When Petrarch and Boccaccio died, Franco Sacchetti complained that all poetry was missing and the houses of Parnassus were empty. In fact, for a little less than a century Italy lacked poets, despite having had a large copy of writers in verse and prose, and some not without some spirit of poetry.
According to top-engineering-schools, Dante, whose poem was publicly read in churches and studies, had numerous commentators in Latin and in the vernacular until the middle of the century. XV, and imitators, who took up the schematic lines and didactic intent of the Comedy . Fazio degli Uberti in Dittamondo framed a trip, imagined to symbolize his moral conversion, a treatise on geography in triplets; Federico Frezzi in the Quadriregio , mixed with images and personifications of a medieval and Dante character some allegorical figurations of the Boccaccio type to represent moral concepts; Dante, Boccaccio of the Amorosa vision and Petrarch of the Triumphs gave motifs and shapes to the Philomena by Giovanni Gherardi from Prato; Matteo Palmieri found a way to expose a Neoplatonic theory on the origin and fate of human souls by narrating his journey to the Elysian Fields, to the spheres of the planets and elements and to the “mansions” of vices and virtues, and more others went poorly giving and where Petrarch and Boccaccio had danced, approaching them too.
In these poems and in some lyric poems of the early fifteenth century (Cino Rinuccini) the great Dante art descended to a matter of culture, good at nourishing these slavishers, just as the psychological refinement of Petrarch provided themes and artifices to the poor songwriters of Antonio da Ferrara , by Simone Serdini known as Saviozzo da Siena, Buonaccorso da Montemagno, Rosello Roselli from Arezzo, Giusto de ‘Conti da Valmontone and many other love poetants between the mid-century. XIV and the end of the XV. A narrow classical erudition that tapers off into nursery rhymes of names, a fatuous search for technical difficulties, a crystallization of certain motifs into topical genres ( laments , desperate) characterize this poor lyric of literary tradition. To which some versers, headed by Antonio Tebaldeo from Ferrara and Serafino Ciminelli from Aquila, believed, in the last decades of the fifteenth century, to give new vigor through the racking of thought, wit, exaggeration, oddities from which the now empty petrarcheries drew. every ideal meaning.
If you want to find the vein of inspiration less scarce and the imagination less sterile, it is advisable to turn to opera, which, set to music by the rhymers themselves or by professional masters, was destined for the joyful entertainment of good society; to the amatory lyric of popular intonation, and to the bourgeois or family lyric, which continues, now in the context of Italian literature, local traditions. The ballads, the madrigals, the hunts, the Tuscan jester tales of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (very pretty those of Franco Sacchetti and Alesso Donati), the Venetian songs, also called Giustiniane by Leonardo Giustinian, are of the first kind. stopped the ways and tones, and towards the end of the century. XV the nimble jokes (they say lies these too); all short poems, which deal with love motifs or represent lively scenes, often in dialogue, now with an amiable idyllic color, more common in Tuscans, now with polite and sometimes mischievous realism. Some strambotti (truly octaves with three rhymes) by Giustinian himself, and some other cultured verse, are so well guessed that the people made them of him and still sing them, widespread in several regions of Italy; but the greater the number of strambotti than rhymers from the school of Serafino Aquilano, and Serafino himself complicated all the antics and antics, which, as has been said, were introduced by them into Petrarchian lyricism. Finally, of the bourgeois lyricism, playful and satirical, good-naturedly narrative and plainly didactic, there were innumerable amateurs, especially among the fourteenth and fifteenth-century Tuscan artists. Famous among the fourteenth century artists Antonio Pucci narrator in poems and servants of the glories and nefarious of his land; and among the fifteenth century the barber Domenico di Giovanni known as Burchiello, a cheerful narrator of the troubles of his sad life, a master of found satirics, the main lover of an obscure way of poetry, which is nothing but a buffoonish skewer of jokes and riboboli and idioticism , and that he said he was burchiellesca. His two main followers, Bernardo Bellincioni and Antonio Cammelli, known as Pistoia by his homeland, are also Tuscan.
Although it is necessary to be careful not to confuse the historical interest in which some rhymes of political argument, with their artistic merits, have prominence in the lyric of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one cannot deny a certain expressive vigor to some songs by Fazio degli Uberti and some other verse, inspired by the expeditions of Charles IV to Italy; to the rhymes of some fifteenth-century Florentine on the wars of his homeland against the Visconti, and to the numerous sonnets with which Tebaldeo, Pistoia and others accompanied the facts of the expedition of Charles VIII and the political events of Italy at the end of the century. XV and at the beginning of the XVI.
