Citing Petrarch in Naples: the politics of commentary in Cariteo's Endimione.

Benedetto Gareth (ca. 1450-1515), called "il Cariteo" (in a pun on Gareth > Garetus > Garetteo > Cariteo) by fellow members of Pontano's Neapolitan Academy, was a Spaniard who emigrated in 1468 from Barcelona to Naples as it was entering its Golden Age. (1) He served under three Aragonese kings, first as Keeper of the Royal Seal (1486-96) for Ferrante I and Alfonso II, and then in that position and as Prime Minister (1495-96) for Ferrante II. Having suffered great personal losses when Charles VIII of France invaded the Kingdom in 1495, he escaped to Rome before Louis XII ended Aragonese rule in Naples in 1501. After the Spanish supplanted the French in 1503, he returned to Naples where he published part of his Petrarchan Rime in 1506 and all of it as a sequence entitled Endimione in 1509. Under Spanish rule, however, he never regained the prestige that he had enjoyed with the Aragonese kings.

As might be expected of poetry written in high court circles during these turbulent years, his literary production has important political implications. The promotion of Petrarch by a Spanish emigre as a standard for Italian poetry in Naples resounds with unavoidably patriotic overtones, but only in a highly qualified sense associated with specific people and events in the poet's local or regional milieu. (2) A paradigm for such sentiments exists in the reception of Petrarch's poetry available in printed commentaries published in northern Italy. These commentaries display a territorialized appropriation of Petrarch among contending editors and competing readerships in different political regions, and they provide a template for Cariteo's patriotic sentiment in his Endimione.

With its overt representation of an amatory situation in which the lover alternately dominates and submits to the beloved, a political situation in which the poet becomes thrall to the fortunes of state, and a rhetorical situation in which the speaker seeks to control his audience's responses through extravagant praise and blame, Cariteo's Endimione anticipates later versions of Petrarchism both inside and outside Italy. (3) Pietro Bembo's canonization of Petrarch as the supreme model for poetic style in his Prose della volgar lingua (1525) generated a pan-European interest in Petrarch hardly imaginable in Cariteo's time. (4) Poets in regional centers of northern Italy and at monarchical courts in Spain, France, England, and elsewhere adapted Petrarch's sonnet sequence to their local interests, more often than not ones that imbued figurations of the beloved with strong patriotic sentiment. (5) Facilitating this association of Petrarchan verse with such sentiment were commentaries on the Rime sparse printed in major editions of the text from 1476 on. The authors of these commentaries were publishers and editors, sometimes scholars, seeking to enhance its prestige for a particular readership, and they did so by foregrounding Petrarch's well-known social, cultural, and political contributions to various regions or areas of Italy and southern France. (6)

The earliest commentator was Antonio da Tempo who produced annotations (composed in the 1420s at Padua, printed at Venice, 1477) that commend Petrarch's affection for Venice, the noble Paduan Carrara family, and the villa at Arqua bestowed on him by the latter. (7) Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), serving Filippo Maria Visconti at Milan, wrote a commentary (ca. 1447, printed at Bologna, 1476), that celebrates Petratch's years in Milan and Parma as the guest of Galeazzo Visconti. (8) The Veronese Hieronimo Squarzafico (fi. 1480-1503), completing Filelfo's work with his own gloss (Venice, 1484), chronicles Petrarch's affiliations with other northern Italian Ghibelline lords. (9) All three commentaries -- Antonio's, Filelfo's, and Squarzafico's -- were collected and published together in a deluxe folio edition prepared by Albertino da Lissona at Venice in 1503, subsequently reprinted eight times between 1507 and 1522, and its impact on succeeding commentaries was tremendous. (10) Intent upon challenging its misrep resentations, Alessandro Vellurello (1490?-1554?) in his annotated edition of Il Petrarcha (Venice, 1525) reminded readers that Petrarch had spent most of his life in southern France and that Laura herself was French. (11) Later commentators cast even wider nets to affirm or deny Petrarch's often partisan commitment to Italy. In 1533 two Neapolirans, Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo (b. 1490?) and Sylvano da Venafro (b. 1495?), published separate commentaries that highlighted Petrarch's visits to Naples and King Robert's support of him. (12) Commentators with Lutheran or Calvinist sympathies such as Fausto da Longiano (1502-70?, writing at Modena, 1532), Antonio Brucioli (1498-1566; writing at Ferrara, 1548), and Ludovico Castelvetro (1505-71; writing in the 1540s, published at Basel in 1582) foregrounded Petrarch's criticism of the Avignon papacy and Roman politics. (13) With scholarly credentials superior to the above, Bernardino Daniello (1500-68) produced a commentary (Venice, 1541; revised 1549) that stressed Pe trarch's immersion in the texts of classical Rome and ancient Greece. (14)

Cariteo's Endimione appeared earlier than most of these commentaries, but it took shape in the light of those by Antonio da Tempo, Filelfo, and Squarzafico that had set the mark for promoting Petrarch's local Italian allegiances. One of Cariteo's aims is to cite Petrarch as an adoptive poet of Naples, a visitor from abroad who contributed to the culture of King Robert's Kingdom and who forged strong bonds between it and the rest of Italy. Endimione itself fell into relative obscurity soon after the author's death, a measure perhaps of his failure to obtain preferment in the new Spanish regime. It nonetheless inscribes, for both the old Neapolitan and the new Spanish nobility in that regime, political uses to which Petrarchism could be put in occupied Naples and a compelling justification for Petrarch's Tuscan style as normative even there.

As it happens, Cariteo did not introduce Petrarchism to Naples. The Aragonese court in the last quarter of the fifteenth century had already produced a good deal of amatory and occasional poetry modeled on Petrarch's example. Courtiers and amateur poets such as Pietro Jacopo de Jennaro (1436-15 10) and Giuliano Perleoni (fl. 1468-93) offer early examples, forecasting more sustained efforts in following decades by Giovan Francesco Caracciolo (1437-1506; Amori et Argo, 1506), Colantonio Carmignana (Operette di Partenope Suavio, 1515), and the anonymous Notturno Napoletano (fl. 15 19-31; Opere artificiose, 1521). (15) A codex of amatory sonnets by Cariteo from 1493-94 shows that his Petrarchism originated in this milieu, but the publication of selected Rime di Chariteo at Naples on 15 January 1506 and of his complete work, including Endimione, in November 1509 reveals an important advance. (16) Marking the end of an amateur Neapolitan Petrarchism, Cariteo's sonnets announce the beginning of a new Petrarchism in Naples, one that would take root in the mid-sixteenth century with the literary discussions of Antonio Sebastiano Minturno (1507-74) and his circle, the commentaries of Sylvano da Venafro and Gesualdo, and poetry by Angelo di Costanzo (1507-91), Luigi Tansillo (1510-68), Galeazzo di Tarsia (1520-53), Bernardo Tasso (1493-1569), and Torquato Tasso (1544-95). (17) One of his contemporaries and associates was Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530), whose Rime, published posthumously in 1530, are more derivative and "orthodox" in their Petrarchan elocutionary strategies than his, and certainly less varied and extensive in their thematic motifs. (18) Cariteo, by comparison, adheres less to standard Petrarchan diction or syntax and permits an occasional Roman or Neapolitan locution. He does, however, take great care to refine the order of his songs and sonnets so that they narrate a story, one that authorizes Petrarch in Naples as a model for expressing personal, political, and polemical themes.

