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

Fearless and vigorous, Paolo Sarpi defended the reasons of Venice in the struggle for jurisdiction with Paul V, and firm in his aversion to the Roman curia, he drew inspiration from all his numerous writings, among which the Istoria of the Council of Trent stands out . There the writer, who lives his material, creates a sober and concise prose, alien to literary lenocinî, sometimes rough, other than that, rich in studied elegance and therefore less effective, by Sforza Pallavicino, also the author of one  History of the same council intended to refute the thesis of the Venetian servant: both in their judgment of historians respectively not immune from moralistic and curialistic preconceptions. After all, the historiography followed until after the middle of the century. XVII the formal humanistic tradition, adapting, in terms of matter (facts and thought), to the spiritual currents of the time, to the dispositions and interests of writers, who are not infrequently vulgar adventurers of the pen. Among the noblest and most worthy historians of the early seventeenth century it is enough to remember Enrico Caterino Davila, author of a history of the civil wars of France, and Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, who narrated the uprising of the Netherlands against Spanish rule.

To substantiate the reasons for absolutism, Botero in the aforementioned  Reason of state  quoted Tacitus, the historian of the empire, who had succeeded in the cult of political writers to Livio, the historian of the republic, who came into suspicion together with his editor, Machiavelli , whose works had been placed on the Index since 1559 and the name forbidden. And Tacitus, whose  pathos  was not understoodprofound and interpreted as a master of the new reason of state, he gave safe conduct to the doctrines of the hated Florentine statesman, which distorted but recognizable were being repeated, because the practice of politics never ceased to attest to its truth. Under the veil of his ironies, Traiano Boccalini, a fruitful and witty genius, clearly showed that, commenting on the great imperial historian, he used it to boldly censor the bad government, the cruelty, the hypocritical arts of the Spanish monarchy and to urge sleepy Italians to free themselves from foreign subjection. Advocate of freedom, Boccalini longs for a form of government similar to the aristocratic republic of the Venetians, and, although not devoid of prohibitions, advocates popular education and the abolition of privileges,

Not only political life, but also the literature of his time, Boccalini judged acutely and freely in the  Ragguagli di Parnassus , an invention that was not new, but animated by him with a new spirit, now ironic and now playful, now fiercely satirical and now good-natured mocking, and often imitated in the century. XVII. Of course, he does not have an aesthetic doctrine different from the classical one of his peers; but among the judgments inspired by it, and albeit in contradiction with them, there are some observations of good news, such as the relief of the more historical than preceptic meaning of  Poetics of Aristotle and the condemnation of empty formal elegances in the works of historiography. In Boccalini, according to MYSTERYAROUND.COM, there was a spirit of unruly and adventurous rebellion which, characteristic of his time, manifested itself here and there in brief observations and theoreticals scattered in the comments, in the rhetorical treatises, in the critical discussions, in the very works of serious erudition, without investing the fundamental doctrines inherited from the Renaissance. But the bizarre spirit of Alessandro Tassoni rose in rebellion, in  the Different Thoughts , against the same canon of art that the Renaissance had banned, fighting the servile adoration and imitation of the ancients with observations that precede the French  querelle des anciens et des modernes, showing unreasonable blind devotion to Aristotle and letting one glimpse happy presentiments of truth among a thousand oddities and childishness and ridicule. Moreover, in  Petrarch’s Considerations above the rhymes , he turned the arrows of his wit against Petrarchism, always showing himself to be a convinced advocate of the rights of reason against authority and a proponent of a start of literature in accordance with modern tastes and needs.

Greater and more decisive battles against Aristotelianism prevailing in the school supported not only the genius of thinkers such as Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella, but the irrefutable eloquence of the Galilean method and discoveries, which interest us, both only for the reflections that they had in literary art and in particular in vulgar prose. What is simple, precisely, linear in Galilei’s prose in the  Saggiatore , in the  Massimi systems , in  the Dialogues of the new sciences , in the beautiful letters, places it in a group with Dante’s prose in the  Convivio, Leonardo, Machiavelli and a few others; prose of genuine Florentine style tempered in forms of spontaneous classicism by the vigor of thought and the clarity of the fantastic vision; prose of which the passing of time and the intensification of the spirit of autonomy will create, also through the action of scientific prose, a tradition which, opposed to the tradition of studiously adorned prose, will lead to modern prose. But those qualities, which abstracted from the Galilean reality allow this classification, have their specific, individual and unclassifiable life, in the stupendous dialogues and reasonings where Galileo’s very soul beats with his deep emotions in front of the great discoveries, with his ironies demolishing the reasons of the adversaries, with its enthusiasm, with its festivity.