Decorum, Imitation, and the Canonization of Petrarch

In tying all this to the question of decorum, it makes sense to start where cinquecentisti did, with Cicero, by recalling two tenets that he asked his orator to heed in order to claim the listener's attention and goodwill. He illustrated the first of these, decorum, with the declaration that "perfumes compounded with an extremely

[55] "La prima differenza che tra l'oratore nasce, et il poeta è che l'uno ricerca il persuadere, et l'altro l'imitare, à cui succede la regola, & norma di parlare, in quanto che l'oratore usa parole sciolte da legami de i piedi, & libere dall'obligo delle sillabe & delle rime, & il poeta è astretto all'una & l'altra legge" (Ragionamenti, p. 273).

[56] "L'oratore fugge l'uso delle favole, & in vece di quelle abbraccia le leggi, i costumi, gli esempi & l'historie; la dove che il poeta dando co 'l penello della persuasione colore alle menzogne, ci fa parere il falso verosimile" (ibid., p. 281).

[57] Aristotle drew the distinction in Poetics 9.4. On the close links between rhetoric, poetry, history, and other arts of discourse see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 1: Chap. 1.

[58] Daniello's lengthy comparison between poets and historians confined differences between the two to Aristotelian criteria of truth, but otherwise portrayed both as rhetoricians. "Sono così dell'uno, come dell'altro proprie l'Amplificationi, le Digressioni, le Varietà. Ambo studiano in muover gliaffetti, il decoro di ciascuna cosa in ciascuna cosa, et materia servando. Ambo insegnano, dilettano, & giovano parimente. Ambo le cose ne dipongono; & quasi davanti a gliocchi le ci pongono" (Proper to both are amplifications, digressions, and variety. Both study how to move the affections, each of them having decorum and serving the subject matter. Both teach, delight, instruct equally. Both depict things and virtually place them before our eyes); Poetica, p. 42.

sweet and penetrating scent do not give us pleasure for so long as those that are moderately fragrant."^[59] Along with many other examples, this one aimed to show that a good thing too much indulged in would ultimately lose its allure. The second tenet follows naturally from the first: in order to ensure that the listener not become overly satiated with a particular effect, the orator must always seek variety in his rhetoric. For as Crassus warns in De oratore, "a style . . . that lacks relief or check or variety cannot continue to give pleasure for long, however brilliantly colored the poem or speech may be."^[60] Both poets and musicians, Cicero claimed, appreciate the necessity of modulating their works through variation.^[61] Related to these two tenets was the notion of the three stylistic levels, plain, middle, and high (or vigorous), which allow the orator to "decide what is needed at any point" and "be able to speak in any way the case requires."^[62]

These are the intersecting principles I have pointed to in connection with decorum — in both senses of moderation and of matching styles to subjects — and variety. Modern-day critics easily miss the interdependencies between them precisely because they were taken for granted and intermingled by cinquecento thinkers. Dolce exemplifies this in an amusing explanation of how to match styles to subjects, as he haughtily admonishes poets to maintain propriety by preserving each of the three levels. By varying slightly and thus alleviating a too-strict adherence to any one level, a shrewd poet could succeed in striking a decorous stylistic balance.

The wise poet must try with all his might while writing about humble material not to debase himself too much and go crawling around like a child on all fours — which can easily happen, every virtue having within its bounds vice — and likewise, when writing in the middle style not to enter the high, or writing in the high style not to spill over into bombast, as so many do.^[63]

Dolce warns the poet to pursue all stylistic levels with restraint in order to avoid extremes.^[64] Lurking behind this Ciceronian advice is the now familiar idea that an admixture of devices belonging to different styles should be called on to help

[59] De oratore 3.25.99. On Cicero's probable borrowing of the term decorum from Aristotle's Rhetoric see Marvin T. Herrick, "Decorum," Chap. 5 in The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism, 1531-1555, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 32, no. 1 (Urbana, Ill., 1946).

[60] De oratore 3.25.100.

[61] Ibid. 3.26.102: "Neque id actores prius viderunt quam ipsi poetae, quam denique illi etiam qui fecerunt modos, a quibus utrisque summittur aliquid, deinde augetur, extenutur, inflatur, variatur, distinguitur."