Northern Italian commentators on the Rime sparse had represented Petrarch as a poet who folded such themes into a seamless whole. Antonio da Tempo recounts that Petrarch had spent his happiest, most productive years supported by the Visconti in Milan and Parma: "Da principi & signori temporali da cardinali & papi era la notizia sua desiderata infra i quali magiormente dal magnamimo & inclito Galeazo alhora di Milano duca" (He was called upon to serve by princes and lords and by cardinals and popes, and among them chiefly the generous and magnanimous Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan) ([Aiiii.sup.v]). Antonio sounds a note of Ghibelline pride and Milanese admiration that Francesco Filelfo amplifies. The latter goes to great lengths to incorporate praise of Viscontian Milan into his commentary, even to the extent of relocating the famous sonnet 16 ("Movesi il vecchierel canuto et bianco," putatively about the poet's Roman journey) from the Eternal City to "Milano al tempo della felice memoria di magnanimo principe Messer Galeazo Uesconte inclyto signor de Milano dalla cui excellentissima sublimita lui fu ben ueduto e molto honorato" (Milan at the happily remembered time of our great prince, Galeazzo Visconti, lord of Milan, by whose most excellent highness he had been well received and much honored) ([22.sup.v]). In Filelfo's hands the Rime sparse. become an eloge to Petrarch's years in Milan (1353-61) and his friendship with the Visconti rulers. The commentator who completed his work, Hieronimo Squarzafico, calls attention to the poet's years in Venice and his dealings "Venetiis cum Andrea Dandulo, cum Michaele Celso et Marino Falerio Venetiarum ducibus, et cum aliis multis patritiis et doctis viris" (with Andrea Danduolo, Michele Celso, and Marino Falier, Venetian leaders, and with many other patrons and learned men) (Solerti, 354). In showing how to serve the leaders of a patrician republic, Petrarch provides a model for poets to serve leaders in the mixed states of Italy, from the communes, republics, duchies, and signorie in the north to the papal states in the center and the sprawling Kingdom of Naples in the south. Such was the critical legacy that accompanied printed editions of the Rime sparse as they made their way to the Spanish vice regency. Against this background Cariteo shaped his own Petrarchan rime as to reflect the conditions of his life in high courtly circles of a politically turbulent Naples.

Endimione unfolds as a carefully organized sequence of 214 sonnets, twenty canzoni, five sestine, five ballate, and three madrigals. (19) It pursues a clear narrative line more readily tied to its author's literary and biographical development than earlier sequences, including those of Petrarch or Lorenzo de' Medici. (20) The speaker's name is Endimione and the beloved's is Luna. The first half of the sequence (up to canzone 10) narrates the lover's frustrations in a recall of themes, motifs, and dramatic situations from Ovid, Catullus, Tibullus, and especially Propertius. (21) The next quarter (beginning at sonnet 116) narrates the speaker's loss of his beloved, not through her death as in Petrarch but through her marriage to another and her departure for Spain. Afterwards the speaker becomes more and more involved with political affairs. Stifling his regret for Luna, or just simply forgetting about her, he soon busies himself with writing panegyrics about Naples and its courtly society. It is as though the beloved's departure requires him to seek out new topics for his poetry -- to become, in effect, a new kind of poet. Canzone 15 establishes a chronology by marking 1502 as the tenth anniversary of her departure, an anniversary that occurs ten months after the collapse of Naples' Aragonese monarchy. The decade had seen the death of King Ferrante I in 1494, the abdication of the latter's son and successor Alfonso II on 23 January 1495, an invasion of the French in February 1495, the death of Alfonso's successor Ferrante II on 7 October 1496, and a second French invasion on 4 August 1501 that forced King Federigo to exile in Anjou and the poet to asylum in Rome. (22)

The final quarter of Endimione (from sonnet 165 on) unfolds after 1502 and is entirely non-amatory. The Spanish wrest Naples from the French in 1503 and the speaker returns to the city. As he reenters a court whose rules have changed with its form of government, he now addresses friends and associates who have managed to retain their rank in the new regime. Among these recipients of his sonnets are Ettore Pignatelli, diplomatic liaison between Spain and France in 1505-06 (sonnet 187); Piero d'Exea, secretary of the Spanish viceroy (sonnet 190); Hieronymo di Colle, a court counsellor in 1507-49 (sonnet 192); Bernardo Villemarino, admiral of the viceroy's fleet in 1509 (sonnet 193); Lodovico Montalto, the viceroy's juriscounsel in 1508-28 (sonnets 195-96); Camillo Lopis, tax officer in 1506-13 (sonnet 197); Ferrando Monaco (sonnet 203) and Scipione Filomorino (sonnet 205), Neapolitan gentlemen respected at court since the days of Alfonso I, and survivors of the transition to Spanish rule; and Raimondo di Cardona, Spanish viceroy appointed on 24 October 1509 just as Cariteo's second edition was going to press (sonnet 211). (23)

The 1506 edition of the Rime di Chariteo included only forty-five sonnets, five canzoni, and three sestine, ballate, and madrigals, to which the author had appended a long canzone about his diplomatic career, later designated as canzone 6 in the 1509 Endimione. In this poem Cariteo praises the Latin verse of his colleagues at the Neapolitan Academy, "Sannazar, Pardo, Altilio, / Summontio, di corymbo & laurea degni" (Sannazaro, Pardo, Altilio, and Summonte, all worthy of ivy and laurel) (199-200). In both service to the state and the pursuit of letters, his primary model is Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503), an emigre from northern Italy who had presided over the Neapolitan Academy since 1471, had negotiated the peace of Bagnolo in 1484 and the peace of Rome in 1486 that ended the Barons' War, and had become Ferrante I's Prime Minister in 1487, the post that Cariteo would assume under Ferrante II. (24) Referring to Pontano's astrological poem Urania, the poet celebrates his mentor's Latin style:

Quest'e quel che con versi
Di grandiloquo stil sonori & culti
Et con onorate prose
Rimembrara del cielo i varii vulti.
                                    (190-93)

This is he who with sonorous and erudite verses in a high style and with honored prose will record the varied turnings of the sky.

The implied force of versi here suggests that the only verses worthy of that name are Latin ones, sonorous (sonori) and highly cultivated (culti, with the sense of 'learned and erudite') in the grandiloquent manner ("di grandiloquo stil").

