Introduction

Four Types of Anti-classicism

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” – by means of this famous argutia, William Shakespeare distanced himself from the formulae of the love poetry of his time (sonnet 130, Shakespeare 1986, 141), offering instead a meditation on rhetoric and truth, as well as on the universality versus the individuality of beauty.

While it is possible to read this line as a baroque witticism, it could also be viewed as an act of opposition against the perceived dominance of a discursive scheme, or (in a wider sense) a ‘classicist’ norm, in this case: Petrarchism. In the latter half of the sixteenth century in particular (but not only), such gestures abounded, directed against an assortment of normative tendencies, ranging from Petrarchism to Aristotelianism. Some of these remonstrances have been well-studied, while others are fairly unknown. Yet until today, the phenomena in question have never in their totality been the object of a systematic overview or a typology hoping to incorporate a certain degree of theoretical abstraction.

The present book will attempt this, sketching an outline of such a synthesis for the Italian Cinquecento (and integrating some of the lesser-known parts of this repertoire for the first time), in the full knowledge of its necessary incompleteness or even reductivity. Readers who would like to immerse themselves even deeper into the manifold varieties of non-classicist or anti-classicist writing in Italian sixteenth-century literature, will find ample documentation, analysis and a plethora of new editions in the work of the Italian research group Cinquecento plurale (http://dsu.uniroma3.it/cinquecentoplurale/).

The present volume, while relying on much of the work done by this group, is the product of an inter-university research project on “Antiklassizismen im Cinquecento” (https://www.antiklassizismen.italianistik.uni-muenchen.de) with a different focus. It proposes a model designed to distinguish four types of ‘anti-classicisms’ (hence the plural in our title), differentiated as to their mode and their object of dissent or deviation. The book features four major chapters, each of which studies one particular type of anti-classicism. Every chapter takes the form of an overview, interspersed with more detailed readings of select passages from the literature studied in it.

1 From the late nineteenth century onwards, literary historiography has used concepts of ‘anti-classicism’ in order to articulate the intuition that different phenomena of opposition, parody and criticism of (explicit or implicit) standardisations of literary and artistic practice in the Italian Renaissance could be viewed together in a larger context (Borsellino 1973).

Initially, these observations focused on anti-Petrarchism, a term championed in particular by Arturo Graf in 1886 in his classical study, “Petrarchismo ed antipetrarchismo” (Graf 1886), published in two parts in one of the leading Italian journals of the day, Nuova Antologia. Rivista di scienze, lettere ed arti. This essay was then included in Graf’s seminal book, Attraverso il Cinquecento (Graf 1888), published by Loescher, Turin, along with Graf’s observations on “Un processo a Pietro Aretino”, “I Pedanti”, “Una cortigiana fra mille: Veronica Franco” and “Un buffone di Leone X”.

Graf re-evaluates Petrarchism in the sense of a “malattia cronica della letteratura italiana” (Graf 1888, 3). The concept of anti-classicism plays no role in this; however, anti-Petrarchism is not restricted to the function of a mere opposite of Petrarchism, it is used in a far broader sense, which embraces many tendencies nowadays more commonly described as anti-classicist: “ma è più spesso semplice avversione alle dottrine, agl’intendimenti e alla pratica letteraria degli imitatori.” (Graf 1888, 37). This is why Graf analyses numerous works which will be classified under the heading of explicit anti-classicism in the present book: Capitoli by Berni, Mauro and the Berneschi with their criticism of pedantismo, Michelangelo’s Rime, the capitoli by Castaldi, the Priapea and the Petrarchista of Franco, Aretino’s dialogues and the maccheronian poets. Graf consequently locates his umbrella term ‘anti-Petrarchism’ within a wide field of avversioni and contrasti.1 In this context, he also deals in detail with the “spiritualizzatori di Petrarca” (Graf 1888, 67) and their “operazione dello spiritualizzare” (63).

As early as the late seventeenth century, in the Istoria della volgar poesia by Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni (Rome 1698) and the accompanying Commentarij, different texts and genres are treated that can be assigned to anti-classicism. Only in the case of the so-called poesia famigliare e burlesca, exemplified by Berni’s and the Berneschi’s works, however, do we find observations that point to an implicit perception that these texts deviate from a classicist norm.

In literary histories of the period up to 1888, poesia bernesca remains the most frequently treated variety of anti-classicist text types. However, this genre is generally insufficiently distinguished from satire or poesia maccheronica (Maffei 1858; Cantù 1865). In literary histories written after 1889, anti-classical phenomena (still rarely explicitly described as such until about 1940) are all caught up and swept along together, subsumed under the term ‘anti-Petrarchism’, the phenomenon of which is perceived – probably following Graf – to be a kind of ‘natural’ reaction to pedantic forms of Petrarchism.

During the early phase of research in this field, however, the notion that these heterogeneous phenomena could be compared with or connected to one another, was primarily an effect of an underestimation of the role of diversity and plurality in the Renaissance. This sometimes led to unconsidered or even undue conflation, for example of anti-Petrarchism and other tendencies that ran counter to forms of ‘classicism’ (Graf 1888; Battisti 1962) or to the mixing up of poetological with socio-historical categories (Petronio 1992; critically, Friede 2012/13). In particular, some scholars lost sight not only of the fact that the objectives of such opposing gestures are often hardly comparable (critically, Schulz-Buschhaus 1975), but also that the connections or analogies between the various normative systems that ‘anti-classicists’ seem to attack are by no means self-evident; ‘classicist’ norms can even be partly incompatible with one another (Petrarchism vs. Aristotelianism; Huss et al. 2012).

In a second phase of research – one conducted since roughly the mid-1990s – the coexistence, within the Renaissance, of fundamentally different literary options was either affirmed and studied as a hitherto neglected side of the Renaissance (Corsaro 1999; Procaccioli 1999a; Corsaro et al. 2007), or even declared as the basic epistemic fact of the early modern period as such. Thus, ‘plurality’ (Hempfer 1993b; Hempfer 2010a; Kablitz/Regn 2006) or ‘pluralisation’ (Nelting 2007; Müller et al. 2010) was taken to be the very signature of the epoch: where the multiplicity of (potentially incompatible) authorities does not merely exist or grow, but is reflected or acted upon (be it by discussing it, dramatizing it or seeking to control or to reduce it), a specific difference between the early modern episteme and that of the Middle Ages can be discerned. The publications of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre “Pluralisierung & Autorität” (https://www.sfb-frueheneuzeit.uni-muenchen.de) at the LMU Munich University illustrate this process in a variety of ways and regarding different social as well as intellectual spheres.

If it is true, following this analysis, that in the early modern period norms such as the rules of poetics are experienced and evaluated precisely as elements of such a plurality, both the unifying singular term ‘classicism’ and its counterpart ‘anti-classicism’ will appear anachronistic or inappropriate. Both sides of the opposition will have to be ‘pluralized.’

On the other hand, the concept of ‘pluralisation’ itself falls short of the intuition of earlier anti-classicism research in that it tends to level out the antinomies and hierarchies between model and counter model, original and parody, etc., which characterise this field, and their possible interrelationships. It makes them disappear in a homogeneous field of manifold possibilities.

Consequently, this book will describe anti-classicisms and their classicist counterparts in the plural, while maintaining the binary relationships between them.

2 Investigating anti-classicist phenomena...