[62] Orator 21.70.

[63] "[D]ee l'accorto Poeta a tutta sua forza procurar, che mentre egli scrive di materia humile, non s'abbassi tanto, che a guisa di fanciullo, vada carpone per terra; ilche puo avvenir facilmente, havendo ogni virtù per confino il vitio. è così volendo darsi allo stil mezano, non trappassi all'alto; o applicandosi all'alto, non passi alla gonfiezza; vitio, dove di leggero sono trabboccati, e trabboccano molti" (Osservationi, fol. 94).

[64] Cf. De oratore 3.25.100 and Ars poetica 24-31. Bembo had set this precedent in vernacular literature by cautioning that the "extremes of virtue" are wont to resemble the "beginnings of vice" (La vicinità e la somiglianza che aver sogliono i principi del vizio con le stremi della virtù); Prose, p. 85.

temper each one, with one main level predominating. In compositional terms this is what early modern writers generally had in mind by "variety" and why they dwelt at the local levels of words and phonemes in trying to guide aspiring writers toward stylistic success. In talking about elezione, disposizione, and ordine Bembo had alluded to just this process of simultaneously keeping styles separate while intermixing them to avoid extremes.

One must then choose the words; if speaking of lofty material, grave, high, resonant, clear, and brilliant ones; if of low and vulgar material, light, flat, humble, popular, quiet ones; if of material in between these two, then likewise middle and temperate words which incline as little toward one or the other of these two poles as possible. It is necessary, nonetheless, in these rules, to observe moderation and avoid above all satiety.^[65]

In other words, since the devices proper to any given style must not be pursued too far, the secret to good writing is to emphasize one stylistic level while judiciously borrowing words and devices from others.

As growing attention to genre made it necessary to decide how propriety should be applied to epic and dramatic poetry, commentators following Bembo extended his ideas to include characters. Daniello warned that one needed not only to see that "the parts of the material treated have propriety among them but that those assigned to persons also be most suitable, proper, and fitting; and beyond those, that the speech given to them be of a smoothness, mildness, gravity, happiness, grief, and in sum, full of all the affects according to the quality, dignity, habits, office, and age of each one."^[66] This, Daniello explained, was what the Latins called "decoro" and the moderns "convenevolezza" (fittingness).

Later theorists articulated more clearly the relations between the concept of stylistic levels and new Aristotelian notions of genre. In working out such ideas, they tried to determine which characteristics were essential to different genres, especially whether they were inherently low, middle, or high, and what sorts of circumstances allowed departures from the norms. Among the earliest to publish works attending specifically to questions of genre were Girolamo Ruscelli and Francesco Sansovino. Ruscelli's Del modo de comporre in versi nella lingua italiana, published in Venice in 1559, offered separate chapters describing each of the different lyric types: stanze, terze rime, madrigals, ballate, canzoni, and sonnets.^[67] One year later Sansovino's

[65] "Da scegliere adunque sono le voci, se di materia grande si ragiona, gravi, alte, sonanti, apparenti, luminose; se di bassa e volgare, lievi, piane, dimesse, popolari, chete; se di mezzana tra queste due, medesimamente con voci mezzane e temperate, e le quali meno all' uno e all' altro pieghino di questi due termini, che si può. E di mestiero nondimeno in queste medesime regole servar modo, e schifare sopra tutto sazietà" (Prose, p. 55).

[66] "[L]e parti delle materie che si prendono a trattare, habbiano fra loro convenientia, ma che quelle ancora che alle persone si mandano, convenientissime, proprie, & accommodate siano; et oltre a ciò, che il parlar che si dà loro sia di soavità, di mansuetudine, di gravità, d'allegrezza, di dolore, e finalmente pieno degli affetti tutti, secondo però la qualità, la degnità, l'abito, l'ufficio e l'età di ciascuna" (Poetica, pp. 35-36).