This praise of Pontano's Latin poetry throws Cariteo's Italian rhymes into an odd perspective. Why did the author, a Spaniard by birth, choose to publish in a foreign vernacular? As surviving documents of his political career attest, he possessed a good Latin style matching that of his friends and associates who were distinguished masters of Latin composition. (25) He nonetheless followed a different route, ignoring Latin but pursuing a Tuscan style whose literary archaisms and Provencal echoes must have seemed strange to his Neapolitan audience, especially after the Spanish installation, when a retreat to classical style came to dominate the aristocratic culture of the old Neapolitan nobility. (26) Very much involved in the politics of the new court and its Spanish dominators, Cariteo exercised his talent in an Italian literary vernacular rather than in Latin despite his non-native grasp of the former and his humanist ease with the latter. Obviously he could have written in an Aragonese dialect, too, but that would not have helped the Spanish ruling class to legitimize its relationship to a preexistent Neapolitan court culture. His Petrarchism performs a facilitating role, then, that enables the Spanish viceregal government to insert itself into a new vernacular environment by absorbing what it can from a northern Italian court culture. (27)

The first edition of Endimione carefully displays the poet's resourcefulness, dramatizing the hopes and illusions of a lover in the last troubled days of the dying monarchy. Its Petrarchan motifs emerge in canzone 1, "Tra questi boschi agresti, / Selvaggi, aspri & incolti" (In these woods, wild, uncivilized, harsh, uncultivated), a poem that acknowledges its debt not just to Virgil but to Propertius and to Dante as well, and especially to political complexities embedded in the latter's Commedia. Among the Roman elegists, Propertius expressly compares his work as a lyric poet to that of epic poets, valuing the "mollia serta" (tender garlands) of elegiac verse (3.1.19) as equal in aspiration and worth to those earned through the high style of epic. With this pedigree in mind, Cariteo's poem imitates Propertius' elegy 1.18 whose speaker seeks the shade of deserted woods so that his beloved might not hear him complain. (28) Just as Propertius' beloved is named Cynthia in figuration of the moon, so Cariteo's is named Luna, and both lead their lovers into concrescent cycles of endless change. By following Luna's course "che con dolce errore / Rivolve la mia vita" (that with a sweet errancy overturns my life) (21-22), Cariteo's speaker soon implicates himself in a Dantesque version of ancient dolce error.

Luna has commanded her admirer to be silent: "Ne vuol ch'io cante o scriva, / Et di parlarne meco anchor mi priva" (Nor does she wish that I sing or write and she forbids me to speak about it even to myself) (25-26). Obedience, trustworthiness, and the ability to keep one's confidence are qualities required of all public servants as well as of courtly lovers. This speaker finds it hard to play by the rules required of him. His defense is that he tells his tale to inanimate stones. Early in the poem he notes their loyalty to him: "Sol che costante fede / Si trove in questi sassi" (Constant faith is found only in these stones) (7-8). Later he addresses them without fear of betrayal: "Qui senza tema invoco / La cagion de mia morte" (Here without fear I invoke the cause of my death) (46-47). Both statements echo key claims by failed public servants in Dante's Inferno: the protestation of valuing "costrante fede" from Pier della Vigna's lament about betrayed faith in the wood of the suicides (Inferno 13.74) and the declaration of acting "senza tema" from Guido da Montefeltro's misplaced confidence about trusting his interlocutor in the ditch of evil counselors (Inferno 27.66). Betrayed faith and deluded optimism consign Cariteo's speaker to his own "selve oscure" where the Dantesque echoes gather force: "Disfogar mi convene / Tra queste selve oscure" (It suits me to unburden these cruel pains in these dark woods) (43-44).

The problem evokes Dante's outer world but its symptoms penetrate Petrarch's inner world. The apocopic disfogar (43) resounds from Petrarch, "E 'ntanto lagrimando sfogo / di dolorosa nebbia il cor condenso" (And then I weeping unburden my heart of the sorrowful cloud gathered in it) (canzone 129.57-58), and it suggests the speaker's hope that the work of composing poetry might purge him of dangerous illusions. In the long run, however, Cariteo's hope clashes with the force of Petratch's model. When Petrarch recognizes that truth dispels or "de-shadows" this illusion (sgombrar, with its echo of ombra, 129.49), he confesses to be hollow without it, "pietra morta in pietra viva" (a dead stone on a living rock) (129.51). Cariteo tries to reach a moment of truth without suffering these consequences, but in this attempt he confronts the limits of Petrarch's style. He misuses it to flatter the beloved, and the effort backfires. In his selve oscure (44) -- here the echo comes from Dante rather than Petrarch, and its moral tone is darker than Petrarch's -- the speaker comforts himself with rhyme:

Pero quest'aspre pene
Con rime acerbe & dure,
Conformi assai con questo horribil foco,
Disfogar mi convene
Tra queste selve oscure,
Poi che pianger non lice in altro loco.
                                        (40-45)

But with unripe hard rhymes it is agreeable to me to vent these bitter torments amid these dark woods since I am not allowed to weep elsewhere.

At this point the Roman elegiac model introduces a new turn. In an elegy that anticipates Cariteo's anxiety about Luna's marriage to a Spaniard, Propertius laments Cynthia's marriage to an Illyrian: "ut sine me vento quolibet ire velis" (without me you sail under the first wind) (1.8.4). For Propertius, Cynthia follows the moon and her itinerant movement (errare) motivates the speaker's complaint. For Cariteo the name of Luna recalls Propertius' Cynthia, but its oral-aural identification with l'una (the one) also generates a paranomastic metonymy in the manner of Petrarch's identification of Laura with lauro (laurel), l'aura (the breeze), and l'oro (gold). (29) This metonymy implies Luna / L'unds provisional opposition to the world of the many and its prevailing disorder as the speaker celebrates her resistance to change. The beloved protests that his Petrarchan hyperbole offends her. As 'Moon,' after all, Luna presides over the realm of change and can remain constant only in her inconstancy. The speaker none theless insists upon her constancy even when she corrects him:

Ne donna, ne donzella
Fu vista mai si
Com'hor tu canti. -- Ond'io risposi ardendo:
Quel che non trova pare
Il vostro specchio sol vi puo mostrare!
                                             (61-65)

'No lady or maid was ever yet beheld such as the one you now sing of.' Whence I replied while burning, 'Your mirror alone can show you what finds no equal.'

To absolve himself of blame for displeasing his beloved, he will utter words that she cannot hear, "a far l'ultima pruova / D'aprir tacitamente il dolor mio" (to undergo the final test of unbosoming my grief in silence) (70-71). The Petrarchan oxymoron of silent speech now becomes his governing illusion as the waxing and waning of Luna's affection draws him into an orbit that portends disaster.

This complication finds its outlet in the middle of Cariteo's revised sequence. (30) The complete cycle of 247 poems divides into three parts, the first dominated by the amatory motif of the speaker's Petrarchan love for Luna, the second narrating her departure from him, and the third detailing his subsequent involvement in Neapolitan history. The structure adumbrates one that Vellutello would confer upon Petrarch's Rime sparse when he rearranged the order of poems into three distinct parts: poems in vita di Laura, poems in morte di Laura, and poems in testimony of Petrarch's public life and political concerns. (31) Cariteo attempts something similar. The three parts of Endimione constitute fictive enactments of his own private and public life, reflecting tides of change in Naples' historical destiny.

