According to topmbadirectory, the forms that the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries had given to religious thought and feeling reborn after the thousand to new depth and intimacy (candor of prose, lyricism of laudi), continue, via for the century. 14th and 15th century, to welcome the fantastic activity, mostly modest, of pious souls, refining themselves, if not always perfecting themselves, technically and sometimes opening up to the expression of the rehabilitated sense of humanity. The Florentine Iacopo Passavanti, a Dominican friar, in the Mirror of true penance he teaches asceticism reinforced with legendary examples, in a limpid, robust, coherent style, reminiscent of Boccaccio; Caterina Benincasa da Siena, fervent soul of mysticism and admirable courage for the triumph of her ideas, in more hundreds of letters often quivering with warm and vigorous eloquence, which is formed in images of biblical flavor and in artifices by the critics of the abstract word compared to secentisms, he advocates the crusade, the reform of the Church and the return of the papal see to Rome; her disciple, Giovanni Dominici enlivens the communicative ardor of a profound morality in his Florentine prose ( Government of family care , Book of love of charity, sermons), while from his custom with the Latinity of the Fathers and ecclesiastical writers derives a certain emphasis and abundance of style; similar in this to Savonarola, whose preaching, solemn for the use of biblical allegories, terrible in the description of the scourges threatened to the Church and to the world, strong for the solidity of the arguments advocating moral and political reforms, deeply moved Florence towards the end of the century XV.
On the other hand, the prose of the sermons of San Bernardino degli Albizzeschi da Siena, who lashes with vigor of eloquence the vices of his contemporaries, often availing himself of ‘images drawn from the humblest reality of life and witty short stories, and everywhere transfusing the warmth and candor of his faith. Frank, calm, perspicuous is also the prose of the pious legends and the lives of the saints, which, however, in the century. XV is assuming a certain relative complexity of constructs and the correctness of syntactic ligaments, and at times manifests the spirit of the new times in the care of well determining the legendary news, almost trying to humanize the fantastic supernatural. It is of this type the Life of Blessed Colombini , written on the traces of a Latin text by Feo Belcari, translator or reducer of other ascetic prose, author of sonnets, of lauds, of sacred representations.
The sacred praises continued to multiply wherever they were devoted brotherhoods, down through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their production becoming more intense when special circumstances revalued religious sentiment in the crowds, as was the case in the middle of the century. XIV, when the blessed Giovanni Colombini aroused a new fervor of piety (laudi del Bianco da Siena), and in the knight years between that century and the fifteenth, when the so-called motion of the Whites broke out in northern and central Italy, to which perhaps whoever is the author is due, the laude Di ‘ , Maria dolce , with what desire, beautiful for the fusion of religious ardor with a sweet feeling of humanity. This sentiment and a growing regularity of syntactic and metric forms characterize the laudi that were composed in the fifteenth century, perhaps in greater numbers than others, by Belcari and another Florentine, Francesco di ser Albizzo.
Alongside the lyric lauds, dramatic laudi had spread from Umbria to the neighboring regions, from which, as already mentioned, the sacred theater originates. Of this Umbria itself, Abruzzo, Rome, Florence have handed down to us documents of the fifteenth century of considerable breadth; much more numerous are the Florentines, who, if you take away the meter, which in them is the octave, while in the others the sixth of hendecasyllables, are not dissimilar, in terms of structure, from those of the other regions.
Topic of the sacred representations are facts of the life of Christ or stories of the old testament or legends of saints, all slavishly scripted on the trail of the scriptural or hagiographic source. Action, better dialogue, because we cannot speak of a real action in fifteenth-century sacred dramas, it passes continuously from place to place and includes periods of many and many years; under which conditions of the text the stage structure was suitably coordinated. The reasons for the story are cheerfully trampled on, whence the strangest anachronisms abound, especially in certain costume scenes, intruded with comic or satirical intentions. But all this would not detract from the sacred theater’s artistic value, if it had an intimate dramatic force, if the characters were represented with psychological intuition and the facts with the power of glimpses and efficacy of expression. Among the authors, most anonymous, some few known also for other writings (Feo Belcari, Pierozzo Castellani, Lorenzo the Magnificent, etc.), there was no creative genius that could be the Italian Calderón or Shakespeare. The free genius of Poliziano molded the delicate into the forms of popular sacred theater idyllic-elegiac pathos of his soul as a poet, creating the Orpheus ; the classical pedantry of some other poet or of half poets or of simple verseurs pretended to discipline them by sometimes adopting the division into acts, attenuating the improbability of the abrupt passages from place to place and time to time or introducing the use of choirs and prologues classic type ( Timone del Boiardo; Cephalus by Niccolò da Correggio; Sofonisba by Galeotto del Carretto; Panfila del Pistoia, etc.). And the sacred representation went to die in the cribs and oratories of the convents or in popular sacred spectacles, which still survive in some regions of Italy.