[67] This direction was widely taken up later in the century in endeavors like Cesare Crispolti's "Lezione del sonetto," presented to the Accademia Insensata of Perugia about 1592. See the ed. and commentary in Trattati 4:193-206 and 420-21. On the relation of this phenomenon to Aristotelian criticism as it applies to the last two decades of the century see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 2: Chap. 13, "The Tradition of Aristotle's Poetics V: Theory of the Genres." For a critique of Weinberg's explanation how genre theory came to emerge in the mid-sixteenth century and an attempt to account for it through attention to contemporary poetic practice (and not just the new understanding of Aristotle's Poetics ) see Daniel Javitch, "Self-Justifying Norms in the Genre Theories of Italian Renaissance Poets," Philological Quarterly 67 (1988): 195-217.

little Discorso sopra la materia della satira drew stylistic boundaries for a genre that was fundamentally defined by the nexus between literary topic and tone.^[68]

Deep at the heart of all these commentaries on stylistic levels and propriety lay a horror that gonfiezza (bombast) and asprezza (harshness) might invade the official literary language — qualities even less readily accommodated in the simplifying poetics of popularizers like Dolce than in Bembo's poetics. The insurgence of Petrarchan satirists at the presses during the 1540s made members of the Bembist establishment increasingly nervous — so much so that Dolce could chastize Giulio Camillo (Delminio) for gonfiezza with a verse as innocent as "Quando l'alta salute de le genti" and even censure Petrarch for the swollen vowels of "Giunto Alessandro a la famosa tomba."^[69]

Although few theorists fired off criticisms with as little provocation as Dolce, the impulse to expel any gesture that seemed immodest, unpretty, raw, or harsh, or could in any way be accused of excess, was widespread. In the last analysis it accounts for the tendency among Venetian theorists to make aesthetic dogma out of edicts that in Cicero had stemmed more from practical exigencies. Bembists supplanted the pragmatics of oratory with unbudging expressive biases that ossified the demands imposed on Castiglione's courtier to uphold codes of modesty, elegance, and charm.

These biases led Bembo to his now famous condemnation of Dante, whose writing he claimed allowed unacceptable breaches of decorum.^[70] Reproving linguistic transgressions in the Inferno, Bembo insisted that Dante would have been better off avoiding horrifying subjects than resorting to the gruesome language he sometimes used to describe them.

And if it still sometimes happens that that which we intend to write about cannot be explained with proper words, but rather it is necessary to bring in vile or harsh or spiteful ones — which I scarcely believe can happen, there being so many ways and modes of speaking, and so much variety, and the human tongue being suited to taking diverse forms and diverse likenesses, and almost colors — but if it nonetheless

[68] In Sette libri di satire . . . Con un discorso in materia della satira, first published in 1560 (Venice, 1573), fols. [5]-[7], esp. fols. [6']-[7]; mod. ed. of the "discorso" in Trattati 2:513-18.

[69] Osservationi, fol. 94'.

[70] For other sixteenth-century attitudes toward Dante, especially late in the century, see Michele Barbi, Della fortuna di Dante nel secolo XVI (Pisa, 1890); Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 2: Chaps. 16 and 17; Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Misure del classicismo rinascimentale (Naples, 1967), pp. 221-62; and most recently Deborah Parker, Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (Durham, 1993). This polemic, and particularly the opposed sides that literati in Florence and Venice took in the debate, forms a backdrop to my "Rore's 'selva selvaggia:' The Primo libro of 1542," JAMS 42 (1989): 547-603; see esp. pp. 547-50 and 589-91.

happens, I declare that whatever part cannot be expressed properly should be left silent rather than marring the rest of the writing by expressing it, especially where necessity does not press or force the writer — from which necessity poets, above all others, are far removed.^[71]

With this Bembo set the stage for a poetics tyrannically ruled by the demands of a puristic elocutio. By going so far as to eliminate particular subjects, he imposed a highly restrictive view of the oratorical poet as a kind of virtuosic manipulator of words, rather than thoughts — a poet with virtually no philosophy.