Sonnet 146, for example, expressly conflates the amatory with the political in its double lament for the loss of Luna through her marriage and departure for Spain in October 1492 and the death of King Ferrante I fifteen months later. Its distant model is Petrarch's sonnet 269, "Rotta e l'alta colonna e 'l verde lauro" (Broken are the high Column and the green Laurel), a poem that conflates amatory and political sorrows as it commemorates the passing of both Cardinal Giovanni Colonna and Laura. As Vellutello would later comment, Petrarch laments "che 'n si brevissimo spatio di tempo si perda poi tutto quello che 'n molti anni con gran pena e stento l'huomo tanto per acquistar s'e affaticaro, come vuol inferire" (that in a very short time is lost all that for many years with great pain and effort he has labored so much to achieve, as you can understand) ([95.sup.v]). Cariteo's version of this sonnet contrasts the sorrow that Naples feels after Luna's departure with the happiness that Spain enjoys upon her arriv al: "Quanto del proprio mal si duole & lagna / ... Tanto s'allegra la felice Hispagna" (As much as Naples suffers and laments its own unhappiness, so happy Spain rejoices). His sestet affirms that the king's recent death can hardly inflict more woe, since Luna's absence has already impoverished the kingdom:

Onde 'l signor del regno & di fortuna,
Volando al ciel, lascia minor gloria,
Poi ch'era Napol senza la mia Luna.
Ne tanto l'altro Re de sua vittoria
Contra gente Africana, oscura & bruna,
Quanto d'una tal luce, hoggi si gloria.

Whence the lord of this kingdom and its fortune, flying to heaven, left behind a diminished glory since Naples remained without my Luna. Nor did the other king [Ferdinand] bask in his victory [at Granada] against the dark and swarthy Africans as much as he did in Luna's light.

Though this encomiastic gesture celebrates Luna, its vehicle of comparison evokes Ferdinand the Catholic's expulsion of the Moors from Granada in 1492 and it extols Spanish sovereignty in Iberia. As it also happens, Ferdinand's military strategist at Granada was Gonsalvo de Cordoba (1453-1515), Spain's victor over the French at the battle of Garigliano in 1502 and the first viceroy of Naples in 1504. (32) Cariteo's nod towards Ferdinand and Granada is also a bow towards Gonsalvo and his installation as viceroy.

In this context the Petrarchan turn inaugurates the poet's testimonial to the new regime. It affords a transitional space, allowing him on the one hand to connect his poetic expression with a northern Italian literary culture, on the other to proclaim his adoptive Neapolitan political identity as a Spanish emigre. (33) Before the French and Spanish invasions of Naples, Cariteo's skill in echoing the Petrarchan style allowed him to appropriate the literary greatness of Tuscany and to advance Naples' literary culture. After the collapse of the Aragonese monarchy it provides him with a means to ingratiate his new masters and endorse their rule. That he shares their Spanish birth affords a parallel with Petrarch. For Antonio da Tempo, Filelfo, and Squarzafico, Petrarch was of Florentine parentage, but he had spent his early adulthood as a protege of French popes and his service to the Visconti in Milan marked a return to his Italian heritage. So too with Cariteo, who was of Spanish origin but who spent his entire adulthood in Naples. His current bow to the Spanish vice regency marks his return to Spanish political service, now in the name of a different culture that he can link to the heritage of central and northern Italy. (34)

Cariteo's absorption into the new regime follows a familiar pattern. Within the first decade of the sixteenth century, many leading intellectuals of the defunct Aragonese court offered their humanist literary skills to the Spanish viceregal government. They included such native Neapolitans as the sexagenarian and sometime Petrarchan poet Pietro Jacopo de Jennaro (1436-1510), Tristano Caracciolo (1439-1528), and Andrea Matteo Acquaviva (1458-1529), all willing to adapt to the new politics instead of resisting its formidable power. (35) Each brought a humanist arsenal of classical learning to bear on current affairs by writing about the new government, the instability of human affairs, and moral lessons that could be drawn from the course of events. In these endeavors they continued the program of the Neapolitan Academy exemplified by Giovanni Pontano in an earlier generation. (36) Cariteo's moral realism and his descent into the flux of current events reflect this milieu. His loss of L'una 'The One' precipitat es his fall into the multiplicity of political history.

Canzone 17 dramatizes Cariteo's options by referring to a powerful literary model, Petrarch's celebrated political canzone 128, "Italia mia." Though Cariteo's poem honors the Aragonese dynasty, it honors even more the idea of an emergent centralizing authority that the Spanish viceregal government represented after 1503. (37) It commemorates Aragonese rule as a useful but distant precedent that the vice regency now fulfills, just as Petrarch's canzone 128 had sketched an Italian history that later commentators saw as a figural forecast of events in Cariteo's lifetime. A decade after Cariteo's death, for example, Alessandro Vellutello would focus his commentary upon the "bavarico inganno" (128.66) of "Lodouico Bauaro, ilquale con valido essercito in Italia era disceso" (Lewis of Bavaria, who had descended into Italy with a powerful army) ([171.sup.v]). In this reading, Lewis figures as the first in a long line of foreign invaders who despoiled Italy, reaching a climax in Cariteo's era with the French and Spani sh invasions of 1494. Even earlier, however, Francesco Filelfo had argued that Petrarch's canzone urges a need for Visconti leadership against petty warring lords of Italy. Only the hegemonic rule of Milan might heal the wounds of civil strife throughout the peninsula: "Drizza il suo parlare uniuersalmente a tutta italia per rispecto de romani e di fiorentini e de lombardi.... Honestamente gli reprende come ingrati e senza alchuna compassione e carita uerso la patria" (He addresses his words to all Italy embracing the Romans, Florentines, and Lombards.... He frankly reproves them as ungrateful and without compassion or charity for the homeland) ([127.sup.r]). As for Filelfo, so for Cariteo, the strong steady hand of a powerful leadership, even one of such dubious legitimacy as the Visconti despotism in the former's view or the Spanish vice regency in the latter's, might represent a force for the good rather than the bad, protecting Italy against its own worse instincts.

Cariteo's poem opens with a pastiche of words, phrases, and quotations from Petrarch's model, exactly replicating the latter's stanzaic pattern (AbCBaCcDEeDDfGfG): "Quale odio, qual furor, qual ira immane, / Quai pianere maligni / Han vostre voglie, unite, hor si divise?" (What hatred, what fury, what monstrous ire, what malignant planets have now divided your once united wills?) (1-3). As in Petrarch's canzone 128 the speaker urges unity against an aggressive foe. His addressee is an Italian ruler who holds the fate of the peninsula in his power. Cariteo does not name this ruler, but evidence points to Ludovico il Moro of Milan, who on 21 October 1494 summoned King Charles VIII of France to invade Italy, precipitating a later invasion of Milan in 1499, leading to the overthrow of Ludovico in 1500, and then an invasion of Naples in the summer of 1501. (38) Even after Spain's victory over France in 1503, the threat persisted, motivating the Holy League of Spain, Venice, England, and the Papacy against France i n 1511. Not until the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559 would French designs end. From Cariteo's perspective, the security of Naples and the rest of Italy depends on Spanish strength. (39)

The poem's third stanza focuses on French aggression. A stunning commercial metaphor questions the strength of foreign leagues and partnerships: "Quanto mal puo sperarsi ogni momento / Da liga o compagnia / Di cui lo proprio honor vende & rivende" (How poorly can we trust any moment of league or partnership with one who sells and retails his own honor?) (36-38). A brutal figure of the French monarch as an uncontrollable wolf underscores this dangerous game that Ludovico il Moro plays with foreign powers, "Che per l'orecchi tene un lupo inico, / Che '1 lasciar ne 'l tener non gli secyri" (That he holds by the ears an enemy wolf, and that neither letting go nor holding tight is safe for him) (40-41). The speaker imputes to Ludovico one of the gravest sins in the pit of Dante's hell, treachery against one's kin, figured as the sin of Cain, "l'odio antico, / Che col primo Parente / Nacque" (the ancient hatred that was born of our primordial parent) (44-46). His motivation is lust for power, "l'infinito ardore / D 'imperio" (the infinite craving for power) (58-59), an imperium figured in Petratch's canzone 128 as a hollow name, a word that some have made an idol, "un nome / vano, senza soggetto" (an empty name without substance) (128.76-77). Here Filelfo comments that Petrarch mocks the very idea of political power: "Il Petrarca se ne ride e fassene beffe" (Petrarch scoffs at it and derides it) ([128.sup.v]), while Antonio da Tempo describes a context of civil strife that parallels Cariteo's own situation: "Questa morale fece M.E contra li segnori de italia che in quesro tempo erano tutti in guerra" (Petrarch fashions this moral warning against the lords of Italy who at this time were all at war against one another) ([C6.sup.r]). According to both commentators internal conflict proves more destructive than external invasion, and to remedy it Petrarch urges adjustment, accommodation, and reconciliation.

