Ciriffo Calvaneo. The latter, it is said, was continued by Luigi from the second through the fifth canto (another brother, Bernardo [1438–88], is the author of the sacred drama Barlaam e Josafat and of religious poems, almost all unpublished). Of little value, even autobiographically, is La Confessione, a chapter in terza rima connected with what the poet says, in justification of himself and his faith, at the close of the Morgante; and it certainly did not succeed in shaking the bizarre poet free of the reputation he had in his own time as an unbeliever, a reputation that led to his exclusion from ecclesiastical burial.