Bembo's view was later more gently reasoned in Tomitano's Ragionamenti, which reflected that, though Petrarch was indeed the better poet, Dante was the better philosopher.^[72] The problem as Tomitano formulated it was that Dante so greatly excelled in invention and understood so well the various states of the soul and the issues of theology and philosophy that "he forgot many times to be a poet."^[73] Petrarch, by contrast, had much in his heart with which to grace language but only hinted at a concrete knowledge of the natural world. When one interlocutor questions whether, since philosophy is a necessary gift of a poet, the better philosopher is not the better poet, Tomitano counters (through the mouth of Speroni), "I do not concede that Dante, although he may be a better philosopher, is a more serious poet than Petrarch. For Petrarch understood as much of philosophy as is necessary to bring spirit and fullness to his rhymes, so that in beautiful elocution, from which a poet takes his name, . . . he was better than Dante. From which one must conclude that he was a better poet than Dante" (emphasis mine).^[74]

Tomitano's compromise notwithstanding, Bembo's indictment of Dante became axiomatic in Venetian academies. By 1551 Muzio was singing the Petrarchan line in catechistic verse: "a pure and graceful writer was Petrarch/above all others . . ./ audacious to excess was Alighieri."^[75] Not surprisingly, it was Dolce who took up the gauntlet, discounting Dante's poetic judgment — and just at the time when members of the Accademia Fiorentina were launching a public defense of Dante's poetic reputation.^[76]

[71] "E se pure aviene alcuna volta, che quello che noi di scrivere ci proponiamo, isprimere non si possa con acconce voci, ma bisogni recarvi le vili o le dure o le dispettose, il che appena mi si lascia credere che avenir possa, tante vie e tanti modi ci sono da ragionare e tanto variabile e acconcia a pigliar diverse forme e diversi sembianti e quasi colori è la umana favella; ma se pure ciò aviene, dico che da tacere è quel tanto, che sporre non si può acconciamente, più tosto che, sponendolo, macchiarne l'altra scrittura; massimamente dove la necessità non istringa e non isforzi lo scrittore, dalla qual necessità i poeti, sopra gli altri, sono lontani" (Prose, pp. 55-56).

[72] "Il Petrarca [è] maggior poeta di Dante, si come Dante miglior philosopho di M. Francesco" (Ragionmenti, p. 286).

[73] "[S]i dimenticò più volte d'esser poeta" (ibid., p. 285).

[74] "Non vi si concede, che Dante quantunque sia maggior philosopho: venga ad esser piu grave poeta del Petrarca. Percio che il Petrarca quel tanto di philosophia intese, che a recar spirito & fermezza alle sue rime bastava: la dove che poi nella bella elocutione, della quale si denomina il Poeta, . . . fu di Dante migliore. Onde conchiuder si dee egli esser stato di Dante miglior poeta" (ibid., p. 287).

[75] "Fu 'l Petrarca scrittor puro e leggiadori/Sopra ad ogn' altro . . . / Di soverchio fu audace l'Aldighieri" [sic ] (Dell'arte poetica, vv. 183-84 and 187).

[76] On the issue of style Dolce claimed that "l'autorità di Dante . . . non vale. percioche egli cosi nella elettion della lingua, come anco d'intorno alle bellezze Poetiche, non hebbe quel buono & perfetto giudicio, che si vede havere havuto il Petrarca: come bene e dottamente è mostrato dal Bembo nelle sue prose" (The authority of Dante . . . does not count. Because in the choice of language, as in the matter of poetic beauty, he did not have that good and perfect judgment that one sees Petrarch to have had, as has been shown well and learnedly by Bembo in his Prose ); Osservationi, fol. 7'.

In a general way the pro-Petrarchan position depended on imitation theory, which once again took inspiration from classical rhetoricians.^[77] The Veneto led sixteenth-century Italy in trying to standardize vernacular practices of imitation.^[78] As early as 1513 Niccolò Liburnio discussed imitation in the third of his dialogues Le selvette. But neither Liburnio, here or in his later Tre fontane of 1526,^[79] nor Gianfrancesco Fortunio, in his Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua of 1516, tried to exalt a single exclusive model. Unlike Bembo, who reduced the number of acceptable models to two (Petrarch for poetry and Boccaccio for prose),^[80] Liburnio and Fortunio sanctioned the whole trecento triumverate. They agreed with Bembo only in rejecting contemporary authors as models — authors whose practices were less susceptible to totalizing description and reproduction by their contemporaries. In this sense all three were taking part in a trend toward linguistic standardization that both promoted and was inspired by projects of editing and publication.

