TANSILLO, LUIGI. - Born of a Nolano family, and probably at Nola and not at Venosa, in 1510, d. at Teano on 1 Dec. 1568. A poet, courtier and soldier, he remains one of the most remarkable and most amiable figures of our literary history between the years of Ariosto and those of Tasso. His loyalty to the Spaniards, first in the person of Don Pedro, viceroy of Naples, then in that of the latter's son Don Garcia, was a sincere sentiment, and it is not possible to hold it against him.
A poet only in the vernacular, and without a taste for prose, he nonetheless has an eye for literary genres, with which he compares himself, and by which he sometimes regulates a native popular fervor. From this came his various stanzas. In the 183 of the Vendemistore (written between 1532 and 1534) a genuinely popular motif meets not only with reminiscences of carnival songs, but also with the Latin of the time; in the 173 of the Clorida (1547), Ovid's Metamorphoses, albeit through a short poem by Bernardino Martirano, help to glorify the garden of the villa of Don Pedro of Toledo and bring the inspiration back within the compass of idyllic-mythological-encomiastic poetry. Moreover, even the eclogue
The dialogue I due pellegrini (1528), with which he had made his debut, is a mixture of spontaneity and literature and as such gave work, perhaps more than it deserved, to the historians of the Pastoral fable.
Anything but irreligious, T. was not rich in religious inspiration. Therefore his octave poem Le lacrime di s. Pietro, published posthumously and written after the Vendemistore had been placed on the Index, is a poor thing; yet it owed a certain fortune and vogue (it was soon translated into Spanish) to that of the new literary genre to which it belonged. For the religious poem in the vernacular begins with it. Not much more can be said of his two didactic poems in the vernacular: the Balia and the Podere. They are not much; but in the genre of didactic poetry, so often arid in Italy and abroad, they stand out for a certain liveliness of feeling. They are written in chapters. But it is not for these works that T. occupies his place of honor between Ariosto and Tasso. For his fame, if not exactly for his glory, a few of the many lyric verses he wrote suffice, especially those in which a melancholy and ardent feeling for nature, a sensuality wholly quickened by the flame of the spirit, sometimes recall the great romantics. And then the sublime of religion and of country also flashes in him.