Italy Literature – Heralds of Novelty in the 16th and 17th Centuries Part I

This is, in Tasso, an individual note which, after two centuries, passing from an expressive fact to a fact of culture, will become a characteristic note of a group of works, and soon after will become a spiritual character of an entire age. But more important, among the tenacious theorizing of the past, as the first flashes of a distant future, are the controversies debated around the  Pastor fido , the pastoral tragicomedy of Guarini. Tragedy with a happy ending, a mixture of serious and comic, formed by the juxtaposition rather than the fusion of two, or rather three, actions, the  Pastor fido it was not well known to which of the literary genres sanctioned by Aristotle’s authority he belonged. The audience read avidly and applauded on the stage that drama, in which the dream of an ideal and generic humanity removed from the filthy contact of historical reality, appeared to be realized by art with a richness and splendor of forms never seen before. But the Aristotelians criticized him for his escape from canonical rules and for his lack of moral training; while Guarini and his supporters supported the independence of poetry from life and therefore pure delight as the end of poetry and defended, albeit trying to make it fit within the gates of the rules, the new genre, the  tragicomedy, which broadened the dramatic representation of the reality of life and overshadowed principles of artistic freedom not lacking in audacity at that time. These are the first portents of doctrines and artistic achievements that the future will see; which were accompanied by the theoretical affirmations of Pigna, who, defending the  Furioso  and talking about the true and the probable in the novels, distinguished the empirical truth from the fantastic truth and dared to assert that “a lie of a good poet buries every truth”, and of the Platonist Francesco Patrizi, who declared that Aristotle’s precepts, as insufficient to constitute a poetic, could not constrain the freedom of the artist. Giraldi himself, so little firm in the defensive principles of the  Furioso, showed a certain spirit of independence by taking as the subject of his tragedies fables of his own invention, giving some double action and happy ending, making some tears to the unity, removing any intervention in the dialogue to the choirs, which he leaves to act as interludes between a act and the other. In short, already in this second half of the sixteenth century, the critical principles of romanticism were dawning in the distance.

According to IAMHIGHER.COM, the pastoral drama, which among its numerous poets had, after Tasso and Guarini, worthy of mention (Antonio Ongaro, author of Alceo ; Guidobaldo Bonarelli, of  Filli di Sciro ), came to mingle with melodrama, the great creation of the extreme Renaissance, in which there was a strong leaven of the future. From the erudite research of the Florentine chamber of the Bardi on the music of the Greeks and especially on its relationship with the recitation of tragedies, he was born in 1590 with the  Daphne by Ottavio Rinuccini, agile and fresh verse, and by the learned counterpointist Iacopo Peri, the recitative style or cantata declamation, which, due to the great advances made by music in the expression of the dramatic life of the human soul, squeezed music and poetry into a fruitful combination, which led to the great romantic musical work, Italian and foreign, of the century. XIX. Elsewhere the harbinger of the new era, as we have said, in a reaction to the rigid theorizing of classicism; here, the times are renewed, in the implementation itself, nourished by passion, by theories elaborated by the meditation of the ancient.

The Catholic Reformation, the effect of which has already been seen in inventive literature, then also operated in political science, which, free and vigorous, had previously been the free and vigorous prose of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, and now, even in the most vigorous of its representatives, Paolo Paruta, it is a high, noble, dignified prose, but a little cold and as if stunned (perhaps unconsciously, because Paruta is a sincere Catholic) by the restraint that the search for a conciliation of politics with the renewed maxims of individual morality; conciliation which is the aim pursued by Paruta in the dialogues  of the perfection of political life  and in  political speeches . Giovanni Botero’s prose is even duller than in the  Reason of State he stops the principles of absolutism now triumphant everywhere and draws the figure of a prince who makes religion rule and judge of every act. But Botero rises to more solid forms of thought and therefore of style when, forerunner and initiator of modern economic science, he exposes in  the Causes of the grandeur of cities the  doctrines that the economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries once again formulated and discussed, and in the  Universal Relations  collects a valuable wealth of economic and statistical materials on all countries of the world. Thus Paruta draws from his devotion to his homeland an unusual warmth of sentiment and style in some pages of his  History of the war in Cyprus. and in the dialogues, and more in the dispatches and in the report of his embassy to Rome.