Cariteo emulates this Petrarchan figure of the poet and public servant as a voice of conscience and moral authority. He notably expands Petratch's "Io patio per vet dire" (I am speaking to tell the truth) (128.63) into a statement about his public calling and his commitment to openness and honesty:

Non parlo per cagion del proprio affanno,
Che 'n questa humil fortuna
Riposo piu, che gli altri in sommo imperio.
Ne mi move a parlar paura alcuna
D'alcun privato danno,
Ma sol di pace ardente desiderio.
                                           (65-70)

I do not speak because of my own anguish, since in my humble lot I am more at rest than others with great power. Nor does any fear of any personal harm impel me to speak, but only an ardent desire for peace.

He endorses Naples' Aragonese monarchy as the best defense of Italy because it is already congruent with the "bel campo Hesperion" of Spanish domain. The figure candidly evokes the Spanish ancestry of Duke Ferrante II, next in line to succeed Alfonso II who became king in the year of Ludovico il Moro's treachery. (40) The crucial word monarchia validates the Aragonese crown in Italy where Lodovico remains only a duke:

Che nel bel campo Hesperio
Di monarchia io veggio un Duca degno,
De la preclara sterpe d'Aragona,
Ch'aspecta aurea corona
Non sol del proprio suo, ma d'altrui regno.
                                           (71-75)

For in the beautiful Hesperian field I see one duke worthy of kingship, from the illustrious line of Aragon, who awaits a golden crown not only of his own realm but of others, too.

In January 1495 Ferrante II took the crown after his father's abdication, but within twenty months he would die of natural causes and within eight years so would his successor, his uncle Federigo, the last of the Aragonese kings. (41)

Cariteo situates this poem at the precise moment of Alfonso's abdication in the narrative of Endimione, but he rakes great care to present its action as a figure awaiting fulfillment in an undefined future. The emphasis on Ferranre's Spanish ancestry promotes the continuity of his reign with the Spanish viceregal government. The next stanza anticipates the outcome by evoking a larger historical scheme through classical reference. This scheme accommodates the speaker's lengthy paraphrase of Tibullus' Elegy 1.10 against war: "Quis fuit horrendos primus qui protulit enses?" (Who was the first discoverer of the horrible swords?) Line 91 translates Tibullus' argument: "Noi ne Ii nostri danni hor convertimo" (We now turn this invention to our own destruction). The problem of war and greed is universal and the rapacious designs of France upon Italy represent a current instance. In the wake of this violence, Spain's opposition to France allows a timely solution for Naples' recovery. The concrete fulfillment of Italy' s destiny is the legitimation of Spanish power in the Kingdom.

Cariteo's final stanza now evokes the haunting conclusion of Petrarch's model, "I' vo gridando: Pace, pace, pace" (I go crying: Peace, peace, peace) (128.122). The Neapolitan version expands Petrarch's anaphora into a hortatory address:

Ai, pace!, ai, ben!, di buon si desiato!...
Et in questo amenissimo terreno
Di Napol, dove 'l cielo e piu sereno,
Ferma i tuoi piedi gravi.
                                       (97.107-09)

O peace, o good so desired by the good! ... in this most agreeable land of Naples where heaven is most serene, plant your feet deep.

As the abstractions pace and ben suggest, chances for peace would no longer hinge upon the particular means available against Ludovico il Moro or France's Charles VIII in 1494. The Aragonese king has abdicated and both heirs have died. When Cariteo prepared his poetry for publication in 1506 and again in 1509, the monarchia of line 72 had passed decisively to a Spanish viceroy who was then the only leader strong enough to thwart French ambitions. Conciliation with Spain represents Naples' --and Italy's -- best hope for stability and security. In its exalted language, Petrarch's call for peace adumbrates Cariteo's call for a coalition of power among Naples, Italy, and Spain. By displacing the temporality of the poem's action, this call proposes an illusionary timeless view of civil order that rises above partisan politics. By urging its claims in figures drawn from Petrarch's poetry, it summons fulfillment through the Spanish viceroy. By registering its own impulses as ones that derive from Petrarchan sources, it records the flow of an earlier history.

Misfortunes multiply in the poems that follow. Canzone 19, for example, addresses Alfonso d'Avalos, Marquis of Pescara (1450-95) and chief representative of the old Neapolitan barons at the court of King Ferrante I, in a eulogy upon the death of his wife in 1494. (42) Echoing Horace's ode 2.9.17-20 on the death of a friend, it exhorts Alfonso to dispense with laments for his wife and to contemplate instead his own heroic future: "Concedi al flebil cor gia qualche pace/Et converte le tue molli querele/In un piu grave & piu canoro accento" (Grant your plaintive heart some peace and turn your soft complaints to a weightier and more melodious Intonation) (19-21). Three poems later the speaker mourns the death of this Alfonso, the victim of a French assassin in 1495. Virgilian pathos limns a description of the attack: "D'invidia punto dunque, horrendo & forte,/Tre volte l'assalta con arme accese" (Stung with envy; hideous and strong, three times the assassin assaulted him with impassioned arms) (sonnet 152). The l ament in turn calls forth two sonnets about King Ferrante II, the first praising his leadership, "Egli e pur dio, che con giustissima ira/Ha posto a terra il barbaro furore" (He is really a god who with most righteous anger has knocked to the ground the barbarian rage) (sonnet 153), the second (sonnet 154) announcing his death in October 1496 and the passing of an entire way of life associated with the old Aragonese regime.

This latter poem associates the absence of Luna with Ferrante's death as cause for double grief, again recalling Petrarch's sonnet 269:

Vorrei cantando io misero allegrarme,
Et dir de la mia Luna in dolce rime
Le divine bellezze al mondo prime,
Di cui osai io primo innamorarme;
Et rimembrar con alto, ornato carme
Del mio Aragonio sol, chiaro & sublime,
II regno, li trophei, le spoglia opime,
Recuperate con giustissime arme.

By singing I would like to cheer up my miserable self, and to utter in sweet rhymes the divine beauties of my Luna, preeminent in this world, with whom I first dared to fall in love; and with a high, ornate song, to recall the reign of my clear and sublime Aragonese sun, his trophies, his rich spoils, gained with the most just of arms.

