Modern Mannerism in Italian Poetry

Thomas Peterson

• Publisher: Quodlibet
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9788822900715
• eBook ISBN: 9788874629947
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

«The neomannerist poetry of the Novecento is featured here in concise analyses of the works of seven poets. The dark light that gleams from their verse is at once the product of derivation from the earlier maniera and of a new poetic idiom, coined in direct response to the late modern experience of the sublime, the irregular and the unexpected.»This study approaches mannerism as a constant in literary history, a stylistic system that re-emerges in the 20th century with particular force. As demonstrated in readings of Ungaretti, Sinisgalli, Fortini, Campo, Giudici, Rosselli and De Signoribus, the neo-mannerist poem is both self-generated and derivative, and proposes in its message a strong ethical response to the crises of the century.

1. MANIERA: DEFINITIONS AND HISTORY

Stemming from the figurative arts of the 16th century, mannerism evolved from its original identification with stylistic exaggeration and perspectival distortion in the arts – conceived as a movement against the classical harmonies and stabilities – into a positive tendency, in art but also literature. The great mannerist artists cultivated form against content, artifice against overt passion1. Mannerist art was known, above all, for its grace, complexity and preciosity. «Maniera», as John Shearman states, means «style», and in the case of mannerism this is understood in an absolute and positive sense as a consistent means of organizing the polarities of experience in a rapidly changing world2. Faced with the spiritual crisis of the latter 16th century and with an increasingly sophisticated public, Mannerist artists and poets created a new interior dimension that entrusted style to convey a newly interiorized and inherently moral conception of artistic knowledge: «Self-conscious stylization is the common denominator of all mannerist works of art» (Shearman 1967, p. 35). While the term mannerism was first applied to the visual arts, it was subsequently applied to writers whose intensification of style reflected a dynamic response to social crisis, as in the Counter Reformation, and a positive derivation from Renaissance models, which were carried forward and transformed.

Raimondi’s 1962 essay, «Per la nozione di Manierismo letterario», lays the groundwork for the use of mannerism as a literary term. Raimondi presents the perspectives of scholars who have adapted this historical style in the arts to literature and specifically poetry. Raimondi stipulates that if one is to implement a concept of mannerism across epochs one must adopt «un punto di vista, una struttura orientativa […] aperta e antitotalitaria» and respect the uniqueness of particular periods and traditions; thus if one applies the stylistic profile of 16th century mannerism to late modernity one must avoid contingencies that pertain only to the late Renaissance, such as debates about literary precepts, Aristotelian unities or heretical doctrines. Similarly, while 16th century mannerism responded to a spiritual crisis, it cannot be reduced to such labels as «decorative», «grotesque», or «unbalanced», or be confused with the baroque. In contrast to that extravagant and dilatory style, mannerism is austere and understated.

The renewal of classical thought in the Renaissance was not without contradictions: the discovery of the transformational character of knowledge was not compatible with the idea of individualism, which held knowledge to be immutable. As the mannerist artists and writers addressed the mutability of knowledge they realized that art is not a tool used to represent an action but is constitutive to the action, which it changes even as it changes the artist. Mannerism is the common denominator, therefore, for a select group of artists and writers who departed from the imitation of nature and established a new relation with the object, and a less conventional, less harmonious idea of beauty. Mannerism manifested a new interiority, a place of refuge from the crises of the world. If posterity tended to view these artists as distorters of Renaissance aesthetics, that view was modified as the term mannerism gained true critical legitimacy.

Curtius was the first scholar to conceive of mannerism as «a constant in European literature»; rather than confining mannerism to a single period, he found it preferable to identify it by its rhetorical features, which included hyperbaton, circumlocution (periphrasis), annominatio (paranomasia), mannered metaphor, acoustic conceits, epigram and the style of pointes [acuteness]3. Similarly, Raimondi writes, «il Manierismo diviene […] una costante europea, un “fenomeno complementare” dell’arte classica di tutte le epoche» (Raimondi, in Quondam 1975, p. 59). While Curtius’s focus on the ornatus has its limitations, his linking of mannerism to the Asianism that emerged in ancient Greece as an alternative to Atticism – «the subtle-sententious and the grandiloquent-impetuous» – is well taken: «Asianism is the first form of European Mannerism, Atticism that of European Classicism» (Curtius 1953, p. 67).

A student of Curtius, Gustav Hocke carried forward his ideas, contrasting the mimetic simplicity of the Attic sensibility to the Asiatic, which offers «una nuova gnosi alessandrina, […] una gnosi che vorrebbe trovare la “verità prima”, l’incontro con un assoluto, soprattutto nell’arte, nella letteratura e nella musica» (Hocke 1965, p. 14). Hocke traces the origins of Mannerism to the mystical beliefs in letters and numbers of the Eastern semitic civilizations. Such an aesthetic is inherently self-reflexive and finds early manifestations in Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s Canzoniere4. Hocke contrasts mannerism and classicism in ontological terms:

Per l’ontologia «classica», l’essere riluce nel palese, nel naturale, ma si nasconde nell’uso del non-naturale. Nel manierismo è esattamente il rovescio. Per l’ontologia manieristica, l’essere riluce nel non immediatamente visibile, nell’antinaturale, perché si crede che esso si nasconda nell’esclusivamente naturale. (Hocke 1965, p. 212)

The radical difference in the understanding of nature and the perception of being in nature leads to a difference in poetic practice. In response to an outer world deemed to be fragmentary and inconstant, the mannerist generates a «disegno interno», an internal design that conveys the wholeness, constancy and solace possible in the inner world.

