PULCI, Luigi. – Poet, born in Florence on 15 Aug. 1432, died in Padua in Nov. 1484. He soon entered into personal relations of affectionate patronage with the Medici and was a “most observant servant” of Lorenzo, who entrusted him with missions in various parts of Italy.
From his youth, Pulci made himself known as a good vernacular poet. At the urging of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of the Magnificent, he began (from about 1453 to ’70) to compose and read 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 later called “maggiore” (a title modern editors reject) in the Florentine edition revised and expanded by the author into 28 cantos in 1483 (ed. by G. Fatini, Turin 1948). Shortly before his marriage (1472) to an Albizzi, Pulci placed himself in the service of the condottiere Roberto da Sanseverino and followed him almost continuously for twelve years until his death.
At a certain point, Pulci had to embody for the Medici an extreme tendency toward anti-humanistic impiety, which sat ill with the lively cultural movements of Florence in the last decades of the century, such as the Christian Platonism of Marsilio Ficino and the neo-classicism of Angelo Poliziano. With Ficino, the poet descended to a polemic that quickly degenerated into mocking or scurrilous invective; with Poliziano, however, he maintained relations of friendship and gratitude. Yet it is likely that Lorenzo himself eventually felt a certain irritation toward him, whether because of shifting political circumstances or because of complaints from his Florentine friends and his pious wife Clarice. Hence Pulci’s near-exile and his resentment toward the Florentine humanist milieu that rejected him.
Almost ignorant of Latin and the classics, indifferent to the poetic traditions of the Trecento, and bound—through his disregard for Aristotelian-Thomist or Platonic-Ficinian religious problems—to the unbelief of Florentine Jews, to scientific averroism, and to Paduan naturalism, the poet turned his lively wit to the burlesque reworking of chivalric motifs that he found crudely handled or parodied in anonymous cantari (such as the Florentine *Orlando*, studied by Rajna); from this arose the *Morgante*, which at first the author may have intended to title *I fatti di Carlo Magno*. The ideals of his heroes dissolve into a precipitate and clownish atmosphere: any religiosity that some claim to see preserved, along the lines of conventional cantari, even in the invocations of the various cantos, is in fact ambiguous and mocking. One need only observe the mechanical, mocking conversions to faith in the poem, the manifest incredulity that pervades it, the indulgence in rationalistic or materialistic interpretations that seem vaguely to echo the averroism theorized in those years, for example, by Nicoletto Vernia at the University of Padua; then the gratuitousness of certain deeds of the paladins, which smack of puppetry; and
the digressions and reflections, some naive, others bizarrely heretical, that proliferate in the poem as in Pulci’s sonnets. Even the Dantean structure of many cantos is clearly parodic. Compared with the gentle, courtly humanism of Boiardo, or with the smiling human comedy to which Ariosto would elevate his heroes by reconciling chivalric romance with the refined culture of his time, Pulci’s poetic world appears all the more crude and discordant in a medieval fashion, lacking the detachment of true humor, as one senses, for example, in the insistence with which the grotesque intrudes even into scenes where pathos is traditional (cf. the brief and comic resurrection of Orlando at Charlemagne’s arrival); and likewise in the burlesque tone he tries to weave into the marvelous and the romantic, it is highly problematic—if not impossible—to find, as Foscolo could, “a tragic effect, indeed a religious sentiment that invests it with a certain dignity.”
The entire fabric of the poem unfolds in familiar and popular modes, richer and more original than its model, the *Orlando*. The perfidy of Gano, the goodness and credulity of Charlemagne, the generous boldness of the paladins Orlando and Rinaldo, the naive roughness of the giant Morgante, the mocking impiety of Margutte, the theological subtleties of the demon Astarotte, and the spells of the magician Malagigi provide the poet with endless episodes and complications, in a language deliberately light-hearted and sometimes coarse, and in an ottava rima that, whether following popular tradition or aiming at parody, shuns all classical harmony and, with its precipitous meter and rhythm, underscores the comic tone, the precariousness of psychological situations, and the provisional nature of technique. Yet despite its shortcomings, Pulci’s poem remains a singular document of no mean imagination and holds a precise place in the history of the elaboration and decline of chivalric myths in parodic or satirical guise, as seen, for example, in Pulci’s *Margutte*, Folengo’s *Cingar*, and Rabelais’s Panurge. Nor should the influence of certain of Pulci’s more successful and original figures, such as the syllogizing Astarotte, be forgotten—despite changes in poetic tone and spiritual attitudes—on the romance and epic poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries, from Ariosto to Tasso and Milton.
To the popular vein also belongs the cold and harsh ottava rima poem *La Giostra*, which Pulci composed for the Magnificent’s wedding (1469); Poliziano would soon produce something far more refined in singing a similar tournament. In competition with Lorenzo’s *Nencia*, Pulci wrote the *Beca di Dicomano*, a burlesque pastoral in mockery of the idylls and refinements of the pastoral world; and he poured his taste for rapid description into various witty letters, his mood between sullenness and irritation into *Fruttale* and *Sonetti*, often savory or bitter in invective, such as the malicious and sarcastic ones exchanged with Matteo Franco. On the basis of subtle but unconvincing conjectures, many suppose that Pulci also had a hand in two works traditionally and unanimously attributed to his brother Luca (1431–70): the ottava rima of the mythological poem *Driadeo d’Amore* (1465) and that of the jocose poem *Ciriffo Calvanero*, the latter allegedly continued by Luigi from the second to the fifth canto (another brother, Bernardo [1438–88], is the author of the sacred play *Barlaam e Josafat* and of religious poetry, almost all unpublished). Of little value, even autobiographically, is *La Confessione*, a chapter in terza rima that connects with what the poet says in justification of himself and his faith in the closing of the *Morgante*, and it certainly did not suffice to shake off the reputation—acquired in his own time—of an unbeliever that clung to the eccentric poet and led to his exclusion from ecclesiastical burial.