Bembo's ostensible claim was for two models, but in fact he relied almost solely on Petrarch for prosody, diction, themes, genres, and lexicon. Bembo's single-model position raised theoretical hackles early in his career, setting him apart from more flexible, empirically minded courtiers whom he otherwise often resembled. It was in part this difference that stood behind the famous dispute on imitation between Bembo and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, as preserved in a Latin epistolary exchange from the second decade of the sixteenth century.^[81]

Pico insisted that the author of original texts had to sort through a wide range of models, selectively commandeering what suited his own nature and guarding against the appropriation of anachronistic, ill-fitting aspects of others' works. Each person was endowed with an individualized mental simulacrum of beauty, which could be violated only at one's peril.^[82] In countering Pico's argument, Bembo claimed to have sought in vain for this simulacrum, for some Neoplatonic mirror of

[77] For further on theories of imitation, rhetoric, and their relation to Petrarchism see Greene, "Sixteenth-Century Quarrels: Classicism and the Scandal of History," Chap. 9 in The Light in Troy; Hathaway, "Poetry as Imitation," Part One in The Age of Criticism; and for related musical issues, Howard Mayer Brown, "Emulation, Competition, and Homage: Imitation and Theories of Imitation in the Renaissance," JAMS 35 (1982): 1-48.

[78] For general treatments of the topic see Greene, The Light in Troy, and G. W. Pigman III, "Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance," RQ 33 (1980): 1-32, and the copious literature cited there.

[79] See Padley, Grammatical Theory, pp. 54-57 and 65-67, and Floriani, "Grammatici e teorici," pp. 164-65.

[80] For further on this point see Floriani, "Grammatici e teorici," pp. 141-43.

[81] For analyses of the dispute see Baldacci, Il petrarchismo italiano, pp. 11-27; Greene, The Light in Troy, pp. 171-76; and the introduction to Giorgio Santangelo, Le epistole "De imitatione" di Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola e di Pietro Bembo (Florence, 1954).

[82] See the edition of Santangelo, pp. 27-28: "[Natura] Ideam igitur ut aliarum virtutum, ita et recte loquendi subministrat, eiusque pulchritudinis affingit animo simulachrum; ad quod respicientes identidem et aliena iudicemus et nostra" (Nature supplies us with a pattern for speaking well, as for the other virtues, and creates in our mind a similacrum of this beauty with reference to which we habitually judge both what is not ours and what is); trans. from Greene, The Light in Troy, p. 172.

perfection, in his own youthful mind.^[83] Having failed, he turned to the models of Cicero for prose and Virgil for verse. At first he tried merely to mimic them, but said he could later emulate them — a higher and ostensibly more creative act. Lesser models, according to Bembo, would have been useless in implanting this consummate paradigm in the mind of the aspiring poet.^[84] And what did he try to imitate? Only style. "The activity of imitating is nothing other than translating the likeness of some other's style into one's own writing."^[85] As Bembo describes him, the imitator offers no heuristic resistance, no challenge to the model, but surrenders himself as a passive medium, a clear pool of water ready to take the dye.

Bembo's recommendation that a writer copy another authoritative author, widely accepted by the second quarter of the sixteenth century, resulted in an academized rigor that exceeded even his own prescriptions. As taken up by critics like Delminio — and inveighed against by Aretino — the notion of imitation was flattened into a deadly sort of thieving.^[86] To be sure, Daniello sought to enrich the idea with Aristotle's theory of mimesis, a more imaginative notion of poetry as an imitation of the actions of men and thus of nature itself.^[87] Others, like Tomitano, sounded the same call, but their contexts were tacitly Horatian. Tomitano exemplified this in describing the poet as an "imitator of human actions who arouses admiration in the listener" (emphasis mine).^[88] In a adhering to Horatian concerns for sonorous effects — and of necessity its rhetorical adjunct of imitation-as-emulation — Tomitano typified the midcentury fusion of Horace and Aristotle that Marvin T. Herrick has characterized.^[89]

Even as late as 1560, Bernardino Parthenio's dialogue Della imitatione poetica avoided dealing centrally with Aristotelian imitation.^[90] Parthenio was a former stu-

[83] On the idea of the mirror in Renaissance literary imitation see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford, 1953), esp. pp. 30-42.