Cariteo laments not only a frustrated love affair and the death of a prince, but also the end of his security in the employment of the Aragonese kings, his safety amid the threat of foreign invasion, and the honor paid to him as a respected court poet:

Potessi almen formate un flebil canto
D'absentia & morte; ond'io da gli occhi verso
Onde d'eterno & miserabil pianto!
Ma donde uscir puo l'uno & l'altro verso,
S'un nimbo occidental mi turba tanto,
Ch'io son nel mar di lagrime sommerso!

I could at least fashion a plaintive song about absence and death, whence I pour from my eyes waves of endless and despicable grief. But whence can issue one and another line of verse if a Western cloud disturbs me so much that I am drowned in a sea of tears.

At this point the figure of Luna is absorbed into a "nimbo occidental" that echoes from Petrarch's canzone 28.10 "d'un vento occidental dolce conforto" (the sweet comfort of a western wind), portending in the earlier poem the dominance of France, and especially the leadership of Philip VI. In his commentary on Petrarch's canzone 323, Squarzafico emphasizes the variability and open-endedness of Petrarch's allegory: "Altra alla philosophia e alla poesia che facilmente si puo adaptare piglia ziaschuno quale allegoria gli pare" (Other meanings can as easily be accommodated to philosophy and poetry; each reader should take whatever allegory appears best to him) ([MI.sup.r]) In Cariteo's poem the conceit seems equally flexible. The breeze from Spain associated with the beloved's absence now blows into winds from France that visit disaster upon the Aragonese dynasty. The speaker laments his own frustrated love affair and the death of a king, but he still takes comfort in a limited good fortune. As long as Spain endo ws Naples with a strong government, the former Kingdom need not fear the domination of France. The nimbo occidental that blows from Spain may yet carry with it something good.

Inevitably the French threat becomes a harsh reality in 1501. Referring to events of that year, sonnet 172 presents an apostrophe to Naples as the speaker's adoptive home, his seconda patria now stormed by Louis XII's cruel forces:

Seconda patria mia, dolce Sirena,
Parthenope gentil, casta cittade
Nida di leggiadria & nobilitade,
D'ogni vertute & di delicie piena.

My second fatherland, sweet Siren, gentle Parthenope, virtuous city, nest of loveliness and nobility, full of every virtue and delight.

The transition from octave to sestet announces the speaker's departure for Rome, where he would remain until Spain's appropriation of Naples two years later:

Con tal dalor ti lascio & con tal pena
Qual, lasso!, io mai soffersi in nulla etade
A dio, amici!, a dio, colei contrade!
Hor quik ragion le lagrime non frena.
Vivete voi felici, a cui finita
E gia la sua fortuna; io son chiamato,
D'un fato in altro, in faticosa vita.

With such sorrow I leave you and, alas, with such grief as I have never endured in any situation. Farewell, friends! Farewell to you, these regions. Here now reason does not restrain my tears. You live happy lives, for whom fortune has already reached its end. I am summoned from one fare to another, in a tiring life.

At this crucial juncture the speaker evokes Petrarch's late assessment of his own roodess wandering in the final canzone of the Rime sparse, the penitential hymn to the Virgin: "Da poi ch' i' nacqui in su Ia riva d'Arno, / cercando or questa er or quell'altra parte, / non stata mia vita altro ch' affanno" (Since I was born on the bank of the Arno, searching in this and now this other direction, my life has been nothing but troubles) (366.82-84). Northern commentators had seized upon this passage to offer a retrospective claim about the poet's local affiliations at the end of the Rime sparse, noting that Petrarch had never really lived within the walls of Florence. Following Antonio da Tempo, Squarzafico asserts that out of loyalty to his adoptive Milan Petratch slighted his ancestral Florentine identity: "Quivi se debbe saper chel petrarcha non nacque su Ia riva darno ello nacque in arrezo nel borgho dii horto come esso scrive in la sua prima epistola al suo socrare. Veto e che Ia progenia sua fu a lancisa ch ie su Ia riva di Arno et mette luno locho per laltro" (Here it ought to be known that Petrarch was not born on the bank of the Arno, but was born in Arezzo in a quarter towards the east, as he writes in his first epistle to his friend Socrates [Ludwig van Kempen]; it is true that his ancestors came from Incisa on the banks of the Arno, and so he exchanges one place for the other) ([N4.sup.v]).

Cariteo's version likewise invokes his origins outside the kingdom with which he has been identified. Like the Petrarch described by the commentators, he is a wanderer who has achieved his greatest success in a land not of his birth, sometimes at great cost to his sense of ancestral origins, "la patria avita," more recendy at great cost to his loyalty for Ferrante II and the old regime: "Mai nullo mal mi venne inopinato I Dal giorno che Iasciai Ia parria avita, I Io fui da fati iniqui exercitato!" (Never has any unexpected good come to me; from the day that I left my ancestral land I have been tormented by unjust fates). Here, however, Cariteo vaunts his Spanishpatria not to lament his bad luck in Naples but rather to celebrate his connection with its Spanish future. Even the "faticosa vita" that he anticipates in Rome can be turned to good account as he devotes his time there to prepare for celebrating Spain's expected victory over France. Immune to the transpositions of power in his adoptive land largely be cause he has served as an outsider from the beginning, Cariteo presents himself as an ideal spokesperson for Naples past and present.

As Cariteo imagines it, he can dedicate his talent to Naples' future and can facilitate its reconstruction under Spanish rule. Sonnet 176 projects this dream by echoing a key passage from Virgil's Georgics, a poem that expounds upon a host of practical skills for reclaiming the homeland from civil disorder: "Se lice comparar cose terrene / A le divine, io rivedervi spero / Col cor tranquillo & fuor d'atro pensiero" (If one may compare worldly affairs to divine ones, I hope to see you again with a tranquil heart free from gloomy thought). In the passage to which this tercet alludes, Virgil compares the activity of busy bees with the labor of the cyclops: "Non aliter, si parva licet componere magnis" (Not otherwise, if it is allowed to compare small things with great) (Georgics 4. 176). (43) The larger context of the Georgics relates this work of nature to a polity emblematic of Octavian's new world order. Cariteo appropriates Virgil's topos when he compares his desire to reenter Naples with Plato's desire to r eenter Athens after his Syracusan sojourn: "Essendo di colui vertute il fine, / D'apparati di Re Syracusani / Scampo, qual bianco agnel d'horrende spine" (Since virtue was his only goal, he fled from the hollow display of the Syracusan king, as a white lamb instinctively flees from horrible thorns). The speaker's hope for political renewal begs an historical analogue. Plato renounced a sybaritic life in Syracuse and dedicated his intellect to the reconstitution of Athens. So too Virgil had pledged his poetic talent to Rome, and by submitting to Octavian, he became the future emperor's most brilliant propagandist. Cariteo likewise signals his willingness to assist the vice regent of Ferdinand the Catholic who, through the marriage of his daughter to the son of Maximilian, would endow his Castilian heirs with the Holy Roman Empire. (44)

And again for Cariteo the proximate model is Petrarch. Like Plato, the poet of the Rime sparse had traveled abroad and had served rulers outside his native clime. Like Virgil, he was willing to propagandize for those who, however flawed, might bring stability to a land in turmoil. As Antonio da Tempo emphasizes at the beginning of his commentary, Petrarch caught the attention of Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan, and "da lui per littere evocato aiquanto tempo sotto titolo di suo consigliero climoro & tal volta in Milano e quando a Parma" (summoned by the latter, he remained for a while with the title of counselor, sometimes at Milan, often at Parma) ([Aiiii.sup.v]). The talent that made him useful to Galeazzo was his skill with words, his verbal ability to advocate on behalf of a ruler who was trying to consolidate his newly gained power.

