SANNAZARO, JACOPO. - Poet, b. in Naples on 28 July 1456, d. there on 24 April 1530. He belonged to the Accademia del Pontano under the name Azio Sincero; he lived at the court of the Aragonese, wholly loyal to the infante Frederick, whom in 1501, at the fall of the monarchy, he followed into exile and did not abandon until Frederick's death (1504). He then returned to his villa at Mergellina. He was buried in the adjoining little church, in the tomb he had had prepared for himself and which is still preserved.
Yet what is singular in his figure as a man of letters does not represent an exception; it belongs rather to a tradition to which, on different levels, Boiardo and Castiglione equally belong. Like them he was at once humanist and gentleman; he had the almost religious feeling for Latin of the humanists; but he shared the tastes and curiosities of the profane world of the court, which was also his world, and he met these with the work of his pen, notably in the famous Gibomneri, bizarre compositions in the vernacular verse; a kind of frottola, a true "tangle" (such is the meaning of the word) or snarl of subjects wholly disparate among themselves, and sometimes in the tone of a riddle, held together by jest. Among these concessions of his to profane taste the most fortunate was the Arcadia, the story of Azio Sincero (his pseudonym), who, to flee the pangs of an unrequited love, migrates to seek oblivion and peace in the land of shepherds, confiding in one of them and receiving in return confidences no less painful. Then one fine day, inspired by a dream and guided by a nymph, he plunges into the bowels of the earth, reaches by that route his native Sebeto and here finds the news that the girl, the cause of his sorrows, is dead. This, in the first redaction of 1485, consisting of ten eclogues and ten prose pieces, which circulated in manuscript for a long time. In 1501 he put it into print, enriched with two eclogues and two prose pieces. What then is the Arcadia? It is likely that at first Sannazaro thought, as Boccaccio had already done in the Ninfale Fiesolano, or also in the Filocolo, of starting from old familiar classical motifs, and of allegorizing in the developments the vicissitudes of the courtly world. This in fact is what he did, because the book is full of such allusions, down to the level of gossip. Except that he was truly a humanist; and therefore this classical material which in his predecessors, especially in Boccaccio, immediately lost its seriousness and, tainted with Petrarchan and Provençalizing tones, could end in a perhaps unconscious caricature of itself, with him preserves to the very end its dignity and its charm. It was no use his thinking that he was writing in the vernacular and that his public was alien to this culture; the Latin poets continued to suggest their reminiscences to him one after another, and he could not help chiseling them with a prose that is undoubtedly artificial, but that also ends by being the closest to the good Tuscan tradition that had ever been written in Naples. In the history of vernacular literature in southern Italy the prose of the Arcadia represents a coup de théâtre. In short, there came out of it a strange work, composite, refined, soft and cold at the same time, and the first to perceive in it a contrast between intentions and culture, between form and content, was probably he himself, Sannazaro. And perhaps he already expressed it in the words "ill-secure is that fame which has no other ground than the judgment of the vulgar." With all this the work had an enormous fortune: it was translated into all the nascent vernaculars, it represented Italian Renaissance throughout the world. It is not to be wondered at: without knowing it, in the full tide of classicism, by some decades in advance, it foreshadowed the tendencies of the classicistic age. Perfectly in harmony with his own aesthetic, Sannazaro felt himself instead in the De partu Virginis, where the task was to bring the language of Virgil to the glorification of the Christian manger. When the great bucolic in three books and about a thousand verses was completed, in 1513, Leo X through the hand of Bembo complimented the author thus: "We awaited your work with eagerness, and we now rejoice to see it completed. It would have been dear to us at any time; but it is especially dear to us at this time. We have need of writers like you, today when the Christian tradition is assailed inigno stilo." Certainly great is the distance between the simplicity of the Gospel narrative and the splendor of the Sannazarian evocation, enriched by mythological intrusions; Christ gathering the angels around him may resemble Jupiter; the Joy that descends upon the earth may resemble Mercury; it may surprise that Proteus is introduced to prophesy the Baptism of Jesus, and that the prophecy is evoked precisely by the cerulean King Jordan. Nevertheless in this flowery and warm Alexandrianism one must be cautious about speaking of discordance. As for speaking of insincerity, it would be ridiculous. The piety that transpires from it has its own unmistakable gentleness: the gentleness of the humanistic Renaissance. Sannazaro also wrote piscatory eclogues, and elegies to Cassandra Marchese and epigrams, some of which would not seem to be by this mild gentleman, so bitter do they sound.
Bibliography2 works
Giuseppe Toffanin