[84] On the problematic question of imitating lesser models see JoAnn Della Neva, "Reflecting Lesser Lights: The Imitation of Minor Writers in the Renaissance," RQ 42 (1989): 449-79.

[85] "Nihil est enim aliud totum hoc, quo de agimus, imitari; nisi alieni stili similitudinem transferre in tua scripta" (Santangelo, Le epistole, p. 45).

[86] On this aspect of Delminio see Greene, The Light in Troy, p. 177. In a letter to Dolce of 25 June 1537 Aretino compared such "thieves" to those who "trample herbs to gather condiments" (gli ortolani sgridano quegli: che calpestano l'herbicine da far' la salsa, e non coloro; che bellamente le colgano); Lettere, 6 vols. (Paris, 1609), 1:122.

[87] See E. N. Tigerstedt, "Observations on the Reception of the Aristotelian Poetics in the Latin West," Studies in the Renaissance 15 (1968): 7-24, for a discussion of this aspect of the Renaissance tradition of Aristotle's Poetics. On Aristotelian verisimilitude see Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces, pp. 9-19 and Part 2. For a clarification of issues relevant to music late in the century see Gary Tomlinson, "Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi's via naturale alla immitatione, " JAMS 34 (1981): 60-108.

[88] Tomitano, Ragionamenti, p. 226; see Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism 1:384.

[89] Herrick's The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Criticism remains the best treatment of the subject.

[90] On the two types of imitation Parthenio says there is "Una, la qual consiste nell'esprimere eccellentemente le nature & i costumi di quelle persone, che ci proponiamo d'imitare. . . . Ma di queste sorti di imitation lasciando la cura ad Aristotele, solamente tratteremo dell'altra, laquale consiste nelle parole & ne modi di dire" (There is "one, which consists in expressing excellently the natures and habits of those persons whom we propose to imitate. And this is the end goal of poetry, which is meant to express human actions. . . . But leaving the care of this sort of imitation to Aristotle, we treat only the other type, which consists in words and modes of discourse"); Bernardino Parthenio, Della imitatione poetica (Venice, 1560), pp. 93-94.

dent of Giovanni Battista Egnazio (the teacher of Venier and his circle), and his interlocutors included literati from the region: Gabriele, Paolo Manuzio, and Trissino. Unlike theorists late in the century for whom Aristotle's poetics of mimesis became the primary theoretical matrix, Parthenio gave only cursory attention to the imitation of nature, and this mainly as a byway to the main issues of sound and meter.

The foremost modern historian of these texts, Bernard Weinberg, was dismayed by what he perceived as the sullied fusions of ancient sources devised at midcentury and the indifference of midcentury theorists toward the integrity of canonical ancient texts.^[91] This put him at odds with the basic working methods of writers like Tomitano and Parthenio, who habitually compiled their arguments by drawing loosely from ancient texts. For Weinberg that spelled damning impurity, philological sloth and ignorance, and lack of resources — icing without cake. More than this Weinberg viewed the replacement of Ciceronian imitation of models by Aristotelian imitation of nature as a teleological victory of the late sixteenth century that midcentury authors, with their constant backsliding into rhetoric, had failed to pull off. Rhetoric, as he viewed it, simply lacked substance.

Yet in turning everything to rhetorical account, treatises like Parthenio's were not so barren as Weinberg made out. The rhetorical vision that led Venetians to read in universally Ciceronian-Horatian terms also prompted them to innovative meditations on rhythmic and musical properties of verse.^[92] In searching for listener appeal, Venetians hoped to convey meaning through sound and awaken readers to interactions between sound and meaning. These interactions were the musical basis of their attraction to Petrarch's verse and their theoretical basis for conflating it with Ciceronian oratory. By careful attention to sound, theorists invigorated the decorum/variation conjuncture thought to form common ground between Petrarchan poetics and Ciceronian rhetoric, explaining how meanings were manipulated through variations of sonorous effects.