Poliziano. The Quaestiones Camaldulenses and the Altercazione. Lorenzoâs Selfe DâAmore and Laude. Girolamo Benivieni
The poets of the Academy do not as a group show much real power or originality, and only two, Angelo Poliziano and Lorenzo deâ Medici, have won any widespread fame. In them one may find a literary complement of the art of fifteenth-century Florence, although that art is perhaps more varied and profound than their work. Their range is, in fact, a severely limited one, though within it they often achieve exquisite results. Their poetry is not that of great passions or large conceptions. If one were seeking a hasty definition one might call it the poetry of delight; delight in natural beauty; in youth and gaiety; in country people and pursuits; in art and learning; in all the graces and pageants of a brilliant society; in the humour and at times in the crudities and vulgarities of life. The poets see their world through a tinted haze of literary reminiscence, but their feeling for the past is itself so vital that it does not spoil the freshness of their own perceptions, but becomes instead an essential element in them. The emotion that stirs them most deeply is regret that their joys cannot endure; and their loveliest lines are burdened with the sense of âthe lapse of hours.â
Though Lorenzo sometimes shows a warmer humanity, Poliziano was incomparably the greatest artist of the circle. Whether in a Latin âSylvaâ or elegy, classical, yet as purely Florentine as a bas-relief of Donatelloâs, or in a âcanzonetta,â where the popular poetry of Tuscany has been refined to a quintessence by a scholarâs touch, his verse has a melody, a finish, a precision, a delicate pictorial quality that make it perennially charming. He is so perfect that one is left with a thwarted wish that he were somehow greater.
His own predilections were mildly Aristotelian, but in subtler ways Ficino, of whom he always writes in terms of respectful discipleship, may well have been an inspiration to him. His purely scholarly and literary interests were too strong to allow him much time for philosophical studies.1 As a poet he seems to have kept remarkably detached from the doctrines of the Academy; there are scarcely any direct references to them in his verse, and it is a debatable question whether or not they affected him.
His religious verse is fluent but conventional; his love poetry, with its echoes now of the âstil nuovisti,â now of the popular songs of the countryside, is sometimes bantering, sometimes wistful, sometimes tender, as in the bird-like clarity and freshness of âLa Brunettina miaâ; but it rarely makes any attempt at a philosophical treatment of its subject. In the âStanzeâ addressed by the ghost of a lover to his mistress there is a descant on a theme reminiscent of Cavalcanti and prophetic of Michelangelo, the idea that the belovedâs beauty is an epitome of the beauty of the world.
Costei ha privo il ciel dâogni bellezza
E tolto i beni di tutto il Paradiso
Privato il Sol di lume e di chiarezza
E posto lâha nel suo splendido viso.
Al mondo ha tolto ogni sua gentilezza
Ogni atto e bel costume e dolce riso.
Amor le ha dato il guardo e la favella
Per farla sopra tutte la piĂč bella.1