Pulci, Luigi

PULCI, LUIGI. - Poet, b. in Florence on 15 Aug. 1432, d. in Padua in Nov. 1484. He soon entered into personal relations of affectionate patronage with the Medici and was an "most observant servant" of Lorenzo, who entrusted him with missions in various parts of Italy.

From his earliest years, P. had made himself known as a good poet in the vernacular. At the urging of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of the Magnificent, he set about composing (from 1453, it seems, to '70) and reading at the court of 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" (an epithet that editors today reject) in the Florentine edition revised and enlarged by the author, in 28 cantos, of 1483 (ed. edited by G. Fatini, Turin 1948). Shortly before his marriage (1472) to an Albizzi, P. placed himself in the service of the condottiere Roberto da Sanseverino and followed him almost continuously, for 12 years, until his death.

P. must have interpreted at a certain moment for the Medici an extreme tendency of anti-humanistic empiricism, which was ill reconciled with the cultural movements so alive in Florence in the last decades of the century, such as the Platonic-Christian humanism of Marsilio Ficino and the Latin and vernacular neoclassicism of Angelo Poliziano. With Ficino the poet descended into a polemic that soon turned into mocking or scurrilous invective; with Poliziano he instead maintained relations of friendship and gratitude. But it is likely that Lorenzo himself finally felt a shadow of annoyance toward him, either because of the shifting political game, or also because of the complaints of his Florentine friends and of his pious wife Clarice. Hence the quasi-exile of P. and his indignation toward the Florentine humanistic milieu that rejected him.

Almost ignorant of Latin and of the classics, heedless of the fourteenth-century poetic traditions and undoubtedly bound, in his contempt for religious, Aristotelian-Thomistic or Platonic-Ficinian problems, to the unbelief of Florentine Jews, and to scientific Averroism and Paduan naturalism, the poet bent his lively inspiration to the laughable reworking of the chivalric motifs that he found crudely grouped together or parodied in anonymous cantari (such as the Florentine one that Rajna studied, the Orlando); and from this was born the Morgante, which at first the author perhaps intended to title I fatti di Carlo Magno. The ideals of his heroes are dissolved in a precipitate and buffoonish atmosphere: the religiosity that some claimed to see preserved, on the pattern of the customary cantari, even in the invocations of the various cantos, is in substance ambiguous and irreducible. It suffices to observe in the poem the mechanical, mocking conversions to the faith, the manifest incredulity that circulates in it. The indulgence in rationalistic or materialistic interpretations that confusedly seem to smack of Averroism, theorized for example in those years by Nicoletto Vernia at the Paduan Studium; and then the gratuitousness of certain deeds of the paladins, which smack of the marionette-like; and the digressions and considerations, some candid, others bizarrely heretical, that swarm in the poem as in P.'s sonnets. The very Dantean movement of several cantos is evidently parodic. Compared with the gentle and courtly humanism of Boiardo, or with the smiling human comedy to which Ariosto will raise his heroes, finding the accord between the romance of chivalry and the exquisite culture of his time, P.'s poetic world will appear even more crude and medievally disharmonious, without the detachment proper to true humor, as one notices, for example, in the insistence with which between the extraordinary and the immeasurable the grotesque winks even in scenes where the pathetic is traditional (see the brief and comic resurrection of Orlando at the coming of Charles); and thus, even in the burlesque tone that strives to interweave 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 sentiment that clothes it with a certain dignity."

The entire plot of the poem unfolds on familiar and popular modes, with greater richness and originality than its model Orlando. The perfidy of Gano, the goodness and credulity of Charles, the generous daring of the paladins Orlando and Rinaldo, the naive roughness of the gross Morgante, the mocking impiety of Margutte, the theological subtleties of the demon Astarotte and the enchantments of the magician Malagigi offer the poet occasion for innumerable episodes and complications, in a deliberately flippant and sometimes coarse language, and in an ottava that, whether to follow popular tradition or to adapt itself to the parodic intention, shuns all classical harmony, and with its ataxias and precipitate rhythm underlines the buffo tone, the precariousness of psychological situations and the provisionality of technique. But even in its inadequacies, P.'s poem remains a most singular document of no mediocre imagination, and has its own very precise place in that history of the elaboration and decline of chivalric myths in a parodic or satirical key, which is punctuated, for example, by P.'s Margutte, by Folengo's Cingar and by Rabelais's Panurge. And of certain more successful and original Pulcian figures, such as the syllogizing Astarotte, one must not forget, even amid the changing of poetic tones and spiritual attitudes, the influence on the romance and epic poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from Ariosto to Tasso and to Milton.

To the popular vein also belongs the short poem in ottava rima, cold and hard, La Giostra, which P. composed for the wedding of the Magnificent (1469); Poliziano would know how to do quite another thing in singing of a similar tournament a few years later. In competition with Lorenzo's Nencia, P. composed the Beca di Dicomano, of bucolic structure in a burlesque key, as if in mockery of the idylls and delicacies of the pastoral world; and he poured his taste for rapid description into various witty letters, his humor between the surly and the irritating into Frottole and Sonetti, often tasty or bitter in invective, such as those, malicious and sarcastic, exchanged with Matteo Franco. On the basis of shrewd research on unconvincing indications, it is supposed by many that P. also had a hand in two works that tradition and the printed editions concordantly attribute to his brother Luca (1431-70): the ottavas of the mythological short poem Driadeo d'Amore (1465) and those of the playful poem Ciriffo Calvaneo: the latter would have been continued by Luigi from the second to the fifth canto (another brother, Bernardo [1438-88], is the author of the sacred representation Barlaam e Josafat and of religious poems, almost all unpublished). Of little value, even autobiographically, is La Confessione, a capitolo in terza rima that connects to what the poet says in justification of himself and of his faith at the close of the Morgante, and which certainly did not suffice to shake off from the bizarre poet the reputation, which he had in his times, of unbeliever, and which caused him to be excluded from ecclesiastical burial.

Giulio Vallese