La fonte di ogni eloquenzia: Il canzoniere petrarchesco nella cultura poetica del Quattrocento ferrarese.

Italo Pantani. La fonte di ogni eloquenzia: Il canzoniere petrarchesco nella cultura poetica del Quattrocento ferrarese.

Studi e testi italiani: Collana del Dipartimento di italianistica e spettacolo 16. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2002. 468 pp. index. bibl. [euro] 30. ISBN: 88-8319-753-4.

This assiduously documented study takes its title from a poetry presentation at the court of Ferrara in 1434. With Leonello d'Este and Guarino Veronese in his audience, Jacopo Sanguinacci of Padua argued for love as a source of inspiration, holding up Francesco Petrarca, honor of Florence, as a model of manners, eloquence, and vernacular style: "Vedi la fonte d'ogni bel costume, / d'ogni eloquenzia e d'ogni bel vulgare, / poeta singulare, / misser Francesco, che Fiorenza onora." (11)

If Jacopo's verse, quoted at the outset of Pantano's project, fails to strike a familiar chord for most of us, the same will be true for countless others he patiently flushes from the literary underbrush for his chronological flow-chart of Petrarch's fortunes at Ferrara in the Quattrocento. Keyed to a grid that advances by decades and by princely epochs, from Niccolo III (1393-1441) to Ercole I (1471-1505), La fonte d'ogni eloquenzia traces the local evolution in letters that led to the rise of Petrarch. Compared to what happened in other cities, beginning with Florence, acceptance of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta was slow to come in Ferrara. Traditionally, the court had favored chivalric entertainments and French romances, attested by a 1436 inventory of the palace library that puts Petrarch in third place after Ovid and Boccaccio, but without any mention of the Canzoniere or Trionfi. Nevertheless, by century's end the situation is just reversed. The ducal library, grown to 512 titles recorded in a catalogue of 1495, holds only the Liber sine nomine and one other unidentified Latin text by Petrarch, but it boasts all his lyric production, as well as commentaries on the Triumphs by Bernardo Lapini Ilicino and Jacopo di Poggio Bracciolini.

Petrarch's progress in Ferrara was impeded, Pantano argues, by the influence of Guarino Veronese, who arrived there in 1429 and remained leader of the intellectual community until the death of Leonello d'Este in 1450. Guarino's teaching, decisively "anti-vernacular," advocated civic art modeled on the language and the literature of the ancients as proper to his modern humanism, whose living paragon was Emanuel Chrysoloras. Yet counter-forces chipped away at this "obstinate resistance" throughout the century. The Council of Ferrara (1438) brought such outsiders to the city as Giusto de' Conti, whose La bella mano was an influential canzoniere that aggressively embraced the Petrarchan example, and the chameleonic Leon Battista Alberti, who promoted poetry in the mother tongue with his watershed contest of 1441, the Florentine Certame coronorio. By 1460, the first Petrarchist canzonieri appeared in Ferrara, and by 1470, printed editions were turning Italy's master sonneteer into a national classic. Even Girolamo Savonarola, Pantano's concluding example, could imitate his metrics and lexicon "sub specie spirituali" in canzoni of 1475.

Although Pantano himself calls his unpromising territory "semi-desert"--a city hostile to Petrarch in what Croce labeled the "century without poetry"--he manages to amass an immense quantity of evidence, bring it under scholarly control, and demonstrate his thesis of a gradual movement away from eclectic "plurilinguismo" in poetry at Ferrara to the single standard of Petrarchismo. For an overview, readers will find useful his first chapter, which synthesizes the very dense material that follows, rich with quotes, punctilious in their analysis, and tirelessly annotated in footnotes that crawl up a good part of almost every page. Approximately three times the length (ca. 180,000 words) of most scholarly monographs published in the United States, its prolixity will irritate those who prefer Strunk and White's standard of verbal economy. So, too, will sentences that run to more than one hundred and fifty words, sometimes interrupted by as many as three sets of parentheses. Perhaps it is apt that Pantano should recount Petrarch's slow progress in a book that can only be slowly read.

To define one line of pre-Bembo Petrarchismo, Pantano has run a wire from Petrarch's last circle to Tito Vespasiano Strozzi and his more famous nephew, Matteo Maria Boiardo, hanging on it along the way every shred of evidence he could find to establish Ferrarese connections with the master canzoniere. This is a very masculine world, since evidently Ferrara did not produce a single female writer in the Quattrocento acquainted with "misser Francesco." Women enter Pantano's pages only infrequently and fleetingly, as the ruler's wife (Eleonora of Aragon, Lucrezia Borgia) or ideal recipients of verse collections (Giovanni Marrasio's Angelinetum, Basinio da Parma's Liber Isottaeus). Supplemented with a splendid bibliography, the book has only a partial index that excludes female recipients of poems, Petrarch himself, titles of works, and all subjects that are not proper names. Consequently, except for students specialized in this place and period, much will remain buried on pages crammed with information. Not a book to read but a book to consult, Pantano's solid contribution will join the classics of scholarship on Renaissance Ferrara.

VICTORIA KIRKHAM

University of Pennsylvania