As a writer, Cariteo commands a host of rhetorical skills that can profit the new order in Naples. His earlier career as a poet who furthered its artistic renewal during Aragonese rule might only foretell what his resumed career could accomplish for the Spanish government. As though to situate his talent within a political frame, he repeats his reference to Virgil's Georgics in the prologue of his 1506 Rime. The context emphasizes Naples' recovery. Addressing his current patron Cola d'Alagno, signore of Rocca Rainola, (45) Cariteo celebrates the various talents that make human beings productive members of society: "Parte de li homini in farma populare; parte in exercitio de la arme; alcuni, (benche pochi,) in studio de lettere; altri in persequire le fere per li boschi; altri in thesaurizare; & molti, in servire al delicato amore" (Some [have dedicated all their efforts and attention] to public fame; some to the exercise of arms; others, though few, to literary study; others to hunt game in the woods; others to hoarding treasure; and many to serving tender love) (460). The passage echoes the stunning conclusion of Virgil's Georgics 2 that begs the muses' help to see a larger picture: "Vero dulces musae accipiant me primum ante omnia" (But let the sweet muses receive me first before all things) (475). Here the Roman poet contrasts his vision of civic renewal against the designs of greedy opportunists to control the state: "Sollicitant alii remis freta caeca, ruuntque / In ferrum, penetrant aulas et limina regum" (Some weary the blind seas with oars and rush upon the sword, they advance to the halls and palaces of kings) (504-05). True reconstruction might occur only when the new regime acknowledges and cultivates the talents of those whom it has subdued. Public servants of the old order can make useful contributions upon joining the new. Poets and rhetoricians such as Virgil or Cariteo can oblige their current masters.

The 1509 edition of Endimione omits this prologue, whether because Cariteo's patron had withdrawn support or because the poet's fortunes had changed. The possibility of working within the vice regent's precincts may no longer have seemed feasible, or Cariteo may have thought it better to let his expanded text speak for itself in demonstrating his rhetorical skills and suggesting their public value. Having participated in similar projects during the artistic renaissance of the 1480s, he must have felt that he had a good deal to offer the new rulers of Naples. This senior citizen of arts and letters would publish his Petrarchan Rime as a gesture of his willingness to comply with the new regime. Certainly in the first printed editions of Petrarch from 1476 to 1503, the commentaries of Antonio da Tempo, Filelfo, and Squarzafico had represented Petrarch as the paradigm of a loyal monarchist, not at all the unwavering Florentine republican depicted in Leonardo Bruni's Vita di Petrarca (1436). In them the former pro tege of Avignonese popes became a discreet servant of Visconti masters, a poet who prospered most in autocratic Milan, but was truly a poet of all Italy who had been crowned at Rome by the king of Naples and who later resided in Parma, Padua, Venice, and Arqua. The political pragmatism and pan-Italian spirit of this Petrarch are what Cariteo would situate in his adoptive Naples. Gonsalvo de Cordoba paid some attention to the poet in March 1504 by nominating him to serve as governor of Nola and in July 1504 by reinstating his pension of 300 ducats. (46) Nothing else indicates, however, that by the time he died in 1515 he had received any other significant public recognition.

Cariteo's Petrarchism nonetheless took root in Naples as a literary language to be cultivated in the mannerist styles of Costanzo, Tansillo, Galeazzo, Bernardo and Torquato Tasso, and others who followed. It conferred on the Neapolitan court an Italian cultural identity to which the Spanish aristocracy assimilated. Because this show of public spirit helped to whet Naples' opposition to its other foreign claimant, France, which pursued its goals in Italy until 1559, the Spanish viceregal government even encouraged it. Cariteo's vernacular poetry served the viceroy's purposes only briefly, however. Though several incomplete editions of the Rime were published at Venice in succeeding years, no edition appeared in Naples after 1509. Posterity can be hard on those who serve their own times too well, and Cariteo's work surely exemplifies the efforts of a poet who tried to please contemporaries across the spectrum. Largely and unfairly ignored in the canon of sixteenth-century Petrarchism, it exemplifies Petrarchism 's adaptation to a new site of political engagement. Broadening the site of Petrarchism, it signals the conflation of lyric discourse with a rise of patriotic sentiment.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

(1.) For detailed biography with a lengthy introduction to the work see Percopo's edition, from which I quote throughout. For Cariteo in the context of Neapolitan Humanism see Altamura, 1941, 161-86. For political background see Pontieri, 591-624, and Cortese, 31-66. For artistic background see Hersey.

(2.) For the political self-consciousness of Naples in the early sixteenth century see Lepre, 11-163; for its feudal character see Astarita, 1-15. For the Petrarchan lyric as a vehicle to express patriotic sentiment see William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

(3.) For Cariteo's anticipation of the later Italian lyric in relation to his modifications upon earlier Neapolitan verse see Santagata, 296-341. For the transformation of Italian models outside Italy see Greene and Braden.

(4.) For Bembo's Prose see Kennedy, 1994, 82-113, and McLaughlin, 249-74. For Bembo's role in editing Petrarch see Richardson, 1994, 48-78; for Bembo's reception outside Tuscany see Trovato, 1994, 75-121, and Sabbatino, 13-44, and 149-238.

(5.) In Italy successive anthologies of Rime diverse di molti eccellentissimi autori, some published by Gabriel Giolito at Venice but all following the format that he pioneered, provide major examples. Altogether eight volumes appeared between 1545 and 1560, offering a compendium of Italian verse from every region of Italy proclaiming local sentiments. See Glubb and Clubb and Della Neva. For national sentiment in Petrarchan poetry outside of Italy see Navarrete, Hampton and MacEachern.

(6.) For the social, cultural, and technological contexts of early printed editions see Trovato, 1991, 121-63; Petrucci, 169-203; Quondam, 1994; Richardson, 1994; and Ibid., 1999, 107-57.

(7.) He was evidently not the Paduan lawyer (1290-1337) who compiled the Summa artis rithmici vulgaris dictaminis (1332), but he was likely a Paduan contemporary of the latter; see Dionisotti, 1974, and Kennedy, 1994, 36-41. For the cultural and ideological dimare of Padua in the late fourteenth century see Kohl, 103-204.

(8.) See Raimondi, 1950; Robin; Parker, 53-57; and Kennedy, 1994, 41-43.

(9.) See Dionisotti, 1974, 86-91, and Kennedy, 1994, 43-45. For the conflict between Viscontian despotism and Florentine republicanism in shaping the reception of Petrarch outside northern Italy, particularly in England but also in kingdoms such as Naples, see Wallace, 38-62.

(10.) Albertino silently incorporates Squarzafico's continuation of Filelfo's commentary; see details in Fowler, comp., 75-92.