In his Rime Giovanni Della Casa introduces a more severe style into the 16th century lyric, including an altered syntax and versification, more difficult phrasing and use of enjambement and the lack of pauses between parts of the sonnet. Della Casa marks the move away from a sterile and conventional Petrarchism and toward a tense, dramatically staged interiority. Torquato Tasso would imitate Della Casa, including his use of «parole pellegrine» – and his introduction of a complex narrative content into the lyric. Georg Weise places Tasso at the apex of 16th mannerist poetry.

Poetic mannerism continues in the 17th century with Donne and other English Metaphysicals, whose poetry represents an alternative to both «l’estetica classicistica dell’idealismo» and «[il] canone “realistico” dell’empirismo» (Hocke 1965, p. 299). It is seen again in Shelley, Novalis and Blake, then in Hopkins, whose concept of «inscape» presupposes a combinatory art of letters and words in alliterations, palindromes, paragrams and «reflected» associations and verbal doublings, and subsequently in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valéry and Mallarmé5. While Hocke and Hauser are insightful in positing the transhistoric nature of literary mannerism, the further refinement of that term will depend on its restriction to specific cultural contexts, given that mannerist practices are so variable: «la nozione di manierismo come tempo […] di crisi comporta una compresenza di stili anche molto diversi, una polivalenza di manifestazioni…» (Scrivano 1980, p. 183).

The modern formulation of mannerism was assisted by the rise of modern art: «L’ipotesi di un collegamento tra l’insieme dei fatti che sgretolano dall’interno la tradizione classica rinnovata dalla civiltà rinascimentale […] si palesava inevitabile, ma ciò che la rendeva formulabile era un’avvenuta esperienza dell’arte moderna» (Scrivano 1980, p. 178). It was not easy, as Scrivano notes, to initiate a nuanced discussion of literary mannerism in the 1950s: «Chi avrebbe del resto potuto allora ragionare in termini di una qualche proprietà di alienazioni, di sistemi e di strutture, di retorica, di antropologia, e d’altro?» (Scrivano 1980, p. 14). The term would only gain proper critical currency when its variability and mutability were fully respected:

… si consolidava la nozione di Manierismo, che si presentava da subito nella sua interna varietà, nella sua mobilità, nel suo continuo processo di trasformazione. Così oggi il Manierismo si può meglio concepire come un sistema di stili che come uno stile… (Scrivano 1980, p. 184)

As historical mannerism attained legitimacy, it became apparent that it shared certain features with modern Expressionism. While it is important, as Shearman warns, not to project 20th century biases – such as extreme tension and irrationality – onto the 16th century, it has become possible to perceive mannerism today, in the words of Claude-Gilbert Dubois, as a «universalizable phenomenon» in the «history of the subject»:

Parce que l’histoire des styles au XVIe siècle est en rapport avec l’histoire du sujet, elle acquiert par là une valeur métahistorique: l’histoire du sujet n’est pas propre à un siècle, et la maniérisme, conçu comme une phase dans la dialectique du sujet, peut être considéré comme un phénomène universalisable. (Dubois 1979, p. 191)

In contrast to the aesthetics of rupture, division and fragmentation that characterize much modern poetry, mannerist poets develop a constructive attitude toward crisis, incorporating the act of critical self-reference into their poems. They do not work out of weakness, but perceive alienation as a means to seize on the social reality and transform it in an act of reawakening6. If the mannerist poem betrays a condition of emotional turbulence, that is not the result of self-absorption but is a response to the brokenness of the world.

A useful way of conceiving the mannerist duality is given by Anceschi’s division between the autonomy and heteronomy of the work of art. The autonomy of poetry concerns its belonging to a vertical and synchronic lineage of the word, while its heteronomy concerns its subjection to other disciplines and knowledge regimes:

… nell’un caso, si cerca di trovare l’asse di sostegno della vita estetica dell’arte nella vita estetica dell’arte stessa, definendone la posizione nella vita dello spirito; nell’altro, si cerca di sostenere l’esteticità dell’arte, appoggiandola alle relazioni che essa ha con tutte le altre forme della cultura, e, in queste relazioni, parzialmente o totalmente risolvendola. (Anceschi 1976, p. 3)

The mannerist poet perceives the autonomy and heteronomy of art as complementary and participates equally in the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of language. By respecting this duality, one guarantees that poetry will adhere to its own intrinsic cognitive and perceptual structures, distinct from those of philosophy, sociology or other fields.

In terms of a dichotomy proposed by Genette between the «constitutive» approach to literary texts, based on pre-established norms and rules, and the «conditionalist» approach, which examines the work in its own intrinsi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• 1. Maniera: Definitions and History
• 2. Tracing a Lineage
• 3. Ungaretti
• 4. Sinisgalli
• 5. Fortini
• 6. Campo
• 7. Giudici
• 8. Rosselli
• 9. De Signoribus
• 10. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Abstract
• Biography