SACCHETTI, FRANCO. - Poet, b. perhaps at Ragusa ca. 1330, d. ca. 1400. His name appears among those of the oldest and most illustrious families in the canto of the nobility of Florence, the XVIth of the Paradiso; but their social condition had by then declined, and the life of Franco di Benci passed amid varied and often dramatic vicissitudes of politics at home, of trade, and of travels in various parts of Europe, of public offices in the city and at Bibbiena, at S. Miniato, at Faenza.
A man of severe meditations, of rich readings, of lively curiosity, while culture was organizing itself in philological humanism and was already deducing from the poetics of the great fourteenth-century writers the principles of vernacular classicism, he withdrew from the commitments, but also from the abstractions, of the new men of letters, and set himself to compose in two directions that seem opposed: the frank and often austere religiosity of the Sposizioni di Vangeli, the severe morality that stands out from the Lettere (but in every one of his works, at moments, there appears the face of a resentful and fretful moralist who sees only too well the decline of life and of civic custom); and the inexhaustible festivity of a varied and picturesque reality, most mobile in the scattered and cheerful tumult of its gestures, to which nevertheless he does not abandon himself: it seems rather that he observes it from a certain distance, as if recalling it; and it is the play of a continually amused remembering, and continually surprised by circumstances, the most assiduous theme of the Trecentonovelle.
One perceives clearly that he is in crisis between the religious synthesis offered to his living and his thinking by a richly shared and meditated Christianity, and the dispersive appearance in which the real is shattered and dissipated. Civic culture was the most conspicuous fruit of Christian civilization, and Franciscanism had taught Italy the prodigy of a life that is animated in spiritual breath and is reconciled to a loving God, creator of a benign nature: the synthesis between divine truth and reality, which is a joyous occasion of spiritual rediscovery, seems to hint at dissolving again, in S. And he sets himself to arrange a relationship that may reconnect, in a formal crystallization artistically irreproachable, the unity of life and the multiplicity of the real. From this intention his ballate, his madrigals, his cacce receive light and prestige in the Rime. S. attempts a limited but highly original formal solution of his conflict, seeking the harmony of a dance and of a music that enchant and suspend fleeting reality. That civic life comes to a halt, mimetically poses, and is summed up in rhythm. Franciscan spirituality too had availed itself of the traditional choral forms, composed of words, music, and dance, to illustrate the soul's itinerary to God; but the Rime of S. and also his novelle, which, read through the Rime, reveal how he is always ready for formal solutions, interrupt that ascending movement of which Dante had been the very great poet, and limit themselves to reobserving a reality circumscribed in itself, limitedly harmonious, often onomatopoeic, and yet, in the grace of the poetic intent, not unmindful of the gift whereby the spiritual life lends to the profane some of its purest cadences.
Bibliography9 works
Mario Apollonio