(11.) Vellutello offered the most extensive biography of Petrarch to date, culled from his reading of the Familiares and from research into Avignonese history, and he reordered the sequence of Petrarch's Rime sparse to conform to his understanding of events in Petrarch's life; his edition of Le volgari opere del Petrarcha became the most frequently issued one in the sixteenth century (six major printings and twenty-three reprintings at nine different presses between 1525 and 1584). See Belloni, 58-88; Parker, 119-21 and 196-97; and Kennedy, 1994, 45-52 and 285-88.

(12.) See profiles in Ibid., 52-62; for Gesualdo see Belloni, 190-219; for Sylvano see Sabbatino, 46-55.

(13.) See profiles in Kennedy, 1994, 67-81; Spini, 96, 192-93; and Raimondi, 1952b.

(14.) See Belloni, 226-83; Parker, 109-23; Kennedy, 1994, 62-67; and Raimondi, 1952a.

(15.) For a selection of these poets with critical commentary see Altamura, ed., 1978. For additional background see Altamura, 1941, 161-86; and Santoro, 1988. For a detailed reading of Endimione in the context of Neapolitan poetry see Santagata, 88-96, 171-81, and 242-76.

(16.) See Contini and Fenzi.

(17.) For the sixteenth-century infiltration of Petrarchism into the Neapolitan Academy, especially in the commentaries of Gesualdo and Sylvano da Venafro, in the theory of Minturno, and in the poetry of Bernardino Rota, Angelo di Costanzo, Luigi Tansillo, and Galeazzo di Tarsia, see Ferroni and Quondam, 11-72 and 209-33.

(18.) Among Sannazaro's eighty sonnets, nine canzoni, five madrigals, four sestinas, and three capitoli, some poems may dare from as early as 1478. The majority seem products of the early 1490s, but Sannazaro withheld them from publication until, following norms set forth by Bembo nearly three decades later, he revised them to conform to Petrarch's archaic Tuscan usage. See Folena; Mengaldo; Dionisotti, 1963; and Kennedy, 1983, 37-59.

(19.) For the structure of Endimione see Santagata, 307-30.

(20.) For principles of order in Petrarch's Rime sparse compared with earlier collections of lyric poetry see Holmes, 170-86. For autobiographical elements in Lorenzo's Petrarchan sonnets that are directed away from an account of concrete historical events and toward an abstract justification of Medici ideology see Kennedy, 1989, 46-67.

(21.) For the volume's fusion of Petrarchan figuration with classical (especially Ovidian and Horatian) motifs see Consolo; for Cariteo's debt to Propertius see Fanti.

(22.) For these political events see Lepre 165-220.

(23.) See the closely detailed notes of percopo's edition for identifications of these persons. For a comprehensive account of the early years of the viceregal government with specific reference to many of these individuals, see Cernigliaro, 44-61.

(24.) For Pontano see Tateo, 1972a and Toffanin.

(25.) Sannazaro, for example, had turned almost exclusively to Latin verse after 1503, producing his Piscatorial Eclogues, his short epic on the birth of Jesus, De partu virginis, and various elegies, odes, and epigrams. For Sannazaro's wish to attract a readership outside Naples by writing in Latin, see Kennedy, 1983 and Santagata, 330-41.

(26.) The monarchy of Aragonese Naples had been the major source of artistic patronage in the old days, determining cultural production by its private interests and public needs, and its preferences for classical forms continued to dominate the tastes of the Neapolitan Academy after the Spanish installation; see Bentley, 48-69; Tateo, 1972b, 121-33 and 189-208; and Lisio, 11-36.

(27.) For the choice of the northern Italian dialect over the Spanish language in the Neapolitan court poetry of Cariteo's contemporaries see Compagna, Capone, and Vozzo Menda; and Sabatini, 117-46 and 213-18.

(28.) As Cariteo's speaker explains, he does this "Che del parlar d'amor tanto s'offende" (Because she is so much offended by my talk of love) (13).

(29.) Luna's name activates a Petrarchan pun on several levels. Just as Petrarch named his beloved for apianta, Cariteo names Luna for a pianeta, substituting for a plant a palnetoid. On an oral-aural level her name as l'una evokes the Platonic ideal. See Prier, 1992a and 1992b.

(30.) The second edition of Endimione, revised and greatly expanded, appeared at Naples in November, 1509, published by Pietro Summonte, the scholarly and resourceful editor of Pontano and Sannazaro. For the evolution of Cariteo's style between printed editions see Fenzi, 67-74, and Santagata, 307-13.

(31.) For Vellutello's rearrangement of the Rime sparse in his 1525 edition of Il Petrarcha see Kennedy, 1994, 285-88.

(32.) For Gonsalvo see Lepre, 183-214 and Cernigliaro, 34-43.

(33.) For the development of a distinctively Neapolitan sense of statehood in response to its political domination by a distant Spain and its cultural attachment to the test of Italy, with the growth of a local bureaucracy as a mediation between Spanish and domestic powers, see Musi, 39-58.

(34.) For formative notions of Italian identity in the early sixteenth century see Schiera, For the papacy as a proto-national model for pan-Italian bonding see Prodi, 107-10, and 157-81. For proto-national Italian self-consciousness see Lazzaro. There are in fact three Italys to consider: the communes of the north, the papal states of the center, and the Kingdom of the south, the last of which constitutes the periphery of a distant Spanish center and the province of an emergent empire. The Spanish viceregal government was consequently impelled to grant regional satellites large measures of autonomy. For the feudalization of the Neapolitan periphery in response to this condition see Gernigliaro, 46-54.

(35.) For brief efforts at resistance see Ibid., 13-17. For Jennaro's poetry see Corti's edition. For Caracciolo's poetics see Santagata, 141-70 and 202-41; for Garacciolo's attraction to Petrarch's supposed Ghibelline principles see Santoro, 1957, 132-56.

(36.) The latter had imbued Neapolitan humanism with an expedient and prudential, though not necessarily immoral or amoral, approach toward politics in De principe (1468), De obedientia (1470), De prudentia (1499), and De fortuna (1501), vaguely anticipating some of Machiavelli's pragmatic positions. See Bentley, 202-22 and 241-87. For the theme of adversity and bad fortune as a recurrent top tapos in Neapolitan literature, see Santoro, 1978, 15-69.

(37.) For the function of the viceregal administration as a central government and its relation to local powers see Musi, 75-89.

(38.) For Ludovico il Moro see Cellerino.

(39.) For the stabilization of political power and of social and commerical interests under Spanish governance see Musi, 133-52.

(40.) For Ferrante II see Pontieri, 591-624.

(41.) Ibid.

(42.) For Alfonso's important role as a spokesperson for old Neapolitan interests in the Aragonese monarchy see Cernigliaro, 82-87.

(43.) For Virgil's exhortation toward civic responsibility in the Georgics see Miles, 1-63; for the poem's figuration of patriotism see Perkell, 100-15; for its affinity to epic representations of public identity see Farrell, 114-57.

(44.) For European perceptions of Ferdinand's and later his grandson Charles V's dynastic ambitions, see Hillgarth, 309-28.

(45.) For Cariteo's patrons, including Alfonso and Costanza d'Avalos and Cardinal Lodovico d'Aragona, see Gareth, Intro., ccxxxi-ccxxxviii.

(46.) Ibid., xi-xli, and Document, cclxxxiv.

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